The Listening House Page 4

  “What’s all the racket?”

  We told him what I’d found. He leaned excitedly beside us.

  “That’s right. That’s right, all right. That’s a man there!”

  He and Mrs. Garr repeated that, over and over. The police car came hurtling up the street below; as it did so, two more men ran down my back steps to be greeted with explanations. They were the two men I’d seen together that first morning. I paid them little attention; all my interest was riveted on the scene below. The police car stopped at the street’s edge, not four feet from the body. The two officers burst from the car at its instant of pause, bent over the heap of clothes.

  They straightened quickly, conferred briefly. Then one man dashed off in the car again; the other stayed by the body. The man on guard waved up at us, as if in affirmation.

  “I’m going on down,” the youngest of the men beside me said. The other two went after him with alacrity, cutting across Sixteenth Street and the backyards of the houses in the next block to reach the stairs that go down to Water Street near the capitol. I turned, and there was Mrs. Garr paddling after.

  “Mrs. Garr!” I called, running to catch her. “You can’t go down like that! Not in your nightgown! Not in your bare feet!”

  She halted at the edge of the yard, with my hand on her arm.

  “Why, I hain’t got my clothes on,” she grumbled in bewildered discovery. Her white hair was whipping about her face; long streamers of it were loose from the tumbled knot on top of her head. She scuttled for the house.

  “Wait’ll I get my clothes on! Don’t you go on down before I get my clothes on!” she commanded.

  I wasn’t anxious to go down; the rail was close enough for me. In the short interval I had spent running after Mrs. Garr, the policeman below quickly had his hands full; people were streaming out of the Water Street houses to crowd the scene, fall back, crowd forward again as he ran back and forth, pushing them away.

  “Stand back there, stand back!” I could hear his shouts, rebounding against the concrete wall.

  Up Water Street, running, came the three men from Mrs. Garr’s house. As they neared the group below new sirens cried. An ambulance and two more police cars sped ruthlessly through the crowd; people scattered back momentarily, pressed forward again. Uniformed men spilled from the cars.

  “What is it? What were the sirens for? Where’s my husband—where’s Mr. Waller?” the fat woman’s breathless voice asked beside me.

  “There’s a man down there, dead,” I answered, looking up only to see that the other inmates of the house were there, too, now: the department store clerk, Mr. Grant, Mrs. Tewman. “Your husband went down there with the others.”

  The men below turned the body over. There was a moment of quiet, then hubbub again. Faces lifted, looking upward at us. I moved back from the rail.

  The fat woman screamed. “Joe! They’re taking him!”

  “Your husband? Why, that’s—” I began. It was true. “But look! The other men, too. They’re all getting in one of the cars.”

  The car holding the men from Mrs. Garr’s house sped back toward the capitol.

  “Wait! Watch where the car’s going. It’s coming up here!”

  “Joe!” the woman wailed.

  In the crowd below there was active movement now; I saw photographers’ tripods, the body being lifted to a stretcher.

  A car screamed to a stop beside the house. The three men from the house and as many policemen came out of it, walked in a group toward us. Mr. Waller cried:

  “It’s a dead man all right. He was shot. But he fell down that hill, too. And they figure he must have fell or been pushed down that concrete drop from just about here!”

  * * *

  —

  THE DEAD MAN HAD fallen from up here! Involuntarily I looked over the rail again, shuddering at the drop.

  “Stand back from the rail there!” one of the policemen ordered peremptorily. He waved us away as the other two officers began examining the concrete paving and the rail. “Go on back to the house, all of you. Get in that house, there! I’m going to want some statements, and I don’t want to miss anybody.”

  We crowded through my rooms into the hall. Mrs. Garr, fully clothed now, was just emerging from her cubbyhole.

  “What you comin’ in here for?” she asked the officer angrily.

  “Man fell or got pushed over that rail right in back of this house,” the man explained impatiently. “You run this joint?”

  “I’m the owner of this prop’ty.”

