The Complete Crime Stories Read online

  They sat down, she panting and convulsively straightening her aching back. He didn’t look at her. But he was thoroughly aware of her now—of every detail of her slim shape, of those places where her dress was torn, of the heady, sweetly sensuous scent that hung about her. Presently they went on. The top lifted, and he turned again. She gasped at what she saw.

  A dead entry is indeed a terrifying spectacle, and could serve as a chamber in some horrible inferno. Untended by man, the top erodes from the air and forms great blisters, like the blisters on paint, except that each blister is five or six feet across and five or six inches thick. The blisters then crack and fall, piece by piece, to the floor, which is thus covered with jagged shards of stone that look like gigantic shark teeth. Add that one touch can bring a blister crashing down; that the fragments underfoot can cut through the thickest shoe; that wiring, timber, rails, and all other signs of human activity have long since been removed; and that in fact nothing human ever comes here—and you can form some idea of what the abandoned parts of a coal mine are like. They proceeded slowly, hugging the wall, he ahead, she at his heels, holding tight to his denim jacket. Then they turned into another, worse than this, and then into still another. They had gone only a short distance in this when there was a report like a cannon shot and the lamp went out. She screamed.

  “It’s all right. Some top fell down, that’s all. Stick close to the rib, like I do. It generally falls in the middle.”

  “Is the lamp busted? Why did it go out?”

  “Air. Concussion blew it out.”

  “Please light it. The dark scares me so.”

  “Sure.”

  He had, in fact, already unhooked the lamp from his hat and was banging the flint with the palm of his hand. Sparks appeared, but no light. She moaned: “I knew it was busted.”

  “It ain’t busted. Carbide needs water, that’s all.”

  He opened his lunch bucket, to pour in water. Then he remembered he had drunk all his water. He waited, hoping a few drops might still be left. Nothing happened.

  He closed the bucket, set it down, puckered his lips, preparatory to priming the lamp with spit. Then his mouth went dry with fright and he couldn’t spit. For what he had touched, when he set down the bucket, was a hand, cold and unmoving. She felt his breath stop. “What’s the matter?”

  “We took the wrong turn.”

  “Are we lost?”

  “No, we ain’t lost. But we’re in the haunted entry.”

  “The—”

  He placed her hand over the cold thing he had touched. She screamed, and screamed again. “That’s the stone—the stone they put up for him because they couldn’t get him out. With the hand chiseled on it, holding a palm. And he’s in there, and he keeps tamping his powder.”

  “I don’t hear nothing,” she whispered.

  “You will. … He tamped in his powder, and lit his fuse, and started out here to wait for the shot. Then the whole room caved in. And he keeps going back there to see why it don’t go off, and then he tamps in his powder again, and—”

  “I still don’t hear—”

  But her words froze in her throat, for off in the rock somewhere began a faint clink, clink, clink. Then it stopped. “That’s it—that’s the needle. Now comes the tamping iron.” The sound resumed, reached a brisk crescendo, and stopped again. “Now he’s coming out! Now he’s coming this way! And we can’t move; we got no light!”

  They were crouched on the floor now, locked in each other’s arms, in an ecstasy of terror. Several times the sound was repeated, and they strained closer as they listened and waited. But fear is a peculiar emotion: it cannot be sustained indefinitely at the same high pitch. In spite of his horror of the ghost, he gradually became aware that there was something distinctly pleasurable about this: lying in the dark with this girl in his arms, shuddering in unison with her, mingling his breath with hers; indeed, with an almost exquisite agony he began to look forward to each repetition of the sound. He thought of her flesh again, and in a moment his hand was touching her side, patting the torn place in her dress, as though this were what the circumstances called for. She didn’t seem to mind. On the contrary, his thick paw apparently soothed her; so that she relaxed slightly, and put her head on his shoulder, and sighed. He patted and patted again, and each time the sound would resume they would draw together.

