“We wouldn’t have even been able to hold the ‘suicide’ against him. You did all that yourself, you know, even to shackling your foot to that boat-anchor and dropping it over ahead of you. A person who is afraid of the jump into water but determined to go through with it might have taken such a precaution as that.
“I had a hunch it was hypnosis the minute you told me that candle incident. But how was I going to prove it? So much of that stuff is fake that most people don’t want to believe in it. Now I’ve got two other police-officers, beside myself, who saw—or rather heard—the thing happen all over again. And that’s going to carry weight that no coroner’s jury will dare disregard.
“You were in a state of hypnosis when you committed this crime, that’s the whole point. In other words, you were as unresponsible, as inanimate, as insensible, as the knife or club that a murderer wields to accomplish his deed. You were simply the weapon in the actual murderer’s hands. Your own mind wasn’t functioning, you had no mind. Two bodies were being directed by one mind. His.” He stopped and looked at me. “Does that scare you?”
“Oh boy.” I puffed out my cheeks.
“It would me too. I’d better begin at the beginning. Joel Fleming used to be a professional hypnotist in vaudeville years ago. I found enough scrapbooks, old theatre-programs, and whatnot in trunks here in this house to testify to that. Stage-name ‘Dr. Mephisto.’ He undoubtedly possesses a gift of hypnotic control—over certain subjects. (With my wife, Lil, for instance, I’m afraid he’d come a complete cropper—and even wind up helping her dry the dishes.)”
He was trying to cheer me up; I grinned appreciatively.
He went on, more seriously: “But there is such a thing, you know, it’s not all bunk by any means. Only, certain types of people are more easily influenced than others. Well, he got out of vaudeville years ago while the getting out was still good, and he went into another line of business entirely, which doesn’t need to concern us here, and he made good dough. Then like they all do, he made the mistake of marrying someone years younger than him, a hat-check girl he met at a nightclub. It wasn’t only that she married him simply for his money and to be able to quit handling people’s sweatbands at four bits a throw; she was already the sweetie of a convict named Dan Ayers, who was doing time just then for embezzlement. You get the idea, don’t you? Ayers got out, found a ready-made situation crying to be profited by—so he profited by it. He cultivated Fleming, got in solid with him; he didn’t have to get in solid with Dorothy, he was already.
“All right. Fleming did make these trips to South America, all but the last time. It’s obvious that he found out what was going on quite some time back, somewhere in-between the last real trip he made and the fake one just now. It’s equally obvious that he brooded and he planned revenge. They talk about a woman scorned. There’s nothing more dangerous than a middle-aged husband who finds himself betrayed by a younger wife. It wasn’t just a case of marital disloyalty involved either, he found out they were planning to make off with all his available funds and securities the next time he was away, just strip him clean and goodbye. You notice he didn’t entrust her with the combination of that safe here in the house.
“That’s the basic situation. All that we’ve got to go on is just conjecture. The three principals are dead now and can’t give evidence. I’m not trying to defend Fleming, but there is something to be said for his doing what he did. It turned him into a demon. He wanted Ayers dead, and he wanted Dorothy dead too—now. But he picked a low, lousy way of effecting his purpose. He wasn’t going to endanger himself, risk his own security. No, he started off for ‘South America,’ dropped from sight, holed-up in a rooming-house in the city under the name of Burg, and picked an innocent kid, who had never done him any harm, who had just as much right as he had to life and the pursuit of happiness, to do his murdering for him.
“He tested you out, saw that you were a suitable subject, and—well, the rest we got over the dictaphone last night. To give him his due, he wasn’t deliberately trying to have you apprehended for the crime either. He would have been just as satisfied if you were never caught yourself.
“But the point was, whatever clues came into the possession of the police pointing at the killer, would point at you, not him. He had provided himself with a buffer; he would always be one step removed from the crime. If they ever caught the man the clues pointed to, if they ever caught the actual killer, it would always be you, not him. It was a lot safer than just hiring a professional killer, in full possession of his faculties; it removed all danger of eventual betrayal and implication.
“True, he had to drive you up there, because you don’t drive. Maybe he would have had to anyway; I don’t know enough about hypnotism, I don’t know if control can be effectively maintained over such a great distance. It was just as well he did, from his point of view. You lost the knife, only killed Ayers by a fluke in struggling with him, and Dorothy would have gotten away scot-free, if he hadn’t been lurking outside to lend a hand himself. If she had lived to raise the alarm, you probably would have been nabbed then and there, before you could make a getaway in your dazed state; which would have brought the investigation back to the rooming-house too quickly to suit him, his presence there might have been revealed in spite of all his precautions. So he crushed her to death and whisked you back to immunity.”
“How is it I remembered the whole murder-scene so vividly the next morning? Especially their faces—”
“His control wasn’t one-hundred-percent effective; I don’t know if it ever is. The whole scene must have filtered dimly through to your conscious mind, remained in your memory the next morning after you woke up—just the way a dream does. And other particles, that remained imbedded in your subconscious at first, also came out later when they reduced themselves in actuality: I mean your memory of the stone entrance-lanterns, the cut-off, the spare door-key, the hall light-switch, etcetera. All that stuff is way over my head, I’m not qualified to pass expert judgment on it. I’d rather not even puzzle too hard about it, it scares me myself.”
