The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  We went in.

  It couldn’t have been dignified by the name hotel. The “desk” was just a hinged flap across an alcove, within which sat a man in shirt-sleeves reading a paper under a light.

  One good thing, there was no question of a bell-boy showing you up and looking on. You paid your fifty cents, you got a key, and you found your own way up. We didn’t want any witnesses—if it was in here.

  He didn’t even bother looking up at us, just heard the double tread come in, asked: “Two-in-one or two singles?”

  Denny said, “How many rooms you got here that back up against that place next door? We like to fall asleep to music.”

  Even that didn’t get a rise out of him; he expected anything and everything. “One on a floor, three floors, that makes three altogether. I’ve got someone in the one on the second, though.”

  So that was the one. My stomach gave a sort of half-turn to the right, and then back again.

  Denny said, “D’you have to sign when you get in here?”

  “You got to put down something when you pick up your key, you can’t just walk in.” Meaning a place like this didn’t expect right names and didn’t care if it got them.

  “Let’s see what was signed for that one you got taken on the second.”

  “What’s all this to you?” But he was still too indifferent to be properly resentful about it.

  “We might know the guy.”

  We did. One of them anyway. It was a double entry. The cocaine had vibrated my handwriting like an earthquake but I could still recognize it. “Tom Cochrane, 22-28 Foster Street.” For once they’d gotten a right name and a right address. It was probably the only one in the whole ledger—and it had signed for murder! The second name, also in my handwriting, was “Ben Doyle.” No address given, just a wavy line. So I’d signed on for someone else too.

  We just looked at each other. Then at him. Or rather, Denny did. I was afraid to.

  “Were you here when this was signed?”

  This time he did get annoyed, because the question touched him personally. “Naw, I go off at twelve, don’tcha think I gotta sleep sometime too?” That explained, at least, why he didn’t recognize me. But not why it hadn’t been found out yet.

  “D’you give any kind of service here? Don’t you send someone in to clean these rooms in the daytime?”

  He got more annoyed than ever. “What d’ya think this is, the Ritz? When a room’s vacated, the handyman goes in and straightens up the bed. Until it is we leave it alone, for as long as it’s been paid for.” I must have paid for this one for two days in advance, double occupancy; there was the entry “$2” after the two names. But I hadn’t had two dollars on me, I’d only had thirty-five cents.

  “What’s all this talk about? Do you two guys want a room or don’t you?” We did, but we wanted that second-floor room that already had “someone” in it. Denny obviously didn’t want to use his badge to force him to open it up for us, that would have meant a witness to the revelation that was bound to follow immediately afterward, and automatic police notification before he had a chance to do anything for me—if there was anything he could do.

  “Give us the third-floor one,” he said, and put down a dollar bill. The mentor of the establishment hitched down a key with a ponderous enamel tag from the rows where they hung. The one immediately below was missing. The “occupant” still had it. If I’d taken it away with me, I must have lost it in the course of that mad flight through the shadows; only the closet key had turned up at our place this morning.

  Denny, with unconscious humor, scrawled “Smith Bros.” in the registry (he told me later he wasn’t trying to be funny), and we started up the narrow squeaky staircase. He turned aside when we got to the second floor, motioned me to keep on climbing. “Scuffle your feet heavy to cover me, I’m going to try to force the door open with something.”

  I shuffled my way up step by step, trying to sound like two of us, while I heard him faintly tinkering at the lock with some implement. I unlocked the one we’d hired on the floor above, put on the light, looked in. Yes, there was something vaguely familiar about it; this was the end of the trail, all right. The closet in this one had a key in it, had been left slightly ajar by the last occupant.

  I crept back to the stairs, listened. The tinkering had stopped, he must have forced the door. A curt “Sst!” sounded, meant for me. I eased down one flight, to where I’d left him. You could make them fairly soundless if you tried hard enough.

  The light from inside was shining out across the grubby passage. A half-section of his face showed past the door-frame, waiting for me; then withdrew. I made my way down there, moving slow, breathing fast.

  It was the room all right. He’d already taken down the stuff that I’d barricaded the closet door with, but it was still strewn around nearby. A table, a chair, even a mattress.

  He signed to me and I closed the door behind me. He gave the closet key I’d turned over to him at our flat a fatalistic flip-up in the hollow of his hand. “Here goes,” he said. I got a grip on the back of a chair and hung on tight.

  He turned and fitted it into the lock. It went in like silk, it turned the lock without a hitch. It couldn’t have worked easier. It belonged here. I said a fast prayer, that was all there was time for. “Make it turn out it was somebody else did it!”

  Denny’s body gave a hitch and there was no more time for praying. He’d caught it against him as it swayed out with the closet door. It must have been semi-upright behind it the whole time. I hadn’t done a good job of propping, it must have shifted over against the door instead of staying against the wall behind it; and the way the knees were buckled kept it from toppling over sideways.

  He let it down to the floor, out in the room. It stayed in a cockeyed position from the way it had been jammed in. It was stiff as tree-bark. He turned it over on its back, made me come over. “Remember him? Take a good look now. Remember him?”

  “Yeah,” I said dry-lipped.

