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The September, 1958 issue of Guilty brought this 10,000 word exercise in paranoia, one of the many blackmail-and-murder stories that I did for W.W. Scott. My ledger indicates that I wrote it in January, 1958, a month that included five other short stories, two novels, two radio scripts, and three magazine articles. I was a busy boy in those days.
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SOMEONE IS WATCHING YOU
Joanne was a shameless and evil witch, out to trap men.
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Bauman’s first mistake was to stop the car and pick up the girl. It was the sort of thing any man might have done, even a sensible man like Bauman, who was thirty-eight and loved his wife and didn’t usually think about picking up strange women in his car.
But it was a rainy spring night, with distant thunder booming and the occasional crackle of lightning splitting the sky. Bauman had been working late at the office, which was an accounting firm in midtown Manhattan, and he was heading uptown in his car, figuring to take the Queensboro Bridge at 60th Street across the river to Queens, where he lived in Forest Hills. Ordinarily he drove down 42nd Street and used the Queens Midtown Tunnel, but the tunnel had a toll charge. Bauman had spent a little too much on lunch for himself that day and, being a thrifty guy, he was making up the extravagance to himself by going a little out of his way and taking the bridge.
The girl was standing in the shadows at the approach to the bridge on 59th Street. Bauman saw her when his car was stopped for a light, and he gave her the kind of automatic appraisal any man would give.
She was young, and good-looking. She wore a flimsy plastic raincoat huddled up around herself, but she was getting good and wet. The way it looked she was planning to walk across the bridge into Queens.
The idea struck him then. An uncharacteristic idea, maybe, something left over from his early Boy Scout days. Be kind to women. Help old ladies across the street. If you see a pretty girl, carry their books to school for them.
Bauman leaned across the front seat and rolled down the window on the right-hand side of the car. A cold April wind whipped in at him and rain sprinkled his face as he peered out.
“Miss?”
She looked up suspiciously. Grinning to show he meant no harm, Bauman added immediately, “Hi, there. Can I help you out? I’m driving across the bridge.”
Immediately the suspicious look on her face vanished, and her eyes lit up. “Oh, would you?” she asked. “I’m so wet! If you’d just take me across—”
“With pleasure, Miss.”
Bauman twisted the door-handle and shoved the door open. She stepped lithely into the car, bringing with her a little of the chill of the storm, and closed the door behind her, snapping down the thumb-lock.
The light turned green. Bauman started up again and headed toward the bridge.
–
As he drove, he glimpsed her from the corner of one eye. She was young, all right—twenty-two, twenty-three maybe, just a kid, Bauman thought from the vantage-point of his own elderly-sounding thirty-eight years. She had brown eyes and brown hair, the latter plastered rather prettily to her forehead.
She was sitting quite close to him, too.
“Lousy night,” he said. “Lousy night for girls to be walking along bridges alone.”
“I had to,” she said simply.
“Oh.”
After another moment or two he said, “How far into Queens are you going? I’m heading for Forest Hills myself.”
“I’m going all the way out to Jamaica. If it’s okay with you, you can drop me at the Forest Hills subway stop, and I’ll get there the rest of the way myself.”
“Sure,” Bauman said. He frowned slightly; something seemed to be a little out of key in what she was saying, but he didn’t worry much about it.
Until she moved a little closer. Now she was sitting practically jammed against him, the way the teenage girls did when their boyfriends took them for a drive in their cheap jalopies. Pressed tight.
“Ah—”
He didn’t know what to say. She said, “What’s your name, mister?”
“Bauman. Fred Bauman.”
“My name’s Joanne.” She didn’t give the second name. They were off the bridge now, and driving through the dark, silent Queens streets. Outside the rain continued to pour down, but the car seemed warm and cozy. Bauman felt the first stirrings of a strange desire that shocked and astonished and pleased him all at the same time.
Her hand slipped to his knee. Keeping one hand on the wheel, he brushed her hand off.
“Please,” he said.
“What’s the matter? Don’t you like it, Fred?”
“I—please don’t do it.”
“Will your wife object? You are married, aren’t you?” She was watching him sharply, out of shrewd young brown eyes.
“Yes, I’m married,” he told her a little impatiently. What sort of girl had he picked up, anyway? Why had he picked her up? He was regretting the whole thing now. He wished there was some way of getting her to leave the car now. But he couldn’t think of any.
“I’ll bet I can show you some things your wife doesn’t know,” she said slyly. She put her hand back on his knee and started to move it. This time he left it where it was.
He drove on. She said, “Why don’t you park over there, Fred? Just for a couple of minutes. It’s dark there, right next to those trees. Nobody will see.”
“No,” he said.
But he found himself swerving the car toward the dark sidewalk anyway. What’s happening to me? He asked himself. Why am I doing this?
