The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  Macreedy didn’t seem to do anything. He took one look at the sun blazing over Honda, winced, and borrowed a pack of cards from Mrs. Jiminez. He spent the morning playing solitaire in the hotel dining room.

  * * *

  —

  It wasn’t quite noon when three riders from Cameron’s Rancho Mesa drifted into Sullivan’s. The bartender served them, surprised. “No work today?” he asked.

  The three shuffled their feet. They didn’t look at Sullivan. One said, “We got our time. We’re drifting.” Sullivan stared: Doc Velie, nursing his head in a corner, snickered. Another of the riders said angrily, “Better pay, south a-ways!” The third gulped his drink and glanced through the window toward the hotel. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s get along.”

  In spite of the heat they spurred their horses to a trot through the town. Macreedy heard them pass the hotel, but never looked up from his card game.

  He left it only once all that day. He walked through Honda to Liz Brooks’s garage. Macreedy noticed that there were more men in town; all along the street they fell silent as he passed. He noticed another thing, too. Nearly every man had a gun belt buckled on.

  Liz Brooks saw him coming, waited for him.

  Macreedy raised his hat and asked one question: “Who fired that shot yesterday?”

  The girl looked at him with tired, red-rimmed eyes. She shook her head.

  “It might go easier if you’d tell me,” Macreedy said.

  Liz Brooks shook her head again.

  Macreedy turned and walked back to the hotel. He could feel the tension along the street. It was like the heat, steady, oppressive, mounting. It even followed him into the hotel.

  He stayed there through the rest of the day, playing game after game, stopping only to eat. Outside, Honda baked and speculated.

  Night brought relief only from the sun. Macreedy finished his supper, pushed the dishes aside, dealt the cards. Doc Velie, glaring, stamped out of the room. Coogan Trimble, drawn irresistibly, came all the way from Sullivan’s to stand over Macreedy’s table.

  “Won’t the game come out?” Trimble asked.

  “Eventually,” Macreedy said.

  * * *

  —

  That night, after Macreedy had gone to bed, the tension broke in Honda. A puncher in Sullivan’s denied, heatedly, that he’d ever been to Adobe Wells. The word “lie” snapped out; a name was shouted. The saloon rocked with the roaring of gunfire. Before it was over, two men were dead, another was badly wounded, and the state police were on their way.

  The shots woke Macreedy. He lay listening until the shouting had stopped, then got up and went to the open window. In the white floodlight beam of a full moon, Honda seemed crowded with men. One group was under Macreedy’s window, and from it a voice cursed Macreedy savagely, blaming him for the shooting.

  A colder voice, Trimble’s, cut across the swearing: “Shut up, you fool! That’s what he wants!”

  With a sudden silence, every face in the group was a white patch lifted toward Macreedy’s window. The big man stiffened. He was a clear target in the moonlight, and he knew it, and he was careful not to move. Any sudden motion might bring a gunshot from the street, instead of hatred. Macreedy gazed down on the group, until it quietly broke up and drifted off in fragments. Then he let his breath out slowly.

  He stayed at the window, watching, until the state police cars had come and gone. Then he went back to bed. He was asleep when the tap came on his door.

  Macreedy was out of bed with a leap, and his gun was in his hand. The room was darker. The moon was gone; the window showed blue instead of silver. Macreedy put his back against the wall by the door, and spoke very quietly: “What is it?”

  Through the thin panel a voice said, “Liz Brooks sent me.”

  Macreedy didn’t turn on the light. He unlocked the door, then raised his gun. “Open it,” he said. “And come slow.”

  A man walked into the room, a slender shadow in the half-light.

  “The bulb’s over your head,” said Macreedy. “Pull it on.”

  The man reached up, fumbled, found the light, and turned it on. Then he walked across to the window and pulled the shade down. He turned, as Macreedy shut the door.

  “Your name would be Horn,” said Macreedy.

  “You’re good.”