“Why did I seem to know her, when I didn’t? Why was I so—sort of hurt, heartbroken, at the sight of her face?”
“Those were Fleming’s thoughts, not yours, filtering through your mind. She was his wife, about to desert him, helping another man to rob him in his absence.”
I was sitting down on the edge of the bed, lacing my shoes. That reminded me of something else. “It was drizzling in town that night when I went to bed—and the streets were only starting to dry off when I woke up the next morning. Yet the soles of my shoes were perfectly dry; how could they be, if I followed him even across the sidewalk to where he had a car waiting at the curb? And I doubt that he brought it up that close to the rooming-house entrance, for fear of being seen.”
“I remember you mentioned that to me once before, and it’s puzzled me too. The only possible explanation I can think of is this—and that’s another thing we’ll never know for sure, because that point didn’t come up when he was giving himself away in the alcove last night: can you remember whether you got them off easily that night, when you were undressing in your own room, or as sometimes happens with nearly everyone, the laces got snarled, you couldn’t undo the knot of one or both of them?”
I tried to remember. “I’m not sure—but I think a snag did form in the laces of one of them, so I pulled it off the way it was without really opening it properly.”
“And in the morning?”
“They both seemed all right.”
“That’s what it was, then. You couldn’t undo the knot in time while you were hurriedly getting dressed under his ‘direction.’ You followed him out and around to wherever the car was in your stocking feet, shoes probably shoved into the side-pockets of your coat. He got the knot out for you at his leisure in the car, before starting. It wasn’t raining up here that night, and by the time you got back to town
again the sidewalks were already starting to dry off, so your shoes stayed dry.”
“But wouldn’t my socks have gotten wet?”
“They probably did, but they’d dry off again quicker than shoes.”
I was ready now. Waggoner and his deputy went over ahead without waiting for us. I guess he figured I’d rather just go alone with Cliff, and he wanted to make it as easy as he could for me. He said, “Bring the kid over whenever you’re ready, Dodge.”
Cliff and I started over by ourselves about half an hour later. I knew I’d have to go into a cell for awhile, but that didn’t worry me any more; the shadows had lifted.
When we got out in front of the constabulary Cliff asked: “Are you scared, kid?”
I was a little, like when you’re going in to have a tooth yanked or a broken arm reset. You know it’s got to be done, and you’ll feel a lot better after it’s over. “Sort of,” I admitted, forcing a smile.
“You’ll be all right,” he promised, giving me a heartening grip on the shoulder. “I’ll be standing up right next to you the whole time. They probably won’t even send it all the way through to prosecution.”
We went in together.
Bad Time at Honda
HOWARD BRESLIN
THE STORY
Original publication: The American Magazine, January 1947
ALTHOUGH HE NEVER GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL because of an automobile accident at the age of fourteen that gave him a permanent shoulder disability, Howard Mary Breslin (1912–1964) went on to study at Manhattan College, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree, and had a successful writing career. His attempts at securing a job as a journalist proved fruitless so he turned to writing radio scripts for such shows as Off the Air, which starred Shirley Booth, and The Honest Captain (both cowritten in alternate weeks with Knowles Entrikin), Mayor of the Town, which starred Lionel Barrymore, and Allen’s Alley (cowritten with David Howard).
He took the risk of quitting his highly paid career as a radio scriptwriter to devote himself full-time to writing novels and short stories. He had immediate success with The Tamarack Tree (1947), a novel set in 1840 in a small Vermont village of two hundred people that swells to twenty thousand to hear Daniel Webster speak during the “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” presidential campaign and becomes the scene of sudden violence. It was followed by ten additional novels under his own name, as well as Run Like a Thief (1962), a suspense novel written under the pseudonym Michael Niall. Set in New York, where Breslin was born and lived for virtually his entire life, it is a two-pronged story of a man attacked by a juvenile gang after he rescues a girl and a television tape of a bank robbery whose perpetrator the man recognizes from his neighborhood.
Curiously, after his short story inspired the motion picture Bad Day at Black Rock, Breslin wrote a novelization of the screenplay and published it with the same title as the movie but published it under the Niall pseudonym, though the original story had been published under his own name.
Another of his short stories served as the basis for Platinum High School (1960), about a man who comes to investigate his son’s death at an elite military school for delinquent boys; it starred Mickey Rooney, Terry Moore, and Dan Duryea.
THE FILM
Title: Bad Day at Black Rock, 1955
Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Director: John Sturges
Screenwriters: Don McGuire, Millard Kaufman
Producer: Dore Schary
THE CAST
• Spencer Tracy (John J. Macreedy)
• Robert Ryan (Reno Smith)
• Anne Francis (Liz Wirth)
• Dean Jagger (Sheriff Tim Horn)
• Walter Brenna (Doc Velie)
• John Ericson (Pete Wirth)
• Ernest Borgnine (Coley Trimble)
• Lee Marvin (Hector David)
The full-length film is remarkably close to the storyline and tone of the short story, though inevitably padded out to accommodate the longer format. The first difference, which does not have any impact on the story as a whole, is that its hero, John J. Macreedy (Peter in the story), has only one arm in the film, though he has no disability in the story.
