[Celebrity Murder Case 02] - The Alfred Hitchcock Murder Case

by George Baxt

  “It could,” said Cole, “but somehow, I seem to feel Hitchcock and Reville are actually innocent bystanders.”

  “Perhaps you’re right, but I say we continue to keep them under close surveillance. That’s a dangerous witch’s caldron brewing over there in Germany. So we’ll keep after Mr. Hitchcock and Miss Reville, if you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, not at all, sir,” said Cole and then, unable to resist, commented, “And thereby hangs a trail.”

  He understood the stony silence that followed.

  Two weeks later in Munich, Hitchcock sat in his small office in the studio talking on the telephone to Michael Balcon in London. The connection as usual was terrible, and both were shouting.

  “I said we did the last shot half an hour ago!” shouted Hitchcock. “The film is completed! Thank God it’s completed!” He listened. “I didn’t get that! What? What?”

  “Congratulations! Is it any good?” shouted Balcon.

  “I’ll know better after the rough assemblage! Alma and I will get together with the editor first thing tomorrow morning and get cracking on it!”

  “You’ll have to work fast! The Mountain Eagle is scheduled to shoot in mid-July!”

  “Well make the date, not to worry. I say, Mickey, we’re a bit short of cash here!”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said we’re a bit short of cash!”

  “Oh cash, cash, of course, that bothersome trifle. I expect to transfer a bank draft to you by next Monday.”

  “Sooner than that! We’re existing on credit!”

  “Don’t worry about it, you’ll be fine!”

  Alma entered and took a seat. Hitchcock shot her a “heaven help us” look and shouted into the telephone, “It is unpleasant being short of funds!”

  “What about the police?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of borrowing from them!”

  “You nit, have they any fresh leads on the murders?”

  “I don’t know. Detective Farber hasn’t been in touch in days.”

  “Oh, yes, he has,” interjected Alma.

  “What? What? Hold it, Mickey.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Is Farber here?”

  “No, he got through to the stage. He wanted to speak to you, but I told him you were in a shouting match with Mickey Balcon in London, so he gave me the news.”

  Hitchcock looked apprehensive. “He knows who did the killings?”

  “Oh, no. There have been no miracles. It’s Rosie Wagner. She’s been spirited away from the sanatorium. She’s gone missing.”

  “Good lord, but how?”

  Alma shrugged. Hitchcock shouted the news to Mickey Balcon. Then he had to remind Balcon who Rosie Wagner was.

  “I say, Hitch!” Balcon shouted. “Do you suppose all this has the making of a good thriller?”

  “Don’t change the subject!” shouted Hitchcock. “Send the bloody cash or we hop the next train back to London!”

  “Don’t you dare! The money’s on its way. Meantime, I’ll advise our people at the studio to advance you enough to get by on until it arrives. How’s Alma?”

  “Hungry!” shouted Hitchcock, and slammed the receiver down on the hook. Bristling with anger, he leaned back in his chair. “What the hell do you suppose is going on?”

  “Rosie’s disappearance?”

  “To hell with Rosie, she was a total crashing bore. With us. You and me.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Hitch, I still love you.”

  “I know you do. That isn’t what I’m referring to. Mickey’s had a visitor from Whitehall. From British Intelligence. They cross-examined him about us”

  Alma was delighted. “How marvelous! What have we done?”

  “That’s what they’re trying to find out.” He leaned forward. “My dear, it seems there’s a suspicion that we’re clandestinely up to no good. That we might be spies.”

  “Us, spies? You? Me? Me, who has been known to keep a secret for as long as three minutes?” She erupted with laughter. “Oh, that is wonderful! Oh, how delicious! And what did Mickey tell this gentleman from Whitehall?”

  “He most politely told him to go to hell, but most politely. Alma? Remember a few weeks back when I said we’re not in the midst of a spy thriller? Well, my dear, I rescind the statement. I have a suspicion we have become very innocently involved in a very troublesome situation.” He arose from the chair and crossed around the desk to Alma and helped her to her feet. “We have another two months here in Germany, my darling. We must proceed with very great caution/’

  “Hitch,” she said darkly.

  “What is it, my love?”

  “You’ve just sent a freezing chill up my spine.”

