The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  “Sure, I—I’ve got to find out what happens—I’ll find some way; it won’t be here or at the place you work.” He turned and went out.

  There went a foolish guy. He had to have his chance, I supposed. You’d give a dog his chance. I watched him down the first flight. I couldn’t tell if he looked like me or not, because I couldn’t tell what I looked like. He didn’t look like himself, to me, in that hat and coat, so maybe that was enough.

  I listened until he got the rest of the way down. The stairs must have been clear yet, I heard him get the yard door open and go out through there. I rapped once against the wooden doorframe beside me, for luck. His luck. Then I closed the door and went in.

  “Now, what’d I do that for?” I wondered, shaking my head.

  It took them a little while to make their arrangements, I guess, or maybe they’d had to wait for orders from higher up. They had no inkling that there was any hurry about it, that I’d accidentally tapped a wire, so to speak, or they would have been over a lot sooner. The knock on the door, of course, was an indication in itself that he’d made it.

  There were two of them. The man in the lead slanted me aside as if I were just an extension panel on the door, strode through. “Come on out, Dixon, don’t make us go in after you.”

  “He’s not in here,” I said innocently.

  The other one was the same one had been installed up here when I got home earlier tonight—Hiller I heard his teammate call him. “He’s skipped the gutter, Hiller. Here’s his hat and coat.”

  Hiller took a look. He caught on fast. “Where are yours?” he said, coming back to me.

  “On the third hook from the left, in the closet,” I stalled.

  “You mean he walked out in ’em.” He was trying to get me for being an accessory. “Now what were you doing while this was going on?”

  “I was in there shaving; how’d I know he was going to take a duster?”

  He went in the bathroom, opened the cabinet, and tested the bristle of my brush. Then he dried-off the tips of his fingers on a towel. Even that didn’t satisfy him; he reached up and felt the side of my face. His fingers skidded on it like an ice-skating rink. Sure I’d shaved. I always shaved at nights. I’d had nearly fifteen minutes to shave, between the time Dixon left and they got here.

  Hiller narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you sure you weren’t in on this?”

  “What would I get out of it either way, whether he stayed or went?”

  I had him there so beautifully that he failed to notice I’d answered his question by asking him one of my own. “No use waiting,” he said to his partner. “He won’t be back—not here anyway. You better come down with us, Carr; I think we’d like to ask you a few, this time.”

  I had to go without my hat and coat, my friend had mine. Hiller even suggested I put on his. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, for some strange reason; call it superstition if you like, I still wasn’t positive they hadn’t last been worn by someone who had taken a life.

  They pegged away at me down there quite a bit, but it didn’t get them anywhere. Whether you’re telling a lie or telling the truth, the whole art of it lies in simplicity; stick to something simple and don’t ball yourself up. I’d seen the figure of a woman get in a cab at my doorway, through the mist; I didn’t claim it was Estelle Mitchell, I never had. That was the whole gist and burden of my story. How could anyone trip on anything as short and uncomplicated as that? Well—detectives like this Hiller get thirty-six-hundred a year, I think. I was now about to find out why.

  They didn’t let on that I’d fallen face-flat, so to speak. Hiller just mumbled, “Ask you to go up to Mrs. Mitchell’s with us for a few minutes,” and we were on our way again.

  It was a typical early-century interior; gloomy hall going back for miles, with doors opening all the way down it. A man that I at first thought was a teammate of theirs, working at this end, admitted us. He was up in his late thirties, I should say, or even higher than that. Hiller said, “Hello, Tremholt; we’d like Mrs. Mitchell to come out and hear something, a minute.”

  He cranked his head kind of dubiously. “The doctor was with her until now; he just about got her quieted down. Go easy, will you, fellows?” But he went down the hall to one of the end doors. So by that I caught on he wasn’t a bureau man but some relative or member of the family. Meanwhile we’d detoured into an old-fashioned parlor, cluttered up with junk. The girl’s late father, in a photographic enlargement, looked down from one wall, the mother from the other. As she had once been.

