Alfred Hitchcock Presents: 16 Skeletons From My Closet Part 10

Pop only nodded. It seemed to him he had heard Jack the Ripper ask, "And what does he plan to do about you when he leaves, Pop?" But he didn't feel he should pa.s.s the question on to Burke Morgan.

"Turn out that light," Morgan directed. "They know you're staying here and that you can't sleep with the light on."

Obediently, Pop pulled the cord. The tall, thin man swore.

"Pretty Boy Thomas and the girl!" he said. "Their faces are s.h.i.+ning in the dark!"

"Phosphorus," Pop told him as he settled into his old rocker. "They're supposed to be ghosts, sort of, watching you die. You should hear the spiel I worked up. It's very dramatic."

"That's enough gab. I could get sore about that exhibit idea of yours, but I won't."

Pop leaned back comfortably. Many a night he had drowsed until daylight in his old rocker. He watched Morgan trying to relax in the rigidity of the prop electric chair, and knew that Morgan's shoulder must be getting worse now - a lot worse. Morgan began to twitch uneasily.

"The laddie is suffering for a drug. Morphine, I suspect." That was Dr. Crippen, whispering in his ear.

"He's got it bad." That was Dillinger, making the observation in a cool, professional manner. "They probably gave him a shot when they sprung him, and now he needs another. His nerves probably feel like copper angleworms inside his skin."

Pop agreed. He'd seen too many addicts in the carny business not to know the symptoms. Burke Morgan was suffering. But Pop couldn't do anything about that. He closed his eyes. His breathing became deep and regular. In a few minutes he was snoring a little.

The tall man in the chair on the little platform listened to the snores and scowled. The pain in his shoulder had settled down to a burning sensation interrupted by fleeting stabs of pain. He could feel the sweat standing out on his forehead. His hands twitched. He wanted to yell, curse, make a break for it, shoot his way through the police outside.

But he did nothing. That was how a man got himself killed - through acting impulsively. He'd killed Pretty Boy Thomas impulsively, and they had caught him. Now he settled himself in the chair, determined to be still, and he was. He pin-pointed his concentration on getting through the night.

He had been here, in Pop Dillon's waxworks museum, many times. Now, in the darkness broken only by the faintest of light coming from a street lamp outside the windows, he could feel the wax figures of cutthroats, footpads, killers and victims all around him. He could feel them almost on the point of moving, of speaking. No wonder Pop, after so many years, could hear the dummies talk. In the silence, Burke Morgan found himself waiting for a voice to break the quiet.

"Morgan..." He could almost swear that he had heard his name spoken. "Burke Morgan..." He had heard it! He looked toward Pop. By the faint light he saw Pop asleep in his chair, lips parted as he snored, chest rising and falling unevenly.

Burke Morgan licked his lips. It was the craving for the white stuff. He shouldn't have taken that first shot when they got him out of the prison van. But it had helped. Now he'd turn off his imagination. It took imagination to have the electric chair gimmicked by a bribed electrician, to figure on being transferred, to plan a getaway, to carry it out in spite of everything going wrong. But he mustn't let his imagination get away from him now. He could wait it out. He had before.

The silence stretched out and out, like a rubber band being pulled until it had to break, but wouldn't. He clamped his teeth together and gripped the arms of the chair to still the shaking of his hands.

"Burke Morgan..." He heard it plainly this time, but he knew it was a sound in his mind, not in his ears. The phosph.o.r.escent face of Pretty Boy Thomas seemed to be smiling at him. "How does it feel to be waiting for them to pull the switch at midnight? How does it feel to know you only have a couple of minutes left?"

He almost answered before he realized it. Then he clamped his lips shut. That was how you went mad, talking back to voices that weren't there. Again the silence stretched out to the breaking point.

"He doesn't know." It was a girl's gentle voice. He looked at Alice Johnson and could swear he saw her lips move. "Tell him he's just dreaming he's free and he'll understand."

"That's all this is, Burke." And this time he knew he could hear Pretty Boy's voice. "You're dreaming of us. It's almost midnight and you need the white stuff bad and they've strapped you into the electric chair. You can't bear to die so you're dreaming that you've escaped, dreaming you're going to get away. But you aren't."

