Rear Window Read Free Page B

standing there looking over at me from the pantryway.   He said accusingly: "You ain't touched a thing.   And your face looks like a sheet"
      It felt like one.   It had that needling feeling, when the blood has left it involuntarily.   It was more to get him out of the way and give myself some elbow room for undisturbed thinking, than anything else, that I said: "Sam, what's the street address of that building down there?   Don't stick your head too far out and gape at it."
      "Somep'n or other Benedict Avenue."   He scratched his neck helpfully.
      "I know that.   Chase around the corner a minute and get me the exact number on it, will you?"
      "Why you want to know that for?" he asked as he turned to go.
      "None of your business," I said with the good-natured firmness that was all that was necessary to take care of that once and for all.   I called after him just as he was closing the door: "And while you're about it, step into the entrance and see if you can tell from the mailboxes who has the fourth-floor rear.   Don't get me the wrong one now.   And try not to let anyone catch you at it."
      He went out mumbling something that sounded like, "When a man ain't got nothing to do but just sit all day, he sure can think up the blamest things——"   The door closed and I settled down to some good constructive thinking.
      I said to myself: What are you really building up this monstrous supposition on?   Let's see what you've got. Only that there were several little things wrong with the mechanism, the chain-belt, of their recurrent daily habits over there.   1.   The lights were on all night the first night.   2.   He came in later than usual the second night.   3.   He left his hat on.   4.   She didn't come out to greet him — she hasn't appeared since the evening before the lights were on all night.   5.   He took a drink after he finished packing her trunk.   But he took three stiff drinks the next morning, immediately after her trunk went out.   6.   He was inwardly disturbed and worried, yet superimposed upon this was an unnatural external concern about the surrounding rear windows that was off-key.   7.   He slept in the living room, didn't go near the bedroom, during the night before the departure of the trunk.
      Very well.   If she had been ill that first night, and he had sent her away for her health, that automatically canceled out points 1, 2, 3, 4.   It left points 5 and 6 totally unimportant and unincriminating.   But when it came up against 7, 1 hit a stumbling block.
      If she went away immediately after being ill that first night, why didn't he want to sleep in their bedroom last night?   Sentiment?   Hardly.   Two perfectly good beds in one room, only a sofa or uncomfortable easy chair in the other.   Why should he stay out of there if she was already gone?   Just because he missed her, was lonely?   A grown man doesn't act that way.   All right, then she was still in there.
      Sam came back parenthetically at this point and said: "That house is Number 525 Benedict Avenue.   The fourth-floor rear, it got the name of Mr. and Mrs. Lars Thorwald up."
      "Sh-h," I silenced, and motioned him backhand out of my ken.
      "First he wants it, then he don't," he grumbled philosophically, and retired to his duties.
      I went ahead digging at it.   But if she was still in there, in that bedroom last night, then she couldn't have gone away to the country, because I never saw her leave today.   She could have left without my seeing her in the early hours of yesterday morning.   I'd missed a few hours, been asleep.   But this morning I had been up before he was himself, I only saw his head rear up from the sofa after I'd been at the window for some time.
      To go at all she would have had to go yesterday morning.   Then why had he left the bedroom shade down, left the mattresses undisturbed, until today?   Above all, why had he stayed out of that room last night?