The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

—

  Lil dozed off right after the improvised snack she’d gotten up for us in the kitchen, tired-out from the excitement of the storm and of getting lost. In that remote, secure world she still inhabited you did things like eat and take naps; not in the one I was in any more. But the two of us had to sit with her and go through the motions, while the knowledge we shared hung over us like a bloody axe, poised and waiting to crash.

  I think if she hadn’t started to nod, he would have hauled me outside into the dripping dusk with him then and there, if he’d had to, to get out of earshot. He couldn’t wait to tackle me. All through the sketchy meal he’d sat there drumming the fingers of his left hand on the tabletop, while he inattentively shoveled and spaded with his right. Like an engine all tuned-up and only waiting for the touch of the starter to go.

  My own rigid wrist and elbow shoved stuff through my teeth, I don’t know what it was. And then after it got in, it wouldn’t go down anyway, stuck in my craw. “What’s the matter, Vince, you’re not very hungry,” she said one time.

  He answered for me. “No, he isn’t!” He’d turned unfriendly.

  We left her stretched out on the covered sofa-shape in the living-room, the electric fireplace on, both our coats spread over her for a pieced blanket. As soon as her eyes were safely closed, he went out into the hall, beckoning me after him with an imperative hitch of his head without looking at me. I followed. “Close the doors,” he whispered gutturally. “I don’t want her to hear this.”

  I did, and then I followed him some more, back into the kitchen where we’d all three of us been until only a few minutes before. It was about the furthest you could get away from where she was. It was still warm and friendly from her having been in there. He changed all that with a look. At me. A look that belonged in a police-station basement.

  He lit a cigarette, and it jiggled with wrath between his lips. He didn’t offer me one. Policemen don’t, with their suspects. He bounced the match down like he wanted to break it in three pieces. Then he shoved his hands deep in pockets, like he wanted to keep them down from flying at me.

  “Let’s hear about another dream,” he said vitriolically.

  I eyed the floor. “You think I lied, don’t you—?”

  That was as far as I got. He had a temper. He came up close against me, sort of pinning me back against the wall. Not physically—his hands were still in pockets—but by the scathing glare he sent into me. “You knew which cut-off to take that would get us here, from a dream, didn’t you? You knew about those stone lanterns at the entrance from a dream, didn’t you? You knew where the key to the front door was cached from a dream, didn’t you? You knew which was the porch-switch and which the hall—from a dream, didn’t you? You know what I’d do to you, if you weren’t Lil’s brother? I’d push your—lying face out through the back of your head!” And the way his hands hitched up, he had a hard time to keep from doing it then and there.

  I twisted and turned as if I was on a spit, the way I was being tortured.

  He wasn’t through. He wasn’t even half-through. “You came to me for help, didn’t you! But you didn’t have guts enough to come clean. To say, ‘Cliff, I went out to such-and-such a place in the country last night and I killed a guy. Such-and-such a guy, for such-and-such a reason.’ No, you had to cook up a dream! I can look up to and respect a guy, no matter how rotten a crime he’s committed, that’ll own up to it, make a clean breast of it. And I can even understand and make allowances for a guy that’ll deny it flatly, lie about it—that’s only human nature. But a guy that’ll come to someone, trading on the fact that he’s married to his sister and he knows he’ll give him an ear, abusing his gullibility, making a fool out of him, like you did me—! I’ve got no use for him, he’s low and lousy and no-good! He’s lower than the lowest rat we ever brought in for knifing someone in an alley! ‘Look, I found this key in my pocket when I got up this morning, how’d it get in there?’ ‘Look, I found this button—’ Playing on my sympathies, huh? Getting me to think in terms of doctors and medical observation, huh?”