Burke Morgan closed his mouth and shut off the answer he had almost made. He'd heard about this business of imagining you were free just before they pulled the switch on you. The mind escaping from reality, they called it. But this was real. This was no dream.

He bit his lips until the blood came, and the faces of Pretty Boy Thomas and the girl ceased to be alive, became mere wax masks again.

Silence, stretching, stretching - "Almost midnight," Alice Johnson said, and Morgan jumped.

"You'll be joining us in a minute," Pretty Boy said. "Listen, you can hear the big clock striking midnight now."

He did not have to listen. The first stroke of the big tower clock set the air to vibrating, and it was the sound of a knell tolling, tolling for him.

"It'll be over soon." Pretty Boy's voice was almost gentle. "On the sixth stroke they'll throw the switch and three thousand volts will crash into your body and burn your nerves and short circuit your brain. Listen, there's the fourth stroke - and the fifth -"

Burke Morgan seemed to hear a whole chorus of voices whispering the count together. Four - five - six - He tried to shut them out, shut out the clanging clock, shut out everything. But he could not shut out the venomous hiss of electric current surging into the chair. He could not ignore the great shower of sparks that flamed around his head, his hands, his feet, the smell of burning...

Burke Morgan leaped up wildly. He gave a single scream, and it seemed to him a hundred throats echoed it. Then silence, darkness, nothingness.

Pop Dillon settled back into his old rocker. There would be photographers and reporters there early and he wanted to be on hand for them. There would be columns in the newspapers tomorrow about The Chamber of Horrors. Oh, it would be a fine summer. Now the police had finally gone, taking with them the bodies of Burke Morgan and poor Officer Hendryx, two for the morgue who would eventually be immortalized in wax in the Chamber of Horrors.

"Pop." It was Pretty Boy Thomas' voice - yes, it was. "That was clever, Pop. Even to me it sounded like my own voice."

"And mine did to me." That would be Alice Johnson speaking in her shy, soft voice.

"Well, after all, I was a pretty good caster," Pop answered modestly, but pleased by the praise. "I was one for all of ten years, in a carny show. You know what a caster is? A ventriloquist. Yeah. Carny people use that short name."

"You handled him well." It was Jack the Ripper this time. The voices were no louder than the rustling of mice in the woodwork, or the fluttering of curtains at the windows. To anyone but Pop, they would have seemed just that. "I was wondering if you were going to try that shower of sparks effect you worked out to give the crowds a thrill, taking them by surprise when you put your foot on a b.u.t.ton beside the platform."

"Yes," Pop answered. "I thought it would startle him long enough for me to run to the door and call for help."

"Of course you didn't know it was his heart that had put him in the prison hospital," Dr. Crippen, the poisoner, said with professional detachment. "But the combination of a craving for drugs, tremendous tension, shock and a bad heart killed him. Right there in your electric chair."

"He got what was coming to him," Dillinger growled. "You should let me have real bullets in my gun and I'd a saved you the trouble."

"This way was better," Billy the Kid said. "We'll have a great summer. The crowds will be flocking in."

"They'll be flocking in to see me, not you old dusty, moth-eaten has-beens!" a new voice sneered, and a sudden, shocked silence filled the big room.

Pop Dillon's eyes opened wide in surprise, and looked at the figure of Burke Morgan, which he had brought up and seated in the electric chair for the benefit of the photographers.

"Is that any way to talk, Morgan?" Pop asked severely. "Hardly dead yet and boasting already?"

"It's true and you know it," Burke Morgan said. "They'll mob the place to see the electric chair I died in, right at midnight", just when my sentence said I was to die."

Pop was about to answer when Jack the Ripper spoke up.

"Let him talk all he wants," Jack said. "Just don't answer him and he'll get tired of being left out. There's no point in being concerned over who draws the crowds, because what's good for one of us is good for all of us. Why, think what would happen if Pop ever had to go out of business. We'd be sold, melted down - killed."

There was a little murmur all over the room, a stirring, a rustle of anxiety, like the creak of old woodwork settling.

"Oh, I'm good for a long time yet," Pop told them all. "But I want you to be on your best behavior this summer and put on the finest show we ever had."

