The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  He said, speaking quickly, probably to override his own misgivings, “Take the Laurel Avenue bus line, to the Whitegate part of town. Get off at Borough Lane stop. There’s a rooming house there, 305, with a tailor shop below. Go up one flight. Harris is the name.” Then he caught his breath, said, “And whatever you do, if you notice anyone following you—”

  “They’ve given me up as a hopeless case long ago. Don’t worry, everything’ll be under control.”

  He hung up without waiting for any more. That was all right; now I had him.

  He looked bad when he finally let me into the place, after all the usual rigamarole of casing the stairs to make sure no one was at my heels. He looked like he hadn’t slept decently since he’d left our own place. It was a cheesy-looking little hole, about the best a guy wanted by the police could hope to get for himself. Judging by the litter, he’d been doing most of his eating out of cracker boxes and tomato cans, and smoking himself to death.

  “Yeah, I brought some dough,” I answered his question. I didn’t bother passing it to him, because he wasn’t going to need it anyway.

  “Are they still hot for me?”

  “I don’t know. The last I saw Hiller was the day of the funeral, standing over in the shadows at the back of the church. I guess he was hoping that—the guy that did it would show up, out of curiosity or something. I didn’t let on I recognized him.”

  He took quick steps back and forth, raking at his hair. “It’s not fair! Through no fault of my own, I’m suddenly hunted down like a mad dog—for something I didn’t do! I suddenly find myself in a position where there’s only one guy left that’s still willing to believe I didn’t.”

  “No,” I said, quietly but succinctly.

  That brought him up short. His lips formed the question without sounding it.

  “You better make that unanimous,” I went on. “What do you expect? What choice have I got?” He tottered backward, crumpled onto the sagging, unmade cot, reached down and gripped the mattress edge with one hand as if to steady himself. I went over the whole thing again, step by step, but as much for my own benefit as for his. “I came back that night, and instead of taking it easy reading like other nights, you were rushing around in there, as if you were straightening things up. I heard you through the door.”

  “Sure, I was pounding distractedly back and forth; you would be too if you’d just lost your girl.”

  “I knocked instead of using my key, and the knock frightened you. You only opened on a crack until you saw who it was—”

  “That was just a reflex; I didn’t want to see anyone, I had too much on my mind—”

  “You told me you’d just put her in a taxi at the door. The sidewalk was wet, but the soles of your shoes were dry.”

  “Yes, that was an outright lie, but an innocent one. I didn’t want you to think I was heel enough to let her go down by herself.”

  “You told me you heard her whistling up a cab, you let me lie to the cops about that. Her mother says she couldn’t whistle a note.”

  He looked at me wide-eyed. “I didn’t know that, I didn’t know that.”

  The edges of my mouth curled. “She was your girl and you didn’t know she couldn’t whistle?”

  “She never happened to tell me; the occasion never arose. I heard someone whistle—”

  “A little bird, no doubt.” I went ahead. “You left me at twelve, to go down for a quick pick-up. McGinnis told me you didn’t show up in his place until two. What were you doing before you went in there?”

  “Walking around in the rain,” he said dully, “like you do when, you’ve lost something.”

  “Was this what you lost?” I gave the two raincoat fasteners I’d been carrying around on me all week a careless pitch over toward him. They landed on the cot beside him. “There was a third one, that you overlooked. I stepped on it up at our place, while you were out that night ‘walking around in the rain.’ I put it on the table, and the next I knew it had disappeared; you hid it from that first cop that came around to question you.”

  “Yes, I did.” He lowered his head. “She was already missing, it already looked bad enough for me, without him picking a thing like that up. I was starting to get nervous by that time. When she was trying to leave, I’d tried to hang on to her, get her to stay, but not in a murderous way. She had to wrench her raincoat from my pleading grip, and the fasteners came off. I thought it might save me a lot of unnecessary trouble if that cop just didn’t see that third one lying there on the table right as he was checking the description of what she’d been wearing. Sure it was foolish to conceal it, but everyone does foolish things at times, why should mine be made to count so heavily against me?”

