“He must have recognized the man he saw you with as a Yard operative. Maybe he’d already seen him during some previous investigation over there. When he saw the two of you together like that, he was afraid you were beginning to suspect him, thought you might be on the point of divulging his identity and whereabouts, if you hadn’t already. That was enough to bring on the so-called shock without the aid of any blackout. Only it was a very sane, level-headed ‘shock’ in this case. He knew what he was doing. Well, the fall to the ground did what the hangman’s rope was waiting to do, and a lot more cheaply — broke his neck.”
She pressed her face against his coat. “I’m glad it’s over.”
“Sure. It’s all over and done with now. In a little while you’ll forget all about it.”
“All but one thing. I’ll never be able to look at a white rose again as long as I live.”
Afterword to “The Death Rose”
In “The Death Rose” (Baffling Detective Stories, March 1943) Woolrich recycled the storyline of his classic “Dime a Dance” (1938): a young woman stakes herself out as bait to trap a psychotic serial killer of women. This time she’s a wealthy debutante rather than a taxi dancer, the tale takes place during Manhattan’s World War II practice blackouts rather than in peacetime and the narration is in third rather than first person. As so often in Woolrich the suspense depends on wild coincidence — how likely is it that every man Ginny meets would match the killer’s psychological profile so closely? — but while his emotional roller-coaster is spinning, flaws like this are all but unnoticeable. The radio version of the story, broadcast on the CBS series Suspense (July 6, 1943) and starring Maureen O’Hara as Ginny, captured the noir mood so miraculously well that I’m half convinced Woolrich wrote the script himself.
“He won’t hurt me,” she answers understandingly without taking her eyes from mine. “We used to be in love.”
Used to? Then that’s why I’m dying. Because I still am. And you aren’t anymore.
She bends and kisses me, on the forehead, between the eyes. Like a sort of last rite.
And in that last moment, as I’m straining upward to find her lips, as the light is leaving my eyes, the whole night passes before my mind, the way they say your past life does when you’re drowning: the waiter, the night maid, the taxi argument, the call girl, Johnny — it all meshes into start-to-finish continuity. Just like in a story. An organized, step-by-step, timetabled story.
This story.
New York Blues
It’s six o’clock; my drink is at the three-quarter mark — three-quarters down, not three-quarters up — and the night begins.
Across the way from me sits a little transistor radio, up on end, simmering away like a teakettle on a stove. It’s been going steadily ever since I first came in here, two days, three nights ago; it chisels away the stony silence, takes the edge off the being alone. It came with the room, not with me.
Now there’s a punctuation of three lush chords, and it goes into a traffic report. “Good evening. The New York Municipal Communications Service presents the 6:00 p.m. Traffic Advisory. Traffic through the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and over the George Washington Bridge, heavy westbound, light eastbound. Traffic on the crosscut between the George Washington and Queens-Whitestone bridges, heavy in both directions. Traffic through the Battery Tunnel, heavy outbound, very light inbound. Traffic on the West Side Highway, bumper to bumper all the way. Radar units in operation there. Traffic over the Long Island Expressway is beginning to build, due to tonight’s game at Shea Stadium. West 70th Street between Amsterdam and West End avenues is closed due to a water-main break. A power failure on the East Side I.R.T. line between Grand Central and 125th Street is causing delays of up to forty-five minutes. Otherwise all subways and buses, the Staten Island Ferry, the Jersey Central, the Delaware and Lackawanna, and the Pennsylvania railroads, and all other commuter services, are operating normally. At the three airports, planes are arriving and departing on time. The next regularly scheduled traffic advisory will be given one-half hour from now—”
The big weekend rush is on. The big city emptying itself out at once. Just a skeleton crew left to keep it going until Monday morning. Everybody getting out — everybody but me, everybody but those who are coming here for me tonight. We’re going to have the whole damned town to ourselves.
I go over to the window and open up a crevice between two of the tightly flattened slats in one of the blinds, and a little parallelogram of a New York street scene, Murray Hill section, six-o’clock-evening hour, springs into view. Up in the sky the upper-echelon light tiers of the Pan Am Building are undulating and rippling in the humidity and carbon monoxide (“Air pollution index: normal, twelve percent; emergency level, fifty percent”).
Down below, on the sidewalk, the glowing green blob of a street light, swollen to pumpkin size by foreshortened perspective, thrusts upward toward my window. And along the little slot that the parted slats make, lights keep passing along, like strung-up, shining, red and white beads. All going just one way, right to left, because 37th Street is westbound, and all going by twos, always by twos, headlights and tails, heads and tails, in a welter of slowed-down traffic and a paroxysm of vituperative horns. And directly under me I hear a taxi driver and would-be fares having an argument, the voices clearly audible, the participants unseen.
“But it’s only to Fifty-ninth Street—”
“I don’t ca-a-are, lady. Look, I already tolje. I’m not goin’ up that way. Can’tje get it into your head?”
“Don’t let’s argue with him. Get inside. He can’t put you out.”
“No, but I can refuse to move. Lady, if your husband gets in here, he’s gonna sit still in one place, ’cause I ain’t budgin’.”
New York. The world’s most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying.
I take away the little tire jack my fingers have made, and the slats snap together again.
The first sign that the meal I phoned down for is approaching is the minor-key creak from a sharply swerved castor as the room-service waiter rounds a turn outside my door. I’m posted behind a high-backed wing chair, with my wrists crossed over the top of it and my hands dangling like loose claws, staring a little tensely at the door. Then there’s the waiter’s characteristically deferential knock. But I say “Who is it?” anyway, before I go over to open it.
He’s an elderly man. He’s been up here twice before, and by now I know the way he sounds.
“Room service,” comes through in that high-pitched voice his old age has given him.
I release the double lock, then I turn the knob and open the door.
He wheels the little white-clothed dinner cart forward into the room, and as the hall perspective clears behind him I get a blurred glimpse of a figure in motion, just passing from view, then gone, too quickly to be brought into focus.
I stand there a moment, holding the door to a narrow slit, watching the hall. But it’s empty now.
There’s an innocuous explanation for everything. Everything is a coin that has two sides to it, and one side is innocuous but the other can be ominous. The hall makes a right-angle turn opposite my door, and to get to the elevators, those whose rooms are back of this turn have to pass the little setback that leads to my door.
On the other hand, if someone wanted to pinpoint me, to verify which room I was in, by sighting my face as I opened the door for the waiter, he would do just that: stand there an instant, then quickly step aside out of my line of vision. The optical snapshot I’d had was not of a figure in continuous motion going past my point of view, but of a figure that had first been static and then had flitted from sight.