  Suddenly, though, she sat up, listened, and turned to him. “That ain’t no miner.”

  “Oh, yes, it is. He—”

  “That ain’t no miner. That’s water. I can tell by how it sounds.”

  “Gee, if we could only get some! But I can’t even start the lamp. I’m scared so bad I can’t spit.”

  “Give me that lamp. I can spit.”

  She took the lamp, and he heard it hiss from plenty of good wet spit. He struck the flint, and flame punctured the darkness. “We got to hurry. That won’t last long.”

  “Keep still, so I can hear.”

  He held the light, and she crawled on her hands and knees, cocking her head now and then to listen. The flame grew smaller and smaller. Suddenly she thrust her hand under a slab of rock. “There it is.”

  “You sure?”

  “Give me the bucket.”

  She took the bucket and thrust it under, and at once came the loud clank of water on tin. They looked at each other, and he spoke breathlessly: “That’s it! That’s how it sounded, only now it’s in the bucket.” The lamp went out, and they waited in the dark while there came a few drops, then a pause, then a few more drops, then the rapid staccato of a full trickle, then a long pause, then the separate drops again. After a long time she shook the bucket, and they heard the water slosh. “That’s enough. That’ll get us out.”

  They poured water in the lamp, struck the flint, and a fine big flame spurted out. They were off at once. They went through more dead entries, then came to where the going was better. He laughed—a high nervous giggle. “Ain’t that a joke? Won’t them miners feel silly when I tell them that haunt ain’t nothing but water?”

  “It come to me, just like that, that them was drops.”

  “And think of that—that was why they stopped working that coal. That’s why the company had to close down them entries. Not no miner would work in there.”

  “Gee, that’s funny.”

  When, still laughing at this, they popped suddenly on to the old drift mouth, it was nearly dark outside, and snowing. They said stiff good-byes; she thanked him for helping her out, and promised to protect him in his guilty secret. She started down the mountain toward the part of the camp where she lived. He watched her a moment, and then something rose in his throat, an overwhelming recollection—of a naked patch of flesh, lovely smell, and brave, hissing spit.

  He called in a queer strained voice: “Yay!”

  “What?”

  “Come back here a minute.”

  She ran back and stood in front of him. He wanted to say something; didn’t know what it was; then heard himself talking, in the same queer voice, about his hope there was no hard feelings about what he had said, back there in the mine, before they started out. She didn’t answer. She kept looking at him. And then, to his astonishment, she came up and put her arms around him. Then he said it. He pulled her to him, pushed his lips against hers for the first time, and the words came jerkily: “Listen. … The hell with going home. … Let’s not go home. … Let’s get married. … Let’s … be together.”

  She stayed near him, touched his face with her fingers, then looked away. “We can’t get married.”

  “Why not?”

  “We got no money. You got no money. I got no money, nobody in a coal camp has got any money. … Gee, I’d love to be with you.”

  “My old man would take us in.”

  “And your old lady would throw us out.”

  “All right, never mind the married p
art. Let’s not go home tonight. Let’s stay up here, in one of these shacks.”

  “They’ll be looking for us.”

  “Let them look.”

  “We’d be awful cold and hungry.”

  “We can build a fire, and I got two sandwiches left.”

  “… All right.”

  They tried to say something else, but found themselves unexpectedly embarrassed. But then he began shaking her, his eyes shining. “Who says we can’t get married? Who says we got no money? Why, I’ll have a job! I’ll have a real job! I’ll have a company job!”

  “How will you get a company job?”

  “The haunt! Don’t you get it? I’ll prove to them miners that haunt is nothing but water! Then they can get that coal! Boy, will they give me a company job for doing that! Will they!”

  “Gee. I bet they will.”

  “Listen. Do you really mean it? About camping out tonight?”

  “I don’t want we should be separated, ever.”

  “Kiss me again. Maybe we can catch a rabbit. Can you cook a rabbit?”

  “Yes.”