  “And then you threw the other two—those, over there next to you—out the washroom window at McGinnis’s.”

  “That was just a rebellious gesture. I’d lost her, I was hurt and bitter. I did that like a man picks up a pebble or a stick and chucks it away from him, as a vent to his inner feelings. And Red, be logical; if I did it for concealment, why wouldn’t I have done it sooner, the whole two hours I was roaming around in the rain, why did I have to wait until I got in there?”

  “Maybe you only recalled you had them on you after you got in there, maybe you didn’t remember them while you were still outside.” I shook my head at him slowly. “It’s no use, Dixon. Do you blame me, after all that, for thinking you did kill her? Would you blame anyone for thinking it?”

  “So you’re going back to them now and tell them where I am. Tell them where they can come and find me.”

  I shook my head quietly.

  “Then where are you going?”

  “Just back to our place—” I looked him straight in the eye. “And you’re coming with me.”

  “That’s what you think.” His hand, the right, had been clutching the mattress edge all this while. I’d mistakenly thought for balance, for moral support. He withdrew it now, and a gun came slithering out in its grip. He must have bought it in some pawnshop with the money I’d staked him to; he hadn’t taken one with him the night he left. He pointed it square at me and said, lethally, “You’re never going to leave here alive again. I can’t afford it, I’m fighting for my life now. Well if it’s got to be me or you, then it’s going to be you. If you were my own blood-brother standing before me—”

  “Now at last,” I told him, “you’ve put the finishing touch to your own admission of guilt. A man who’s capable of murdering his own best friend in cold blood, like you’re about to, is certainly capable of murdering his sweetheart. If you didn’t kill her, why would you be so afraid to go back with me—?”

  I didn’t know just when he was going to pull the trigger; he was going to any second, I could tell that just by looking at the expression in his eyes. The cot was a decrepit iron affair, one of those so-called portable things with legs that folded back under it. One hadn’t been opened fully, or else had slipped back a little from the repeated vibration of his getting on and off the cot twenty times a day, like he must have. I’d noticed long before this came up that it didn’t hit the floor perpendicular, but leaned in a little, letting the other three do most of the work for it.

  I was sitting close enough to it, but that was the trouble—I was so close that any move my foot made was sure to catch his eye. I said, “All right, Johnny, let’s have it and get it over with,” and I clasped my hands at the nape of my neck and leaned my head and shoulders back in the chair, as if at defiant ease. That attracted his dangerously twinkling eyes to the upper part of my body, and the very act of stretching backward from the waist up brought my legs unnoticeably further out in the opposite direction. I felt my shoe graze the cot support. I swung my foot out, like when you tee-off. Then I chopped it back. The support snapped up flat against the frame, and that corner of the cot came down.

  The shot was jolted out of him by the sudden
slide. It tore straight through at heart level, but the shift over carried it under my left arm pit, and the elbow was up, so it didn’t do anything. I dove over on top of him before another one could come out, slapped the gun hand down against the mattress, and ground my knee into it.

  The beating I gave him brought the other cot support down, and we rolled down to the floor together, in a mixture of soiled sheets, gun-smoke, and dust from the mattress. As he’d said, it was him or me, and he had a gun; I didn’t pull my punches, although my usual way of fighting is not to hit a guy when he’s down under you.

  I quit when he stopped fighting back, and pocketed the gun. He went out a little from my jaw and face blows. No one seemed to have heard the shot, or if they did, it was the kind of a place where they believed in minding their own business. I threw water in his face to revive him, and before his head had altogether cleared he was already down below on the street with me, rocky but standing on his own legs. I got him into a cab, and before he knew it I had him over at our place, had closed the door on the two of us, and flung him back into his own favorite chair—only from about five yards away.

