The Big Book of Reel Murders
Page 12
“Sure he’s gone long ago,” White called back from the stair-well as he spun around down, “but he can’t go any place I can’t go after him! Start dusting up your flat, Mrs. Quinn, your husband’ll be back in a few weeks.”
He routed out the janitor of the building behind the Quinns’ first of all, quelled his growls with a whiff of his badge. “Now never mind your beefs. How long the people in I-A been living in the building?”
“The McGees? Two years next April.”
“And I-B, on the other side of the hall?”
“That’s Mrs. Alvin. She’s been living in the house five years.”
He took the flat to the left of the Quinn window first. Both ran all the way through from the street to the rear. He kept his thumb on the bell.
“Headquarters. You McGee, are you?”
A man of about fifty, in long underwear under a bathrobe, admitted—with evident nervousness—that he was. His wife hovered in the background, equally nervous. Somewhere behind them a kid’s voice piped: “Is it Sandy Claus, Mom, is it, huh?”
Sandy Claus asked crisply, “Who sleeps in your back room?”
“Me three kids,” said McGee. Less nervousness now, the detective noticed. He went back just the same and took a look for himself. They had three beds in there. There was a girl of about thirteen in one, two younger girls in the other.
“They always slept back here?”
“Ever since we moved in. What’s up, mister?”
Instead of answering, White glanced down at the floor. He said, “What size shoe d’you wear?” Watched his face closely. McGee looked innocently startled at the question, but not guiltily startled. He was evidently one of those men that don’t know their own sizes.
“Twelve,” answered his wife unhesitatingly.
That, by the looks of them, was putting it mild. They were out of it, for all practical purposes. He just asked one more question, for luck.
“Ever have any relatives or friends—men friends—stop with you here in the flat, say, last summer?”
“Naw, there ain’t room. Where would the kids go?”
“G’night,” said White abruptly.
A lady of ripe vintage opened the door across the hall after a lengthy interval. She gave him the usual apprehensive reaction. “Don’t get alarmed. Just want to talk to you. Who occupies your back room?”
“Why, I rent that out to roomers.”
“This is it,” he said to himself. “I’m coming in,” he said and did so. “Who’s got it now?”
“Why, a very respectable young lady, a librarian. She—”
“How long’s she had it?”
“Since about Labor Day.”
“Early in September, eh? You may as well sit down and quit shaking. This is going to take quite some time. I want to know who had it before this very respectable young lady.”
“A young man, a—a Mr. Kosloff.”
“Mr. Kosloff, eh?” He got out his notebook. “About when did he give it up?”
It wouldn’t come to her. “Two or three weeks before—”
“You’ve got to do better than that, Mrs. Alvin. I want the exact date. That man’s under suspicion of murder. So it’s important.”
She gasped, fluttered, floundered. “Oh, you must be mis…He was such a quiet, nice young man.”
“You can always count on ’em being that way at home. Now how about it? Don’t you keep any records?”
“I—I can tell by my bank-book, I think.” She went inside, fumbled around endlessly, came out again with a dog-eared passbook. “I get ten dollars for the back room, and I make a point of depositing each room-rent as soon as I get it. Now, the last entry here, before she came, is July 30th. They pay in advance, of course. I’m very strict about that. That means he stayed on until the 5th of August.”
White narrowed his eyes joyfully at her. Wontner had been killed during the night of the 4th-to-5th. “You’re doing swell, Mrs. Alvin. Now just think back carefully. Did he let you know a day or two ahead that he was leaving, or did he walk out on you unexpectedly? This is important. See if you can remember.”
She concentrated, struggled, recaptured. “He just up and marched out at a minute’s notice. I remember now. I was put out about it. I wasn’t able to sell that room all the rest of the month.”
He’d found out all he needed to know. He got down to business, pencil to notebook. “What’d he look like?”
“About twenty-eight or thirty, light-haired, around your height but a little slimmer.”
“Eyes?”
“Er—blue.”
“Was he working while he stayed here with you?”
“No, but he kept trying. He just couldn’t seem to locate—”
“Did he say where he was going, leave any forwarding address?”
“Not a word.” That would have been too much to hope for, anyway. “As a matter of fact, a letter came for him the very next day after he left, and I kept it here for a long time, in case he should ever call around for it, but he never did.”
He nearly jumped into her lap. “Where is it? Y’still got it?”
“It was stuck in the mirror of the sideboard for months. Finally I threw it out.”
He felt like grabbing her and shaking her till her store teeth fell out. “Where was it from? What was the postmark on it?”
“Well, the idea!” she said haughtily.
“Come on, you’re a landlady. Don’t try to kid me.”
She looked slightly furtive, so he knew he’d hit the nail on the head. “Well, er—can’t a body get in trouble for opening other people’s mail?”
“No,” he lied flagrantly. “Not if it’s left unclaimed for over thirty days.”
She brightened immediately. “Well, I didn’t like to mention it, but I wanted to see if it was—er, important enough to keep any longer, so I steamed it open. It was just a trashy letter from some girl in—now let me see, Pitts—Pitts—”
“Pittsburgh?”