He pulled up and stopped. She reached laughingly across him and yanked back the hand-brake. Then she turned up to him and her lips sprung to his like iron to a magnet. She clung to him a moment in the front seat, and despite the annoying interference of the steering wheel she writhed lithely against him. Through his spring jacket and through her raincoat he felt the firmness of her young breasts against his body. Her tongue darted against his; her hands convulsively tightened on his shoulders.
Then she broke away.
“Okay, Fred. We can drive on now.”
“No,” Bauman grunted.
“No?” she repeated. Her eyes danced mockingly before him. Aroused by a desire he had not felt for many years, he reached out for her, tried to pull her toward him.
–
“Don’t hold me like that!” she said, almost whimpering, as she fought to get loose.
“You—damned—tease—” he muttered, inflamed now, almost a madman. The interrupted caresses had done their work. He wanted more, now. He wanted everything.
She fought, but his strength prevailed. Despite her repeated outbursts of “No, no,” she gave ground steadily, her resistance weakening, her words lost in sobs. Even as he drew her to him, Bauman’s mind kept asking quietly, Why am I doing this? Have I gone crazy?
Finally it was over. He drew back, awed and shocked at what he had done.
After a while he looked at her. He expected to see her bowed in shame and terror, sobbing, cursing him. She wasn’t.
She was smiling.
“In this state, Mr. Bauman of Forest Hills, that offense is known as rape.” Her voice was well under control, as if they had merely been holding hands five minutes before.
He gaped at her.
She went on, “You must be aware of the act you just committed. You violently compelled me to take part in illicit relations with you. What would your wife say if she learned you had done an awful thing like that?”
He turned in his seat and stared wildly at her. “What are you driving at?”
“Money,” she said. “Money for keeping quiet. You wouldn’t want me to go to the police—”
“You couldn’t prove anything.”
“My dress is torn. A medical examination will show the truth. It’ll be your word against mine, sure—but the evidence will be on my side. And so will the jury.”
Horror clutched at him.
“What do you want from me?”
“Five thousand dollars,” she said calmly.
“Five thous—”
“You heard it the first time, Mr. Fred Bauman of Forest Hills. Cough up or I’ll go to the police.”
He fumbled for words. “I don’t have any such amount of money.”
“Find it somewhere. You don’t think you can rob me of my virtue and get away with it, do you?”
“But—you led me on! You tempted me—”
“You heard me yelling No when you got serious, didn’t you? Does that sound like willing consent?”
He moistened his lips. He had to admit to himself that he had, in fact, forced her. But how had he known this would happen? How—
“I’m not going any further with you,” she said. “Suppose you give me your business card.”
“What for?”
“So I can get in touch with you at your office. Or would you prefer to have me phone you at home to make arrangements for payment?”
He thought of Ethel at home, perhaps picking up the phone and hearing this girl’s voice. Ethel was so touchy about things; she’d be sure to ask a million questions. Fred Bauman’s suddenly shattered world spun in dizzy pieces around, him.
“Here it is,” he said in a harsh whisper, and took one of his cards out of his wallet and shoved it at her. She grinned at him and pocketed it.
“Thanks, sucker.”
She unlocked the door, sprang lightly out, and trotted off into the darkness.
The rain was still coming down.
–
Numbed, Bauman pulled away from the curb and drove off homeward. He was beginning to realize what had really taken place. If he hadn’t seen it before, her final words—”Thanks, sucker!”—gave the show away.
The whole thing had been rigged.
She had been waiting there by the bridge approach—how long? half an hour, maybe?—for a man driving alone to come along in a car and pick her up. Once safely inside, she had made use of a series of skillful questions to find out whether he was married or not, what his name was, where he lived. Then she had stirred him to action—and, by refusing at the critical moment, had led him on to commit what was actually rape.
But her attitude was completely businesslike right afterward. Forthrightly, she had asked for money; and she had taken his business card. It had all been rigged. He had been played for a fool.
And it was going to cost him five thousand dollars.
That was the chilling, numbing, killing fact that hit him like a cleaver in the skull. Five thousand dollars. If he didn’t pay, she’d go to the police with her story—and who would believe his?
He would lose his job, his wife, his home. He would go to jail. Thirty-eight years of quiet law-abiding life, undone in ten minutes because some shrewd girl climbs into your car and uses you as the unknowing actor in an unrehearsed little drama of passion.
Bauman’s fingers gripped the cold plastic of the steering-wheel tightly. He reviewed the scene over and over again, noticing now in his mind how she had led him on, how she had inflamed him into committing this one mad act that marred all the structure of the life that had gone before it.
He realized that if he had any brains he would have smelled something peculiar right at the outset. If she was going all the way out to Jamaica, as she had told him, what in creation was she doing walking across the Queensboro Bridge in the rain? Did she intend to walk to Jamaica? Of course not. She didn’t intend to walk anywhere. She had just been lying in wait, like a black widow spider crouching and waiting for its prey to come along down the garden path.
Well, he had come along. And now the spider’s fangs were hooked deep in his throat.
