Dark Tunnel (12 page)

When I finished the letter I stood and thought for a minute without moving, if the kind of circles my mind was moving in can be called thinking. Peter Schneider had been with Ruth in Canada, perhaps for a couple of weeks. Even then he was a fast worker. I had not been overwhelmed by his charm, but then he was my rival. If I was a competitor at all, and I didn’t feel like one. She must have been very willing, to be corrupted so quickly. I remembered what Dr. Schneider had called her, and had a sudden vision of two white German bodies grappling in darkness. I felt sick with a moral sickness I had felt once before: when I was four or five I walked into a little wood and found a small snake trying to swallow a large toad.

My mind veered away from this and went on travelling in circles. A day or two before, Kirkland Lake had been in the news. Twenty or so German prisoners had escaped from a Canadian prison camp near there. Most of them had been caught again, a few had been killed resisting capture. What was the errand which Ruth had been afraid to mention in her letter and of which Peter had approved? Had the two of them gone to Northern Ontario to help German prisoners to get away?

But even in a state of emotional bewilderment I saw that this logic was a bit hysterical. The sincerity and pathos of her letter flooded back into my mind and confused me more. I couldn’t believe that letter was an exercise in literary deceit. Perhaps she knew even less than I did about Peter Schneider, perhaps he had fooled her completely. Then I remembered that she was an actress. Perhaps she had fooled me. My feelings ran hot and cold, and the snake and the toad grappled amorously in the underbrush, eating each other behind the bedroom door.

The toll of the tower bell made me start and look at the clock on the mantel. It was midnight, and I had been on my way to McKinley Hall to find Alec. I cursed myself for a dawdler and went out the door, stuffing the letter in my pocket.

I lived on the north side of the campus, ten minutes from McKinley Hall, which is on the south side. I covered the distance in five minutes by trotting and cutting across the dark campus, and approached the building from the rear.

There was one light on in its block-long length. It seemed to be on the fourth floor. Of course, the Middle English Dictionary office. Alec must be up there again. I looked for a light on the fifth floor immediately above the Dictionary office, but the fifth-floor windows were all dark. No light in Alec’s office second from the end.

The walk that ran along behind the building was unusually dark. The flood-light on the corner must have burned out, I thought, and I looked up as I passed it.

As I raised my eyes, a light flashed on in the second window from the end on the fifth floor, Alec’s office, and a man leaped at me from the lighted window. He howled like a dog and stretched out his arms as he leaped outward and I cowered against the wall in terror, quivering like a beaten animal. No human being could make that leap to the bare pavement.

The howling man dived headfirst to the sidewalk in front of me and I heard his skull break with a sound like an egg dropped on the floor. One leg thrashed in a convulsion and the body crumpled and lay still. Blood spattered and glistened darkly on the dim pavement, and I moved sideways along the wall to avoid it.

Then I remembered the flashlight still in my pocket. I turned it on the upturned face. There was no face. Dark blood was flowing from the head like oil in steady, wormlike streams. I felt the pulse. No pulse. I straightened the twisted body and the ruined head moved limply sideways like a pumpkin on a string.

I knew by the hair and the clothes that it was Alec. I said to myself, I’m going to kill Schneider, and I heard the words said aloud by someone. I must have said them because there was nobody else there.

My mind began to function again after the shock, and a sudden thought jerked me upright and accelerated my heartbeat ready for action: whoever had pushed Alec out of the window must still be in the building. Before I could move I heard the faint sound of a woman’s shout from somewhere high up in the building, and then something that sounded like a door being shaken violently in its frame.

I looked up at the lighted window from which Alec had fallen and saw that it was half-open. Again the woman’s shout came keen and distressed out of the dark building, and then there was the crash and tinkle of broken glass. Somebody was breaking into Alec’s office. My heart pumped faster but I stood where I was and watched the window.

I heard the woman’s shout again, louder and more anguished now. She was calling, “Alec!”