"We will ... We will ... We certainly will..." the whispers a.s.sured Pop. He closed his eyes with satisfaction. They were a good troupe to work with. It was going to be a fine summer.

As he drifted off to sleep, he could hear the rustle of tiny voices rise and fall in the darkness. All of them were now busily discussing the evening's events.

Even Jesse James.

I have found killers to be men who love their work. At the close of a day, as they wend their way homeward, they do indeed have a feeling of great accomplishment. Unlike the white collar man in his gray flannel suit, they see a whole job through to the end - the end of someone or other.

A GUN WITH A HEART.

BY WILLIAM LOGAN.

"I don't want to come back without him," George said. His wife sat down at the white kitchen table, a sock and darning egg in her hand. She put the egg in the sock and looked up. "Why don't you want to?" she said. "What difference would it make?"

"A difference to me, first of all," George said. "And, second, I'm known as a dependable man. I've got to stay dependable. It's a matter of reputation."

"Terry's not going to get rid of you because you come back without this one man," his wife said. "You can leave, and spend a couple of days looking - really looking. You know where he won't be, if you see what I mean. You can make it all look good, George. And then you can come back - and what's the harm?"

"I don't like it, that's the harm," George said. "I never did anything like that."

"You never had an a.s.signment like this before, either," his wife said.

George went to the refrigerator and opened it. He studied the contents for a second, brought out an orange and began to peel it carefully, sitting at the other side of the white table. "That's not the question," he said. "The thing is, am I dependable or am I not dependable?"

"George -"

"I don't like it any better than you do. But Terry knew what he was doing when he asked me to take this one on. He must have figured I knew him better than anybody else, and so I was the man to look for him. He would figure like that."

George put a section of orange in his mouth. His wife watched him. "How can you sit there and eat, and talk about it?" she said. "You're so calm. It's like nothing at all to you."

"Don't say that," George told her, swallowing the section of orange. "We were close. We were very close at one time, like brothers. I can feel that. But what else can I do?"

"You can do what I told you," his wife said. "Put on a good act of looking. Didn't you ever not find somebody before?"

George nodded. He put another section of orange in his mouth, chewed and swallowed it. "Just once," he said. "It turned out later the man was dead, died of natural causes."

"No matter how it turned out," his wife said. "Did Terry want to get rid of you then?"

"Well, he wasn't happy about it," George said.

"You're still here," his wife said. She placed the sock and the darning egg on the table. "You're still around."

"Yeah," George said. "Sure. I'd better get going. I got a long drive."

"You think about what I said," his wife said. "You think about it, I mean really."

"Sure," George said.

He got up, swallowing the last of the orange. He put on his shoulder holster and shrugged a jacket over it. "Maybe I better take a raincoat," he said. "It might rain out there. You never can tell."

His wife sat without answering him. George went to the hall closet, picked out his raincoat and folded it neatly over his arm. "I'll see you when I see you," he said.

"George, please -"

"Let's not fight about it," George said. "I'm leaving. I got to leave."

"I don't like it," his wife said.

"I'll think about what you said," George told her. "I honestly will."

"Can't you do what I want?" his wife said. "It's what you want too, or what you tell me you want."

"We've been over this," George said. He went to the front door. "Now I'm leaving," he said.

"Please, George," his wife said.

George shrugged. "I'll give you a call when I'm ready to come back," he said.

George drove carefully, and not too quickly, out of town and onto the turnpike. There was very little traffic; George allowed himself the luxury of a cigarette as he drove and thought about his next move.

Fred was his cousin, he thought, and maybe his wife was right; you had to pay some attention to that. It wasn't like going out after a stranger. And he and Fred had been closer than most cousins; they'd almost been like brothers for many years. George could remember secrets they had shared, expeditions they had gone on together; when Fred had finished with high school, George, a year older, was already a runner for the organization, and he had managed to get Fred his first job.

Now Fred had walked out. Fred had announced he was going straight, and he didn't want to have anything more to do with the organization. Of course, Terry had been right, too; you couldn't let a man get away with that; a man in a responsible position had to have his mouth shut for him if he ever decided to walk out. You could never trust a man once he was away from the organization. And if the man knew too many secrets, you had to get rid of him. Even aside from Terry's talk about teaching the rest of the crowd a lesson, there was that business of knowing too much, and George could see that Terry was right.