  One hand came out of his pocket at last. He threw away his cigarette, not downward but on an even keel, he was so sore. He spit on the floor to one side of him. Maybe because he’d been talking so fast and furious, maybe just out of contempt. “Some dream that was, all right! Well the dream’s over and baby’s awake now.” His left came out of the pocket and soldered itself to my shoulder and stiff-armed me there in front of him. “We’re going to start in from scratch, right here in this place, you and me. I’m going to get the facts out of you, and whether they go any further than me or not, that’s my business. But at least I’m going to have them!”

  His right had knotted up, I could see him priming it. How could that get something out of me that I didn’t have in me to give him.

  “What were you doing out at this place the night it happened? What brought you here?”

  I shook my head helplessly. “I never was here before—I never saw it until I came here today with you and Lil—”

  He shot a short uppercut into my jaw. It was probably partly-pulled, but it smacked my head back into the wall-plaster. “Who was the guy you did it to? What was his name?”

  “I’m in hell already, you blundering fool, without this,” I moaned.

  He sent another one up at me; I swerved my head, and this time it just grazed me. My recalcitrance—it must have seemed like that—only inflamed his anger. “Are you gonna answer me, Vince? Are you gonna answer me?”

  “I can’t. You’re asking me things I can’t.” A sob of misery wrenched from me. “Ask God—or whoever it is watches over us in the night when we’re unconscious.”

  It developed into a scuffle. He kept swinging at me; I sent one or two swings half-heartedly back at him—the instinctive reflex of anyone being struck at, no more.

  “Who was the guy? Why’d you kill him? Why? Why? Why?”

  Finally I wrenched myself free, retreated out of range. We stood there facing one another for an instant, puffing, glaring.

  He closed in again. “You’re not going to get away with this,” he heaved. “I’ve handled close-mouthed guys before. I know how to. You’re going to tell me, or I’m going to half-kill you with my own hands—where you killed somebody else!”

  He meant it. I could see he meant it. The policeman’s blood in him was up. All the stops were out now. He could put up with anything but what he took to be this senseless stubbornness, this irrational prevarication in the face of glaring, inescapable facts.

  I felt the edge of the table the three of us had peacefully eaten at so short a time before grazing the fleshy part of my back. I shifted around behind it, got it between us. He swung up a ricketty chair, that didn’t have much left to it but a cane seat and four legs, all the rungs were gone. It probably wouldn’t have done much more than stun me. I don’t think he wanted it to. He didn’t want to break my head. He just wanted to get the truth out of it. And I—I wanted to get the truth into it.

  He at least had someone he thought he could get the truth out of. I had no one to turn to. Only the inscrutable night that never repeats what it sees.

  He poised the chair high overhead, and slung his lower jaw out of line with his upper.

  I heard the door slap open. It was over beyond my shoulder. He could see it and I couldn’t, without turning. I saw him sort of freeze and hold it, and look over at it, not at me any more.

  I looked too, and there was a man standing there eying the two of us, holding a drawn gun in his hand. Ready to use it.

  * * *

  —

  He spoke first, after a second that had been stretched like an elastic-band to cover a full minute, had snapped back in place. “What’re you two men doing in here?” He moved one foot watchfully across the room-threshold.

  Cliff let the chair down the slow, easy way, with a neat little tick of its four l
egs. His stomach was still going in and out a little, I could see it through his shirt. “We came in out of the rain, that suit you?” he said with left-over truculence, that had been boiled-up toward me originally and was only now simmering down.

  “Identify yourselves—and hurry up about it!” The man’s other foot came in the room. So did the gun. So did the cement ridges around his eyes.

  Cliff took a wallet out of his rear trouser-pocket, shied it over at him so that it slithered along the floor, came up against his feet. “Help yourself,” he said contemptuously. He turned and went over to the sink, poured himself a glass of water to help cool off, without waiting to hear the verdict.

  He came back wiping his chin on his shirtsleeve, held out his hand peremptorily for the return of the credentials. The contents of the wallet had buried the gun muzzle-first in its holster, rubbed out the cement ridges around its owner’s eyes. “Thanks, Dodge,” the man said with noticeable respect. “Homicide Division, huh?”

