The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  “Shut your mouth and keep it shut,” Arnold Friend said, his face red from bending over or maybe from embarrassment because Connie had seen his boots. “This ain’t none of your business.”

  “What—what are you doing? What do you want?” Connie said. “If I call the police they’ll get you, they’ll arrest you—”

  “Promise was not to come in unless you touch that phone, and I’ll keep that promise,” he said. He resumed his erect position and tried to force his shoulders back. He sounded like a hero in a movie, declaring something important. But he spoke too loudly and it was as if he were speaking to someone behind Connie. “I ain’t made plans for coming in that house where I don’t belong but just for you to come out to me, the way you should. Don’t you know who I am?”

  “You’re crazy,” she whispered. She backed away from the door but did not want to go into another part of the house, as if this would give him permission to come through the door. “What do you…you’re crazy, you…”

  “Huh? What’re you saying, honey?”

  Her eyes darted everywhere in the kitchen. She could not remember what it was, this room.

  “This is how it is, honey: you come out and we’ll drive away, have a nice ride. But if you don’t come out we’re gonna wait till your people come home and then they’re all going to get it.”

  “You want that telephone pulled out?” Ellie said. He held the radio away from his ear and grimaced, as if without the radio the air was too much for him.

  “I toldja shut up, Ellie,” Arnold Friend said, “you’re deaf, get a hearing aid, right? Fix yourself up. This little girl’s no trouble and’s gonna be nice to me, so Ellie keep to yourself, this ain’t your date—right? Don’t hem in on me, don’t hog, don’t crush, don’t bird dog, don’t trail me,” he said in a rapid, meaningless voice, as if he were running through all the expressions he’d learned but was no longer sure which of them was in style, then rushing on to new ones, making them up with his eyes closed. “Don’t crawl under my fence, don’t squeeze in my chipmunk hole, don’t sniff my glue, suck my popsicle, keep your own greasy fingers on yourself!” He shaded his eyes and peered in at Connie, who was backed against the kitchen table. “Don’t mind him, honey, he’s just a creep. He’s a dope. Right? I’m the boy for you and like I said, you come out here nice like a lady and give me your hand, and nobody else gets hurt, I mean, your nice old bald-headed daddy and your mummy and your sister in her high heels. Because listen: why bring them in this?”

  “Leave me alone,” Connie whispered.

  “Hey, you know that old woman down the road, the one with the chickens and stuff—you know her?”

  “She’s dead!”

  “Dead? What? You know her?” Arnold Friend said.

  “She’s dead—”

  “Don’t you like her?”

  “She’s dead—she’s—she isn’t here anymore—”

  “But don’t you like her, I mean, you got something against her? Some grudge or something?” Then his voice dipped as if he were conscious of a rudeness. He touched the sunglasses perched up on top of his head as if to make sure they were still there. “Now, you be a good girl.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Just two things, or maybe three,” Arnold Friend said. “But I promise it won’t last long and you’ll like me the way you get to like people you’re close to. You will. It’s all over for you here, so come on out. You don’t want your people in any trouble, do you?”

  She turned and bumped against a chair or something, hurting her leg, but she ran into the back room and picked up the telephone. Something roared in her ear, a tiny roaring, and she was so sick with fear that she could do nothing but listen to it—the telephone was clammy and very heavy and her fingers groped down to the dial but were too weak to touch it. She began to scream into the phone, into the roaring. She cried out, she cried for her mother, she felt her breath start jerking back and forth in her lungs as if it were something Arnold Friend was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness. A noisy sorrowful wailing rose all about her and she was locked inside it the way she was locked inside this house.

  After a while she could hear again. She was sitting on the floor with her wet back against the wall.

  Arnold Friend was saying from the door, “That’s a good girl. Put the phone back.”

  She kicked the phone away from her.

  “No, honey. Pick it up. Put it back right.”

  She picked it up and put it back. The dial tone stopped.

  “That’s a good girl. Now, you come outside.”

  She was hollow with what had been fear but what was now just an emptiness. All that screaming had blasted it out of her. She sat, one leg cramped under her, and deep inside her brain was something like a pinpoint of light that kept going and would not let her relax. She thought, I’m not going to see my mother again. She thought, I’m not going to sleep in my bed again. Her bright green blouse was all wet.

  Arnold Friend said, in a gentle-loud voice that was like a stage voice, “The place where you came from ain’t there anymore, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out. This place you are now—inside your daddy’s house—is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time. You know that and always did know it. You hear me?”

  She thought, I have got to think. I have got to know what to do.

  “We’ll go out to a nice field, out in the country here where it smells so nice and it’s sunny,” Arnold Friend said. “I’ll have my arms tight around you so you won’t need to try to get away and I’ll show you what love is like, what it does. The hell with this house! It looks solid all right,” he said. He ran a fingernail down the screen and the noise did not make Connie shiver, as it would have the day before. “Now, put your hand on your heart, honey. Feel that? That feels solid too but we know better. Be nice to me, be sweet like you can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in?—and get away before her people come back?”