  “Remember him alive, that’s what I mean.”

  “No, no, I only remember him lying there, only not so shrivelled—” I backed away, nearly fell over a chair.

  “Pull yourself together, kid,” he said. “This is something they would have put you through anyway. It’s a lot easier just with me alone in the room with you.”

  He disarranged the clothing, peered down. “Sure, a knife did it,” he nodded. “Three bad gashes; one in the stomach, one between the ribs, and one that looks like it must have grazed the heart.” He looked at the belt-buckle. “B. D.,” he murmured. “What was that name down there—Ben Doyle?” He started going through pockets. “No, he’s been cleaned out; but the name checks with those initials, all right.” He drew back a little. I saw him scanning the corpse’s upturned soles. “He did a lot of walking, didn’t he?” The bottom layer of each was worn through in a round spot the size of a silver dollar. “But the heels are new, not worn down at all. What’d he do, walk around on tiptoes?” He took something from his pocket and started to reverse a small screw that protruded like a nail-head. Then he pulled and the whole heel came off. It was hollow. Three or four folded paper packets lay within it in an orderly row. He opened one into the shape of a little paper boat. I didn’t have to be told. I’d seen that white stuff before.

  “He was a peddler,” he said. “But he wasn’t the guy that contacted you at the party. Where does he come in it? I wonder if the Narcotic Squad would have heard of this guy before, can give me anything on him. I’m going to check with Headquarters, ask them.” Before he went out, he crossed to the window, raised the dark shade that shrouded it. The pane behind it was also painted dark, a dark green. You could see the heads of heavy six inch nails studded all along the frame, riveting it down. Even so, he took that same screwdriver from his pocket and scraped away a tiny gash on the dried paint-surface. Then he held a lighted match
close up to it. “Solid brick backed up to it,” he commented. He started for the door. “You’re down on their blotter for this room—and in your own handwriting—along with this dead guy. I want to find out if he was seen coming here with you. Or if it was the guy with the scar. Or both. Or neither. I gotta dig up that other slouch that was in charge of the key rack here from midnight to morning; he’s the only one can answer all those things.”

  I started out after him. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t have stayed in there alone for a million dollars. “All right, go back and wait in the one over this, if it gets you,” he consented. He closed the door on the grisly sight within. “But keep your eyes and ears open, make sure no one gets in here until we’re ready to break it ourselves.” He went down and I went up.

  I didn’t know how long to give him, but pretty soon it seemed to be taking longer than it should have. Pretty soon the room up here started to get me, just as bad as though I’d stayed down there. Try hanging around when you know there’s a dead body under your feet in the room below, a body you’re to blame for, and you’ll know what I mean. The band showed up for work next door while I was in there, and instead of making it better, that only made it worse. It nearly drove me nuts, that whispered music coming through the walls, it brought last night back too vividly again.

  Finally I couldn’t stand it in there another minute, I had to get out, wait for him down below by the street entrance. I almost lunged for the door, a damn good cold panic on me. I got it open, poked the bilious light out. Then I saw something in the darkness behind me. Something that made me hold the door at half-closing point and stand there on the threshold.

  It should have been pitch black behind me in there now. The place only had a dead window. It wasn’t. A late moon must have come up since we’d been in here. Three phantom silvery lines stood out around the drawn shade, like a faint tracing of phosphorus. There was moonlight backing it, only visible now that the room light was out.

  My panic evaporated. I went back in again, leaving it dark. I crossed to the shade, shot it up. Moonlight flashed at me through the dust-filmed glass. There was no brickwork, no dark paint, blanking out the windows on this floor. Denny hadn’t been up here at all, or we might have found that out sooner. The garage was only two stories high, the rooming-house three, that was a detail that had escaped our attention until now.

  The frame wasn’t nailed. I hitched it and it went up. The garage roof was a bare four feet below me, plenty accessible enough to— But the fact remained the body hadn’t been in this room, but in the one below, where the window was blocked. I scanned the roof; it looked like an expanse of gray sand under me. In the middle of it, though, there was dim light peering up through some sort of a skylight or ventilator.

  I didn’t have any theory, I didn’t know what I thought I’d find out or what I hoped I’d find out, I just went ahead on instinct alone. I sidled across the sill and planted my legs on the graveled roof. I started to pick my way carefully over toward that skylight, trying not to sound the gravel.

  I got to the perimeter of it, crouched down on hands and knees, peered over the edge and down. Nothing. Just the cement garage floor two stories below, and a mechanic in greasy overalls down there wiping off a car with a handful of waste. No way to get up, no way to get down—except head first.

  I straightened up, skirted it; eased on. I took a look down over the front edge of the roof. Just the unbroken cement front of the garage, a fly couldn’t have managed it. I went around to the side, the one away from the Silver Slipper. There was a narrow chasm there, left between the garage and some taller warehouse next door. And midway down that there was something. A pale, watery, yellow reflection cast on the warehouse wall by some opening in the garage wall directly under me, at second-floor level. And more to the point still, a sort of rickety iron Jacob’s ladder leading down to it. I could only see this at its starting point, up where I was; the darkness swallowed the rest of it.