Keeping his eyes fixed to the road in front of him, he drove home. He got there at half past nine. The rain had doubled its intensity. He parked the car outside the apartment building where he lived and went upstairs, to the three-room apartment where he and Ethel had lived for all thirteen years of their married life.
She was sitting in the living-room-dining-room, wearing an old housecoat, watching television. Bauman looked at her with new eyes when he came in. She was thirty-six; middle-aged, almost, from the viewpoint of the girl he had picked up this evening. Her hair, once lovely auburn, was going gray around the edges. She was getting plump and the skin around her throat was loosening up.
He hadn’t noticed any of these things before. He had simply accepted them as being—part of, well, Ethel. After all, he wasn’t the same hotshot he’d been thirteen years ago either.
Now he found himself comparing her to that slim, hungry girl he had encountered that evening. No matter what it was going to cost, he thought, it was almost worth it just to hold that girl and—
He felt a tingle of shock at what he was thinking. He hung up his coat and walked into the living-room. It seemed to him that the signs of his guilt gleamed like searchlights all over him.
But Ethel looked up from the shimmering screen only for an instant, to smile at him and say; “Did you work hard today, dear?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It was a tough day. I’m beat.”
Five thousand dollars, he thought. A pretty damn expensive roll in the hay.
Five thousand dollars? What will I ever do?
–
Somehow he fell asleep that night and somehow he woke up the next morning, and he ate a tasteless breakfast and drove back to Manhattan. If he seemed preoccupied, Ethel hadn’t said anything about it. But he was beginning to realize that Ethel never looked too closely at him any more. She took him for granted. Well, he thought, she was going to find out a few things about him that would surprise her, unless he coughed up the five thousand.
He was in the middle of a complicated tax-case preparation, and having a tough time with it because the image of the girl in the rain kept coming between him and the dull figures on the long yellow sheets of paper before him, when his phone rang.
The time was quarter after eleven in the morning. His first reaction, as his hand went out for the receiver, was puzzlement. The only one who ever called him in the mornings at his office was Ethel, and she always called at twelve noon on the dot. Who was calling at quarter after eleven, he wondered?”
“Hello,” he said.
“Mr. Bauman?” came a woman’s voice.
Her voice.
“Who is this, please?” Bauman asked, trying to keep the quiver out of his voice.
“You know damned well who this is, Freddie-boy,” she said, “Don’t try to play dumb now.”
“What do you want with me?” He was speaking low; there were other men in the office, though they were bent over their own work and probably weren’t paying any attention to what he might be saying.
“You also know what I want with you,” came the level reply. “Five thousand bucks, Freddie-boy. Cash on the barrel, or I go to the police.”
He began to sweat. “I told you last night I don’t have that kind of money.”
“You aren’t going to like it in jail, lover.”
He brushed the beads of perspiration out of his eyebrows. After a moment of lip chewing he said, “Can’t you make it less?”
“Five thousand. You willfully and wantonly assaulted me, and I can make it stick in court.”
“And how long do I have to raise the money?” he said, giving in.
“I want it by tomorrow afternoon.”
“I can’t do it.”
“Tough,” she said. “If I wait much longer than that I won’t have a case. I can’t very well yell ‘rape’ two months after the event and expect it to hold up. So I have to know right away whether you’re going to ante the dough or whether I’ll have to talk to the cops . . . and to your wife.”
He was silent again for a minute. “You don’t seem to understand that if I could pay you I would. Anything, just to get you off my neck, to let me forget the thing that happened last night. But I’m not made out of money. I just can’t pull five grand out of the air. If I took anything like that out of the bank, my wife would want to know all about it.”
“Maybe we can arrange terms,” the girl said thoughtfully.
Hope rose in Bauman’s heart. “What kind?”
“Can you put your hands on a thousand in a hurry?”
Would she settle so cheaply? he wondered. He considered it. “Yes,” he said. “I could get a thousand, I imagine. It wouldn’t be so easy, but—”
“Good, You deliver a thousand to me tomorrow, and then pay me a hundred bucks a week till the end of the year. Every Wednesday, say. That’ll come out to five thousand, okay.”
He made the automatic computation: it would actually be only 4700 dollars. There was thirty-seven weeks left to the year. Well, whatever, it was the price.
“Okay,” he said weakly. “I’ll do it. Somehow. How do I get the money to you?”
“You mail it, chum. Box 356, Times Square Station, New York 36. Address it to Miss Joanne Harris. That isn’t my name, but it’s the name the box is rented under. Got that? Box 356.”
He jotted it down. “I’ll send you the thousand right away.”
–
So this is what it’s like to be blackmailed, he thought, dully. One thousand down and only thirty-seven weeks to pay.
His salary was $9000 a year. His take-home pay was in the neighborhood of $140 a week, after taxes and hospitalization deductions and things like that. And he was supposed to divert $100 of that a week into the pocket of the enterprising little bitch who had lured him into raping her that night in the rain.