  She felt her pounding heart. Her hand seemed to enclose it. She thought for the first time in her life that it was nothing that was hers, that belonged to her, but just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn’t really hers either.

  “You don’t want them to get hurt,” Arnold Friend went on. “Now, get up, honey. Get up all by yourself.”

  She stood.

  “Now, turn this way. That’s right. Come over here to me—Ellie, put that away, didn’t I tell you? You dope. You miserable creepy dope,” Arnold Friend said. His words were not angry but only part of an incantation. The incantation was kindly. “Now, come out through the kitchen to me, honey, and let’s see a smile, try it, you’re a brave, sweet little girl and now they’re eating corn and hot dogs cooked to bursting over an outdoor fire, and they don’t know one thing about you and never did and honey, you’re better than them because not a one of them would have done this for you.”

  Connie felt the linoleum under her feet; it was cool. She brushed her hair back out of her eyes. Arnold Friend let go of the post tentatively and opened his arms for her, his elbows pointing in toward each other and his wrists limp, to show that this was an embarrassed embrace and a little mocking, he didn’t want to make her self-conscious.

  She put out her hand against the screen. She watched herself push the door slowly open as if she were back safe somewhere in the other doorway, watching this body and this head of long hair moving out into the sunlight where Arnold Friend waited.

  “My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” he said in a half-sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.

  C-Jag

  CORNELL WOOLRICH

  THE STORY<
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  Original publication: Black Mask, October 1940, as by William Irish; first published in book form in The Pocket Mystery Reader edited by Lee Wright (New York, Pocket Books, 1942). Note: The story was retitled “Cocaine” for its first book publication.

  CORNELL GEORGE HOPLEY-WOOLRICH (1903–1968) had a prolific short story–writing career, with most of the stories published under his William Irish pseudonym. Lippincott, his publisher for most of the books published as by William Irish, was not afraid to release numerous volumes of his collected stories. Since publishers generally maintained the myth that short story collections don’t sell, the stories that had appeared under his own name were not released by the publishers of the majority of his novels but they found their way into “William Irish” collections.

  It is uncommon to have short stories serve as the inspiration for motion pictures, but Woolrich was an exception with more than a dozen stories being adapted. Although some authors whose work had fallen into public domain had many of their short tales serve as the basis for films, including Arthur Conan Doyle with his Sherlock Holmes character and Edgar Allan Poe with his famous stories of horror and the supernatural, rarely did they provide much more than a title or a kernel of the plot.

  While it is inevitable that works in different media will have variations, it is evident that the films based on Woolrich’s stories were largely dedicated to following the author’s plotlines as authentically as possible—a tribute to Woolrich’s exceptional talent as a plotter and executioner of suspense fiction.

  A common theme for Woolrich’s work is that its characters are enduring a living nightmare and “C-Jag” is among those tales. Tommy Cochrane, jobless and desperate, attempts to alleviate his hopelessness by taking cocaine. After passing out, he awakens from a nightmare convinced that he killed someone during his blackout. He’s living with his sister and Denny, her cop husband, and Tommy confesses to him. They begin to investigate, retracing Tommy’s steps from the previous night, when they discover a body in a closet, apparently sealing his fate. The true killers turn out to be some thuggish gangsters, who are tacked on at the end of the story and are dealt with in a shoot-out.

  “C-Jag” was the first Woolrich story ever to appear in an anthology, undergoing a title change to the more familiar “Cocaine” in order to prevent confusion on the part of readers who may not have known the underworld argot. The editor of the anthology was Lee Wright, who was Woolrich’s editor at Simon & Schuster. The story was also reprinted with the titles “Dream of Death” and “Just Enough to Cover a Thumbnail.”

  THE FILM

  Title: Fall Guy, 1947

  Studio: Monogram Pictures

  Director: Reginald Le Borg

  Screenwriters: Jerry Warner, John O’Dea

  Producer: Walter Mirisch

  THE CAST

  • Clifford Penn (Leo Penn) (Tom Cochrane)

  • Robert Armstrong (“Mac” McLaine)

  • Teala Loring (Lois Walter)

  • Elisha Cook Jr. (Joe)

  The bones of the opening of the Woolrich story remain in place, with Tom waking from a cocaine-induced blackout, covered in blood, with no memory of the previous night. After that familiar (to Woolrich readers) premise, the story develops quite differently. In the film version, Tom is arrested but escapes and tries to learn the truth. He gets help from his girlfriend, who doesn’t think he could have hurt anyone, and his sister’s husband, a cop. They find Joe, the man who took Tom to a party the night before, and, when they go to the apartment where the party took place, they find a corpse in a closet in the apartment a flight up. Joe is murdered but Tom is cleared when they learn that he had been set up. No gangsters suddenly appear in the film version, their murderous presence replaced by an elaborate frame-up designed to eliminate a blackmailer.

  Since the film was made by the “Poverty Row” studio Monogram Pictures, it is not surprising to find largely unknown actors with varying talent levels being directed by the Vienna-born Reginald Le Borg, who specialized in low-budget B movies for virtually his entire career.