  “Oh, and mine too, mine too. Come, my love, let’s repair to the canteen for some double whiskeys. We both deserve and need them.”

  La-la-la-la… la-la-la…

  “And will you please scrub it with that bloody melody!”

  “I can’t seem to, Hitch. I just can’t seem to.”

  BOOK TWO

  BOOK TWO

  London,

  June 1936

  Five

  The years were kind to Alfred and Alma. They married December 2, 1926, after the shooting was completed on The Mountain Eagle, a film so incredibly bad, there are no longer existing prints (“Mercifully,” commented Hitchcock). On Saturday, July 7, 1928, their daughter Patricia was born in their charming flat at 153 Cromwell Road in London. In 1929, Hitchcock directed his first all-talking film, Blackmail, and his leading lady was the luscious blonde Anny Ondra, whom Fritz Lang had pointed out to him in the restaurant in Munich, although her voice was dubbed by a British actress. In June of 1936, the Commonwealth emerged from mourning for the late King George V, who had died on January 17 of that year, and now speculated dolefully as to whether the somewhat inadequate King Edward VIII would fulfill his rumored threat to abdicate the throne unless he was permitted to marry the woman he loved, the ambitious American divorcee from Baltimore, Mrs. Wallis Simpson.

  Eleven years after the unsolved Munich murders, Alfred and Alma were preparing their twentieth film. In the past two years, Hitchcock had begun to win an international reputation with such superb spy thrillers as The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Secret Agent, and Sabotage. The script of his next feature, The Lady Vanishes, was giving him trouble. The writers, Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, were not extracting Hitchcock’s vision from Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins; only Alma could do that, and in the back of his mind, Hitchcock knew Alma would have to take over the project. This would be his second film with producer Edward Black, the previous one, Young and Innocent, having fallen somewhat short of Hitchcock’s usual mark, one of the rare occasions that found Hitchcock and the critics in agreement.

  In addition to the Cromwell Road flat, the Hitchcocks had acquired a modest country home in the quiet, picturesque village of Shamley Green, near Guildford, less than an hour’s drive from London. They called the cottage, which was their sanctuary, “Winter’s Grace.” They spent as much time in it as possible, and of late, Alma was there often alone. Hitchcock was usually at his office in the Gaumont-British Studios trying to get the script he wanted from his writers. This particular June day, Patricia had been taken away for a long weekend with her cousins, her Aunt Nellie’s children. Hitchcock had phoned earlier to tell Alma he’d be home early, but he was bringing a surprise guest for dinner. Alma wasn’t too fond of that kind of surprise, but at least on this occasion he had given her fair warning and she’d been able to prepare a passable dinner. She wasn’t sure as to what to serve for the sweet—fruit and cream, which Hitchcock usually found boring, or a bang-up pudding calorically threatening. Hitchcock had gained so much weight over the past eleven years, Alma found herself smothered in guilt every time she tried to prepare a sensible meal for him. It was that look on his face when she gave him boiled fish and a vegetable, the look of a man betrayed, by a wife who deserved the firing squad, despite the fact tha
t he loved her very much. Alma decided on sponge cake and jelly.

  The phone rang.

  Alma recognized the voice immediately. That damned woman reporter again, trying to get a story out of Hitch. “Miss Adair, I’ve told you three times today Mr. Hitchcock is at the studio. I haven’t the vaguest idea when he’ll be home,” she lied gracefully. She didn’t like Nancy Adair. She hadn’t the vaguest idea what she looked like, because she was only a disembodied voice on the telephone, a voice in pursuit of her husband for the past three days. The determined voice of a freelance journalist anxious to earn a few quid with some sort of story from Great Britain’s most famous and most respected director. Why, even Hollywood was singing its siren song in his not unresponsive ear.

  “I know he’s at the studio because I’m parked outside the gate. They won’t let me in without a pass.”

  “Well, then, hadn’t you best go home?” Wherever that is, and let me get on with this bloody sponge cake recipe.

