“Whenever I could. Maybe twice a week.”
“That isn’t very often for a guy to see the girl he’s planning to marry.”
“I’m a graduate student and part-time instructor at the University here. I don’t have many free nights.”
“I see. Was Miss Hadley a student, too?”
“No. She was assistant to the University librarian.”
“You notice anything strange about her lately? Anything that might indicate she was in trouble?”
I answered carefully, trying to say what I felt without giving it exaggerated emphasis.
“I think so. For about a week she’s been rather remote. Worried, I think. I had an idea maybe she was working too hard.”
“Do librarians work so hard?”
“This was unusual. The Stoneman library, you know. Maybe you remember that old man Stoneman left it to the University when he died some time back. Recently, Margaret and Dr. Cross, the librarian, have been working on it. They went out to the Stoneman place together to see to the packing of the books about a week ago. Since then, they’ve been cataloging the stuff, trying to get it properly classified for the stacks.”
“I see. Now we’re to the big question. Where’d you get that face?”
I told him what had happened as exactly as I could. He leaned forward a little farther, listening intently, his eyes frozen in an expression of sharp attention. When I’d finished, he straightened with a sigh.
“Look, Buster. You say you threw one punch over this guy’s shoulder. How’d you throw it?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“How’d you throw the punch? Up? Down? Straight out?”
“Oh. Just about straight out, I think.”
He shook his head.
“I don’t think so. Not unless he was crouching. You heard the Doc when he went out. The fat guy. He mentioned a giant. There’s a bruised place on the girl’s throat that was made by a thumb. There’re four places made by fingers. The places made by fingers come all the way around the throat to the place made by the thumb. Get the idea? She was choked to death with one hand. A big hand. The hand of a big guy.”
I saw again the shadow coming at me through the pattern of light. I sensed again the man who had held me easily with one hand while he beat me brutally with the other. The hands had been big, all right. But not the man. The man hadn’t been any taller than I. Six feet, that is. T shook my head and said so.
Muller didn’t answer. I saw that he was looking down at my own hands, and I held them out.
“They’re not big,” I said.
He sighed again and shrugged.
“No. Not big enough. It’s hard to tell about things in the dark. You must be mistaken. We’re looking for a big man. Maybe not a giant, like Doc said, but a real big guy.”
He turned away and prowded. Apparently not looking for anything in particular. Just prowling. After a while, he came back.
“Think, Buster. Think hard. Can you think of anyone at all who might have had a reason for killing your girl?”
“No one. Not one at all.”
“No idea who the guy was who attacked you in this room tonight?”
“No.”
“I can see you’re not going to be any help. I never saw a guy who knew less about a girl he was going to marry. How about family? She got any?”
“There’s a mother. Lives upstate in a little town called Shelby.”
“That’s something. We’ll get in touch. For all the good you are, you may as well go home. Leave your address.”
A detective wrote my address in a little book, and Muller went back into the bedroom without another word. No one tried to stop me when I walked out of the house and away.
Chapter Two
Murderer’s Trail
I got patched at the infirmary on the campus and went back to the room I rented on Wadlow Street. It was eleven o’clock then. Lying there within the four pressing walls, I thought bitterly of the strange ends little beginnings come to. You meet a girl in a place where you’ve gone for a couple of beers and company, and what began as beer and company winds up as plans for matrimony just as soon as a guy can get that last big degree and scrape together a few bucks. And all the time, though you don’t know it, beer and company and all plans whatever are nothing but diversions on a short road to death. Death by strangulation in a shabby room.
Until tonight, I hadn’t realized how little I knew about Maggie. Trying to find something back of the present that would point to the killer with big hands, I couldn’t remember a thing of any significance. A giant, the medical examiner had said. But he wasn’t. I could swear that the man in Maggie’s dark living room had been no taller than I.
I lay there a long time, almost an hour, thinking of the killer with the hands of a giant who wasn’t a giant. I shivered, remembering those hands. The one that had reached out in darkness to grasp my coat, fumbling in passing at my face and throat, had felt huge.
The Stoneman library. I wondered if there might be anything there to explain Maggie’s brutal death. It seemed so innocent, the inheritance of some books. Something that happened frequently and uneventfully in the life of a University library. But it was the only connection of any kind that I could make. Maggie and Dr. Cross, the old librarian, had worked on the books together. If there were anything, anything strange in the inheritance art all, he might know about it. After a while, I got up and went downstairs to the telephone in the hall.
While the phone rang in long, persistent bursts at the other end of the line, I remembered Maggie’s mentioning that the librarian was alone in the house of a Mrs. Crowder, where he lived a rather solitary life in a single room. The landlady, it seemed, was currently making an extended visit with an ailing sister. I let the phone ring until the operator told me that my party didn’t answer, and then I thanked her and hung up.
Upstairs, I stood in my room and looked at my bed, but the long and sleepless hours of a morning there did not bear thinking of. I put on my coat and went back downstairs and out of the house. Walking south, I crossed the boundary of the campus and after a while moved into the great shadow of the library. The library where Maggie had worked, young and vibrant in the dim light of towering stacks, touching with fingers that had touched my face and hair the dry and brittle bindings of old books. Now she was gone, as if she had never been, and there was nothing saved for me. Not even in printer’s ink. No little particle between buckram or leather.
The library was built on the brow of a hill, so that the rear wall of the building plunged to its foundation several stories below the main entrance at the front. I went around the building and down the slope of the hill. The massive sack of gray stone grew in gloomy and menacing grandeur with every step I took. I came out of its shadow onto a curving drive and went on down into a street of old residences. It was here that Dr. Cross lived alone in the house of Mrs. Crowder.
There was a light in a rear room on the second floor of the house, visible only as a thin, verticle streak between drapes not quite fully drawn across a window. But no one answered my ringing. I stood on the porch with a thumb on the bell button and listened to the shrill clamor of the bell deep in the hall inside. When I had decided that there would be no answer, I opened the door and stepped into the hall. It was then that I heard the music.
It came faintly, from the rear of the floor above. The music was that of strings and reeds and brasses. It was a sigh of breath from the darkest depths of the most abandoned hell. It was the black despair of the last man in his last hour. There was no terror in it, and no fear, for it was beyond fear and beyond terror.
As I stood listening, the music stopped and the old house fell silent. Then the music began again, moving down the dark stairs upon me. Somewhere on the floor above, an automatic record player was repeating the final movement of Tschaikowsky’s Pathetique.