Fred hadn't been a small-time runner or even a single-owner when he left, not like some little man who runs a book or a numbers drop and knows very little about the higher-ups and the organization work, Fred had been part of the inner group, a rough-house boy who'd made good. Fred had never been a gun, of course; he just didn't have what it took to do that job and George, who knew he was one of the best guns in the organization, knew that, too, about his cousin. But Fred had been valuable in his own way, valuable and trusted. If a man in a responsible position gets away from the organization, George told himself, you have to shut his mouth for him; you can't trust him. George knew that was perfectly right, even if you'd put the man in the responsible position yourself, even if the man were close to you, as close as if you'd been brothers.

George had to do the job, then, and he knew that. But as he drove down the turnpike, getting closer and closer to New York, where Fred had gone and where he would be hiding, he began to feel strange.

She should have known better than to argue with me, George told himself. He felt nervous, without knowing why; he thought perhaps he felt conscience or compa.s.sion, but he didn't know quite what they would be or what they might feel like; he put it down to nervousness alone. She should have kept quiet, George thought; she knows me and she knows I'll do the best thing. Now she has to start me thinking.

George was afraid it would affect his search, or the moment after the search was over. He was afraid he would do something wrong, and then where would he be? In spite of the brave talk, in spite of his wife's confidence, he had no idea what would happen if he reported failure to Terry. It was altogether possible Terry would decide George's usefulness was over, and then George would be the hunted man. George would have to run for his life ... and finally face another gun, with the orders of the organization behind him.

Fred should have known better, he told himself. It's not my fault, what he did. He knows what's coming to him.

George kept telling that to himself, over and over. The drive through the dark, lamp-lit night was long and lonely. Fred had known what he was doing, George told himself. I can't afford to get myself in bad, or get myself killed, just because of Fred. If he wants to play it foolish, that doesn't mean I can't go on playing it smart.

And the way I feel ... This is my job. This is what I do, and what I'm supposed to do. I can't just fool around with my work, as if it didn't mean anything.

George reached the outskirts of the city, the first turnoff into Queens, and slowed down. The drive was almost over; the search was about to start. Stop this foolish thinking, he told himself desperately. Stop it.

It was going to be simple finding Fred. George knew he would be with a girl, and he knew the girl...

Fred hadn't taken the trouble to hide anything, he told himself. For some reason that irritated him, and he had no idea why; he tried not to think about it. There were so many things about this job that made him feel strange; it was almost like a different kind of thing altogether, not a job like all the jobs he had grown used to doing.

At any rate, George knew the girl lived on Fifty-third Street, East, and he knew Fred would be there sooner or later. He drove his car through the ma.s.sed New York traffic, taking great care not to be involved in an accident of any kind, and pulled to the curb three doors away from the apartment house in which Fred's girl lived.

No sooner had he parked, than a cab drew up before the apartment house and a girl got out. George wondered if he should wait for Fred, and decided that since the girl had come home, he would be better off waiting upstairs with her, and not giving Fred any chance to get away. There was the possibility, too, that Fred might already be inside. He was thinking mechanically now, not letting himself feel even the pleasure he remembered from other jobs well done, neatly planned and carefully executed; there could be no pleasure in this job. With any feeling at all, George knew, there was the danger that those strange sensations might come, the conscience or compa.s.sion or whatever they were; he could hardly afford that, at this final stage of things.

He followed the girl through the apartment house door and to the elevator. He looked at the mirror-walls of the lobby, at the front door behind him; he and the girl were strangers and neither talked nor gave any indication that they were aware of each other. After a few seconds, the elevator came. The girl stepped in and George was behind her.

She pressed the fourth-floor b.u.t.ton. George stood waiting. When the elevator stopped, the girl opened the door and stepped out and George followed her. She went to her door without pausing, probably thinking, if she were thinking about him at all, that George was visiting some other apartment on the floor. But he kept close behind her until she had reached her own door. He took out his gun carefully, keeping it almost totally concealed under his jacket.