  Cliff remained unbending. “How about doing a little identifying yourself?”

  “I’m a deputy attached to the sheriff’s office.” He silvered the mouth of his vest-pocket, looked a little embarrassed. “I’m detailed to keep an eye on this place, I was home having a little supper, and—uh—” He glanced out into the hall behind him questioningly. “How’d you get in? I thought I had it all locked up safe and sound—”

  “The key was bedded in a flowerbox on the porch,” Cliff said.

  “It was!” He looked startled. “Must be a spare, then. I’ve had the original on me night and day for the past week. Funny, we never knew there was a second one ourselves—”

  I swallowed at this point, but it didn’t ease my windpipe any.

  “I was driving by just to see if everything was okay,” he went on, “and I saw a light peering out of the rear window here. Then when I got in, I heard the two of you—” I saw his glance rest on the ricketty chair a moment. He didn’t ask the question: what had the two of us been scrapping about. Cliff wouldn’t have answered it if he had, I could tell that by his expression. His attitude was plainly: it was none of this outsider’s business, something just between the two of us.

  “I thought maybe ’boes had broken in or something—” the deputy added lamely, seeing he wasn’t getting any additional information.

  Cliff said, “Why should this house be your particular concern?”

  “There was a murder uncovered in it last week, you know.”

  Something inside me seemed to go down for the third time.

  “There was,” Cliff echoed tonelessly. There wasn’t even a question-mark after it. “I’d like to hear about it.” He waited awhile, and then he added, “All about it.”

  He straddled the chair of our recent combat wrong-way-around, legs to the back. He took out his pack of smokes again. Then when he’d helped himself, he pitched it over at me, but without deigning to look at me. Like you throw something to a dog. No, not like that. You like the dog, as a rule.

  I don’t know how he managed to get the message across, it doesn’t sound like anything when you tell it, but in that simple, unspoken act I got the meaning he wanted me to, perfectly. Whatever there is between us, I’m seeing that it stays just between us—for the time being, anyway. So shut up and stay out of it. I’m not ready to give you away to anybody—yet.

  It can’t be analyzed, but that was the message he got across to me by cutting me in on his cigarettes in that grudging, unfriendly way.

  “Give one to the man,” he said in a stony-hard voice, again without looking at me.

  “Much obliged, got my own.” The deputy went over and rested one haunch on the edge of the table. That put me behind him, he couldn’t see my face. Maybe that was just as well. He addressed himself entirely to Cliff, ignored me as though I were some nonentity. If there had been any room left for objectivity in my tormented, fear-wracked mind, I might have appreciated the irony of that: his turning his back on someone who might very well turn out to have been a principal in what he was about to relate.

  He expanded, felt at home, you could see. This was shop-talk with a big-time city dick, on a footing of equality. He haloed his own head with comfortable smoke. “This house belonged to a wealthy couple named Fleming—”

  Cliff’s eyes flicked over at me, burned searchingly into my face for a second, whipped back to the deputy again before he had time to notice. How could I show him any reaction, guilty or otherwise? I’d never heard the name before, myself. It didn’t mean anything to me.

  “The husband frequently goes away on these long business-trips. He was away at the time this happened. In fact we haven’t been able to reach him to notify him yet. The wife was a pretty little thing—”

  “Was?” I heard Cliff breathe.

  The deputy went ahead; he was telling this his way.

  “—Kind of flighty. In fact, some of the women around here say she wasn’t above flirting behind his back, but no one was ever able to prove anything. There was a young fellow whose company she was seen in a good deal, but that don’t have to mean anything. He was just as much a friend of the husband’s as of hers, three of them used to go around together. His name was Dan Ayers—”

  This time it was my mind soundlessly repeated, “Was?”

  The deputy took time out, expectorated, scoured the linoleum with his sole. It wasn’t his kitchen floor, after all. It was nobody’s now. Some poor devil’s named Fleming that thought he was coming back to happiness.

