The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  * * *

  —

  The Chechens took care of the body after a discussion with the Italians and the Micks. Bob was told his money was no good at several restaurants for the next couple of months, and they gave him four tickets to a Celtics game. Not floor seats, but pretty good ones.

  Bob never mentioned Nadia. Just said Eric showed up at the end of the evening, waved a gun around, said to take him to the office safe. Bob let him do his ranting, do his waving, found an opportunity, and shot him. And that was it. End of Eric, end of story.

  Nadia came to him a few days later. Bob opened the door and she stood there on his stoop with a bright winter day turning everything sharp and clear behind her. She held up a bag of dog treats.

  “Peanut butter,” she said, her smile bright, her eyes just a little wet. “With a hint of molasses.”

  Bob opened the door wide and stepped back to let her in.

  * * *

  —

  “I’ve gotta believe,” Nadia said, “there’s a purpose. And even if it’s that you kill me as soon as I close my eyes—”

  “Me? What? No,” Bob said. “Oh, no.”

  “—then that’s okay. Because I just can’t go through any more of this alone. Not another day.”

  “Me too.” He closed his eyes. “Me too.”

  They didn’t speak for a long time. He opened his eyes, peered at the ceiling of his bedroom. “Why?”

  “Hmm?”

  “This. You. Why are you with me?”

  She ran a hand over his chest and it gave him a shiver. In his whole life, he never would have expected to feel a touch like that on his bare skin.

  “Because I like you. Because you’re nice to Cassius.”

  “And because you’re scared of me?”

  “I dunno. Maybe. But more the other reason.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was lying. Who could tell when anyone was? Really. Every day, you ran into people and half of them, if not more, could be lying to you. Why?

  Why not?

  You couldn’t tell who was true and who was not. If you could, lie detectors would never have been invented. Someone stared in your face and said, I’m telling the truth. They said, I promise. They said, I love you.

  And you were going to say what to that? Prove it?

  “He needs a walk.”

  “Huh?”

  “Cassius. He hasn’t been out all day.”

  “I’ll get the leash.”

  * * *

  —

  In the park, the February sky hung above them like a canvas tarp. The weather had been almost mild for a few days. The ice had broken on the river but small chunks of it clung to the dark banks.

  He didn’t know what he believed. Cassius walked ahead of them, pulling on the leash a bit, so proud, so pleased, unrecognizable from the quivering hunk of fur Bob had pulled from a barrel just two and a half months ago.

  Two and a half months! Wow. Things sure could change in a hurry. You rolled over one morning, and it was a whole new world. It turned itself toward the sun, stretched and yawned. It turned itself toward the night. A few more hours, turned itself toward the sun again. A new world, every day.

  When they reached the center of the park, he unhooked the leash from Cassius’s collar and reached into his coat for a tennis ball. Cassius reared his head. He snorted loud. He pawed the earth. Bob threw the ball and the dog took off after it. Bob envisioned the ball taking a bad bounce into the road. The screech of tires, the thump of metal against dog. Or what would happen if Cassius, suddenly free, just kept running.

  But what could you do?

  You couldn’t control things.

  Madman’s Holiday

  FREDRIC BROWN

  THE STORY

  Original publication: Street and Smith’s Story Magazine, July 1943; first collected in Madman’s Holiday (Volcano, HI, McMillan, 1985)

  A PROLIFIC WRITER OF SHORT STORIES and novels, Fredric William Brown (1906–1972) claimed that he wrote mysteries for the money, but science fiction for the fun; he is equally revered in both genres. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he attended the University of Cincinnati at night and then spent a year at Hanover College, Indiana. He was an office worker for a dozen years before becoming a proofreader for the Milwaukee Journal for a decade. He was not able to devote full time to writing fiction until 1949, although he had for several years been producing short stories; he was a master of the form for which he is much loved today, the difficult-to-write short-short story, generally one to three pages.

  Never financially secure, Brown was forced to write at a prodigious pace, yet he seemed to be enjoying himself in spite of the workload. Many of his stories and novels are imbued with humor, including a devotion to puns and wordplay. A “writer’s writer,” he was highly regarded by his colleagues, including Mickey Spillane, who called him his favorite writer of all time; Robert Heinlein, who made him a dedicatee of Stranger in a Strange Land (1961); and Ayn Rand, who in The Romantic Manifesto (1969) regarded him as ingenious. After more than three hundred short stories, he wrote his first novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), for which he won an Edgar. His best-known work is The Screaming Mimi (1949), which served as the basis for the 1958 Columbia Pictures film of the same title that starred Anita Ekberg, Philip Carey, and Gypsy Rose Lee.

  In “Madman’s Holiday,” an American scientist is working on the development of new explosives and realizes his life is in danger. Written during the early days of America’s involvement in World War II, the story warns of the German menace and is one of thousands of similar tales that appeared in both the pulps and the slick magazines.

