Horrible Imaginings by Fritz Leiber

Author:Fritz Leiber
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: E-Reads
Published: 2003-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

SCREAM WOLF

Although it was a muggy August night in Chicago, the Lieutenant’s smile was as grim and frosty as a December, sunrise over the Loop.

“Let me see if I’ve got it straight so far, Mr. Groener,” he said. “This apartment isn’t your home. You and your wife were visiting Mrs. Labelle, an old friend. You occupied the front bedroom, just back of this living room. The back bedroom was occupied by another guest of Mrs. Labelle’s—a Miss Graves, also an old friend—Mrs. Labelle had the bedroom between.”

The big man sitting opposite the Lieutenant nodded dully, his face turned away from the bridge lamp cascading light on his chair.

“You went to bed about midnight,” the Lieutenant continued. “Mrs. Groener had been drinking heavily. At about two you woke and wanted a cup of coffee. You went back to the kitchen, past the other two bedrooms and through the dining room. While you were heating water, you heard Mrs. Groener scream. You found the bedroom empty. There was a cigarette burning out on the end of the sill of the open window beside a glass half full of straight whiskey. Four stories straight below you made out something turquoise-colored glimmering in the back courtyard.

“Mrs. Groener had been wearing a turquoise-colored long-sleeved nightgown. You knocked on Mrs. Labelle’s bedroom door and told her to call us. Then you hurried down. You were kneeling beside your wife’s dead body when we arrived. Correct?”

The big man slowly turned his head into the light. His face was that of a gaunt old matinee idol under its thatch of silvered dark hair. Then he looked straight at the Lieutenant and held out a steady, spread-fingered left hand.

“Except for one point,” Groener said. “When my wife screamed I didn’t rush back to the bedroom. I finished making my cup of coffee and I drank it first.”

The Lieutenant cocked an eyebrow. The younger blond detective who had been lounging wearily against the wall of the hallway sharply turned his wide face toward the speaker.

“Now and then Mrs. Groener used to scream,” the big man explained, “when she’d been drinking heavily I’d leave the bedroom. It may have been a rebuke or summons to me, or a fighting challenge to the whiskey bottle, or simply an expression of her rather dark evaluation of life. But it had never meant anything more real than that—until tonight.”

“Mrs. Groener was seeing a psychiatrist?” the Lieutenant asked harshly.

“I never was able to get her to,” the big man said. “As I imagine you find in your business, Lieutenant, there’s no real middle course between persuading a person to seek therapy voluntarily and having them forcibly committed to an institution. Mrs. Groener always had the energy be quite sane when necessary.”

The Lieutenant grunted noncommittally. “Well, you certainly seem to have been very long-suffering about it,” he said and then added sharply, “Cool, at any rate.”

Groener smiled bleakly. “I’m an alcoholic myself,” he said. “I know how lonely it gets way out there in the dark.

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