“No, Pittsfield.”
“What was in it?” But he was on his feet already, heading for the door.
“Oh, she said she was glad to hear how well he was doing in the city.”
But he hadn’t had a job at all, according to his landlady. That explained the motive for the murder. To live up to the glowing reports he’d sent back to his home town. White knew where he’d find him now. Massachusetts. He could get up there by noon today. Christmas Day. A hell of a day. But it was being a hell of a day for poor Quinn in the Death House too, his next-to-the-last day on earth. A hell of a way to spend Christmas.
Mrs. Alvin faded out behind him, standing open-mouthed in the doorway of her flat. She’d have something to talk about now for the rest of the winter.
“Grand Central,” he told the taxi-driver.
* * *
—
Christmas Night, on the outskirts of Pittsfield, was all it should have been, diamond-clear, with stars bright in the sky and new-fallen snow white on the ground. Which still made it a hell of a night to do what he’d come up here to do. The little house he was watching looked inviting, with a warm rosy glow peering through its windows and a wreath in each one. A girl’s head had been outlined against them more than once, on the lookout for somebody. Well, there was someone else around on the lookout for somebody too.
The roadster drove up at 6:30, just in time for Christmas dinner. It was a seven-hundred-dollar job. The man who got out was well-dressed, and he had something white, like a box of candy, under his arm. He turned in the gate and walked up the path to the door of the house. He reached out his hand to the knocker wreathed with holly. Light falling through a fanlight above showed him to be about thirty, light-haired, six feet. He wasn’t handsome, but he didn’t look vicious. You could understand a girl asking him to Christmas dinner at her hou
se.
He never made the knocker. He heard the snow crunch softly behind him, and the other man was standing there.
He said with a smile, “Were you invited too?”
“No,” White said, “I wasn’t invited.” He took him by the elbow. “Let’s go back to your car,” he said. “Let’s get away from the house here before she looks out again and sees you.”
“But I’ve got a dinner date.”
“No, Kosloff,” the detective said, tightening his grip on the arm, “you’ve got a date down in the city, for the murder of Otto Wontner.”
He held him up for a minute, till the danger of his falling was past. They turned around and went back toward the car, through the blue-white snow.
Kosloff didn’t say very much until they were sitting in the railroad station waiting for the next train out. Stunned, maybe. Finally he turned around and said to the detective, “Don’t wreck my life, will you? I was going to ask that girl to marry me tonight. I’ve got a diamond ring in my pocket right now I was taking to her.”
“I know,” said White somberly. “You paid five-hundred-and-fifteen dollars for it. I watched you pick it out through the jewelry-store window. Where did all that money come from, Kosloff, you been spending since you got back here last August? You didn’t have a nickel down in the city, living at Mrs. Alvin’s.”
“My mother died right after I got back. She left it to me.”
“Yes, she did die. But not till after you got back. But you already had it when you stepped off the train. You made a big splash, bought all kinds of presents before you went out to her house, were dressed fit to kill.”
“Yes, but I did that on my last few bucks, I tell you! It was all a bluff. I knew she was going, I wanted to make her think I was a big success before she passed on. I couldn’t let her go thinking I was broke, a failure. And the hicks around here, they swallowed it.”
“And what about now? I’ve looked up the records. She turned over to you exactly five hundred dollars. Why, that car of yours alone—”
“Yes, five hundred was all she had banked. But she was old-fashioned, didn’t trust banks. I came into thousands in cash she had hidden in an old wall-safe in the house with her.”
The detective said, “Can you prove that?”
“No,” his prisoner answered. “She didn’t take anyone into her confidence but me. Can you prove that I got it from this man you think I killed?”
They just looked at each other. A train-whistle blew out along the tracks.
“Are you going to do this to me?”
White turned his head aside. He thought, for the first and last time in his career, “What a lousy business I’m in!”
“Then God forgive you,” Kosloff said.
White said, “Go over to the phone and call your girl. Just tell her you’ve been called back to town on business, can’t make it tonight.”
* * *
—
They were the first customers Campana had when he opened up his grocery-store for business early on the morning of the 26th.
“Did you ever see this man before? Look good at him. Take off your hat, Kosloff.”
“I think I do.” Wontner’s former grocer walked all around him, studying his features. “Sure, sure. Lasta summ’. Heessa live near here, no?”
“Was he ever in here when the old man was around, buying his monthly supplies?”
“Sure, sure. He laugh at old man onea time. I say to him, ‘You shoulda have all his mon’, then you can laugh.’ He aska quest’, heessa get very interes’.”
Kosloff said, low and unasked, “It’s true. But that doesn’t mean I—There must have been dozens of his other customers talked over Wontner with him.”
“But those dozens of others weren’t living across the way from Tom Quinn, where they could get hold of his shoes and put them on to go out and commit a murder in. You were. It’s about over, Kosloff.”