  “That was easy. That’s the one thing they gave me.”

  “Like that.” Horn didn’t sound surprised. “That would be Cameron. He’s always wanted my place. So I’m elected.” He lit a cigarette, not hurrying, and blew smoke toward the ceiling. “I walked in alone, Macreedy. I’ll walk out alone. Italian gun or not.”

  “Out at the Wells. That shot. The girl knew it was you.”

  Horn smiled. “Testing. You didn’t scare.”

  Macreedy wasn’t smiling. He asked, “Was it you the night they burned the old man out?”

  “I was there. But I’m not going to be the goat.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Showdown, eh?” Horn took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at Macreedy for a long time. “All right,” he said finally. He sat down on the edge of the rumpled bed. “Liz didn’t want me to go out there with the crowd. I went. You don’t have to believe I went to herd them off, to slow them down. On the other hand, I don’t have to tell you anything.”

  Macreedy nodded. “Go on.”

  “I went. They were drunk. They had a rope. You’ve seen those trees out there; they’re not big enough for that. I thought it might save the old man. But they started burning the buildings. He broke away. Ran for it.”

  Macreedy nodded again.

  “He ran up the hill. You could see him plain, in all that fire. They started to chase him. But I called for the shot. I cursed them out, and called for it. Like I was one of them. I meant to miss.”

  “Yes,” Macreedy said.

  “He couldn’t run very fast. I gave him all the time I could. He was almost to the top when I shot. I put it beside him, into a shadow so they wouldn’t see it hit. I couldn’t believe it when he dropped.”

  “You hit him?”

  “No. There wasn’t a mark on him. But nobody knows that but me. The rest of them beat it. I buried him over at my own place. He was dead, all right. Fright, I guess. Or running up that hill. He wasn’t young. But there was no bullet in him.”

  “The town doesn’t know that.”

  “No. I got the credit. Even with Liz.” Horn bared his teeth. “But that’s the truth. I liked the old bird. Used to get vegetables from him.”

  * * *

  —

  Horn stood up, suddenly tense. “Liz talked me into coming here, ending this thing. You’ve got it. You don’t have to believe it. There’s no proof. I could show you an unmarked skeleton, but you wouldn’t know it was the Jap’s. There was never any proof about what really happened. That’s why I never told my story….Take it or leave it.”

  Macreedy sighed, and tossed his gun on the bed. He said, “You couldn’t stop them?”

  “You can’t stop a stampede, Macreedy.”

  “I guess that’s all,” said Macreedy. “And thanks.” He went to the window and raised the shade. “Almost dawn.”

  Horn heard the dismissal in the words, and started for the door. He had his hand on the knob when he paused. “Why, Macreedy?” he asked. “Why, after four years? What brought you to Honda?” But Macreedy just stood, looking out the window, and Horn left.

  Macreedy slept late, and he spoke to Hastings as soon as he breakfasted. The station agent raced to Sullivan’s with the news: “He’s leaving! He wants me to flag the eastbound Streamliner tonight!”

  It spread through Honda like a cool wind. Sullivan passed it on to the ranches. Doc Velie took off his gun. Even Papa Delvecchio beamed when he heard, and pressed a free apple on the man who told him.
And all through another scorching day Honda scoffed at Macreedy’s solitaire as the gesture of a beaten man.

  Sullivan’s was crowded and happy that night. The jukebox was the only noise in the room, and Macreedy was standing in the doorway. The crowd drew back from him. Somebody pulled the plug of the jukebox out, and the silence was like a shot.

  “Now, listen,” said Macreedy. “All of you. I came here to find Old Man Kamotka. You know what happened to him. So do I—now.” He could hear the breathing in the room, and he went on: “This is why I came. There was a kid named Jimmy Kamotka. He left here years ago. He never wrote his father. The old man couldn’t read. I met Jimmy in the Army. In Italy. He asked me to look in here.”

