Death Has a Small Voice Read online

  “Yes,” Jerry said. “Sure.”

  But it wasn’t yes. It wasn’t sure. He got a taxicab and gave an address. “Make it as fast as you can,” he told the driver. “Sure,” the driver said, “fast as I can, bud.” But the cab crept to the Triborough, crept down the East Side. In front of the apartment house, Jerry gave the driver a bill. “Hey, bud,” the driver said after him, but not in a tone that insisted he be heard. In a hurry to keep his date, bud was—in five dollars’ worth of hurry.

  There was no date, except with the cats. They greeted him, were at first ignored. They protested loudly; they followed Jerry North—a friend turned strange, paying no attention to cats—from room to room. Finally Jerry looked at them.

  “Damn you,” Jerry said. “Why can’t you talk? You were here. Why can’t you talk?”

  They talked enough. It did no good.

  Across a continent, Jerry North had driven a great plane with his urgency. In Chicago, while the plane fueled, he had walked back and forth, back and forth, lighting, dragging at, stepping on, cigarettes. When the plane was again in the air, he drove it on.

  He would get home. He would find Pam. She would be in the apartment, waiting. He had only to get there. If she were not there—but she would be, had to be—he would find her. He would know what to do, where to look. It would be all right, once he was home again.

  But the apartment was strange. Familiar chairs, familiar sofas were strange, not his—not anybody’s. He was a man who had run across a continent, and run to nothingness. Jerry North sat suddenly in a chair by the telephone. He lighted a cigarette, not noticing he did so. Strange cats sat in a circle around him, staring through cats’ flat eyes.

  He dialed again. Captain Weigand was still out. He would be told Mr. North had called. Mullins was out. Sergeant Stein had gone off duty.

  “All right,” Jerry North said, dully. “I’ll call again.”

  He put the receiver back in the cradle. The bell under it rang shrilly. Jerry’s left hand leaped to the telephone. Suddenly, he had too little breath to speak with. He said, “Yes?”

  It was not Pam. The voice was a man’s, heavy, unfamiliar.

  “Mr. North?” the voice said.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Helder,” the voice said. “Sven Helder. You know? At the building.”

  “Yes,” Jerry said. “What is it, Helder?”

  “I got to wondering,” Helder said. “Mrs. North got home all right last night?”

  “What?” Jerry said. His voice was quick again.

  “Mrs. North,” Helder said. “She was here last night. Up at your office. She got home all right, didn’t she?”

  “She was there?” Jerry said. “At the office? No—she didn’t get home all right. We’re trying to find her.”

  There was a brief pause.

  “Well,” Helder said, “she was here and she left all right. Anyway, I thought—I tell you how it was. I got worried. She was—”

  “Wait!” Jerry said. “You’re there now?”

  “Sure,” Helder said.

  “Stay there,” Jerry told him. “I’m coming up. You’ll stay there?”

  “Sure,” Helder said. “I got to, anyway. I got—”

  Jerry North did not wait. He cradled the telephone. He went hatless, without a coat. He thought an empty cab would never come along Sixth Avenue. But one came.

  The glass doors of the building were closed. There was a dim light in the lobby. Jerry put a finger on the night bell and held it there. Sven Helder came through the lobby, lifting a suspender strap over his shoulder. He peered through the glass. He nodded. He took keys from his pocket, slowly. He selected a key; he peered at it and shook his head. He turned the bunch of keys slowly in his hands and chose another. To this one, unhurriedly, he nodded. Finally, he opened the doors.

  He talked as slowly as he had moved. Jerry had to hold tight to himself, force himself to wait. He got the story.

  Pam had come to the building at nine-thirty Monday night—9:32, exactly, by Helder’s watch. He took the watch from his pocket and showed it to Jerry North, and nodded at it, and put it back. He had taken her upstairs. At ten-thirty, when it was time to lock the building for the night, she had not come down. He went up then and found the offices dark, and knew she had left, walking down. He had locked up after her, checked that she had not signed out, grumbled a little about it.