  Inside, an astral miner picked up an astral bucket and sadly prepared to join the great army of unemployed.

  Career in C Major

  1

  All this, that I’m going to tell you, started several years ago. You may have forgotten how things were then, but I won’t forget it so soon, and sometimes I think I’ll never forget it. I’m a contractor, junior partner in the Craig-Borland Engineering Company, and in my business there was nothing going on. In your business, I think there was a little going on, anyway enough to pay the office help provided they would take a ten per cent cut and forget about the Christmas bonus. But in my business, nothing. We sat for three years with our feet on our desks reading magazines, and after the secretaries left we filled in for a while by answering the telephone. Then we didn’t even do that, because the phone didn’t ring any more. We just sat there, and switched from the monthlies to the weeklies, because they came out oftener.

  It got so bad that when Craig, my partner, came into the office one day with a comical story about a guy that wanted a concrete chicken coop built, somewhere out in Connecticut, that we looked at each other shifty-eyed for a minute, and then without saying a word we put on our hats and walked over to Grand Central to take the train. We wanted that coop so bad we could hardly wait to talk to him. We built it on a cost-plus basis, and I don’t think there’s another one like it in the world. It’s insulated concrete, with electric heat control, automatic sewage disposal, accommodations for 5,000 birds, and all for $3,000, of which our share was $300, minus expenses. But it was something to do, something to do. After the coop was built, Craig dug in at his farm up-state, and that left me alone. I want you to remember that, because if I made a fool of myself, I was wide open for that, with nothing to do and nobody to do it with. When you get a little fed up with me, just remember those feet, with no spurs to keep them from falling off the desk, because what we had going on wasn’t a war, like now, but a depression.

  It was about four-thirty on a fall afternoon when I decided to call it a day and go home. The office is in a remodeled loft on East 35th Street, with a two-story studio for drafting on the ground level, the offices off from that, and the third floor for storage. We own the whole building and owned it then. The house is on East 84th Street, and it’s a house, not an apartment. I got it on a deal that covered a couple of apartment houses and a store. It’s mine, and was mine then, with nothing owing on it. I decided to walk, and marched along, up Park and over, and it was around five-thirty when I got home. But I had forgotten it was Wednesday, Doris’s afternoon at home. I could hear them in there as soon as I opened the door, and I let out a damn under my breath, but there was nothing to do but brush my hair back and go in. It was the usual mob: a couple of Doris’s cousins, three women from the Social Center, a woman just back from Russia, a couple of women that have boxes at the Metropolitan Opera, and half a dozen husbands and sons. They were all Social Register, all so cultured that even their eyeballs were lavender, all rich, and all 100% nitwits. They were the special kind of nitwits you meet in New York and nowhere else, and they might fool you if you didn’t know them, but they’re nitwits just the same. Me, I’m Social Register too, but I wasn’t until I married Doris, and I’m a traitor to the kind that took me in. Give me somebody like Craig, that’s a farmer from Reubenville, that never even heard of the Social Register, that wouldn’t know culture if he met it on the street, but is an A1 engineer just the same, and has designed a couple of bridges that have plenty of beauty, if that’s what they’re talking about. These friends of Doris’s, they’ve been everywhere, they’ve read everything, they know everybody, and I guess now and then they even do a little good, anyway when they shove money back of something that really needs help. But I don’t like them, and they don’t like me.

  I went around, though, and shook hands, and didn’t tumble that anything unusual was going on until I saw Lorentz. Lorentz had been her singing teacher before she married me, and he had been in Europe since then, and this was the first I knew he was back. And his name, for some reason, didn’t seem to get mentioned much around our house. You see, Doris is opera-struck, and one of the things that began to make trouble between us within a month of the wedding was the great career she gave up to marry me. I kept telling her I didn’t want her to give up her career, and that she should go on studying. She was only nineteen then, and it certainly looked like she still had her future before her. But she would come back with a lot of stuff about a woman’s first duty being to her home, and when Randolph came, and after him Evelyn, I began to say she had probably been right at that. But that only made it worse. Then I was the one that was blocking her career, and had been all along, and every time we’d get going good, there’d be a lot of stuff about Lorentz, and the way he had raved about her voice, and if she had only listened to him instead of to me, until I got a little sick of it. Then after a while Lorentz wasn’t mentioned any more, and that suited me fine. I had nothing against him, but he always meant trouble, and the less I heard of him the better I liked it.