  “Bob Evans, he leaves the milk around here, he was tooling his truck in through the cut-off that leads to this place, just about daybreak that Wednesday morning, and in the shadowy light he sees a bundle of rags lying there in the moss and brakes just off-side. Luckily Bob’s curious. Well sir, he stops, and it was little Mrs. Fleming, poor little Mrs. Fleming, all covered with dew and leaves and twigs—”

  “Dead?” Cliff asked.

  “Dying. She must have spent hours dragging herself flat along the ground toward the main road in the hope of attracting attention and getting help. She must have been too weak to cry out very loud, and even if she had, there wasn’t anybody around to hear her. Their nearest neighbors are—She must have groaned her life away unheard, there in those thickets and brambles. She’d gotten nearly as far as the foot of one of those stone entrance-lanterns they have where you turn in. She was unconscious when Bob found her. He rushed her to the hospital, let the rest of his deliveries go hang. Both legs broken, skull-fracture, internal injuries; they said right away she didn’t have a chance, and they were right, she died early the next night.”

  Breathing was so hard; I’d never known breathing to be so hard before. It had always seemed a simple thing that anyone could do—and here I had to work at it so desperately.

  The noise attracted the deputy. He turned his head, then back to Cliff with the comfortable superiority of the professional over the layman. “Kinda gets him, doesn’t it? This stuff’s new to him, guess.”

  Cliff wasn’t having any of me. God, how he hated me right then! “What was it?” he went on tautly, without even giving me a look.

  “Well that’s it, we didn’t know what it was at first. We knew that a car did it to her, but we didn’t get the hang of it at first, had it all wrong. We even found the car itself, it was abandoned there under the trees, off the main road a little way down beyond the cut-off. There were hairs and blood on the tires and fenders—and it was Dan Ayers’s car.

  “Well, practically simultaneous to that find, Waggoner, that’s my chief, had come up here to the house to look around, and he’d found the safe busted and looted. It’s in an eight-sided mirrored room they got on the floor above, I’ll take you up and show you afterwards—”

  “Cut it out!” Cliff snarled unexpectedly. Not at the deputy.

  I put the whiskey bottle back on the shelf where it had first caught my eye
just now. This was like having your appendix taken out without ether.

  “Why don’t he go outside if this gets him?” the deputy said patronizingly.

  “I want him in here with us, he should get used to this,” Cliff said with vicious casualness.

  “Well, that finding of the safe gave us a case, gave us the whole thing, entire and intact. Or so we thought. You know, those cases that you don’t even have to build, that are there waiting for you—too good to be true? This was it: that Ayers had caught on Fleming left a good deal of money in the safe even when he was away on trips, had brought her back that night, and either fixed the door so that he could slip back inside again afterwards after pretending to leave, or else remained concealed in the house the whole time without her being aware of it. Sometime later she came out of her room unexpectedly, caught him in the act of forcing her husband’s safe, and ran out of the house for her life—”

  “Why didn’t she use the telephone?” Cliff asked unmovedly.

  “We thought of that. It wasn’t a case of simply reporting an attempted robbery. She must have seen by the look on his face when she confronted him that he was going to kill her to shut her up. There wasn’t any time to stop at a phone. She ran out into the open and down the cut-off toward the main road, to try to save her own life. She got clear of the house, but he tore after her in his car, caught up with her before she made the halfway mark to the stone lanterns. She tried to swerve off-side into the brush, he turned the car after her, and killed her with it, just before she could get in past the trees that would have blocked him. We found traces galore there that reconstructed that angle of it to a T. And they were all offside, off the car-path; it was no hit-and-run, it was no accident, it was a deliberate kill, with the car-chassis for a weapon. He knocked her down, went over her, and then reversed and went over her a second time in backing out. He thought she was dead; she was next-door to it, but she was only dying.”

  I blotted the first tear before it got free of my lashes, but the second one dodged me, ran all the way down. Gee, life was lovely! All I kept saying over and over was: I don’t know how to drive, I don’t know how to drive.