“Just stand there a minute.”
He snapped on a flashlight. A handkerchief was over the lens and the diffused light which came from the bulb cast an eerie glow over the room. I could see that it was garishly furnished, could make out a davenport, a table, some chairs.
Then the light went out. I could hear Wolfe fumbling with something in the room, heard him grunt.
“It won’t be long now,” he said. “I guess the best place for you to stand is right in that doorway. If things don’t work out, you can beat it back there to the kitchen. Now we’d better keep still.”
He snapped on the light again until I took up my station in the hall doorway, then he switched it off again. But I wanted to ask one more question and I did.
“How come you’re after this guy alone? You know he’s goin’ to be here. Why not let the cops in on it?”
“Yeah. That’s just it. If they knew about it, there’d be fifty cops around this place. They’d be so thick Shulz couldn’t miss. This way is safer. Now shut up.”
I don’t know how much later it was, probably not more than ten minutes, when I heard the footsteps in the outside corridor. And if I was nervous before, I was tensed all over now. Maybe I was scared; I know I wasn’t happy about it. I wished then that I’d found out if there was a back door.
Then a key clicked in the lock and I tried to put my thoughts together. Would Wolfe shoot Shulz down in the doorway? Would he give him a chance?
I watched the door swing slowly open. A narrow strip of yellow from the lighted hall crept across the floor, picked out the pattern in the rug, played tricks with the table and chair in its path. I glanced quickly toward the wall opposite the door to see if Wolfe could be seen. I couldn’t pick him out.
Then I watched the tall, thick-set figure, silhouetted in the doorway; saw him step into the room and raise one hand along the wall.
A switch clicked. Nothing happened. I stiffened as the fellow by the door spat out a curse. That was what Wolfe had been fumbling with. He had unscrewed the light bulbs.
Then a conical beam of light shot out from a point directly opposite the door. Wolfe’s flashlight. I couldn’t see what was behind it. I shrank back in my doorway and looked at Shulz.
For a second or two he stood there as though transfixed. His fleshy, heavily jowled face looked ghastly white in the artificial light. His eyes seemed to recede under the puffy lids and a tongue licked out to wet his lips.
“Stick ’em up, Shulz!” Wolfe barked the command. Then it happened.
This was what I had come to see and here it was. My eyes were glued on that puffy face of Shulz. I saw it coming, that thing Wolfe had spoken about, that action of the brain that meant death.
His hand darted inside his coat and I knew what to expect when the gun came out. I wanted to yell at Wolfe, wanted him to shoot while he had time.
Shulz’s automatic whipped into view and the instant it was free of his clothing a streak of flame stabbed the darkness and a roar shattered the quiet of the room.
The time between the first shot and the second couldn’t have been more than a watch tick. But it was long enough for a weakness of fear to sweep over me with the realization that Wolfe must have been hit. But the conical sweep of the flashlight still held steady.
Then the second shot roared and by that time I couldn’t have run if I’d wanted to. Then two jets of flame shot out from a spot about four feet from the flashlight. Two sharp, distinct cracks sounded, like a person slapping a mosquito on his hand.
Shulz’s face twitched. His mouth dropped open and the automatic slid from a hand that showed red on the back. One knee sagged and he braced himself on the other leg to keep from falling.
Wolfe, the .22 in his right fist, stepped into the flashlight’s rays, reached up and turned one of the light bulbs. The resulting glow showed the flashlight resting on the back of an overstuffed chair. Wolfe moved over to Shulz, who hadn’t said a word, and picked up the fallen automatic.
Backing toward a wall phone he said, “Now you see where the .22 comes in, Charlie. The one in the forearm crippled his gun hand, the one in the knee makes him stick around. I didn’t have to kill this guy because, for once, we got a case he can’t beat.”
He reached up for the receiver. “Of course, this may not give you the story you want. This wasn’t a regular shooting contest. I tricked him with the flash, turned it on and stepped to one side. Maybe that don’t count. But maybe you can see what would’ve happened to some conscientious cop standing there with a flashlight — maybe you can see how a real killer works.
“And if this ain’t just what you want, Charlie, let it lay. There may be a time when I can take you out with a .38 instead of the .22.”
Charlotte Armstrong
All the Way Home
We once predicted that “Charlotte Armstrong is going to make detective-story history.” We think she fulfilled that prophecy, but that, we now predict, is “only the beginning”...
I’d dreamed, so many times, how I would save the man I loved. In a dozen wild plots all would depend on me, my nerve, and my wits. And I’d dreamed how I’d win.
But what happened wasn’t like my dreams at all — nothing like them.
I work in Madame Elise’s Salon de Beauté, on the Boulevard. Tom isn’t crazy about the idea of me working, but we haven’t any children, yet, and we can use the money. It’s a good place. Madame Elise is strict, in some ways, but she runs a smart shop.
I’d combed out my four o’clock patron, that Wednesday, and was deep in the back of the narrow place when this woman came in. Madame Elise came out of a booth and stalked, in her stiff-legged way, down the middle aisle. I turned my head. I saw the woman’s face.
The first thing I thought was, Run! But you can’t get out of the shop at the back. Then I thought, Get sick! Go home sick! But I knew exactly what Madame Elise would do. She’d stand over me and ask all my symptoms, loudly, so the patrons would know this wasn’t Madame’s fault. I couldn’t put myself in that spotlight of attention. That was the very last thing I could do.
I couldn’t walk out. I couldn’t run away. I couldn’t go home sick. It was just like a trap — I couldn’t get out.
And if this woman recognized me when she saw my face, then Tom’s life and my life would be ruined.
I went into the lavatory. I was standing there, looking through the window bars, when Joan put her head in. “Elise is hollering. Mrs. Smith. Shampoo and set. She’s yours, dear.”
“Mine? In the blue coat?”
“New, isn’t she?”
“I guess so,” I said. I took my hands off the bars. Joan couldn’t take her instead of me. Nobody could. Any attempt I made to get out of this would only call attention to me.
That woman wasn’t any Mrs. Smith. She was Mrs. Maybee. What I’d have to do, to save the man I loved, was just what I always do, day after day — shampoo and set a woman’s hair. There was one chance. If I could master my own body, my hands and my voice, my breath and the pump of my heart, she might not realize who I was.
When Tom first got into trouble, I dreamed hard about helping him in some miraculous way. But help finally came out of the blue. They stumbled over the man who had taken all that money from Tom’s office. They found the money, and the man confessed, and there was a hullabaloo, because by this time Tom had served a whole month of his sentence in the penitentiary, on top of all the time they’d held him during his arrest and trial.
Of course, they let Tom go, at once. We were married the next day. What our friends and families back east said of us, now, was just that we had gone “out west” and were “doing well.”