  “Only today, I got to worrying,” he said. “You know how women is. Just as likely to forget to sign out as remember. Regulations, but what do they care? But then I got to thinking—I never know Mrs. North be like that. Thinks about other people, know what I mean? So I thought tonight I’d just call up and see if she was all right, and you say she didn’t get home. So—”

  “Let’s go up,” Jerry said.

  They went, in the reluctantly trundling elevator. Again, Jerry fought slowness; again he felt a desperate need to be in time.

  But when the lights were on in the offices, it was again as it had been. There was only emptiness; only, again, the disturbing strangeness of familiar things.

  Pam had come here Monday night—come to this place of empty desks. She had been here—how long? She had come here—why?

  The lights glared down on the empty general office, revealing everything and nothing. As much out of habit as for any reason, Jerry went to his own corner office, and Helder followed him. The lights there revealed only the flat surfaces of familiar things—revealed a cleared desk, a Voice-Scriber on a small, wheeled table, chairs, and a telephone and two walls of books. Here—almost certainly here, to this office—Pam had come at about nine-thirty the evening before. She had been here; she had touched these chairs, this desk. Had she opened and closed again the small, personal file beside the desk? Had she put something in, or taken something out?

  He sat at the desk; he looked at the memo calendar on it. Tuesday, October 28, the calendar assured him. When Pam was there, it had said Monday, October 27. Miss Corning had dusted the desk, torn off yesterday. Abstractedly, Jerry North tore Tuesday off. He examined drawers, not knowing what he sought in them, and found nothing that spoke of Pam. He pulled out the upper drawer of the filing cabinet and looked at it, but did not begin to search it. He could spend hours doing that, with no certainty of gain. He pushed it closed again.

  “She didn’t say why she came?” he asked Helder. “You’re sure she didn’t?”

  “Why would she tell me?” Helder asked. “No, she didn’t say.”

  “Was she carrying anything?” Jerry asked. “A package?”

  “Just one of these bags they carry,” Helder said. He used the word “they” in reference to strange creatures, inexplicable creatures. It was in his tone. “She wasn’t wearing any hat, though,” he added.

  “She doesn’t, much,” Jerry said. “She—” He stopped.

  (She bought hats; she often bought hats. She wore each hat once or twice, and not again. “Maybe I’ve sort of outgrown hats,” Pam North said. Her voice filled the room. “They always begin to look silly,” Pam North said.)

  “What?” Jerry said, to the other voice—the heavy, real voice—in the room. “What did you say?”

  “When she put them down to sign in,” Helder said.

  “Put what down?”

  “With her purse,” Helder said. “I remember now. She put it down to sign in and there was something under it. An envelope, like. A square envelope.”

  Jerry was back, by then. His questions were quick, but the answers were slower. Just a square envelope, under the purse. That was all he could remember. Pam had brought a square envelope with her to the office; whether she had taken it with her when she left, there was no way of knowing. It was something to look for. Jerry looked. He found square envelopes—large envelopes, for unfolded manuscript sheets (not square, but near enough); square envelopes for Voice-Scriber records. (There was a box of these; they were almost never used. They were empty.)

  “That looks about right,” Helder said, of
the Voice-Scriber envelope. “A little bigger, maybe. But I don’t know.”

  Jerry North needed help—professional help. He lifted the telephone on his desk and listened for a second to its deadness before he remembered. He went then to the switchboard at the receptionist’s desk. He dialed, holding one earpiece of the headset to his ear. The answer was not so quick, this time. It came in a weary voice. But it was the right answer—“Weigand speaking.” Then Jerry North talked fast.

  “She had an envelope?” Bill said. “About the size and shape of a record envelope? Wait, then. I’ll be up.”

  He was, in a surprisingly short time; Mullins with him. Bill looked at Jerry North. He said, “She’ll be all right. We’ll find her.”

  “Sure,” Jerry said. “Sure she’ll be all right.”

  To Bill’s quick questions, Helder could give them little more than he had already given. One thing, yes. The offices had been cleaned since Mrs. North was there. They were cleaned every night, between six and eight. Bill Weigand swore at that “Let’s hope they gave it a lick and a promise,” he said. “Come on, Mullins.”