  Macreedy’s smile was not a pleasant one. “Jimmy Kamotka was killed in Italy. I think maybe this town should know that. And remember it. I’m not a cop any more, and you’re all safe enough. But just remember what I told you.”

  Along the railroad tracks came the humming of an approaching train.

  Macreedy looked the crowd over with his calm gaze. Then he spoke, and the word crackled like an insult: “Honda!”

  The big man turned and went out. He reached the station just as the Streamliner slid to a stop. Macreedy climbed aboard without looking back.

  The Boy Cried Murder

  CORNELL WOOLRICH

  THE STORY

  Original publication: Mystery Book Magazine, March 1947; first collected in Dead Man Blues by William Irish (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1948). Note: The title was changed to “Fire Escape” for its first book publication.

  IN THE MID- TO LATE 1940S, Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903–1968) appeared to be exhausted by his prodigious writing schedule and he was not the workhorse he had been for the previous two decades. Mark Van Doren, the noted Columbia professor and scholar, gave him a little boost when he needed it, although not intentionally.

  Woolrich had not taken classes with Van Doren but it is likely they knew each other because Van Doren took the trouble to write to him early in 1947 when he saw the movie version of Woolrich’s novel Waltz into Darkness (1946) and noticed his name in the credits for the novel on which the film was based.

  Woolrich appears to have been touched by the note and wrote back to Van Doren: “That was the kindest letter you sent me. I don’t get very many, and at times it’s like writing in a vacuum, you don’t know if anyone likes it or not. (For that matter, you don’t even know if anyone reads it or not.) So it did me a lot of good; made me want to write again for awhile.”

  Only two new short stories were published by Woolrich in the first half of 1947, but they are among his best. Submitted as “Child’s Ploy,” “The Boy Cried Murder” is among his most frequently anthologized stories.

  The story is told in third person from the perspective of a twelve-year-old boy who cannot help but tell fanciful stories, getting himself in trouble for a habit he can’t break. On a hot summer night, he climbs out onto the fire escape of the tenement building in which he lives in the hope of catching a bit of breeze. He peeks into a window where the shade hadn’t been pulled all the way down and sees his neighbors kill a man and prepare to dismember the body with a razor blade. He is almost caught peeking but, scared half to death, flees down the fire escape and into the safety of his apartment. In the morning, he tells his parents what he saw but, of course, they don’t believe him and give him a beating for his continued prevarications.

  He then runs to the police station to tell them what he saw but they don’t believe him either. He’s prepared to let it drop but the killers realize that there was a witness to their crime and decide they have to dispose of him.

  THE FILM

  Title: The Window, 1949

  Studio: RKO Radio Pictures

  Director: Ted Tetzlaff

  Screenwriter: Mel Dinelli

  Producers: Frederic Ullman Jr., Dore Schary

  THE CAST

  • Barbara Hale (Mary Woodry)

  • Arthur Kennedy (Ed Woodry)

  • Paul Stewart (Joe Kellerson)

  • Ruth Roman (Jean Kellerson)

  • Bobby Driscoll (Tommy Woodry)

  The Window is an outstanding suspense film that follows the entire storyline of “The Boy Cried Murder,” the minor changes nonetheless maintaining Woolrich’s vision and tone. Like most of the motion pictures made from Woolrich’s short stories, it was made on a tight budget (only $210,000, which was modest even in 1947) but the cast was first-rate and the premise so enthralling that the film was a success with substantial box office business.

  It was filmed on location in the tenements of New York City’s Lower East Side, adding verisimilitude to the dangers of the neighborhood. A chase scene leading to an abandoned building ratchets up the suspense as Tommy must not only flee from the killers but must be wary of the inherent dangers of a crumbling structure.

  The film won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Picture, with a screenplay by Mel Dinelli and Cornell Woolrich.