The woman’s head appeared at the window dark against the light. I couldn’t be sure but it looked like Helen Madden. She leaned far out and looked down at me and the dead man with the flashlight beam on his face. She screamed. Her scream ended in a tearing sigh like the last vomit of despair, and her head and shoulders fell out of the light and left the window empty.

I let myself into the building and ran up the west stairs, turning on the lights at the ends of the corridors as I went. So far as I could see the corridors were empty. I waited too long, I thought, I’ve given the Schneiders time to get away.

When I reached the fifth floor, I could see from the head of the stairs that Alec’s door was open, throwing a cone of light across the hall. When I reached the door, I saw that one corner of the ground-glass pane in it was broken. I stood in the doorway breathing heavily, and looked into the room.

The green-hooded lamp above the desk was on, and it cast a greenish light over the woman who was sprawled on the floor beneath the window. I went to her and saw that it was Helen. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was quick and light. It looked as if she had simply fainted. I straightened her out on her back, pulled her skirt down over the bare gooseflesh of her thighs, and let her lie. As long as she stayed unconscious I didn’t have to tell her.

When I stood up, I noticed that the receiver of the telephone dangled on its cord from the shelf below the lamp, hanging almost to the floor. It was swinging slightly, making little clicks against the corner of the desk. Just as I reached for it, I remembered fingerprints and got down on my knees to put my ear against it where it hung. I could hear nothing, not even the dial tone. Then I heard voices, very faint as if from a long way off, like voices on a record-player when the tube has blown out. I could not understand what they were saying. The rustling voices ceased and I stood up again.

The only sign of a possible struggle besides the dangling receiver was the broken glass in the door. But I had heard the crash. Helen must have broken it to get into the office after Alec fell. Perhaps she heard him fall, perhaps she had even seen the Schneiders running away. Or was it Peter Schneider alone?

I stepped around the woman on the floor to look at the window. The lower half was open, a single steel-framed pane about four-feet square that opened at the bottom and swung outward from the top. The top corners of the pane slid down oiled grooves in the upright sashes at the sides when the bottom was pushed out, so that when the window was wide open, it formed a horizontal plane midway in the four-foot square, supported by steel arms. The window was only partly open now. The outswung pane formed an angle of about thirty degrees with the vertical sashes where it met them at the top, leaving room for Alec to have crawled out at the side and jumped from the concrete sill.

But the window was not wide open, as it would have had to be if Alec had been pushed. He had not been dead or unconscious when he fell: he had yelled and thrown up his arms. Had the Schneiders partly closed the window after pushing him out? I had seen nor heard nothing. And why had they turned on the light?

I remembered the light in the window on the fourth floor beneath Alec’s office, and a sudden doubt took hold of me. Had Alec been pushed from the Dictionary office? I had been taken by surprise in the dark, and with my glasses broken, I could be mistaken about the window.

I ran down the stairs to the fourth floor. The door of the Dictionary office was open and the light was on. All the windows were closed and fastened. The door to the inner room where the files were kept was open and I glanced in. It was dark and there was no sound. I turned out the light in the outer room and went back to Helen.

Her breast was rising and falling more slowly and regularly. I put my ear to it and heard her heart beating strongly. I wet my handkerchief at the drinking-fountain in the hall and wiped her face with it. Her eyelids fluttered and she began to stir.

Then, for the first time, I thought of the police. To avoid touching Alec’s phone, I went down the hall to my own office to call them. The Lieutenant at the desk said he’d come right over himself, and I told him to bring a doctor for Helen.

I went downstairs to let the police into the building. When I opened one of the glass doors at the front, the police car was drawing up to the curb. Two men in dark uniforms got out and came up the walk and mounted the steps. They walked quickly but laboriously, as if every building were a tomb.

“My name is Branch,” I said as they came up between the pillars. “I just called you.”

“I’m Lieutenant Cross,” said the wider of the two policemen. Their backs were to the light from the street and I couldn’t see their faces. “This is Officer Sale.”

“Did you call a doctor for the girl?”

“Yeah, this is probably him now.” Cross jerked his head at a car that had just turned the corner. “Go and get him, will you, Sale?”