  THE FILM

  Title: Crack-Up, 1946

  Studio: RKO Radio Pictures

  Director: Irving Reis

  Screenwriter: John Paxton, Ben Bengal, Ray Spencer

  Producer: Jack J. Gross

  THE CAST

  • Pat O’Brien (George Steele)

  • Claire Trevor (Terry Cordell)

  • Herbert Marshall (Traybin)

  Any resemblance between the film and the story on which it was allegedly based is so microscopic that Sherlock Holmes could not have unearthed it.

  Brown’s story is a thriller about a scientist and explosives; the film features forged artworks, thefts, and murder to cover up the scheme.

  The excellent acting of the three stars salvaged a somewhat muddled screenplay in which the principal character, George Steele, believes he has been in a train accident but is unable to recall many details other than he saw an oncoming train about to crash into his. The police have some trouble believing his story and he is threatened with being sent to Bellevue, New York’s hospital famous for its psychiatric ward.

  Lux Radio Theater broadcast a sixty-minute radio adaptation of the movie on December 30, 1946, with Pat O’Brien reprising his film role in the same year in which the movie was released.

  MADMAN’S HOLIDAY

  Fredric Brown

  I FELT SWELL. SOMEBODY said, “He’s coming around,” and I wondered vaguely who was coming around what, but it didn’t matter. It was perfect, just to be lying here asleep, or almost asleep. Let people talk all they darn pleased, just so I could sleep. For weeks now, since I’d started those TNA reaction tests, I’d been going on three or four hours’ sleep a night.

  And now it was all over with, and I was on the way to turn in my report, and although I was sorry the report was negative—well, that was that, and I was going to take a few days off before I bit off another round with old man HE.

  There was a gruff voice. It said, “Look, doc, this is important. He had papers on him that—Well, never mind. Can’t you bring him out of it?”

  “It’s a very mild concussion. But it’s better if he—”

  I wished they’d shut up. It�
��s hard enough to sleep on a train, without your neighbors jabbering all night. With light hitting your eyelids and sitting in an uncomfortable—

  Hell, I wasn’t sitting up. I was lying down flat, and there wasn’t any click of train wheels or any train motion.

  And then I remembered—the wreck! The awfulness of that last moment of consciousness I’d known until now: that sound of tearing steel, and the screams. The sudden darkness and the terribly nauseated feeling, like going down in a fast elevator, but a million times worse, when the front end of the car stops and the back end can’t stop, but goes up and over—

  My eyes jerked open, but the glare of white light forced them shut. I opened them again, more cautiously, and the light was tolerable. I seemed to be in a private room in a hospital. Near the bed stood a man in white and a man in gray tweeds with a dead cigar in his mouth. A nurse was just leaving and left the door ajar behind her.

  The man in white said, “You’re all right, Mr. Remmers. Just a mild concussion.” It seemed almost impossible to believe him; it was incredible that I’d been through that wreck without broken bones. The Washington Flyer had been doing at least eighty.

  The man in gray tweeds growled something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch, but the doctor nodded again. He stepped closer with the business end of a stethoscope in his hand. He said, “Lie down, please,” and listened to me tick for a minute and peered closely at the pupils of my eyes.

  He said, “Normal,” to nobody in particular. Then to me, “This gentleman is from the FBI. Wants to talk to you. Talk all you want, but stay in bed.”

  He left, closing the door behind him, and the man in tweeds looked at me for a full minute without speaking at all. His face was as expressionless as a cue ball. He took the dead cigar out of his mouth, walked over and threw it out the window, and then came back.

  Then he asked, “What happened to the papers?”

  They hadn’t found them, then.

  “They were in my briefcase,” I told him. “The case was on the seat with me, wedged in between me and the arm of the seat, next to the window. I had my hand on the handle of the briefcase when we hit.”

  He grunted noncommittally.

  “Don’t worry about them,” I said. “It was all negative. There wasn’t a fact or formula in that briefcase that couldn’t have been mailed in duplicate to Berlin and Tokyo. What I had in mind to do with the TNA was a flat washout. But Major Lorne wanted me to bring in a report, so I was on my way.”

  “Just what were you trying to do with it?”

  I studied his face a minute while I was trying to make up my mind about answering, and he must have figured what I was thinking. He took a wallet from his pocket, and an identification card from the wallet and handed it to me.

  I’d seen them before, and it was the McCoy. It had his photo and his prints, and his name was Frank Garland.

  I handed back the card. “What do you know about HE?”

  “Not much except that it stands for high explosive. TNT.”

  “TNT,” I told him, “is just one form of high explosive. There are others that pack more wallop, but they aren’t stable. Cast, it can be stored indefinitely. You can drop it, kick it around, and hammer nails with it. You got to use a fulminate of mercury fuse to make it say ‘uncle.’ ”

  “In a loud voice,” said Garland.

