The Red Right Hand Read online

  “511 West Eleventh?” she said. “Do you live there, actually? Why, that’s the big apartment house right across from me. I live at 514, one of the old brown-stones opposite, if you’ve ever noticed. Isn’t that extraordinary? I’ve been living there four months. It seems as if I should almost know you. But I’ve never seen you before, have I?”

  “Not that I know of,” I told her. “I’ve never seen you, anyway. But New York’s like that. We’re neighbors across the street, and we’ve got to get a hundred miles away from it, on a lonely road, to meet.”

  “Do you happen to know who the man is who lives in the second-floor apartment at the end, in your building?” she asked me naively.

  “Why?” I said. “Has someone there been training field glasses on you?”

  “Why, yes,” she said, somewhat embarrassed. “How did you know? I hadn’t realized he had been doing it. But one time when Inis was waiting to take me out to dinner, he noticed someone behind the curtains in the window across, watching with glasses. I always pulled my shades down after that.”

  “When a man wants to know who lives in the apartment opposite, it’s always a pretty girl,” I said. “When a pretty girl wants to know, it’s generally a man with field glasses. One of the most popular of New York sports. I don’t know who lives on the second floor. I live on the fourteenth in the rear, myself, I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that I thought that you—” she said. “I was just thinking of the apartment house you live in, that looms so big across from me, so many hundreds of people living in it. Naturally it wouldn’t have been you.”

  “Why not?” I said. “You’re pretty, and I look human, I hope. If I lived on the second floor, and had field glasses. Still, a doctor gets to see a good deal of anatomy in the course of his trade. We’re neighbors, anyway, that’s been established, and I’m probably related to your boss. What are you, a secretary?”

  “A receptionist,” she told me. “That is, I was. I quit yesterday to get married. We were going to get married in Danbury, but they have a five-day law. Then we started up for Vermont, and met this man—”

  She put the comb away. Her lip had stopped trembling. She looked, and no doubt felt, more controlled now.

  “You’re all right,” I said. “Tell me about it now, as well as you can. What happened?”

  It was a simple enough incident, in its general aspects. She and St. Erme had picked up the tramp a little before sunset, outside of Danbury, fifty or sixty miles below. A repellent-looking little man, but St. Erme had felt sorry for him. They had turned off from the main road onto this side road to have a picnic supper by a lake, a little distance down from where I had met her.

  They had left the tramp in the car with their baggage and provisions, while they had gone down through woods to the lake shore to look the site over, to see if it was suitable. She and St. Erme had reached the lake, and St. Erme beside her was just bending to gather some stones to build a rude fireplace, when she had glanced up and seen the tramp peering over a mossy rock ledge directly above them.

  He had sneaked down after them, a quarter mile from the car, perhaps only to spy on them out of curiosity, it might seem. But she had already been a little disturbed by him, and at the apparition of him peering there above her, with his ugly little red eyes beneath his saw-tooth hat, in the silence and the silver twilight, by the black waters of the deep, quiet lake, she had been completely terrified. She had screamed with all her voice.

  “Don’t!” she had screamed.

  Not with any clear idea that he intended to do anything to St. Erme or her, but wanting him to go away.

  St. Erme had been straightening up, with a rock in his hand, at her cry. He had seen the tramp spying above and had been enraged. With an oath he had let the rock fly at the fellow, who had dodged and fled. Crashing through the underbrush, he had fled back up toward the road where the car was parked.

  St. Erme had pursued him furiously, thinking perhaps to give him a shaking or a thrashing for the fright he had caused her. A big man, with a powerful physique, he must have despised the little sneaking fellow. No thought of danger to himself. Of that knife back in the car.

  Scrambling frantically up the wooded hillslope after, she had heard a hoarse inhuman scream from the road above, followed by a giggling skin-crawling sound like laughter, and then a silence.

  She had been terrified. Abandoning her white coat, too easily seen, she had hidden in the bushes. Presently the tramp had come stalking her. She had caught a glimpse of him in his checked jacket and scalloped hat, with something in his right hand. His eyes, which had been small and red, now looked extraordinarily pale, the pale of ice and freezing murder.

  Crouching and skulking, he had passed over within thirty feet, going down toward the lake shore where he perhaps expected to find her still, and then coming swiftly back up again, before she could get up to the car, calling her name and swearing, with a low snarling voice like a maniac or an animal, while she hid in a paralyzed bird terror.

  He had found her coat where she had left it, picking it up and shaking it, and hurling it down again. For a long time—for hours, it had seemed to her, though it might not have been more than ten or twenty minutes—she had silently crept and hidden from him in desperate silent fright in the darkening twilight woods, with him never more than a hundred or two feet away.

  He had given up trying to find her eventually, and had gone back to the car. She had worked up near enough to the road by then to see St. Erme sprawled motionless in the front seat, with his head hanging down over the car door, as the tramp got in behind the wheel and started off, up the road in the direction I had come from.

  When there had been any strength in her again, and she had been sure that he was gone, she had arisen from her concealment. She had gone back and got her coat, and climbed out on the road. She had gone on up it, finding no houses, meeting no one, exhausted, terrified, and frantic, till my headlights had come around the rock, and she had flagged me.