  He just cowered there, didn’t say anything, didn’t move. His eyes kept following me around, mutely pleading. “Don’t look at me like that,” I told him finally, wincing from the touch of the iodine stopped on my open knuckles. I didn’t offer him any because for all I knew he might have swallowed it. “D’you think this is fun for me? D’you think this is my idea of how we should wind up, you and me?” I picked up the phone.

  He spoke, for the first and last time since we’d come away from the hide-out. He didn’t call me Red any more. “Carr,” he said, “you’re not human at all!”

  “Gimme Police Headquarters,” I answered that.

  A whistle sounded somewhere under our windows. A woman’s voice called, “Yoo-hoo! Taxi!” Then the whistle sounded again, a fine full-bodied thing a man needn’t have been ashamed of. Gears meshed faintly somewhere in the distance and a machine came slithering up, braked directly outside. I heard a door crack open.

  I put the phone down, open the way it was, streaked across the room, threw the window up. I was just a minute too late. I could see the cab roof, but the whistler had just finished getting in. Her hand reached out, pulled the cab door to with a slam.

  I emptied my lungs out. “Driver! Hey you down there! Hold it—stay where you are!”

  He looked out and up at me. “I got a fare al—”

  I backed my lapel at him; all there was behind it was a little dust, but he couldn’t tell from that distance. “Police business!” I said warningly, and hauled my head in.

  I put the phone together on an increasingly annoyed voice that was saying: “Police Headquarters! Who is this?” evidently for the fourth or fifth time, with an abrupt “Sorry, wrong number.” I changed the key around to the outside of the door and locked Dixon in behind me. There was no fire escape to our window, so his only other way out was to come down four stories on the top of his head.

  The woman in the cab was about thirty-six, very blonde; she stuck her head out at me inquiringly as I came skidding up to the cab door.

  “D’you live here in this house?” If she had, I’d never seen her before.

  “Yeah, 2-C, second-floor rear. I been a tenant here three weeks now.”

  “Last Monday night, that’s a week ago tonight, near twelve, this same time—did you call a cab to this door, by whistling for it like you did just now? It was raining—”

  “Sure,” she said readily. “I call a cab to the door every night, rain or shine, so I must’ve that night too. It’s the only way I’d get to work on time. I do a specialty at 12:05 each night, at the Carioca Club. And why wouldn’t I whistle for it, that’s my special talent. Leonora, that’s me. I imitate birdcalls. The customers call ’em out and I give ’em. Anything from an oriole to a—”

  Then he’d told the truth. He had heard someone whistle for a cab; he had seen one standing below; he had—as I had myself—just missed seeing her get in. And maybe it shouldn’t have, but for some reason that made the whole thing look different. The same facts remained, but I saw them in a different light now. Not bathed in glaring suspicion any more, but just unfortunate coincidences that had damned him. Yes, even to his pitching the raincoat fasteners through the washroom window in the bar; that became just a gesture of frustration, of ill temper at having lost her, such as anyone might have made.

  The blonde was saying, “Well, mister, I gotta go, I go on in about ten minutes. If I been disturbing people by whistling for a cab every night, I’ll tone it down—”

  “No,” I said gratefully, “you haven’t disturbed anyone; you’ve saved a man’s life. I want to see you when you get back from work; Carr, fourth-floor front.”

  I went chasing upstairs again. He hadn’t even tried to bust down the locked door with a table or chair or anything while I was gone; he must have been resigned by now.

  “You’re in the clear as far as I’m concerned,” I flung at him abruptly when I came in.

  He just looked at me dazedly; the change was too sudden for him.

  “Hiller told me they’ve established Estelle got as far as the landing below your door, and then someone jumped on her, stifled her cries, choked her senseless then and there. A moment later this Leonora, this professional performer, must have come out on her way to work, a landing below that. The girl wasn’t dead yet, but he thought she was. He lost his head, thought he was trapped, picked her up in his arms and carried her up past this floor to the incinerator closet on the one above this. He actually killed her in there without knowing it, trying to get rid of her. Meanwhile you’d heard the whistle from below, got to the window just too late, mistakenly thought you’d seen Estelle go off in a cab.

