“What am I looking at, then?”
“You’re looking at a legal executioner, under the Mosaic Code. I have a case of Biblical justice to report. I had a friend I valued very highly, and she was caused to die by having the skin of her body deprived of air. Now the man who did that to her is going to die sometime during the night, if he hasn’t already, by having the skin of his body — and his lungs and his heart — deprived of air in the same way.”
He lit a cigarette to match hers. His hands were so steady — too steady, rigid almost — that you could tell they weren’t really. He was forcing them to be that way. His color was paler than it had been when he first came in.
“What have you got to say to that?” She clasped her own sides in a parody of macabre delight.
“I’ll tell you in a minute.” He went over to the door, opened it and looked out again, as if to make sure there was no one out there to overhear. He’d dropped his cigarette on the way over to it.
She misunderstood. “Don’t be so jittery—” she began scornfully.
He’d raised his voice suddenly, before she knew what to expect. It went booming down the desolate hallway. “Corrigan! C’mere a minute!” A blue-suited figure had joined his in the opening before she knew what was happening. He pointed in toward her.
“Arrest this woman for murder! Hold her here in this room until I get back! I’m making you personally responsible for her!”
A bleat of smothered fury ripped from her. “Why, you dirty, doublecrossing— The guy ain’t even dead yet—”
“I’m not arresting you for the murder of Frank Willis. I’m arresting you for the murder of his wife, Annie Willis, over a month and a half ago at the New Rotterdam Theater!”
The greater part of it came winging back from the far end of the hallway, along which he was moving fast on his way to try to save a man’s life.
They came trooping down single file, fast, into the gloom. White poker chips of light glanced off the damp, cemented brick walls from their torches. The janitor was in the lead. He poked at a switch by his sense of memory alone, and a feeble parody of electricity illuminated part of the ceiling and the floor immediately under it, nothing else.
“I ain’t seen him since yesterday at noon,” he told them in a frightened voice. “I seen him going out then. That was the last I seen of him. Here it is over here, gents. This door.”
They fanned out around it in a half-circle. All the separate poker chips of torchlight, came to a head in one big wagon wheel on it. It was fireproof; nail-studded iron, rusty but stout. But it was fastened simply by a padlock clasping two thick staples.
“I remember now, my wife said something about his asking her for the key to here, earlier in the evening while I was out,” the janitor said. “So he was still all right then.”
“Yes, he was still all right then,” Benson agreed shortly. “Get that thing. Hurry up!” A crowbar was inserted behind the padlock chain: two of the men with him got on one end of it and started to pry. Something snapped. The unopened lock bounced up, and they swung the storage-space door out with a grating sound.
The torch-beams converged inside and lit it up. It was small and cramped. The air was already musty and unfit to breathe — even the unconfined air at large between its four sides — and it was lifeless. All the discarded paraphernalia of forgotten tenants over the years choked it. Cartons, empty packing cases, a dismantled iron bed frame, even a kid’s sled with one runner missing. But there was a clear space left between the entrance and the one large trunk that loomed up in it, like a towering headstone on a tomb.
It stood there silent, inscrutable. On the floor before it lay, in eloquent meaning, a single large lump of coal brought from the outside part of the basement and discarded after it had served its purpose. Two smaller fragments had chipped off it, lay close by.
“A blow on the head with that would daze anyone long enough to—” Benson scuffed it out of the way with his foot. “Hurry up, fellows. She’d only just left here when she looked me up. It’s not a full hour vet. The seams may be warped with age, there’s still a slim chance—”
They pushed the scared, white-lipped janitor back out of their way. Axe blades began to slash around the rusted snaplock. “Not too deep,” Benson warned. “Give it flat strokes from the side, or you’re liable to cut in and — Got that pulmotor ready?”
The axes held off at his signal and he pulled the dangling lock off the splintered seams with his bare hands. They all jumped in, began pulling in opposite directions. The trunk split open vertically. A face stared sightlessly into the focused torchbeams, a contorted mask of strangulation and unconsciousness that had been pressed despairingly up against the seam as close as it could go, to drink in the last precious molecule or two of air.
Willis’ body, looking shrunken, tumbled out into their arms. They carried him out into the more open part of the basement, one hand that ended in mangled nails trailing inertly after him. An oxygen tank was hooked up, and a silent, grim struggle for life began in the eerie light of the shadowy basement.
Twice, they wanted to quit, and Benson wouldn’t let them. “If he goes, that makes a murderer out of me! And I won’t be made a murderer out of! We’re going to bring him back, if we stay here until tomorrow night!”
And then in the middle of the interminable silence, a simple, quiet announcement from the man in charge of the squad: “He’s back, Benson. He’s going again!”
Somebody let out a long, whistling breath of relief. It was a detective who had just escaped being made into a murderer.
At the hospital later, in the early hours of the morning, when he was able to talk again, Willis told him the little there was to tell.
“She showed up and said she wanted to get something out of that trunk she’d left behind here in our care, when she’d moved away. I got the key to the storage room from the janitor’s wife. I should have tumbled she had something up her sleeve when she asked me not to mention who it was for. Let them think I wanted it for myself. Then she got me to go down there with her by pretending there were some things of Annie’s in the trunk, from their days in show business together, that she wanted to give back to me.
“I didn’t open my mouth to her, didn’t say a word. I was afraid to trust myself, afraid if I came out with what was on my mind. I’d beat her half-senseless and only get in more trouble with you police guys. I couldn’t wait to get rid of her, to see the last of her —
“I even helped her to open the trunk, because it was pretty heavy to handle. Then she asked me to bend down and see if I could reach something that was all the way down at the bottom of one of the two halves, and I stepped between them like a fool.
“Something that felt like a big rock hit the back of my head, and before my senses had a chance to clear, the two sides had swung closed on me like a—” He shuddered. “Like a coffin when you’re still alive.” He swung one finger-bandaged paw in front of his eyes to shut out the recollection. “The rest was pretty awful.”
The lieutenant came in, holding the confession in his hands. Benson followed.
“She put away?”
“Yes, sir.”
The lieutenant went ahead, reading the confession. Benson waited in silence until he’d finished. The lieutenant looked up finally. “This’ll do. It’s strong enough to hold her on, anyway. You got results, but I don’t get the technique. What was this business of her coming here and confiding in you that she’d made an attempt on Willis’ life tonight, and how does that tie in with the murder of Annie Willis? You hit the nail on the head. This confession proves that, but I don’t follow your line of reasoning. I miss the connecting links.”