  An exception to the parade of second-rate actors in the film is Robert Armstrong, who became a star in King Kong (1933) and remained a working actor into the 1960s. He died of cancer in 1973—curiously, within sixteen hours of the death of Merian Cooper, the coproducer and codirector of King Kong.

  Another exception is Elisha Cook Jr., who may not have appeared in every B noir picture of the 1940s and 1950s (and some major films, too) but it would probably be easier to mention those in which he did not appear than to list his credits. He plays exactly the same sleazy, unctuous character every time and does it exceedingly well. There seems to have been a tacit agreement between him and every director and screenwriter in Hollywood that his character would never make it out of a movie alive.

  After a short film and a trivial, uncredited role in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), this essentially was the screen debut of Leo Penn, credited here as Clifford Penn, who went on to a successful career as a television actor and, more significantly, as a director of such series as I Spy; Kojak; Columbo; Magnum, P.I.; and Star Trek. His refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee in its investigation into the suspected infiltration of Communists in the film industry resulted in his being blacklisted and effectively ending his acting career in motion pictures. He was the father of actors Chris and Sean Penn.

  The working title of the movie during production was One Way Street.

  C-JAG

  Cornell Woolrich

  I KNEW WHAT IT WAS LIKE to wake up after being drunk the night before—everyone does, I guess—but that wasn’t in it compared to what this was like. This had all the same symptoms of the other, and then some new ones of its own. My mouth felt just as dry and my head felt just as heavy and my stomach felt just as bad. And then in addition, my eyes wouldn’t focus right; everything I looked at seemed to have rings around it; and my hands were cold and clammy, and my teeth were on edge, as though I’d been chewing lemons. But worse than anything else was the mental conditioning it had left behind it; I was afraid. I was as afraid as a seven-year-old kid in an old dark house. And when you’re afraid at one o’clock of a blazing bright afternoon, mister, you’re afraid.

  And at that, the after-effects were nothing compared to what the symptoms had been like the night before, while I was still under it. I grabbed my eyes tight to shut out the recollection, and if I’d had an extra pair of hands I’d have stopped up my ears with them at the same time. But the images were inside, in my memory, where I couldn’t get at them. Blurred, but there.

  He was a fellow I’d known slightly—so slightly that I didn’t even know his last name; just Joe. Joe said, “Aw, you need cheering up. Come on with me, I’m going somewhere that’ll cheer you up.” And then, probably an hour later, the parting hand on my shoulder. “Take it easy, be seeing you around, I’m blowing now.”

  I remembered saying, “Well, just a sec, I’ll go with you; I came here with you after all.”

  I remember the knowing wink he’d given me. “Naw, you better hang around awhile; I’m taking that girl in green home. You know how it is, two’s company—” Exit Joe, whoever he was.

  So I stayed on there, like a fool, in a strange place with strangers.

  The rest of it came crowding back on me, all mixed up like what they call montage in the movies. The man with the white scar on his jaw. I kept seeing that white scar, hearing disconnected things he’d said. “Just enough to cover your thumbnail. Always remember that and you can never go wrong; just enough to cover your thumbnail. Then you bring it up the long way, like you were going to wipe your nose.”…“Nice-looking place, isn’t it? You want it, you can have it. Listen, I’d give away anything tonight. Make yourself at home, I’ll be right back.”…“What’d you do, have some trouble in here while I was gone? Loo
k at that, look at the blood all over your shirt!”…“No, you can’t get out that way! That’s a dead window, you fool! Can’t you see by looking at it? It’s nailed-down fast, it’s painted over. They built a house right up next to this, and the brick work sealed it up.”…“Aw, that’s nothing; you want that to go away? I’ll show you how to make that go away. Now hold steady. Just enough to cover your thumbnail. Watch and see how that makes it go away.”…“Don’t get excited, I’m not going anywhere. Just wait here for me, I’ll be right back—”…

  And then it got worse and worse. At the end it was almost a frenzy, a delirium. Of fear and flight and pursuit. The very walls had seemed to whisper. “Look at him, sitting there waiting! They’ll get him, they’ll get him!” They seemed to sing, too. Music kept oozing out of them. Ghost-music. I could hear it so plain, I could even recognize some of the tunes, I could even remember them now! Alice Blue Gown, Out on a Limb, Oh, Johnny, Woodpecker Song. Those were some of the things my crazed, inflamed brain had distinctly heard those moaning, sobbing walls emit. And then the climactic madness, the straining, tugging trip to the closet along the floor; the frantic closing of the door; the locking of it, on what it held; the secreting of the key in my pocket; the piling-up and barricading of it with a table, a chair, anything and everything I could lay my hands on. Then flight, through the labyrinth of the city, hiding in doorways, sidling around corners, hugging the shadows. Flight that went on forever. From—where? To—where? Then kindly oblivion at last.

  All of it a junk-dream, of course. But needles of cold sweat came out on my forehead even now, it was still so vivid, so haunting.

  I didn’t know what to do for a hangover of this kind. But I figured water, lots of cold water inside and out, was good for almost anything under the sun, so it ought to be good for this too. At least it couldn’t hurt it any.