Well, he’d manage it somehow, without Ethel finding out. Once, years back, he had been pretty good at playing the horses. He had given it up at Ethel’s insistence; maybe now he could start again, and pick up the extra cash he would need to pay off the girl.
That afternoon he visited a bank where he had done some business before and arranged a loan of fifteen hundred dollars, the only collateral being his signature. They knew and respected him. They knew he’d be good for the loan when it fell due in six months’ time. They let him have it at 6%, discounted in advance, of course—one thousand four hundred and ten dollars.
That gave him enough to meet the girl’s initial payment and have enough left over to see him through a few more weeks’ installments. He could use some of the money for the horses. All he had to do was hit a daily double, he told himself, and everything would be okay. And at least this way, borrowing it from the bank instead of taking it out of his savings account, Ethel would never know about the money. Provided he didn’t have to pull it from savings when the loan fell due in October.
He had asked the bank to give him the money in the form of a bank check for $1000 and the rest in cash. He endorsed the bank check, slipped it in an envelope, and mailed it to Miss Joanne Harris, Box 356, Times, Square Station, N.Y. 36. The cash he also put in an envelope, and stowed it away in a drawer of his desk at the office. If Ethel ever happened to find him with four hundred dollars in cash in his wallet, there was sure to be a question-session.
And I was being thrifty by taking the bridge, he thought bitterly. I saved two bits in tolls and threw away forty-seven hundred dollars.
He started to think about petty economies he could make. Instead of spending a dollar and a half for lunch, as he usually did, he could eat in the Automat for a dollar. That would save him $2.50 a week, $10 a month, right there. He could put that money into the blackmail fund without trouble from Ethel.
There were other ways he could save, too. He could wear his white shirts four days instead of two; that would cut down Ethel’s laundry bills by half a dollar or so a week, and he could channel that off to the girl who called herself Joanne Harris too. He could ration himself on cigarettes and liquor. He could do lots of things.
By the end of the day his work was hardly done, but his accountant’s mind had computed that he could manage to save $12 a week out of his pocket-money with careful management. That meant he only needed to find $88 a week somewhere, not mentioning the loan due at the bank. It was going to be a lousy year.
If only I took the tunnel that night, he thought.
It was too late for that now. He was stuck.
As he drove home that night—taking the bridge now; the quarter toll at the tunnel was important to him—he looked to the right at 59th Street to see if the girl were lurking there, waiting for some other sucker. She wasn’t. One catch a week was enough for her, it seemed. Bauman wondered how many other men in New York were making weekly payments to her because of a moment’s lapse.
–
She called him again at the office the next afternoon. “I got the dough, sweetheart. You’re a man of your word,” she said.
“Don’t call me again. I’ll pay you.”
“You better. I’ll expect a hundred-buck check the morning of the 16th. Next Wednesday.”
“You’ll get it.”
“And one every week after that till New Years,” she continued.
“Don’t worry about me,” he grated. “I’ll give you your money, you she-devil.”
“Aren’t you even wondering about this installment-plan business?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, don’t you see, I’m killing my own case by accepting installments. Suppose you decide not to give me another penny? I can’t holler rape now—not when you can prove you had paid me a thousand in blackmail already.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Bauman admitted. “If you cash that check you don’t have much of a claim on me in court.”
“I figured I’d bring the matter up, just in case you did think of it and tried to freeze the deal. For one thing, you miss a check and I’ll yell copper anyway. Maybe the case will get tossed out of court, but you try explaining to your wife that you’ve been paying me! Besides that, Buster, I’ve got a friend. He’s bigger than you are and he looks out for my interests. You keep paying or he’ll come around to visit you.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Not yet,” she said. “Just keep kicking through with your hundred and you’ll be okay.”
She hung up.
In the next week, Bauman found his old bookmaker and quietly placed a couple of bets. All that happened was that he lost eight dollars. Trying to recoup that loss, he tossed another eight away. He was out sixteen. He started to squirm.
But the next Tuesday he stopped off at the bank and bought a hundred-dollar money order. He didn’t dare send the girl a check because there was always the chance Ethel might decide to go over the checkbook some Sunday afternoon, and she would want to know about the hundred-dollar check to Miss Joanne Harris.
He mailed her the money-order. One payment down and thirty-six to go.
Strain-lines began to appear in his face. He tried to pretend to his business friends, to their occasional guests, to his wife, that everything was all right. But as the second and the third and the fourth week went by, he began to look worse and worse. People started to tell him so. The head of his firm even suggested that he take a couple of weeks off.
He turned down the idea. Every Tuesday he mailed off his hundred dollars. But it was getting tougher and tougher. He had had a little luck with the horses, but not much; so far he showed a net loss of $40 on his bets, though in the last few weeks he had been doing a little better than breaking even as he gained familiarity with the horses. Still, he was $40 in the hole there. He had used up the bank’s loan, and now he had to channel money from other sources.