  “Good. Tell me who all lives here.”

  “All nice, respectable people.”

  “I don’t care what the heck they are; I’ll find that out. Their names I want.”

  Mrs. Garr listed us, one by one.

  “Okay. Now, which one raised the alarm?”

  “Mrs. Dacres—that’s my new lodger—called it in. That’s Mrs. Dacres. She lives right there in the back.”

  “All right, Mrs. Dacres, how’d you come to discover this body?”

  “After I’d been up a little while I went outdoors because it was such a nice morning,” I explained. “I walked as far as the rail and looked over; at first I thought that was just a heap of clothes thrown out there, but then I saw it wasn’t a heap of clothes.”

  “Uh-huh. You know anything about this guy getting thrown over?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Hear anything out back last night?”

  “No.”

  “Any shots?”

  “No.”

  “Any cars backfiring?”

  “No, I can’t remember any.”

  “Where was you from seven o’clock last night until this morning?”

  I detailed my commonplace activities.

  He merely grunted at the end, and left me.

  One by one he questioned the others. Everywhere the answers were the same. No one had heard anything unusual or seen anything unusual. The three men who had seen the body up close claimed that they had never seen the man before, and signed statements to that effect. Mr. Tewman came in the front door as the inquisition was in full swing; he was a rabbity little blond man in his forties, who said he had been working in his hamburger castle all night, had just come home to sleep. He was completely at sea as to what had happened, but was enlightened by eight voices at once.

  The policeman finally snapped his notebook shut.

  “I’m not gettin’ anywhere with this,” he said. “Looks like a gang killing to me, anyhow. All of you that didn’t see the body this morning will need to report down at the morgue sometime during the day and see if you recognize the guy in any connection. And don’t run your mouths to reporters too much.”

  That last was easy for me, harder for Mrs. Garr and Mrs. Tewman, who answered the doorbell. The others scattered to their rooms, to work, or elsewhere; the house seemed unusually empty that day, perhaps in contrast to the constantly going and coming crowds outside the house. People hung around the sidewalks and the backyard, leaned over the railing. Every now and then throughout the day I saw policemen emerging from other houses in the neighborhood, too; they must have been canvassing the whole vicinity for any clues to the man’s identity or death.

  It wasn’t until the Comet extras were cried on the streets around noon that we began to know anything about the slain man; a radio flash on a midmorning news program gave only the briefest details of the discovery. The Comet extra played the story up big:

  MYSTERY MAN SLAIN

  Stranger Found Shot; May Be New York Man

  The body of a man who had been shot and then dumped down the cliff side of Capitol Hill, to fall sixty feet to Water Street, below, was discovered this morning by a young woman resident of one of the houses on upper Trent Street. Police were immediately called to the scene and arrived within ten minutes of
the discovery. The only clue to the identity of the slain man was in a New York State driver’s license, issued to Samuel Zeitman, 37, New York City. As 37 is the dead man’s approximate age, Gilling City police are already in touch with New York City police in an effort to discover if the slain man is the Samuel Zeitman to whom the license was issued.

  City Residence Unknown

  An investigation is now underway of hotels and lodgings to ascertain the Gilling City residence, the activities, and the acquaintances of the dead man. Any Gilling City residents having information that might concern the dead man are asked to bring such information to the police. The deceased was about 37 years of age, had dark hair, a swarthy complexion, was five feet six and one-half inches tall, wore a large diamond ring on his left little finger, had a dark mole on the left temple. He had been shot through the heart with a .38-caliber pistol, at a time estimated by Police Surgeon Thomley as approximately midnight. A pistol, which is now being tested to ascertain if it fired the fatal shot, was found beside the body. Fingerprints on the gun are all those of the dead man, indicating that he was shot with his own gun. However, the fact that, according to Dr. Thomley, the man was thrown over the cliff at least fifteen minutes after death does away with the probability of suicide.