Sale went to the car that had stopped at the curb and came back with a middle-aged man in a camel’s-hair coat and a dither.

“Dr. Rasmussen,” Cross said to me. “I guess you better look at the body first, doctor, just to make sure.”

“Very well, Lieutenant. Where is it?”

I took them through the building and out one of the back doors.

“You said the dead man’s name is Judd,” Cross said. “Is that the Judd on the War Board?”

“Yes.”

I could see the body on the sidewalk, lying as still as if it had always been lying there.

“There he is,” I said.

The policemen turned their flashlights on the dead man.

“Jesus,” Cross said, “he certainly is mashed up.”

The doctor squatted down by the body, drawing his light coat up around his hips so its hem wouldn’t draggle in the blood on the sidewalk. He stood up shaking his head:

“He was dead the minute he hit the sidewalk. Did he jump from the roof?”

“Fifth floor,” I said. “But he didn’t jump.”

“From that window there?” Cross said, pointing at the lighted window of Alec’s office.

“Yes. That’s where the girl is.”

“Oh, yes, the girl,” Rasmussen said. “I’d better get up there. Nothing I can do here.”

I unlocked the door, which had relocked itself, and the doctor followed me in.

“Second from the end on the fifth floor,” I said. “The light’s on and you can’t miss it. I think she just fainted, and she may be conscious now.”

“Right,” he said, and started up the stairs. I went out to the sidewalk where Cross and Sale were still standing.

“What happened to the light on the corner of the building?” Sale asked. In the light of the lieutenant’s torch I could see that he was a tall man of thirty or so with a sallow skin and a broken nose.

“What light?” said Cross.

“This is the way I go home and there’s always a light here. On the corner.” Sale turned his flashlight on the corner of the building. The light was there all right, and the bulb was in place.

“We’ll look at that later,” Cross said. “Maybe it just blew out.

He turned to me. “You got any idea how this happened, Mr. Branch? You said he didn’t jump.”

“I saw him fall from that window. I think he was pushed. I know he didn’t commit suicide.”

“How do you know?”

“I knew him. He wasn’t the kind of a man who would kill himself, and he had no reason.”

“That you knew of?”

“He had no reason. I talked to him on the telephone half an hour before this happened.”

“Oh, you did? You say you saw him fall. Where were you when he fell?”

“Walking on this sidewalk. About where you’re standing.”

“You say you think he was pushed. Did you see somebody push him?”

“No. I didn’t see anybody. I simply know that Judd was not capable of committing suicide.”

“The damnedest people do,” Cross said. “What did he say on the telephone?”

“He wanted me to come over here.”

“Did he say why?”

“No.” I wanted a more receptive audience before I brought the Schneiders in, and I had to have a talk with the president of the university.

“Where does the girl come in?”

“I don’t know, you’ll have to ask her. She was Alec’s fiancée. She must have been in the building and heard him cry out when he fell. She broke into his office and looked out of the window and saw him down here on the sidewalk and fainted.”

“Jesus,” Sale said. “Tough on her.”

“You’re not accusing
her
of pushing him?” Cross said.

“Of course not,” I snapped. “They were going to be married. This thing is going to ruin her life.”

“Looks like suicide to me, Lieutenant,” said the man with the broken nose.

“I don’t know,” Cross said. “I’m going to call the Detective-Sergeant. Can I phone around here, Mr. Branch?”

“There’s a phone in my office on the fifth floor.”

“Same floor as the room he jumped from, eh? I want to look at that room.”

We entered the building and climbed the stairs to the fifth floor.

Dr. Rasmussen met us at the head of the stairs. “Miss Madden has regained consciousness,” he said. “I put her on the settee in the Ladies’ Room down the hall.”

“I want to ask her some questions,” Cross said.

“Not just now, Lieutenant. She’s had a shock and you’d better let her rest for a while. You can question her later, perhaps.”

“Yeah, how much later?”

“I’d say give her an hour anyway. If she wasn’t a good strong girl, I’d send her to the hospital for the night. But she’s got a stiff upper lip.”

“Did you tell her, doctor?” I said.