He squeezed some from his check—Ethel didn’t keep such close watch on him—and he nibbled a little out of the savings account, and the rest came from his lunch money and his cigarettes and tunnel tolls. Somehow he made the fifth payment. But there were thirty-two payments still to go. Each week he was going to have to go through the same process, scrabbling and scraping to find a C-note. And come October, the bank was going to want fifteen hundred more from him on that loan.
The decision crept up on him slowly. He didn’t know when the thought first entered his mind, but it grew and grew from day to day, haunted him in his dreams, whispered in his dreams, whispered suggestions in his ear as he worked.
The sixth week he risked $20 and lost it on a sure thing. It was getting tougher and tougher to find the weekly hundred. And the cold suspicion was dawning in him that perhaps this obligation would not end with the final payment, perhaps she would go on and on, bleeding him dry for the rest of his life, extorting new payment and never being satisfied.
He would never last out the year this way. He had made up his mind by the end of the sixth week. He was going to kill Joanne Harris.
–
On Monday of the seventh week he phoned the Times Square Station post office and said, “Is it possible for you to give me the home address of one of your box-holders?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” was the firm reply. “It’s our policy never to divulge such information.”
Protesting, Bauman said, “It’s important that I get in touch face-to-face with a box-holder this afternoon. It’s a matter of great importance to her. Couldn’t I possibly have her home address?”
“I’m afraid not. Box-holders pay for the privilege of privacy, we cannot release personal information about them.”
“I see,” Bauman said unhappily.
“If you wish, sir, you could give me your message and I would phone the person in question—strictly as a favor, you understand; the Post Office Department doesn’t prescribe such services. You say it’s urgent?”
“Not that urgent,” Bauman said, and hung up.
So they wouldn’t let him have the home address? There was no sense sending her any messages. He had another way of making contact with her.
On Tuesday he bought his usual hundred-dollar money order. It took his last remaining cash to do it, but he didn’t mind, because he knew this was the last one. He did not put the letter in the mail as he had done with the previous six. Instead he slipped it into his desk drawer and left it there overnight.
Reaching his office at ten minutes to nine the next day, he took the envelope from his drawer and crossed the room to his superior. He said, “Tom, I’ve got to go out on some errands this morning. A little shopping for the home—I’d like to get it done before the afternoon rush starts. I’ll put in the time after five today. Okay with you?”
“Sure, Fred.” It didn’t matter to him, as long as the work got done.
Bauman left the office and walked briskly across town to the Times Square post office station. It was a warm morning at the end of May.
He reached the post office at nine fifteen. I hope she hasn’t been here yet, he thought anxiously.
Strolling into the lobby, he looked around for the rows of post office boxes. He found them after a moment or two, and casually sauntered toward them. He looked up and down the rows. Ah. Number 356.
Through the smoked glass window of the box he could see an envelope within. Good, he thought. That means she hasn’t been here yet.
He walked to the stamp window and bought a couple of 3c stamps, keeping an eye on the boxes. Plenty of people were showing up to get their morning mail, but nobody that he recognized as the girl. He hoped he would recognize her. After all, he had seen her for only a short time, at night, nearly two months before.
He knew that loitering in the post office all day would simply not be allowed. He also knew that the girl might wait all day before she decided to go down to the post office and pick up her mail. She might not even come at all.
Still, he had to find her.
Keeping an eye on the boxes, he went to another stamp window and bought a ten-cent air-letter sheet. Going to the table that faced the box wall, he picked up the cheap ball-point pen that was chained there and started to write a letter to himself, pausing every few minutes as if to think of a phrase, but actually simply looking up to see if the girl had arrived. She hadn’t. Nor had he missed her, because the letter in her box was still visible.
He had no idea of what to write, so he slowly and gravely covered the blue air-letter sheet with the words, “Having wonderful time, wish you were here,” over and over again. By ten o’clock he could no longer stall over the letter any more. He put down the pen, folded the air-letter sheet and sealed it. Addressing it to Santa Claus, the North Pole, he slowly carried it across the floor and dropped it in the airmail chute.
Ten-fifteen. He went outside and paced up and down in front of the main entrance. Every few minutes he darted a glance inside to see if she had come. The day was getting very hot, now, and he was roasting in his jacket and tie. Ten-thirty. Ten-forty-five.
At eleven he went back inside the post office and looked at her box. The letter still sat there. He went to the stamped envelope window and bought another air-letter sheet. As he started to go to the writing table, he looked up and saw her.
She was opening Box 356.
–
His breath stopped. Because of the heat, she was wearing only a blouse and a light skirt; her slim, lovely figure was breathtaking, and for a moment he almost forgot that this was the girl who was cold-bloodedly blackmailing him. Safe back of the writing-table, he watched her open the box and take out the letter. He could see it was some kind of circular. She scanned it and then dropped it in the wastepaper barrel nearby. She seemed disappointed, and no wonder; this was the first Wednesday in weeks that there hadn’t been a nice little money order for a hundred dollars waiting in her box!