  The rest of the account I won’t give; it repeated the story of the discovery. A picture of the man lying facedown in the weeds accompanied the story; one of those sickening pictures the papers are going in for nowadays under the guise of honest realism.

  Mrs. Waller knocked at my door early in the afternoon to ask if I’d go to the morgue with her. Mrs. Garr had already gone with Mrs. Halloran, both all agog. Mr. Waller went with us, although he didn’t have to go; he agreed with our questioner of the morning that it was a gangster killing. He elaborated on his theory all the way downtown.

  The morgue is down by the river; it is a yellow brick building that looks like a factory but smells vilely of disinfectants. I tried to see and feel as little as I could on that trip; heaven knows, it wasn’t enjoyable. We told our errand to a gray, toothy young man in a glassed-in cubicle, were led down a scrubbed, hospital-like corridor to a small scrubbed room with one operating table in it, and a mound on the table.

  The rubber-soled attendant silently pulled a cloth back from the face; it was a thin face, mean even in death, the hair dark and oily, the forehead bumpy, the eye sockets close to the fleshy nose, the chin too narrow. I turned away after the briefest possible glance, hurried out into the corridor again, Mrs. Waller right on my heels. I stood there for a moment until my stomach subsided; we went, tiptoeing, I remember, back to the cubicle, where we signed statements as to our ignorance of the dead man, and that we possessed no information whatsoever concerning his death.

  Getting out of there was like getting out of a—well, like getting out of a morgue. We hurried three blocks as fast as we could walk, then had to stop to breathe, because we were still trying to breathe as little as possible. That is, I was, and I think Mrs. Waller was; Mr. Waller was stodgily matter-of-fact about the whole thing.

  The regular evening edition of the Comet came out with a story that corroborated Mr. Waller. It ran:

  SLAIN MAN IDENTIFIED

  Is Sam Zeitman, N.Y. Gangster. Gang War Hinted

  New York police this afternoon identified photographs of the man found shot on Water Street this morning as Samuel Zeitman, suspected of connection with the New York restaurant racket ring, which was broken this last winter by the vigorous persecution of rackets now being conducted in New York City. Sam Zeitman, the New York police indicated, fled the city this spring to evade the roundup of racketeers; the discovery of his body this morning was the first news they had of his subsequent whereabouts.

  Police Hint Gang Flare-Up

  Lieutenant Peter Strom, in charge of the Gilling City homicide squad, said that the death was in all probability due to an attempt to muscle in on some of the small local gangs who have been attempting to establish rackets in Gilling City. Although such activities are well under control, police indicated, sporadic attempts are made to extort revenue by such means, or through the use of slot machines and similar gambling devices.

  It may have been fear of Zeitman’s big-city methods which led to his death.

  Residence in City Located

  The proprietress of a small loop hotel testified to police this afternoon that a Samuel Zeitman had registered at her hotel on the seventeenth of March, this year, and had since resided there. She later identified the body as that of her lodger. She was unable, however, to tell anything of the man’s activities. He was very quiet, even secretive, she says. She could remember no men visitors to his room. A search of the dead man’s room revealed a second gun, several cartridges, and a blackjack, but no clue as to his activities. Every effort will be made, however, to seek out the killer, police stated.

  The rest was repetition.

  In the days that followed, not one new thing was discovered about that death. I watched for the case every day in the papers, of course; it was played up on page one for a couple of days, then slipped rapidly into newspaper oblivion.

  It was some days before I ventured again to look over that railing. From that time until I left Mrs. Garr’s house I never did stand there without expecting to see another heap of clothes in the weeds below. Sometimes I’d feel pushed to look—and I’d see Water Street, dirty but innocent, with children playing in the rubbish heaps where a dead man had lain a few days before.