  The policemen worked together, dusting gray powder, blowing it away. They dusted the office; the washroom adjoining it; even the sill of the window which opened on a fire escape. As they worked, Bill Weigand talked. He told Jerry of little Harry Eaton; of Hilda Godwin. He asked questions.

  Hilda Godwin, Jerry knew of; had met once or twice. He had heard she was writing a novel. He had not been much interested, since it would, naturally, go to her usual publishers—the Hudson Press. Eaton he did not remember. Then he remembered Eaton’s book.

  “God awful,” he said. “Somebody read it. I only looked at a couple of pages. That was plenty.”

  “You never met him?” Weigand asked, blowing dust from the surface of the Voice-Scriber.

  Jerry hadn’t. But then he remembered something else: with the manuscript, there had been a letter from Eaton. Eaton had thought Mr. North might like “My Life in Crime” because Mr. North knew about things like that, being a “kind of detective.” Jerry remembered the phrase; he heard it or its equivalent too frequently.

  “Right,” Bill said. “Mullins!”

  Mullins turned from the filing case.

  “Here,” Bill Weigand said. “Let’s see the blow-up.”

  They both looked, then. They looked from the blown-up photograph of Pam North’s fingerprints to whorls in gray dust, and back again.

  “O.K., Loot,” Mullins said. “That’s it.”

  They kept at it; they found other of Pam North’s prints. One set under the edge of the desk top—a set of four fingers of her left hand, as if she had hooked her fingers there, standing in front of it. Several individual prints on the Voice-Scriber.

  When they had finished, Bill Weigand stood for a minute or more and looked at nothing.

  “It could be this way,” he said, then. He spoke slowly. “Eaton steals a Voice-Scriber, planning to hock it. He finds a record on it and plays the record back. Something he hears—well, we can’t guess. Say it worried him. He didn’t want to come to us, naturally. He doesn’t want anything to do with us. So—he sent the record to you. I don’t know how he’d happen to have an envelope.”

  “In the case,” Jerry said. “The carrying case. There’s a compartment for them.”

  “Right,” Bill said. “He mailed it to you. Pam opened it. Probably thought it was addressed to her. I’ve seen Eaton’s writing. It’s a scrawl. She brought it here and played it. But somebody—” He stopped, then. He looked at Jerry;

  “Somebody killed Eaton,” Jerry said.

  “Listen,” Bill said, “we don’t know this was why, do we?”

  “For God’s sake, Bill!” Jerry said.

  “Take it easy,” Bill said. “Take it easy, fella. We don’t know. Pam’ll be all right.”

  “Sure,” Jerry said. His voice was dull. He sat down suddenly. “I was out in San Francisco,” he said. “I was at a party. Listen, Bill—I was at a party.”

  “Snap out of it!” Bill Weigand said.

  “Sure,” Jerry said. “Sure, Bill I’ll snap out of it.” He sat and looked at nothing. His fists clenched. He raised them a few inches, and brought them down again. Then, suddenly, he stood up.

  “Why don’t we do something?” he demanded. “Why the hell?”

  “Listen,” Bill said. “Get yourself together. Listen! We’ll do something.”

  Jerry North looked at him, not seeming to see him. He spoke dully. “There’s no place to start,” he said.

  There was, Bill told him. If he’d snap out of it, he’d see the place to start.

  “What?” Jerry said.

  He was told to think.

  “Hilda Godwin’s,” Jerry said. “It started there.”

  “Right,” Bill Weigand said. “You’re damned right.”

  The three of them went down in the slowly creaking elevator. They waited while Helder unlocked the front doors. As they crossed to the police car, they heard him lock the doors again. They went downtown, fast, to the little house in Elm Lane.

  “Listen, Loot,” Mullins said. “We got no warrant.”

  “No,” Bill said. “We haven’t, have we?”

  “O.K.,” Mullins said. “I just mentioned it.”

  The little house was dark. But it was after midnight, then. It was a time for houses to be dark. They rang the bell at the top of the short flight of immaculate white stairs. They rang it again.

  “I’ll tell you, Loot,” Mullins said. “The back would be better, sort of.”