She started to leave. As she neared the door he stepped out from behind the table and said, “Hello, there.”
She whirled, surprise brightening her eyes, and glared at him. “You!”
“Me.” Bauman’s heart throbbed fiercely. He hoped everything would work out all right. “I want to see you. That’s why I came.”
They stepped out into the warm morning sunlight. She said, “I didn’t get my check this morning. I warned you about what would happen if you missed a payment.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t mail it because I decided to bring it in person. I have it right here with me. In my jacket pocket.”
“Well, let’s have it, then,” she snapped impatiently. “And from now on don’t pay me any visits. Go back to mailing it the way you used to.”
He took the envelope from his pocket, ripped it open, and let her see the filled-out money order that was inside. She reached out for it, but he grinned at her, snatched it out of her reach, and put it back in his inside pocket. She stared at him.
“You playing games?”
“I’ll give it to you later. Take me to your apartment and I’ll give it to you there.”
“My apartment? You clown, you think I’m gonna bring you up there?”
He winced at her words. “Joanne—”
“That’s not my name.”
“It’s the only name you gave me. Joanne, look. I can’t get you out of my mind. I wake up nights thinking about you.”
“That’s damn sweet of you.”
“I want you,” he made himself say. “Once more—not just in an automobile, either. Someplace where I can appreciate you.”
“You got a good case,” she said.
“No, listen to me. Take me to your apartment now—and I’ll give you all the rest of the money tomorrow! A check for three thousand. Payment in full.”
The gleam of greed danced in her eyes. “How about letting me have it now?”
He shook his head. “Uh-uh. You’re too shrewd, Joanie. No payment in advance. But I promise you you’ll have it by this afternoon. Just once more in your arms—”
–
Her apartment was on West Forty-Fifth Street, near Ninth Avenue—a rundown neighborhood, with kids yelling in the streets and women hanging out the windows talking to each other. She had given in readily enough, after he had waved the promise of full payment under her nose. Money-grabbing little bitch, he thought, as he walked along the mid-town streets with her.
In ten minutes you’ll be dead, he thought at her as they walked. And I’ll be free of you.
It was a walkup apartment. She went first, he following her, up the creaking stairs. Nobody saw him as he entered. That was good. Nobody would see him when he left, if his luck held out.
She threw open the door of the place. Two rooms, and messy. Dirty clothing all over the place, an unmade bed, drapery hanging askew on the windows. Cheap furniture that probably came with the room. There was a stale and musty smell about the place.
He felt perfectly calm now.
She said to him, “Come on, let’s get it over with, Buster. And then you go get the three thousand you were talking about.”
“Sure,” he said. “Sure. Come here.”
She moved toward him, and there was a light in her eyes—a money loving light, he thought. And so young, too. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-four. She was just a kid, a pretty kid with a good complexion and a pretty face, the kind of kid college boys liked to date, wholesome and good fun—
She was wearing a man’s white shirt, open at the throat. Bauman made sure the door was shut and the window curtains were drawn.
She glided toward him. He caressed her for a moment as they stood together, and she made small purring noises.
Then, suddenly, brutally, he slid his hands upward and locked them around her throat.
In that moment all his thirty-eight years flashed before him. They say that happens to you when you’re dying; Bauman had never expected it to happen while he was killing someone else. But he had never expected to be killing someone else, either. He saw himself as a runny-nosed schoolboy, and as a night student at business school, too busy for dates, and then getting his first job as a bookkeeper, and meeting Ethel when he was twenty-five. She had seemed like the most wonderfully lovely girl in the world then. And here he was, thirteen years later, with his hands on the throat of a girl who had lured him into raping her and then had blackmailed him for so far nearly two thousand dollars. A girl who had been no more than nine or ten years old when he had married Ethel, a girl who had been playing skip-rope then and now was about to die.
His hands tightened. He held her away from him at arm’s length, just in case she decided to claw at his eyes, but she hadn’t thought of that. She tugged at his hands, but the fury that rippled through him doubled his strength, and she could not budge him. From her mouth came thick gurgling noises. He almost felt like letting go, but it was as if his hands were glued to her throat and he could not let go. Her face was turning a mottled purplish color and her eyes, bulging, were frightful to see.
He kept up the pressure and felt her knees starting to sag. He didn’t dare release her yet—not with her half-dead. He gripped her throat, one minute, two minutes, days perhaps. Flecks of foam came from her lips. Her eyes were closed and her legs were not supporting her.
She was blue in the face now and she had stopped making noises. He let go of her throat and she slipped to the floor. Picking up her wrist, he searched for a pulse and found none. He ripped open her blouse, tore away her bra, putting his ear between her full, still warm breasts. He heard nothing. A mirror lay in an open handbag on the cheap dresser. He seized it, held it to her lips, looked at it. It hadn’t clouded.
She was dead. He was free.