  I swung out on it, tested it with one foot. Narrow rungs. It seemed firm enough. I started down very slow. It was like going down into a bottle of ink. The reflection of the lighted square came up and bathed my feet. The ladder didn’t go any lower, it ended in a level “stage” of iron slats, no wider than the window. I tucked my feet in under the last downward rung so they wouldn’t show in the light, leaned out above them, gripping a rung higher up backhand. It was a grotesque position. I slanted my head forward and peered into the lighted square.

  It was an office connected with the garage. There were filing cabinets against the wall, a large flat-topped desk with a cone light over it. There was a man sitting there at it, talking to two others. Or rather going over some accounts with them. He was checking some sort of a list on a sheet of paper he held. There was money on the desk, lots of it; more money than any garage like this would take in in a month. It was separated into several stacks. As he finished checking one list, he’d riff through one stack, rapidly and deftly thumb-counting it; snap an elastic around it, and move it over from one side of him to the other. Then he’d begin on a second list.

  There was something vaguely familiar about the shape of his head, even seen from the back, and the cut of his shoulders. The other two I’d never seen before, I was sure of that. One was sitting negligently on an outside corner of the desk, the other standing up against it, hands deep in pockets. They looked too well dressed to be hanging around the upstairs room of a garage.

  I must have taken too much time to size them up. After all, a paring of a face is just as conspicuous against a blacked-out window as a full-face would be. I didn’t even see the signal passed, nor which of the two gave it. Suddenly the checkmaster had twirled around on his swivel-chair and was staring out at me eye-to-eye. That white cicatrice along the underside of his jaw stood out as visibly as a strip of tape or courtplaster. So there he was at last, the diabolus ex machina.

  My position on the ladder was too complicated to make for a streamlined getaway, I had too many things to do simultaneously. I had to extricate my tucked-in feet, make a complete body turn to face the ladder, before I could start up. Even then, I missed a rung in my hurry, jolted down half a foot and hit my chin on one of the upper ones. By that time the window had flashed up and a powerful grip had me around the ankle. A second one cleaved to its mate.

  I was torn off the ladder, dragged in feet first, and the only thing that saved my skull from cracking in the bounce from window-sill to floor was that it bedded against one of their bodies. I lay flat for a minute and their three faces glowered down at me, ringing me around. One of them backed a foot and found my ribs. The pain seemed to shoot all the way through to the other side.

  Then I was dragged up again and stood on my own feet. One of them had a gun bared, brief as the onslaught had been.

  The man with the scarred jaw rasped: “He’s the patsy I used last night, I toldje about!”

  “There goes your whole set-up, Graz!” the third one spat disgustedly.

  The man with the scar they called Graz looked at me vengefully. His whole face was so livid with rage it now matched the weal. “What the hell, it still holds good! He was one of Doyle’s customers, Doyle cut off his supply, so he knifed him!”

  “Yeah, but he ain’t up there in the room with him any more.”

  “All right, he come to, lammed out through a third-floor window—like he did. He’ll be found dead by his own hand in Woodside Park when morning comes. What’s the difference? It changes it a little, but not much. It’s still him all the way through. Him and Doyle took the room together to make a deal. He was seen going in where Doyle’ll be found. And you know how snowbirds act when they’ve got the crave on and are cut off. There’s a lake there in Woodside. We’re gonna dunk his head in it and hold it there until his troubles are over. Then throw the rest of him in. How they gonna tell the difference afterwards?”

  “Suppose Doyle had already sang a note
or two to the police, mentioning names, before you—”

  “He didn’t sing nothing, I stopped him before he had a chance to; the minute I seen that narcotics dick beginning to cultivate him, I cut out his tonsils! An operation like that in time saves nine. Come on, let’s get started.” He gathered up the money and lists from the desk. “And another thing,” he added, “we’re giving this joint up, it’s no good to us any more, let the jaloppies have it all to themselves from now on. We’re coming back as soon as we ditch this punk and move out all them filing cabinets, right tonight!”

  His two subordinates wedged me up between them, he put out the light behind us, and the four of us started down a cement inner stair to the main floor of the garage. “Run out the big black one, Joe,” one of them said to the grease-monkey I’d seen through the skylight, “we’re going out for a little air.”

  He brought out a big, beetling sedan, climbed down and turned it over to them. He must have been one of them, used for a front on the main floor; they didn’t try to conceal my captivity from him.

  They shoved me into it. It was like getting into a hearse. That’s what it was intended for, only it was taking me to the cemetery before death instead of after. I didn’t say a word. “Denny’ll come back to that room back there too late. He won’t know what happened to me; he’ll start looking for me all over town, and I’ll be lying at the bottom of the lake—”

  Graz got in back with me and one of his two underlings, the other one took the wheel. We glided down the cement ramp toward the open street beyond. Just as our fenders cleared the garage entrance, a taxi came to a dead stop out at the curb directly before us, effectively walling us in. The way it had crept forward it seemed to have come from only a few yards away, as though it had been poised waiting there. I saw the driver jump down on the outside and run for his life, across the street and around the corner. The sedan’s furious horn-tattoo failed to halt his flight.