Spencer Tracy, who eventually agreed to play the character, had been unsure about whether he wanted the role. Plagued by alcoholism at the time, Tracy wasn’t eager to take on any new work but producer Dore Schary wanted him for the role. As the shooting date approached, Schary had the screenwriters make a change in the script that had Macreedy lose an arm in the war, knowing that actors like to play characters with physical disabilities. Still hemming and hawing, Tracy finally agreed after being told that Alan Ladd had been offered the role and accepted. Tracy hated the idea of losing a prime role to another studio star, so went to work. It also didn’t hurt that the producer, Dore Schary, threatened to sue him for the costs the studio had incurred after he agreed to make the film before he changed his mind. The price tag would have been $480,000—a lot of money today but a fortune more than half a century ago.
It was the right decision, as Tracy was nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor in a Lead Role and won the Cannes Film Festival award for Best Actor (tying for first place with the ensemble cast in A Big Family). Also nominated for Oscars were director John Sturges and screenwriter Millard Kaufman.
The film (and the story) opens with Macreedy, a former cop, getting off a train in a tiny, remote town and finding the locals hostile. He’d come to find a Japanese-American named Kamotka in order to let him know that his son had been killed in Italy.
He got little help from the townspeople but finally was taken to where the senior Kamotka lived and found his house burned down. Macreedy is shot at and threatened before learning the truth about Kamotka’s fate and getting back on the train to Chicago.
The film offers a high level of suspense, somewhat reminiscent of High Noon, in which a solitary man must face down a threatening coterie while the rest of the town is either too afraid or too impotent to help.
Filmed in the California desert, the heat during filming was oppressive, frequently hitting one hundred degrees. Tracy regularly invited the cast and crew to his hotel room for cocktails after the day’s shoot. Although an alcoholic, Tracy drank only soda pop because he tried to abstain while working—making up for it with serious binge drinking after the production wrapped.
Coincidentally and ironically, in a story and motion picture featuring anti-Japanese bigotry, the name of the town in the story, Honda, was used long before the Japanese automobile became a well-known brand. The town’s name was changed to Black Rock because it is far more memorable and because the studio wanted to avoid confusion with a recent and successful John Wayne western movie, Hondo.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s president, Nicholas Schenck, did not want the studio to make the film, as he regarded it to be subversive.
A decade after the film’s release, writer Millard Kaufman was given an award by the Japanese government for his sensitive portrayal of Japanese people. “The whole thing was absurd,” Kaufman later said, “because there are no Japanese in the movie.”
BAD TIME AT HONDA
Howard Breslin
HONDA SPRAWLS BETWEEN THE BLUFF and the railroad tracks. The tracks, four strips of steel, bright in the sunlight, fence the endless Southwestern plain from the false fronts of the town. The plain is Honda’s only view; from behind the buildings the bluff, a huge, red-brown mound, roughly shaped like the crown of an enormous sombrero, rises to the sky. Against the bluff’s ancient mass the houses of Honda’s single street are garish and new, in spite of peeling paint and battered tin signs. The glaring sunshine has baked everything, thoroughly, into one color—sepia. Even the dust that swirls up as the Streamliner passes is the same thinned-out, tired brown.
The long red and silver fatly curved Streamliner stre
aks past Honda, heading west, three mornings a week. Eastbound, it rattles by in the night, a sound, sudden and fleeting. But on the mornings when it is seen, its length alive with glints from the ever-present sunlight, the Streamliner is an event to Honda, a glimpse of the sleekness and wealth, the silver-chromium speed, that belong to other places.
That is why the morning the Streamliner stopped it was more than an event; it was a shock. It was wrong, not normal. The whole town felt it; the range, when it heard, felt it. And even then, that morning, the feeling was that this happening would mean a bad time for Honda.
* * *
—
There was no warning. The shimmering heat above the railroad tracks seemed to become audible with a low humming.
Doc Velie, lounging on the porch of Sullivan’s Bar, let his chair down and looked at his watch. “That’ll be her,” Doc told the other loungers. “On time today.”
Honda prepared for the expected passage in its usual way. Papa Delvecchio came out of his grocery store; Liz Brooks climbed up from the grease pit of her garage and stood waiting, wiping her hands vigorously on a piece of waste.
The humming increased in volume. The station door banged, and Hastings, the station agent, peered down the tracks. Hastings was wearing black dust cuffs, and he raised an arm to shield his bald head from the sun.
“Here she comes,” said Doc Velie, leaning forward. Then his mouth popped open. The Streamliner wasn’t racing into Honda; she had cut her speed, and was slowing.
The loungers stared. Liz Brooks dropped her waste. Papa Delvecchio began beckoning wildly to somebody inside the store. Hastings stood as if frozen until the train slid smoothly to a stop. The moment the train ceased motion, Hastings jerked into life, running along the track. But the passenger was on the ground, and the porter was swinging back up the steps, before the station agent reached the open car door.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 20