  There were teardrops in Nancy Adair’s voice. “Please help me, Mrs. Hitchcock. I only want a half hour of his time. This could mean so much to my career. It’s so difficult for a woman to get a foot into Fleet Street.…” Well, then, thought Alma, try using some other part of your anatomy. And then Alma wondered if she had a good figure and worse, blond hair. Hitch was an easy target for a good figure and a head of blond hair, peroxided or otherwise. She knew he privately swooned over such Hollywood blondes as Jean Harlow, Helen Twelvetrees, and Alice Faye. He was on the lookout for a blonde for The Lady Vanishes. The stunning Madeleine Carroll, who’d done two of his recent films, wasn’t available, and his producer was loath to go to the expense of importing a blonde from Hollywood. “Miss Appleby…” that was Hitchcock’s secretary, “… said if you asked Mr. Hitchcock to see me—”

  Alma interrupted rudely, “I do not influence my husband in his profession, Miss Adair…” (And may God forgive me for that statement!) “… so I’m sorry, but I have to ring off. Good-bye.” Alma hung up.

  Nancy Adair, in a phone kiosk outside the entrance gate to the Gaumont-British Studios, slammed the receiver down and roughly shoved the door open. She crossed the street to her automobile while the guard at the gate admired her trim figure and her beautiful mane of blond hair. Dressed in a carefully tailored mannish suit in the style recently made popular by Marlene Dietrich, Nancy Adair appeared to be not yet thirty. Her face was a tribute to the art of her beautician, and her temper was a throwback to her late unlamented parents. She got behind the wheel of her car, slammed the door shut, lit a cigarette, and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She was a very determined young woman.

  “But it is so dangerous for you to be carrying so much weight!” exclaimed Hans Meyer as he and Hitchcock emerged from the executive building and got into the back seat of the limousine that would drive them to the cottage. Hitchcock had gained weight while losing hair. Now in his late thirties, he considered himself still too young to contemplate mortality.

  “You sound just like my doctor, who is a physical wreck.” Hitchcock sat with his hands folded over his stomach. “I don’t want to talk about myself, I want to talk about you and what’s happening in Germany.”

  “What’s happening in Germany is a Schrecklichkeit.” It sounded ugly, and Hitchcock winced. “That means a fright, a dreadful horror, something terrifying.”

  “Like my first two films. Drive carefully, Edgar!” he admonished the chauffeur as they almost sideswiped a car driven by a blonde woman who pulled out of the opposite side of the street as they came out of the studio.

  “Her fault, sir, the bloody bitch,” said Edgar, who chauffeured only for Hitchcock, his regular job being that of studio carpenter.

  “As you were saying, Hans.”

  “I don’t know where to begin. I’m so lucky to have gotten out.”

  “You’re not Jewish, are you?”

  “No, but Nazi persecution isn’t restricted to Jews. It includes Gypsies, homosexuals, intellectuals who refuse to bow before Hitler and his gang and are brave enough to speak out against him.…”

  “There are some pretty awful films coming out of there,” said Hitchcock, who’d recently had an offer to do a film in Berlin and firmly rejected it.

  “How can they help but be awful, they’re either Nazi propaganda or old-fashioned operettas.”

  “How did you learn you were on their blacklist?” Hitchcock wondered what had become of the man’s pencil-thin mustache. Clean-shaven and tired, Hans Meyer had arrived in England a fortnight earlier and couldn’t believe his ears when Hitchcock’s secretary said Mr. Hitchcock did remember the young actor who could climb mountains. What was more important, over the past decade, Meyer had made a good reputation for himself playing villains and oddball characters not only in German films, but in French and Italian ones as well. Hitchcock had seen a good deal of his work, and there was the possibility of a part for him in The Lady Vanishes.

  “Well, when, after ten years of working steadily your phone stops ringing and your agent doesn’t return your calls, you begin to suspect you have a problem.”

  “I should say so. Bloody agents. Now tell me the truth. What have you done to incur the Nazi’s displeasure?”

  “I had a falling out with Leni Riefenstahl. You know her work?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve run some of her things. She also climbs mountains.”

  “That was how we first met. It was in her film The Blue Light. Now she’s a big favorite with the Nazis. There was a rumor she was for a while Hitler’s girlfriend.”

  “I thought he preferred boyfriends.”

  “His tastes are eclectic. Actually, the suspicion is that he is asexual, but that is neither here nor there.”

  “It is for him.”