  She came in a minute later, on the arm of this Tremholt, and made the picture out a liar. The thing had turned her inside out. Her eyes were lost in deep skull pits. She had a wet compress pasted across her brows, and it adhered of its own saturation. She could only hate now, thirst for vengeance, that was all that was left to her. She hated well. For the first time I could understand Dixon’s peculiar skittishness about facing her.

  Tremholt led her to a chair, arm solicitously about her, said, “Sit down, Mom.” I couldn’t figure him the girl’s brother, he must have been a half-brother. Then he stood attentively behind her, hand resting on the back of her chair. I could see it over her shoulder. He’d taken out his own anxiety and grief in a much simpler form: nail-biting. I’d never seen such nails; they were down to the quick, and even past it. The indentations were still left to show how much of them had been gnawed away. A poodle, which had a sort of wistful air, like it missed her too, had trailed into the room after the two of them.

  Hiller said, “Now just once more, in Mrs. Mitchell’s presence.”

  “Why, simply,” I began uneasily, “that I saw a woman’s figure enter a cab—” I ran through it once again. I could sense something had come up, but couldn’t get what it was. Which is liable to happen when you horse around with detectives.

  “I’m not calling you on that,” he said quietly. “What I want to know is, did you hear the signal given, the hail, that brought the cab down the street that far, to your doorway, for her?” And then, for bait, “There must have been one; no cabdriver’s attention could have been attracted if she’d just waved an arm, in that kind of visibility.”

  I could sense the trap. He wanted to drive a wedge between my version and Dixon’s, in order to knock the support from Dixon’s, demolish it. I only had a split second in which to make up my mind, with three pairs of eyes boring into me. If I denied hearing her summon the cab, that would shake the credibility of Dixon’s version, wouldn’t it? How had he been able to hear it, through a closed window, if I hadn’t, right out there in the open? There was also a trap within a trap. He was decoying me by using the terms signal, hail. He wasn’t going to trip me up on that. Dixon had said unmistakably that she’d whistled for one. I’d hooked my story onto his. He’d assured me that I wasn’t backstopping a lie, but simply bridging a five-minute time difference; in other words, corroborating something that had actually occurred, only just too soon for me to eye- and ear-witness it. If his whole story was a lie, that was my tough luck. But you can’t corroborate a thing like that in parts, you either corroborate it all the way or not at all.

  “There was no hail given,” I said. “There was a whistle given. I heard it.”

  No one said anything. They seemed to be waiting for Mrs. Mitchell to speak, as though they already knew something I didn’t. Tremholt looked down at her from behind her chair. Hiller looked across the room at her.

  She spoke at last, in a deathly low voice. “My daughter couldn’t whistle. Not a note. It was an absolute limitation, some kink in her tongue maybe. Many’s the time we heard her try it, all she could do was make a soundless breath, like someone blowing soap bubbles. When she had this dog out with her, the only way she could call him was by clicking her tongue or speaking his name.”

  She’d been addressing Hiller until now. Now she turned on me, as Tremholt started to lead her out of t
he room. “So if you heard a woman in your doorway whistling for a cab, it was not my daughter. You did not see my daughter leave that house!” And then from further down the hall, out of sight: “And no one else did either!”

  Hiller just sat there looking at me, and I just sat looking at my own innermost thoughts. They were a glowing red, and they kept repeating a single phrase over and over again: “The dirty liar! The dirty liar!” And I didn’t mean the dick, either.

  I went back with him to Headquarters from there. I still wasn’t turning stool pigeon. I couldn’t have anyway, even if I’d wanted to, in the only way that would have done them any good. But even if I could have, I knew I wouldn’t have. I didn’t know where he’d gone. And if—and when—I found out, I considered that a little personal matter between him and me. I wasn’t doing their work for them.

