Rear Window Read Online Free PDF

Shock.   Panic.   His hand pushed out and found the wall, and he braced himself with it.   Then he went back toward the door again slowly.   I could see him creeping up on it, stalking it as though it were something alive.   He opened it so slenderly you couldn't see it at all, peered fearfully through the crack.   Then he closed it, and he came back, zigzag, off balance from sheer reflex dismay.   He toppled into a chair and snatched up a drink.   Out of the bottle neck itself this time.   And even while he was holding it to his lips, his head was turned looking over his shoulder at the door that had suddenly thrown his secret in his face.
      I put the glass down.
      Guilty!   Guilty as all hell, and the police be damned!
      My hand started toward the phone, came back again.   What was the use?   They wouldn't listen now any more than they had before.   "You should have seen his face, etc."   And I could hear Boyne's answer: "Anyone gets a jolt from an anonymous letter, true or false.   You would yourself."   They had a real live Mrs. Thorwald to show me — or thought they had.   I'd have to show them the dead one, to prove that they both weren't one and the same.   I, from my window, had to show them a body.
      Well, he'd have to show me first.
      It took hours before I got it.   I kept pegging away at it, pegging away at it, while the afternoon wore away.   Meanwhile he was pacing back and forth there like a caged panther.   Two minds with but one thought, turned inside-out in my case.   How to keep it hidden, how to see that it wasn't kept hidden.
      I was afraid he might try to light out, but if he intended doing that he was going to wait until after dark, apparently, so I had a little time yet.   Possibly he didn't want to himself, unless he was driven to it — still felt that it was more dangerous than to stay.
      The customary sights and sounds around me went on unnoticed, while the main stream of my thoughts pounded like a torrent against that one obstacle stubbornly damming them up: how to get him to give the location away to me, so that I could give it away in turn to the police.
      I was dimly conscious, I remember, of the landlord or somebody bringing in a prospective tenant to look at the sixth-floor apartment, the one that had already been finished.   This was two over Thorwald's; they were still at work on the in-between one.   At one point an odd little bit of synchronization, completely accidental of course, cropped up.   Landlord and tenant both happened to be near the living room windows on the sixth at the same moment that Thorwald was near those on the fourth.   Both parties moved onward simultaneously into the kitchen from there, and, passing the blind spot of the wall, appeared next at the kitchen windows.   It was uncanny, they were almost like precision-strollers or puppets manipulated on one and the same string.   It probably wouldn't have happened again just like that in another fifty years.   Immediately afterwards they digressed, never to repeat themselves like that again.
      The thing was, something about it had disturbed me.   There had been some slight flaw or hitch to mar its smoothness.   I tried for a moment or two to figure out what it had been, and couldn't.   The landlord and tenant had gone now, and only Thorwald was in sight.   My unaided memory wasn't enough to recapture it for me.   My eyesight might have if it had been repeated, but it wasn't.
      It sank into my subconscious, to ferment there like yeast, while I went back to the main problem at hand.
      I got it finally.   It was well after dark, but I finally hit on a way.   It mightn't work, it was cumbersome and roundabout, but it was the only way I could think of.   An alarmed turn of the head, a quick precautionary step in one certain direction, was all I needed.   And to get this brief, flickering, transitory give-away, I needed two phone calls and an absence of about half an