Rear Window and Other Murderous Tales by Cornell Woolrich

Author:Cornell Woolrich [Woolrich, Cornell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense, Noir, mystery, Murder, Rear Window, Woolrich, Hitchcock, Crime
Publisher: Villa Romana Books
Published: 2022-06-13T07:00:00+00:00

Lew and Tom didn’t really see it until they got him in the restroom and stretched him out on a divan up against the wall—the knife-hilt jammed into his back. It didn’t stick out much, was in at an angle, nearly flat up against him. Sidewise from right to left, but evidently deep enough to touch the heart; they could tell by looking at him he was gone.

Tom babbled, “I’ll get the manager! Stay here with him a second. Don’t let anyone in!” He grabbed up a “No Admittance” sign on his way out, slapped it over the outside doorknob, then beat it.

Lew had never seen a dead man before. He just stood there, and looked and looked. Then he went a step closer, and looked some more. “So that’s what it’s like!” he murmured inaudibly. Finally Lew reached out slowly and touched him on the face, and cringed as he met the clammy feel of it, pulled his hand back and whipped it down, as though to get something off it. The flesh was still warm and Lew knew suddenly he had no time alibi.

He threw something over that face and that got rid of the awful feeling of being watched by something from the other world. After that Lew wasn’t afraid to go near him; he just looked like a bundle of old clothes. The dead man was on his side, and Lew fiddled with the knife-hilt, trying to get it out. It was caught fast, so he let it alone after grabbing it with his fingers from a couple of different directions.

Next he went through his pockets, thinking he’d be helping to identify him.

The man was Luther Kemp, forty-two, and he lived on 79th Street. But none of that was really true any more, Lew thought, mystified; he’d left it all behind. His clothes and his home and his name and his body and the show he’d paid to see were here. But where the hell had he gone to, anyway? Again that weird feeling came over Lew momentarily, but he brushed it aside. It was just that one of the commonest things in life—death—was still strange to him. But after strangeness comes familiarity, after familiarity, contempt.

The door flew open, and Tom bolted in again, still by himself and panting as though he’d run all the way up from the floor below. His face looked white, too.

“C’mere!” he said in a funny, jerky way. “Get outside, hurry up!”

Before Lew knew what it was all about, they were both outside, and Tom had propelled him all the way across the dimly lighted lounge to the other side of the house, where there was another branch of the staircase going down. His grip on Lew’s arm was as if something were skewered through the middle of it.

“What’s the idea?” Lew managed to get out.

Tom jerked his head backward. “You didn’t really do that, did you? To that guy.”

Lew nearly dropped through the floor. His answer was just a welter of words.

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