  They wore out finally. The lieutenant or whoever he was in charge suggested, “Why don’t you boys take him over and let him see for himself what this precious friend of his has done? Then maybe he’ll feel a little differently about it.”

  That was the first I knew that the body had been found.

  They took me over to the Morgue with them. They drew out a sort of drawer or lateral cupboard they had her in and whisked back the covering. It would have been tough enough to take even without the way they stood around me and rubbed in it.

  Her neck had been broken in some God-awful way; I’d never seen anything like it in my life before. The whole head was twisted out of line with the body. As though her neck had been caught under someone’s arm in a viselike grip, and then the killer had twisted his own whole upper body around out of joint, to accomplish the fracture. Even then I still couldn’t understand how anyone of less than abnormal strength could—

  They took pains not to leave me in the dark on this point. “Take a good look, Carr. This girl was twenty-two years old, think of that. Do you want to know just what happened to her, with accompanying blueprints? She went to this skunk-friend of yours to tell him they were through; that she was giving in to the old lady and marrying Tremholt—”

  “Marrying Tremholt?” I’d thought he was her brother until then.

  “He’s boarded with the Mitchells for years and he’s been crazy about her ever since she was in grade school. The understanding always was that he was to marry her when she was old enough. He’s practically subsidized the mother for years, she could never repay the amounts she owes him. But that was all right, it was supposed to be all in the family. The girl thought he was pretty swell herself, until Dixon came along. She wasn’t coerced into giving him up; Dixon’s glamor started to wear thin and she finally saw things her mother’s way.

  “All right, so she told him that night. The old lady was a fool to let her go there alone, and Tremholt didn’t know about it. The girl gave your pal the brush-off and walked out on him. He got his second wind, ran after her, caught up with her on the next landing, and started to drag her back, throttling her so she couldn’t scream. He didn’t kill her then, but she’d lost consciousness and he thought he had. He lost his head, dragged her on up a flight above his own door, and secreted himself in the incinerator closet on that floor, maybe because he’d heard somebody come out below.

  “You know those incinerator closets in your building, Carr. A metal flap that you pull down gives onto the perpendicular chute that carries the refuse down to the basement to be burned. Now listen to this if you can stand it—and remember we can show you the scientific evidence for every one of these steps, it’s not just a theoretical reconstruction. He pulled down the flap and tried to unload her body—and she was still alive, see?—down the chute, headfirst, toward the basement and eventual incineration. It was just a panic-reflex. The flap opening wasn’t wide enough, any more than the chute backing it would have been; but there was evidently someone coming up or down out on the stairs at that moment and he was crazed. He wedged her in, then when he tried to extricate her again, after the immediate danger had receded and he could think more clearly, the head and the one shoulder that he had managed to insert, jammed. You can see what happened by looking—”

  “Cut it out,” I said sickly, “cut it out.”

  “He finally heaved her out, but in doing so he broke her neck against the angle of the chute, wrenched her head nearly all the way around back to front. The only consolation is she didn’t feel anything, was unconscious at the time. That guy has been sleeping on the same mattress with you, Carr; keying the same door.”

  I took out a handkerchief and patted it around my mouth.

  “When the coast was clear, he hauled her on up the rest of the way to the roof. He went over the communicating roofs as far as he could—four buildings away, toward Demarest Street, and found a barrel there. They’d recently retarred and regraveled that roof, and the barrel was left over. He put her in that, first emptying the gravel that remained, then covering her lightly with it. The workmen who carried it away got it all the way downstairs before they realized what made it weigh so much and found out what was in it.

  “It’s the prettiest case we’ve had in years.” And they didn’t mean pretty.

  “Now, d’you still want to go to bat for a guy that did anything like that? Tell us where you think he’s gone, you must have some idea.”

  I took the handkerchief away from my mouth, and looked at them a long time, and said slowly, “Gents, I only wish I did have.” And did I mean it!

