The Night People by Edward D. Hoch Read Free Book Online

into her street I saw the first police car pulling up. And then another, almost as quickly from the opposite direction, its low siren splitting the morning quiet.
    And before my running feet reached the house I knew. I knew even as I pushed my way through the wakened tenants, up the stairs to her apartment. I didn’t know how, but I knew what….
    “Where you goin’, Mister?”
    “ Times-Chronicle. ”
    “Okay, take a look.”
    The little creep from downstairs was huddled in a corner of the hallway, sobbing and mumbling at the officers who crowded around him. I went into her room and saw what he’d done. Only one leg was visible, bare, hanging across the rumpled bed. The rest of her body had tumbled down between the bed and the wall, out of sight, mercifully. I saw the blood on the sheets and looked no further.
    “He do it?” I asked one of the cops.
    “Who else? He’s all doped up. Must ’a killed him, seein’ those guys goin’ up to her room every night. Decided he wanted somethin’ too,” he said.
    “Yeah.”
    I kept going, down the stairs to the street, walking, then running, away from there, back to the solid reality of the city room at the Times-Chronicle. I had my story.
    All the way up the words tumbled about in my brain, sorting themselves into neat paragraphs of type. And the city room was buzzing when I reached it, clattering with typewriters, churning with words.
    “You’re back,” the editor said, raising his head from a pile of wet galleys. “Get the story?”
    “I got it. A murder.”
    His eyebrows went up and he motioned to the rewrite man. “Give it to me. From the beginning.”
    I gave it to him. From the beginning.
    When I’d finished he frowned across the desk at me. “Well? Names, man, names!”
    “Names?” I felt stupid.
    “What were their names?”
    “I … I don’t know. Do they need names?”
    He sighed and shook his head at the rewrite man. “For a newspaper they need names. There’s no story in a nameless drug addict killing a nameless prostitute.”
    “But it is a story,” I insisted. “They were people, just like you and me.”
    He just kept shaking his head. “Not like you and me, kid. They belonged to a different world.”
    “But the story….”
    “Never mind. We’ve got a train wreck for page one. We don’t need any local stuff.”
    He turned away from me then, and the rewrite man hurried away, and the buzzing of the city room rolled over me like a tide. And I went over to my little desk in the far corner of the room and sat there for a long time, staring at the typewriter and wondering what her name had been….

Festival in Black
    W IN CHAMBERS WAS PLEASED that the sun was shining at the Feru airport. After two weeks of intermittent Paris rain, he’d almost forgotten what sunshine looked like. Martha had prepared him for more of the same at Feru, and he’d been expecting a week of running between cab and theatre, dodging under umbrellas and sitting in the uncomfortable dark with soggy shoes and socks.
    But the sun was shining in Feru. Even Martha looked better in the brightness, as she ran across the concrete to meet him. Better and younger than he remembered her just three days earlier in Paris. “You brought the sunshine with you,” she said.
    “Thank God for that. Remember Venice last year?”
    “How could I forget?”
    “Schedule ready yet?”
    “Here.” She handed him a slickly printed folder done in three colours and four languages. “I’ve got you a suite at the best hotel in town.”
    “Not the Ferubonne again!”
    “Did you ever stay there before?”
    He nodded, shifting his briefcase so he could light a cigarette. “Five, six years ago, when I first came over here. There was some talk of a film festival then, too, but nothing came of it. When’s our baby showing?”
    Martha flipped a page and consulted the list. “In competition they’re showing in alphabetical order, for some crazy reason. With a title like Wild Yearling, that