  “Right,” Bill said. Absently, he fingered the knob of the door. It turned in his fingers. “The front’ll do,” Bill Weigand said. He opened the door, slowly, quietly. The three of them went into the little house.

  The hall was almost too small for three men. Entering it, they faced a narrow flight of stairs, leading to the second floor. At their right was an opening, the width of double doors. Through it—and they went through it, Mullins’s flashlight beam showing the way—was the living room. It was about ten feet in width. It ran the depth of the little house. It was almost a hall, in dimensions; it was a most glorified hall. Weigand pressed a tumbler switch near the door and light came on in a small, ornate, yet oddly beautiful, chandelier midway of the room. Light reflected from cut crystals. The light fell on heavy, deep red curtains looped at the windows at either end, down one side, of the long, narrow room. It fell on Victorian chairs and sofas; on the marble mantel of a small fireplace at the far end of the room, on a mirror above the mantel and an intricate, small white clock on the mantel shelf. The light fell on white woodwork; on wall paper intricately patterned in gold. The room was perfect in its re-creation of another day—a more opulent day.

  Mullins whistled, softly.

  The room was empty. They could see that immediately the lights were on. They went through it, nevertheless. At the rear of the room, on the left, a sliding door hid a small kitchen, which was by no means Victorian. It, too, was empty. They went back through the room and up the stairs. At the top of the stairs they found a bathroom, a very narrow hall and two bedrooms.

  The bedroom at the rear was, evidently, Hilda Godwin’s. It was small, but not too small for a canopied bed; not too small for a vanity made of mirrors, but wearing skirts. There were crystal sconces on either side of the dressing table. It was a little like the inside of a jewel box, but the single window at the rear was fitted with an air-conditioning unit. The other bedroom, which intercommunicated but could also be reached from the narrow hall, was more matter of fact. It did not, as the rear bedroom did, have the atmosphere of frequent occupancy.

  Both rooms were empty. In each, the beds were neatly made. The closet off the front bedroom held some summer dresses; the larger closet of the rear bedroom was filled with clothes—pretty clothes, very modern clothes.

  Nowhere, on the second floor or on the floor below, was there anything to indicate that violence, or even precipitate action, had occurred in the littl
e house. They went back down again. And, again, Jerry North felt that they had hurried, had run, to nothingness.

  They went over the living room more carefully the second time. The desk at which, they could assume, Hilda Godwin worked, was Victorian in external design, modern in convenience. A typewriter emerged from it, smoothly, when the proper knob was pulled.

  “Missed that, Eaton did,” Mullins commented. “Maybe he was in a hurry.”

  But there was no sign Eaton had been there at all. If he had, in searching for objects at once of value and portable, disturbed the room’s other-day elegance, evidence of his marauding had been smoothed away. It was Mullins who found, pushed into a corner, partly under bookshelves, a small, wheeled table. It was Jerry who, before the others, recognized it.

  “That’s where she kept the Voice-Scriber,” he said. His voice was dull.

  Looking at it closely, with the beam of Mullins’s torch lighting it obliquely, they could see the outline, faint in just perceptible dust, of the device Eaton had stolen. They confirmed what they already knew. They stood for a moment and looked at the little table, and the sound they heard, although a small sound, was loud in the room.

  “The basement!” Bill Weigand said, quickly, his voice low.

  They had missed it the first time; they found it quickly. The door opened off the little kitchen; it opened on a steep flight of wooden stairs. The beam from the torch knifed down the stair flight. Bill Weigand’s voice traveled down the beam of light, as flat, as without inflection, as the light itself.

  “All right,” Weigand said. “Come up.”

  For a moment there was silence. Then there was a sound of movement. Then a tall, youngish man, with a crew haircut, stood in the beam of light. He held a flashlight of his own, turned off. He looked up into the glare.

  “All right, Mr. Rogers,” Bill Weigand said. “Come up.”

  For a moment, Gilbert Rogers, associate editor of the Hudson Press, blinked in the light. Then he came up. They moved back to let him through the kitchen, into the living room.

  “Well?” Bill Weigand said.