  I went over and shook hands, and noticed he had got pretty gray since I saw him last. He was five or six years older than I was, about forty I would say, born in this country, but a mixture of Austrian and Italian. He was light, with a little clipped moustache, and about medium height, but his shoulders went back square, and there was something about him that said Europe, not America. I asked him how long he had been back, he said a couple of months, and I said swell. I asked him what he had been doing abroad, he said coaching in the Berlin opera, and I said swell. That seemed to be about all. Next thing I knew I was alone, watching Doris where she was at the table pouring drinks, with her eyes big and dark, and two bright red spots on her cheeks.

  Of course the big excitement was that she was going to sing. So I just took a back seat and made sure I had a place for my glass, so I could put it down quick and clap when she got through. I don’t know what she sang. In those days I didn’t know one song from another. She stood facing us, with a little smile on her face and one elbow on the piano, and looked us over as though we were a whole concert hall full of people, and then she started to sing. But there was one thing that made me feel kind of funny. It was the whisper-whisper rehearsal she had with Lorentz just before she began. They were all sitting around, holding their breaths waiting for her, and there she was on the piano bench with Lorentz, listening to him whisper what she was to do. Once he struck two sharp chords, and she nodded her head. That doesn’t sound like much to be upset about, does it? She was in dead earnest, and no foolishness about it. The whole seven years I had been married to her, I don’t think I ever got one word out of her that wasn’t phoney, and yet with this guy she didn’t even try to put on an act.

  They left about six-thirty, and I mixed another drink so we could have one while we were dressing fo
r a dinner we had to go to. When I got upstairs she was stretched out on the chaise longue in brassiere, pants, stockings, and high-heeled slippers, looking out of the window. That meant trouble. Doris is a Chinese kimono girl, and she always seems to be gathering it around her so you can’t see what’s underneath, except that you can, just a little. But when she’s got the bit in her teeth, the first sign is that she begins to show everything she’s got. She’s got plenty, because a sculptor could cast her in bronze for a perfect thirty-four, and never have to do anything more about it at all. She’s small, but not too small, with dark red hair, green eyes, and a sad, soulful face, with a sad soulful shape to go with it. It’s the kind of shape that makes you want to put your arm around it, but if you do put your arm around it, anyway when she’s parading it around to get you excited, that’s when you made your big mistake. Then she shrinks and shudders, and gets so refined she can’t bear to be touched, and you feel like a heel, and she’s one up on you.

  I didn’t touch her. I poured two drinks, and set one beside her, and said here’s how. She kept looking out the window, and in a minute or two saw the drink, and stared at it like she couldn’t imagine what it was. That was another little sign, because Doris likes a drink as well as you do or I do, and in fact she’s got quite a talent at it, in a quiet, refined way. “… Oh no. Thanks just the same.”

  “You better have a couple, just for foundation. They’ll be plenty weak tonight, I can promise you that.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “You feel bad?”

  “Oh no, it’s not that.”

  “No use wasting it then.”

  I drained mine and started on hers. She watched me spear the olive, got a wan little smile on her face, and pointed at her throat. “Oh? Bad for the voice, hey?”

  “Ruinous.”

  “I guess it would be, at that.”

  “You have to give up so many things.”

  She kept looking at me with that sad, orphan look that she always gets on her face when she’s getting ready to be her bitchiest, as though I was far, far away, and she could hardly see me through the mist, and then she went back to looking out the window. “I’ve decided to resume my career, Leonard.”