  It received an Oscar nomination for Frederic Knudtson for Best Film Editing, a Writers Guild of America nomination for Dinelli for Best Written American Drama, and a nomination for Best Film from Any Source from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

  The Woolrich story has served as the inspiration for three further filmed versions: The Boy Cried Murder (1966), Eyewitness (1970), and Cloak and Dagger (1984), each of which careered further and further from the original story and the excellent film based on it.

  Bobby Driscoll, who played Tommy so believably in The Window, was a Walt Disney discovery who won a special Oscar in 1950, given only occasionally when the Academy decides a child star is deemed worthy of the award. He was only ten when the film was made but thirteen when he accepted the award, as Howard Hughes, the head of RKO Radio Pictures, had held the film for nearly three years before releasing it.

  Tragically, Driscoll spiraled into drug addiction as an adult and spent his last years as a homeless person on the streets of New York. Ironically, on March 30, 1968, two kids discovered his body in an abandoned tenement in the East Village. He was thirty-one years old.

  THE BOY CRIED MURDER

  Cornell Woolrich

  THE KID WAS TWELVE, and his name was Buddy. His real name wasn’t that, it was Charlie, but they called him Buddy.

  He was small for his age. The world he lived in was small, too. Or rather, one of them was. He lived in two worlds at once. One of them was a small, drab, confined world—just two squalid rooms in the rear of a six-story tenement, 20 Holt Street; stifling in summer, freezing in winter. Just two grown-ups in that world—Mom and Pop. And a handful of other kids, like himself, that he knew from school and from playing on the streets.

  The other world had no boundaries, no limits. You could do anything in it. You could go anywhere. All you had to do was just sit still and think hard. Make it up as you went along. The world of the imagination. He did a lot of that. But he was learning to keep it to himself. They told him he was getting too big now for that stuff. They swatted him, and called it lies. The last time he’d tried telling them about it, Pop had threatened:

  “I’m going to wallop you good next time you make up any more of them fancy lies of yours!”

  “It comes from them Saturday afternoon movies he’s been seeing,” Mom said. “I told him he can’t go any more.”

  And then this night came along. It felt like it was made of boiling tar, poured all over you. July was hot everywhere, but on Holt Street it was hell. He kept trying to sleep but it wouldn’t work. The bedding on his cot got all soggy and streaked with perspiration. Pop wasn’t home; he worked nights.

  The two rooms were like the chambers of an oven, with all the gas-burners left on full-tilt. He took his pillow with him, finally, and climbed out the window onto the fire escape landing and tried it out
there.

  It wasn’t the first time. He’d done it often on hot nights. You couldn’t fall off because the landing was protected by an iron railing. Well, you could if you were unlucky, but it hadn’t happened yet. He sort of locked his arm through the rail uprights, and that kept him from rolling in his sleep.

  It didn’t take him long to find out it was just as bad on the fire escape. It was still like an oven, only now with the burners out. He decided maybe it would be better if he tried it a little higher up. Sometimes there was a faint stirring of breeze skimming along at roof level. It couldn’t bend and get down in here behind the tenements. He picked up the pillow and went up the iron slats one flight, to the sixth-floor landing, and tried it there.

  It wasn’t very much better, but it had to do. You couldn’t go up any higher than that. He’d learned by experience you couldn’t sleep on the roof itself because it was covered with gravel, and that got into you and hurt. And underneath it was tar-surfaced, and in the hot weather that got soft and stuck to you all over.

  He wriggled around a little on the hard-bitten iron slats, with empty spaces in between—it was like sleeping on a grill—and then finally he dozed off, the way you can even on a fire escape when you’re only twelve.

  Morning came awfully fast. It seemed to get light only a minute later. The shine tickled his eyelids and he opened them. Then he saw that it wasn’t coming down from above, from the sky, the way light should. It was still dark, it was still night up there.

  It was coming in a thin bar, down low, even with his eyes, running along the bottom of the window beside him, on a level with the fire escape landing he was on. If he’d been standing up instead of stretched out flat, it would have run over his feet instead of across his eyes.