She lay in a rumpled heap, her skirt up around her hips, her blouse open, as if she had just be making love instead of meeting her death. Bauman looked down at her and wondered if this was just a dream.
No, no dream. She was dead, and he had killed her.
He had to get out of here, now. Fast. Women got murdered in cheap rooming-houses all the time, and the police never worried much about it. He had taken care not to leave prints on anything. Nothing except her throat, anyway, and he didn’t think they would be able to trace him from the purplish blotches on her throat.
He turned to leave.
The door opened suddenly and someone came in.
–
He was a tall man, over six feet tall it seemed, and he was dressed well. In the first shocked moment Bauman thought this might be another victim of the dead girl, but then he saw the man’s eyes and knew that this was her confederate, the friend that she had once mentioned.
He looked surprised. And he was holding a gun.
Bauman backed away, mouthing something wordless and soundless that refused to leave his throat. He stood with his back against the dresser, with the dead girl on the floor between them.
The tall man said, “So you killed her, eh?”
“I-I-”
“Go easy, chum. Calm down. I’m not going to use this rod unless you make me do it. What’s your name, anyway? Miller? No? Bauman, then. Yeah, you must be Bauman. Mae told me about you. The ratty-looking little one with the big nose.”
Bauman moistened his lips and looked from the body on the floor to the man with the gun.
“Are you Bauman?” he repeated.
Bauman nodded weakly. “Yes. Who—who are you?”
The other shrugged. “I was a sort of a friend of your late playmate. You seem to have ended my friendship for me. Well, if you didn’t do it somebody else would have, I guess.”
“She was blackmailing me,” Bauman said.
“Of course she was. I showed her how to work the dodge. I showed her lots of things she didn’t know before. And then you came along and killed her.” He didn’t sound very disturbed. “Well, I was going to pull out of town anyway, without her. Now you saved me the trouble of explaining things to her.”
“I don’t understand,” Bauman said.
“You will,” the other said. He slipped the gun into his pocket as if to show that he was contemptuous of Bauman. “I was sort of Mae’s manager, you might say. But she was getting a little too high-hat about the women I was seeing. It was okay for her to pick up guys and go to bed with them whenever she felt like it, but I had to walk the narrow path.” He chuckled. “Poor Mae. Well, the blackmail gimmick was a good one, but I knew one of these days she’d hit a sucker who wouldn’t come across.”
“What are you going to do with me?”
“With you? Nothing, chum. I’m going to high-tail it out of New York City tonight and get me back to Chicago where I belong.”
“You won’t say anything about—about this?”
The other grinned cheerfully. “Sure I won’t say anything about this. But you’re going to meet me tonight and give me ten thousand as a going-away present, or else I phone the cops and tip them off.”
–
A wave of dizziness rocked Bauman. Not again, he thought. Freeing himself from one blackmailer, he had only made things twice as bad. Now he was a murderer—and he was being asked for ten thousand
He sat down heavily in a rickety chair. “I don’t have ten thousand,” he said in a dull voice, looking away from the huddled dead heap on the floor.
“Get it. Borrow it. Steal it. But come up with it by tonight or I call the cops. It won’t be too hard for them to trace the checks and money-orders you were giving her and find a lead back to you. Of course if I keep my mouth shut you’ll squeak by.”
“Ten thousand,” Bauman said.
“Yeah. In cash, certified check, or money order. I’ll meet you at half past eight tonight at a roadhouse called Marty’s, across the river near Fort Lee on Route 4. You know how to get there?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Be there and make sure you have the dough. I’m gonna leave here now. You wait five minutes and you leave too.”
“Wait a minute,” Bauman said. His business sense still functioned in his numbed mind. “I can’t write a check. Who do I make it payable to?”
“Payable to cash,” the other said. “You don’t need to know my name. So long, fathead.”
Bauman stared at the dead girl on the floor. He waited, counting out the minutes as they passed. When five minutes were up he, too, left.
No one saw him as he slipped down the stairs into the open. It was a little past twelve, now. Kids were coming home from school and the sun was fearfully hot. And he had to produce ten thousand dollars—more than he had in his entire savings account by eight-thirty tonight, or he’d be turned into the police by a man whose name he didn’t know for the murder of a girl who had called herself Joanne Harris and whose real name he knew only as Mae something.
–
This time he knew exactly what his course of action was to be.
Raising the ten thousand was impossible. It would plunge him so deep into debt he would never get out again—and in any event he would have to make explanations to Ethel, and that way she would drag the whole horrible story from him.
No. No money.
But there was another way out.
He had killed once, and his life was thus forfeit. He could kill again without making matters much worse. They can’t send a man to the electric chair twice. He had everything to gain and nothing whatever to lose by killing a second time.
First he stopped in a candy store and phoned Ethel. In a voice that amazed him by its steadiness he told her, “I’m going to have to work late tonight, Ethel. Maybe till nine or ten o’clock.”