  And on that note they let me go home. They knew I was on ice now, they knew I’d keep. They knew, they could tell just by the look in my eyes.

  I didn’t sleep so good that night. I threw the mattress on the floor and slept on the naked bed frame. I kept seeing her before me. She spoke to me like she had on the stairs. “He didn’t chase you out on my account, did he?” Only her head was twisted around so that it practically faced forward across her own shoulder.

  She was buried next day. I went to the services. I sent flowers with a card that said: “From someone who should have stayed home.” Meaning it wouldn’t have happened that night if I’d been there. The mother was there, and Tremholt, sitting close to her, looking after her, as usual. It must have been tough on him. He was under a strain, you could see. He kept breaking up wooden matchsticks between his fingers, sitting there in the pew with her. Afterwards, when the few of us filed out, I glanced down and the floor was covered with them around where he’d been sitting.

  Monday came around again, and I had to do my studying for my Tuesday night class. I had to change textbooks first, we’d finished Volume One the week before, and were going to start in on Volume Two this time. They were standard textbooks, Dixon knew them well, the way I’d had the first one kicking around the place, on renewels, for about six weeks straight. I’d mentioned to him, I think, that we would be about ready to tackle Volume Two in another week’s time, and I could remember his kidding answer: “My, my, you’re getting to be a big boy now!” He probably thought this self-improvement stuff was the bunk.

  Anyway, on my way home from the job, I dropped off at the library, turned in Volume One, and picked up Volume Two, which I’d made sure would be there waiting for me on the shelf. I holed-up for the evening, rolled up my shirt sleeves, sat down at the table with pencil, blank paper and book in front of me, and got ready to cram improvement into my skull.

  I didn’t see it until I’d gotten well into the second theorem, and had to turn a page. Somebody’d been working out one of the problems on the margin of the page. People often did that, I’d noticed, with textbooks of this kind, too lazy to get their own scratch paper or somethi—

  I thought I was seeing things. It was my own name, or part of it anyway, staring up at me from the page. “Red— Call me from Mallam’s ten sharp night you get this out.” Just a hurried pencil scribble, as cramped as possible in order to be inconspicuous, but I recognized the writing. Dixon—the murderer. He must have slipped into the lib
rary sometime earlier in the day, located the reference book he knew I was sure to take out next, and taken a chance on contacting me in this way.

  Well, that was his big mistake. I was fresh out of sympathy with lousy girl killers. I closed the book with a sound like a firecracker going off, and I shoved my fists back through the sleeves of my coat—fists this time, not open hands. He didn’t know when he was well-off. I picked up the phone, hesitated, put it down again. No, Hiller and his side-kicks could come and get him from here, take up where they’d left off the night I’d so misguidedly abetted his running out. I’d bring him back to his original starting point alone and unaided. That was the least I could do in the way of making amends.

  Mallam’s was a big drugstore we both knew well and often patronized. He hadn’t given any number, so how I was to call him I couldn’t figure, but he’d mentioned an hour, ten sharp, so it behooved me to be at the right place at the right time and leave the method up to him.

  The method was simple. I was hanging around by the cigarette-counter when the phone in the middle booth started to ring. The counterman started for it, but I stepped in ahead of him. “That’s probably for me,” I said.

  It was. I knew his voice. He’d simply called me, instead of having me call him; a lot safer. “You saw it,” he said.

  “Yeah, I saw it.” I tried to keep my voice neutral; I was still at his mercy, he could cut himself off.

  “Are you alone there? Are you sure no one’s following you or anything?”

  “Dead sure,” I said grimly.

  “I gotta see you, I gotta know where I stand; it’s not in the papers any more. You’re the only friend I have, Red—” (Wrong tense, I thought to myself, you should have used the past tense.) “—I don’t know who else to turn to. I’m going crazy—and I’m strapped, I can’t even get out of this place I’m in if I want to—”

  “I’ll take care of that,” I promised. I wasn’t kidding by a long shot.