  That was all. That was all at the time then. St. Erme had been struck down by the tramp, perhaps with a tire iron or crank, and knocked unconscious, she thought. Perhaps he had suffered a cracked skull, she was afraid. That was terrible enough to think about. She had not thought of the knife then. She did not think to mention it until later.

  So that was all she had to tell me. An assault on her fiancé, and their car stolen, with him in it. Yet made a little nightmarish by her terror. By the terror that was still in her, underneath, of her pursuit by Corkscrew through the darkening woods.

  Three-quarters of a mile or so down the road I found a place to turn around, where twelve or fifteen feet of level ground extended beyond the road edge on the left, carpeted with grasses and black-eyed Susans, and bordered by an old rotted worm fence, beyond which was a deep sloping woods, with a glimpse of dark starlit water down through trees.

  “There’s the lake we were going to picnic by!” she said. “This is the very place we left the car. We were down there by the water when I saw him spying on us. Inis ran after him up here. I was hiding all through the woods, behind every rock and bush, while he hunted me.

  I took my flashlight from the glove compartment and got out, before I had turned around, looking the ground over. I could still see the tire tracks in the flattened grasses where the heavy car had been driven off the road, and had then gone on.

  There was some dark wetness glistening on the weed stems beside the right-hand tire imprints, those nearer to the fence and woods. It wasn’t crankcase oil. I stooped and felt the ground with my palm. A larger quantity of blood had been spilled here than a man could lose from a nosebleed or a cracked head. A larger quantity than he could lose unless an artery was severed and spurting out.

  For a moment, squatting on my haunches, I held my palm in front of me, away from my knees, thinking of that other moment, in the twilight an hour before, when I had heard the croaking in the weeds beside the road, and had found that blue hat with the
saw-tooth brim. That damned remembered hat.

  I wiped my hand on clean grasses. But it was more than my hand, I felt, that I had put in murder. It was all around me. Up to my neck.

  I got into my car again, and turned it around, and brought her back to MacComerou’s here, where the police were already waiting.

  If St. Erme’s right hand was there at that time, among the weedy flowers and grasses on the road edge overlooking Dead Bridegroom’s Pond, I didn’t see it. I wasn’t looking for it, it is true. I had no way of knowing that it would be missing when he should be found. Lieutenant Rosenblatt has sent down a couple of the troopers now and some of the posse men to search all that spot of ground and the woods adjacent. But I do not believe they will find it there.

  It was such a damned ordinary and commonplace crime, on the face of it—that first murder of the demon.

  It fits an almost tediously banal police pattern, as I understand it. A moronic hitchhiker, having been picked up on the road, yields to a sudden impulse, when the opportunity is given to him, and steals his accommodating driver’s car and possessions, with murder as a mere casual incident to the theft. Not realizing the certainty after a few miles, or at the most a few hundreds, of being caught.

  Every year, in almost every state in the Union, during ordinary times—and often enough still even in these gasless days, it seems—some man is sent to the chair or the gas chamber for a stupid, unpremeditated murder of that sort. There is nothing in the picture of Corkscrew to differentiate him from any other such moronic, almost incidental killer, it would seem, except that afterward he made a supernormally cunning effort to conceal what he had done. And that, when he did not succeed in concealing it completely, he killed again.

  And, most of all, that he hasn’t yet been caught.

  I don’t believe that Rosenblatt was quite satisfied, from the beginning, with the picture, by the nature of the questions he asked. A slow and stolid policeman, with a mind a little dull and trivial, but very persistent and tenacious. I can see him yet, sitting at the marble-topped table in the living room here, with his wrinkled bulldog face Hunched solidly on his burly neckless shoulders, with his forearms planted, making his inquiries with a corrugated brow, and carefully setting down the answers that he got, in his small round handwriting, on the pages of his fat dogeared notebook.

  Going back into Elinor Darrie’s life, and into St. Erme’s, and into everyone’s who might have remotely touched them, to try to find a previous trace of that fantastic killer.

  Q. [To Miss Darrie] Tell me all about yourself, Miss Darrie. Where you came from. Where you live. How long you and Mr. St. Erme have known each other. What other men you know, or have known.

  A. My name is Elinor Darrie. I am nineteen years old. I come from Spardersburg, Pa. I work in the Riddle Insurance Agency in New York. I live at 5I4 West Eleventh, in the Village....

  I have known her only these few hours of the years of her life, yet I think I am acquainted with all the details about her. She was born in her little Pennsylvania town, the daughter of a country newspaper editor and of a mother who had been a schoolteacher. Her parents died together in a fire when she was very small, and she was brought up by her old Amish grandmother. She went to high school, and then stayed home, taking care of her grandmother, and secretly trying to write stories. She is romantic and imaginative, and always wanted to be a writer, as do many lonely children.