  One thing I certainly took for granted: that the killing of Sam Zeitman had nothing to do with Mrs. Garr’s house or the people in it. It never entered my mind that it had, any more than it concerned the other people in the houses up and down Trent Street. Some gangster had had reason to shoot Sam Zeitman, had done so, and had quietly and efficiently slung the body over the rail at Sixteenth Street because it was a handy, quiet spot. That it could have been me that caused Sam Zeitman’s death—well, that would have been as incomprehensible as that it was me that caused the moon to shine.

  Life in Mrs. Garr’s house went on as usual. I was jumpy for a while, but it wore off. Mrs. Garr kept to her orbit. Mrs. Tewman cleaned. The lodgers came and went. My apartment was settled. I liked my two rooms; on bright days they were extremely pleasant. Mrs. Garr was the fly in the ointment, of course. I was putting away my winter clothes one day, shaking them on the back porch to air, dragging the steamer trunk out to the kitchen floor, unpacking my summer clothes, when the sharp rap I’d come to know so well sounded on my door.

  “You’re running my hot water in your kitchen,” Mrs. Garr burst at me, her eyes hard and hot.

  “Why, no, I haven’t been using any water.”

  “It’s no use your talking that way to me. I can tell.” She pushed past me, halted a moment to stare at my clothes and the trunk in the kitchen, limped on to the sink. Her fingers closed over the hot-water faucet.

  “No, you didn’t,” she grunted. “I can tell if anybody’s been using my hot water in their kitchen, because then their faucet’s hot.” She switched subjects quickly. “You doing something with your clo’es?”

  “I’m putting away my winter things.”

  “My, you got a lot o’ clo’es. I cer’n’ly admire to see pretty clo’es.”

  She plumped herself down on the kitchen chair.

  She stuck like a limpet, sitting there while I shook out and hung my summer dresses, folded and packed the winter things.

  She sat hunched forward, her arms folded across her knees.

  “We’re going to have another change in this house,” she told me importantly. “Them Wallers, they’re going. I don’t trust that man. I don’t trust her, either.”

  “Why, I thought he was an ex-policeman,” I said. “Certainly you can trust an ex-policeman.”

  “No, I don’t trust ’em. He snoops. Oh, they don’t think I know what’s going on, bu
t I can tell. Coming down into my basement, says he’s looking for nails. She comes right into the kitchen, asks can she borrow an egg. Oh, they’re looking, all right.”

  I forbore saying that the only person I had known to do any snooping in that house was Mrs. Garr. I couldn’t move a table without having her turn up, her black eyes inquiring and suspicious.

  “But what could he be looking for?” I argued, instead.

  She shot me a glinty look. “They like to snoop. They just like to snoop, people like them.”

  “Oh, you’re just imagining it. You’re here too much. Cooped up. Now it’s getting to be so nice outdoors, you ought to get away once in a while. Go somewhere. See a movie. Why, you never go out!”

  “I ain’t a hand for going. Not now no more. Oh, in my young days, then I was a goer. I could put many a young girl now’days in the shade.”

  “I’m sure of it. Your hair’s still so lovely.”

  I’d reached her pride, of course.

  “Yes, I always had a handsome head o’ hair. Many’s the people remarked about my hair. A handsome head o’ hair . . . I could help you get that trunk back, now.”

  “Oh, don’t bother. I got it out myself. It’s too hard on you.”

  “No, ’tain’t. I ain’t so old as you think.”

  She took one end of the trunk again, and again, gasping, helped me get it back in place before she’d leave.

  * * *

  —

  OF COURSE, I WAS certain her talk of people rummaging through her possessions was imagination.

  Certain, that is, until the day in late April when Mrs. Halloran finally persuaded Mrs. Garr out to see Three Little Maids, which was playing at the second-run movie house below the capitol that week.

  They left in a flurry of argument; at the last moment Mrs. Garr, with all an old person’s reluctance to change from settled habit, sat stubbornly down in the chair in the hall to say no, she wasn’t going. Mrs. Halloran knocked at my door to get my seconding opinion that it would be good for Mrs. Garr to get out for a change. They went finally; I’ve seen less fuss made over plane trips to New York.