“Okay, if you have to. Everything okay at the office today?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Sure. See you tonight-by nine-thirty or ten, no later.”
“So long, Fred.”
With that chore out of the way, he stopped into a bank and cashed in the money-order he had brought along as bait for the girl. Then he walked downtown to Macy’s and visited the sporting-goods store.
He bought a hunting-knife, five inches long and razorsharp. It came in a scabbard that he could attach to the inside of his jacket. He paid for it in cash and left. The knife was the only way. He didn’t know where he could get a gun without a permit, and besides he didn’t know how to use one. And guns were noisy. Poison was strictly for the video shows. And though he hadn’t hesitated to strangle the girl, he knew that force was impossible with the man. He was much too big.
He was too tensed-up even to consider going back to the office at all. Instead he killed the afternoon at a movie house on 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue, watching a couple of old films. One was a western and the other was a science-fiction film. He was glad they weren’t detective stories. Halfway through the science-fiction film, he realized he had seen it already, five years before. He had taken Ethel. He had always been a little of a bug on spaceships and satellites.
He left the theater after seeing the western a second time—not really seeing it, just letting it slide past his eyes. The time was twenty past six. Rush hour was coming to an end now; people were still flocking into the subways at Times Square, heading home to their wives and kids and their nice quiet lives.
He would be heading home now too. Except that one rainy night he decided to take the bridge instead of the tunnel, and set off a chain of nightmare happenings that still hadn’t reached its end.
Walking over to Sixth Avenue, he ate once again in the Automat. This time he wasn’t very hungry. He left the automat a little after seven and stopped in a stationery store He bought a single envelope, took a blank check from his checkbook, put it in the envelope and sealed it. Then he slipped the envelope into his inside breast pocket, in the same pocket where the hunting-knife was clipped.
A headline on the evening paper caught his eye and he bought a copy. He sat down in Bryant Park to read it. It seemed a girl named Mae Elliott had been found murdered by her landlady in a rooming-house on West Forty-Fifth Street. Her occupation was given as unemployed dancer. Police had made no arrests as yet, suspected no one, but were investigating. There was a picture of her; an old one, with her hair cut in a different way. He remembered having seen the picture on her dresser.
At quarter to eight he threw the paper away, walked up to 48th Street where he had his car, and got in. He drove uptown on the West Side Highway to the George Washington Bridge, crossed over into New Jersey, found Route Four, and drove into Fort Lee.
It was eight-thirty on the nose when he pulled up outside the roadhouse whose neon sign proclaimed its name as MARTY’S.
–
The thin sound of a jukebox whined in his ears as he walked in. The big man was waiting at a table in the back, nursing a beer. He looked at his watch as Bauman entered.
“Right on time,” he muttered. “You bring the dough?”
“Sure,” Bauman said. “You don’t think I would have come out here just for a glass of beer.”
“I don’t think anything.”
A waiter came by and looked inquiringly at Bauman. Bauman said, “No, thanks. Nothing right now.”
The waiter vanished. The big man said, “Come on with me.”
“Where?”
“Outside. In back. I don’t want you to hand me the money in here.”
Bauman shrugged and followed him through a back door outside. The back of the roadhouse was shabbily painted and dreary. Stacks of soda-bottle cases stood heaped up everywhere, and empty beer-barrels. It was dark out here; there was no moon. Bauman thought, This is going to be easy.
The big man said, “Okay. Let’s have the dough.”
Bauman took the envelope from his pocket and handed it over. The big man took it and ripped it open with a quick swipe of his thumb. He reached in, pulled out the check, frowned—
“Hey, this a gag? The check’s blank.”
“Oh, dreadfully sorry,” Bauman said. “Wrong envelope. Heh-heh. Little mistake.”
He reached into the pocket again and his hand closed on the hilt of the knife. It felt good in his hands. He brought it out casually, and before the big man could do anything Bauman leaned up and rammed the hunting knife into his throat. He sputtered once, blinked in amazement, and toppled as Bauman yanked out the knife. He landed heavily behind a pile of cases of soda-bottles, out of sight and dead.
“Hey, mister,” a thin voice said.
Bauman whirled suddenly. The door of the roadhouse had opened, and the waiter was standing there, staring at him.
“Mister,” he said again.
No no no no! Bauman thought wildly. He saw too! There’s always someone watching! Every misdeed is part of a chain that leads to another! And now he thinks he’ll blackmail me too. Everyone in the world is a blackmailer. Well, I’ll escape this time.
He let out an agonized sob and plunged the knife into his own throat. There was a moment of blinding pain and that was all.
–
The waiter, standing framed in the back door of the roadhouse, went bug-eyed with fright.
“Jeez,” he muttered. “Stuck the knife right in himself. And I only wanted to tell him he left his car-lights on! You think I caught him killing someone, or something!”
He didn’t stay to see the other body behind the cases.
He had seen enough. He turned and hollered inside, “Hey, Marty, come on out here! Some guy went buggy and killed himself!”