  Her grandmother died this spring, leaving her only the mortgaged house they lived in. The local real-estate and insurance man who was her executor succeeded in selling it for her for a small sum, and with the money she came to New York, where she took a tiny studio apartment in Greenwich Village, and got her receptionist’s job with the Riddle Agency through a newspaper advertisement. Living in the Village was what she had always dreamed of doing—the name symbolizing to her a world of freedom and romance, of glamour and art, as it still does to many small-town girls. Though I live in it myself and hadn’t even known that I was living in it, until she called it that; and all it is is just another bunch of buildings, shops, eating places, and dirty streets.

  She had never been out of Spardersburg before. Hergrandmother had brought her up quite strictly, without even the ordinary social freedoms which most girls enjoy. She had had no attachments or love affairs, not even a high-school sweetheart, before she met St. Erme. It would be hard to see why not, perhaps, except that she was brought up to be afraid of boys and men. Which is something that the male animal is apt to sense in a girl. And though to a few it may be a hunting call, it tends to keep most of themaway from her.

  There is nothing in her past life, then, to indicate even remotely that anyone might have been impelled to do murder because of a passional jealousy over her. She had never met Corkscrew before today, to the best of her knowledge.

  Q. 514 West Eleventh? That is near where Dr. Riddle lives, is it not, Miss Darrie?

  A. [By Dr. Riddle] It is right across the street. However, Miss Darrie and I had never happened to run into each other before tonight.

  Q. [To Dr. Riddle] Thank you, Doctor. The Riddle Insurance Agency, where Miss Darrie has been employed—you don’t happen to know anything about it, I suppose?

  A. It is owned by a second cousin of my father’s, I believe, Paul Riddle. I don’t know him, but I believe his business reputation is quite sound. I have no connection with his firm myself.

  Q. Surgeons’ and Physicians’, and St. John’s Medical, are your connections, Doctor?

  A. That is right.

  Q. A specialist in surgery?

  A. In brain surgery, chiefly. Of course I sometimes do other things....

  Q. [To Miss Darrie] Tell me all about Mr. St. Erme, Miss Darrie. Where he came from, and what his business was. What physical or personality peculiarities he had. Was Inis St. Erme his full name, by the way, or did he have a middle name?

  A. That was his middle name. His first initial was S—S. Inis. But he only used it as a signature, I think. On his insurance application, and the check he drew at the bank this morning. I don’t know what it stood for. He always liked to be called just Inis. It was his mother’s family name, I think, a Scots name. His last name was French. He came from somewhere in the Middle West, from Oklahoma....

  She met St. Erme for the first time a couple of months ago when he dropped in to obtain some business insurance at her office, to which he had been recommended.

  He was a tall, black-eyed man, thirty-three years old, according to the data he gave on his insurance application. He had dark wavy hair which he wore rather long, and a white, somewhat diffident smile. He was well dressed, and wore a heavy seal ring on his right hand.

  He came from Texas and Oklahoma, the son of a wildcatting oil man of French-Canadian ancestry, she learned after she had got to know him, who had made pots of money, and squandered and tossed them away, and had made pots more—and who had had the good luck to die, so far as his son was concerned, at a time when the pots were full. On his mother’s side he had some Scots and Indian blood, he had said.... Elinor had rather got the idea, without any particular reason for having it, that his first name might have been an Indian one which he didn’t like, and that that was the reason he never told her what it was—some name such as Sachem or Seminole.

  Like her, he had not been in New York long, and had no circle of friends, which was in itself a bond between them from the start. His only acquaintances, so far as she knew, were his lawyers and brokers, whom he had sometimes referred to, and one or two business associates whose names she knew. His business was that of an entrepreneur and investor, and also she had got the idea that he played the market at times, when there was a profit to be made in doing it.

  He had never gone around with a girl before her, he told her. He had always been a little afraid of them, he said. But she had a feeling that actually it had been because women didn’t appeal to him, in general—he had none of the ogling of each passing shape and face which afflicts so many men, perhaps most
men, even when in love and on the verge of marriage. His interests since he had been a boy had been mostly financial. His diversions were chiefly newspaper reading and movie-going, with a preference for horse operas and adventure films having a minimum of girls and love interest. He had little interest in literature or books. His eyes quite possibly would have kept him from much reading, even if he had cared for it, she thought.

  St. Erme’s eyes were apparently quite bad. It was a handicap not obvious, however, since he wore contact lenses, and had learned how to get around. He never mentioned it himself. Elinor had known him three or four weeks before she realized that he wore glasses at all. A glint of candlelight in a restaurant had been what had told her then, catching his eyes at an angle, and turning them for an instant to blank, shining glass. She had remembered, when she realized he wore glasses, that occasionally she had noticed him stumbling over some small unexpected obstacle, such as a street curb that was a little high, or a hassock in her apartment that might have been moved out of its customary place— things that, even without glasses, were visible enough to her.

  She had never spoken to him about his eyes, after she had discovered it, however. She had always suffered from a consciousness of her own nearsightedness, though it was nothing in comparison to his. But she was more thoughtful of him because of it....

  That endeavor on St. Erme’s part to conceal the fact that his eyes were not normal, even from the girl he loved, would seem to indicate a rather juvenile vanity in him, which does not fit in with the other details she supplied of him as a mature and solid man of business, who should have been beyond small shams and pretenses. Yet some men are vain about one small particular thing, and nothing else. There are generals who wear corsets.