  Meyer sighed and rubbed his palms on his trousers. “Riefenstahl wanted me to join the Nazis, but I couldn’t stomach that idea. You know, I always dreamed of going to Hollywood.” Hitchcock smiled. “Well, a few actors have made it there, haven’t they?”

  “Well, Peter Lorre’s gotten himself a contract despite his bad teeth and his obesity. He’ll probably spend the rest of his career in thrillers.”

  Hans Meyer asked, “Do you think Mrs. Hitchcock will remember me?”

  ‘Indeed, Hans Meyer, indeed. A week doesn’t pass that we don’t recall those awful murders. You see, Alma and I would love to do a film about that time, but we can’t find the MacGuffin.”

  “The who?”

  Hitchcock explained the MacGuffin. “Ah so!”

  “For a while there, we thought of using Rosie Wagner as our MacGuffin, but we could never figure out what might have happened to her. Have you any idea? You apparently were a friend of hers. “

  “No, I wasn’t,” said Meyers hastily.

  “But you went along in the ambulance with her to the sanatorium.”

  “I felt sorry for her. I thought she was dying. She was so alone, that’s what the studio doctor told me. Her mother dead. Her father murdered. So I volunteered to accompany her to the sanatorium.”

  “Do you know if she ever came out of that catatonic state?”

  “She must have, to have run away from there the way she did.”

  “What way was that?” Hitchcock was wondering if at last he was on to something. Edgar the chauffeur was cursing the bad driving of the blonde woman in the car behind him. On two occasions she had seemed to be trying either to pass them or pull up alongside, and both times she’d almost crashed into cars coming from the opposite direction.

  “Well, what I heard was that she disappeared quite mysteriously. Again it was the studio doctor who told me this when you so kindly gave me that bit in The Mountain Eagle”

  “Don’t ever mention that awful film again. Edgar! What the hell is going on? This is the road to Guildford, not Le Mans!”

  “It’s not me, Hitch, it’s that bloody woman in the car behind us. She’s a right proper menace, she is!”

  “Well, try losing her!”

 
“What do you think I’m trying to do?” Edgar was perspiring, which was unusual for the always cool and collected young man.

  Hitch turned to the actor. “What did the doctor tell you?”

  “She seemed to have vanished in the night. No one saw her go. And if there were accomplices, no one saw anyone entering the hospital or leaving with her. Now isn’t that some puzzle?”

  “Indeed, it is quite some puzzle. Now let me think— that charming detective, Farber. I think it was Farber.”

  “Oh, yes. Wilhelm Farber.”

  “Did you ever have an occasion to cross his path again? On the last day of shooting of that awwwful film, he came by to say good-bye and thank Alma and myself for what little help we could give him, and he said he’d keep in touch and let us know if he ever solved the murders. But alas, we never heard from him again.”

  “As far as I know, they remain unsolved.”

  “And is Farber still in Munich?”

  Meyer moistened his lips and then told Hitchcock, “Farber is dead.”

  Hitchcock’s hand flew to his heart. “Oh, no!”

  “Well, if you remember, he was rather a strange man. A sense of humor…”

  “So unbecoming in a detective, unless it’s in fiction,” commented Hitchcock wryly.

  “… and a rigid sense of proportion. I heard he offended the Nazis and… well, he was found dead in the village of Dachau.…”

  “Dachau. Oh, yes, that’s not too far from Munich.”

  “About ten miles.”

  “Why would anyone want to be found dead in Dachau?” Hans Meyer shrugged. “From what little there was in the newspaper, he’d gone there unofficially, to investigate something on his own, and he was found in a ditch outside the village, his car wrecked, the body strafed with bullets.”

  “The poor soul. I wonder if he was on to something involving the murders of Anna Grieban and Rudolf Wagner, or if it was something else? We’ll never know, will we?”

  “Never, I suppose.”

  Hitchcock rolled down the window and shouted at Nancy Adair as her car passed theirs. “You bloody stupid incompetent bitch. Edgar! Pull into that driveway ahead and let’s be rid of that woman! Imagine! And she’s a stunning blonde, too!” Hitchcock rolled the window back up and then sat back. They rode in silence for a while, Hitchcock waiting for his rapid heart beat to return to normal and for his blood pressure to settle down. La-la-la-la… la-la-la…