  “The thing is, who was the guy? It wasn’t just a stray, a loiterer. He would have waited until she got out into the dark street; there was no robbery motive, she didn’t even have her handbag with her. It was someone who knew her, someone who had followed her here to your place, who had been lurking around outside your door the whole time she was in there, who put the worst possible construction on her visit to you.”

  He nodded dismally. “She kept saying all the way through that she loved me. Even after she’d already opened the door and wrenched herself away from me by main force, she came back a step and kissed me goodbye and said, ‘Nobody can ever take your place, Johnny—’ ”

  “Then he heard that; it only added fuel to his smouldering jealousy. He was too yellow to tackle you personally; he waited until you’d gone in, caught up with her on her way down, leaped on her in a jealous rage.”

  We didn’t mention anyone’s name; we didn’t need to, now that we’d gone this far. I guess we both had the same name in mind. But knowing was one thing, tacking it on another. We were both stopped for awhile.

  I paced around smoking like a chimney. He sat there biting his nails. He’d always been inclined to do that when he was keyed up. After awhile he noticed himself doing it, said mournfully: “I’ve backslid. She’d broken me of this habit, like girls usually try to break the fellows they go around with of little habits they don’t approve of. Here I am doing it again, because she’s not around to see me.” I didn’t say anything. “That was the one thing I ever heard her say in his favor: ‘Tremholt never bites his, why do you have to bite yours—?’ ”

  I stopped short, whirled on him so suddenly, he edged away from me in the chair. “He doesn’t, huh? I saw his hand, resting on the back of Mrs. Mitchell’s chair, when Hiller took me over there, and he practically had no nails left, they were down to the raw. Then again, at the services, when he was nervous, he didn’t gnaw them, he kept breaking matchsticks instead, I watched him. If he was a nailbiter he would have bitten them then of all times. That shows he wasn’t, Estelle was right. Then why’d he bite them—or more likely file them down to the quick—right a
round the time she met her death?” I answered that myself. “Because he got something on them. Probably tar from that barrel of gravel on the roof when he finally—I wonder if we could get him on that?”

  “How?” he said forlornly. “The nails are gone now—and the tar with them, if that’s what it was.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t that.” Something else came to me. “Wait a minute, didn’t I hear the janitor say something about repainting those incinerator closets, around that time? I think I met him in the hall a day or two before, lugging a brush and paint can around with him. I’m going up and take a look. You stay here, someone might recognize you out on the stairs—”

  I went up by myself and inspected the one she had been dragged into. It was just a little dugout at the end of the hall. As you opened the door a light went on automatically, so the tenants could see where to dump their refuse.

  I could tell by the clean look and shiny finish to the walls it had been recently repainted. Those places get pretty crummy in no time at all. He’d done a pretty good job for an amateur. Light-green. The important thing was, had the repainting been done before the night the killer dragged the girl in here, or only afterwards? If it had only been done since, then obviously he couldn’t have gotten fresh paint under his nails.

  I took my own thumbnail to it and tested it by scraping a little nick in it. It was pretty fresh; that didn’t look so good. He’d only given it one coat, and my nail dug through that and laid bare the old coat beneath: a faded beige.

  I looked him up in the basement and asked him about it. He gave me the answer I’d been hoping he wouldn’t. “Naw, I didn’t get to that one until after it happened. I’d gotten up as high as your floor the day of the murder, that was a Monday. I only had the one on the fifth left, I was going to finish that one up the first thing the next morning. He couldn’t get into the one on the fourth with her, because I’d locked it overnight, to keep the tenants out and give the paint a chance to dry. So he took her to the one above. As a result, I didn’t get a chance to paint that until them cops were all finished with it. They made me leave it like it was until late Wednesday afternoon.”