* * *
—
At exactly 3:15½ that afternoon, after he had questioned Kosloff, Campana, Mrs. Alvin, and Mrs. Quinn, the inspector finally picked up his desk phone, said, “Give me the District Attorney’s office.”
Bob White just took a deep breath from the ground up, and let it out again.
* * *
—
Tom Quinn opened the door of his flat, said with the utter simplicity that comes of great tragedy, “I’m back, Annie. I was released this morning.”
“I know,” she said, “Bob White stopped by and told me you were coming.”
“I was on the other side of the—little door already, that night, stumbling along, my slit trousers flapping against my legs. I didn’t even know it when they turned me around and started me back the other way, couldn’t tell the difference. I wondered why it was taking me so long to—get to it. And then I looked and I was back in my cell.” He covered his face with both hands, to blot out the memory.
“Don’t talk about it, Tom,” she urged.
He looked up suddenly. “What are you doing, Annie?”
She latched the valise she’d been packing, started toward the door with it. “I’m leaving, Tom. You’re back now, you’re free. That’s all that matters.”
“You mean you still think—?”
“I’ll never know. I’ll never know for sure. There are 364 days in the year; 182 of them I’ll believe you, 182 of them I won’t. Sometimes I’ll think they got the right man the second time, sometimes—the first. They build up too strong a case, Tom, too strong a case. You were gone fifteen or twenty minutes that night, looking for your shoes. It would take about that long to walk to where that old man lived and back.”
“But I came back without them. You saw me still without the shoes when I came back. I was down there looking for them the whole—”
“Yes, Tom, that’s what you said. You also said you lit matches down there. I was at the window the whole time and didn’t see a single match-flare down below.”
He wrung his hands in anguish. “I fibbed. I remember now! I told you I used matches, but I didn’t because I was a moral coward. I was ashamed to have the neighbors see me and laugh at me.”
“But that little fib is taking me from you. It’s costing you me and me you. Because if you fibbed about the little thing, how do I know you didn’t lie about the big one?” She opened the door. “Who can read that man Bob White’s heart? How can I tell just how much he knows, and isn’t saying? Who knows where duty ended and pity began? I can’t go through that hell of uncertainty, can’t face it. Goodbye, Tom.” The door closed.
Down below on the backyard fence they were at it again, wailing their dirges. It started in low and rolling each time, like a tea-kettle simmering. Then it went high, higher than the highest scream, higher than human nerves could stand. Eeeee-yow. Then it wound up in a vicious hiss, with a salivary explosion for a finale. Hah-tutt! Then it started all over again.
And So to Death
CORNELL WOOLRICH
THE STORY
Original publication: Argosy, March 1, 1941, as by William Irish; first collected in I Wouldn’t Be In Your Shoes by William Irish (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1943). Note: The story was retitled “Nightmare” for its first book publication.
IT IS A HIGHLY SUBJECTIVE THING, a prejudice, admittedly, that I have held for most of my reading life: I don’t like dream sequences. Some are silly, some are overlong, some are wonderfully constructed, and some may even be necessary. I don’t like any of them except for those created by Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903–1968). He has written these scenes in many of his stories and novels and, somehow, they are so powerful that they compel one to read them. Every word.
“First all I could see was this beautiful face, this beautiful girl’s face; like a white, slightly luminous mask swimming detachedly against enfolding darkness.” That’s the opening se
ntence of “And So to Death,” and the beginning of the protagonist’s nightmare. The situation gyres down and down until it’s almost too horrific to bear. And then he wakes—and the real nightmare begins.
It is common for the central character in a Woolrich story to feel lost and disoriented. A normal day for a normal person has gone off the rails and the protagonist is as helpless to stop the calamity as the reader is to stop reading. There will be darkness and terror and something will happen that cannot be avoided, as if a life suddenly were being manipulated by an all-powerful, malevolent presence, and the reader cannot tear his eyes away from the page. This is one of those stories. It relies on coincidence and a desperate reliance on the suspension of disbelief, but the writing is so compelling that you will be happy to forgive what would be intolerable in most authors.
THE FILM
Title: Fear in the Night, 1947
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Director: Maxwell Shane
Screenwriter: Maxwell Shane
Producers: William C. Pine, William C. Thomas
THE CAST
•Paul Kelly (Cliff Herlihy)
•DeForest Kelley (Vince Grayson)
•Ann Doran (Lil Herlihy)
•Kay Scott (Betty Winters)
This atmospheric film of psychological suspense adheres closely to Woolrich’s colorful if eccentric plotline. It is decidedly low-budget, in what may be called the tradition of B noir films—a B picture being generally planned as the second feature back in the day when movie houses offered two feature films (not to mention a newsreel, cartoon, short subject, and a chapter of a serial).
Audiences tended to be less demanding in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s than they are now, walking into the theater when it suited them (rather than checking the time for the beginning of a film), catching up on the plot, and sticking around until it played again without interruptions. One would have to be of an older generation to understand the phrase “this is where we came in,” uttered when a scene became familiar.