  “In a loud voice,” I agreed. “But not as loud as TNA. That’s tetranitroaniline, and it’s got better than forty percent more kick than TNT. It’s about the most powerful of the solid explosives. But it’s got temperament. Goes off, maybe, when you don’t want it to.”

  “And you were trying to stabilize it?”

  “Exactly. But we didn’t, so don’t worry about the papers. If they were lost, I’ve got other copies and they’re of no military value. But those were only the first tests—the first series, I mean. After I rest up, I’m going to try—well, some other angles.”

  And not even to an FBI man was I going to talk about what those other angles might be.

  Apparently, he wasn’t interested. He said, “You talked to Major Lorne, long distance, at four o’clock this afternoon. I imagine that neither of you talked very freely over the phone. But he suggested that you go to Washington to see him. Right?”

  “Right,” I said, wondering where this line of questioning was going to lead.

  “Starting then, at four o’clock, please tell me your movements. Everything you did.”

  “Went right home and—”

  “You took the test reports with you?”

  “No. I gathered them up and put them in the briefcase and put the briefcase in the safe. Then I went down—”

  “Lock the safe?”

  I shook my head. “I told Peter Carr—he’s my assistant—to lock it when he left. Then I went home, had a bath and a shave and supper and left in time to catch the Washington Flyer, going to the station by way of the lab and picking up the briefcase. Carr had left by then, and I let myself in with my own key. Bought a round-trip ticket at the station and—”

  “What’d you do with the other half?”

  “Huh?” It was such a screwy question that I stared at him blankly until he repeated it.

  “Why, in my wallet. Why?”

  “Skip it. And then? After you bought the ticket, I mean.”

  “Got on the train and—” I broke off, staring at him. “Say, what is this? Am I suspected of having stolen those papers from myself, or of engineering the train wreck, or what?”

  He shook his head slowly. I couldn’t tell from his face whether he meant a negative answer, or merely that he wasn’t going to tell me.

  He said, “Maybe you shouldn’t talk too much, at first. I’m going to give you a rest. And—listen, you still say there was nothing important in that briefcase?”

  “Sure. I told Major Lorne over the phone that results were ixnay. If they hadn’t been, I’d have told him to send around a battalion of you boy scouts to escort me there with it. Stabilizing TNA, if it can be done, is big stuff. I wouldn’t risk carrying something like that, without protection. I’m not crazy.”

  He said, “No?” and I didn’t like the way he said it. But he turned and headed for the door. As he went out, I caught a glimpse of blue uniforms in the corridor outside.

  After a moment, the door opened again. It was the nurse who’d been in the room when I’d first awakened. She handed me a newspaper and said, “Mr. Garland thought you might like to see the morning paper.”

  She left, and I unfolded the paper. It was a Philadelphia Post-Gazette, the late city edition. The war news was good. I read it slowly.

  And then, quite suddenly, it struck me that there was something wrong with that front page. It failed to mention the train wreck.

  A local story, sure, but a big one. That train had been only an hour out of Philadelphia. And it must have been a bad wreck—

  No, the date was right. And this edition wouldn’t have gone to press before four in the morning and it was broad daylight now. With a cold chill growing along my spine, I tried page two, and then leafed through the paper from stem to stern. No train wreck story.

  I threw back the covers and got out of bed. My legs felt rubbery, but I got to the door and opened it a crack. There were two policemen, and they both turned around as I opened the door.

  One of them nodded when I asked if he’d send Garland in to talk to me again. I got back into bed.

  Garland came in. This time he pulled up a chair and sat down.

  He said, “I thought you’d want to see me when you’d read that paper. Now what’s this gag about a train wreck?”

  I spoke slowly and carefully. “I boarded the Washington Flyer yesterday evening. To the best of my knowledge, an hour out of town, it was wrecked. Wasn’t it? I mean, didn’t anything happen to it?”

  “Not a
thing. Nobody even pulled the bell cord. It went through on schedule.”

  “If you’d told me that without showing me this paper—Say, how did I get here, and when? And, for that matter, damn it, where am I?”

  “You’re in St. Vincent’s Hospital, in Philadelphia. You were found by a squad car at two o’clock this morning, and brought here. They found you lying in Burgoyne Street, with your head against a lamp-post. You’d been drinking, and you were out cold.”

  “They brought me here?”

  “They took you to police emergency as a drunk. Then, going through your pockets, they found out who you were, and found some correspondence with Major Lorne. They got in touch with him, and he got in touch with us and told us to find out what happened.”

  “I hadn’t been robbed?”

  “There was a hundred and twenty dollars in your wallet. But no train ticket, incidentally. And you had a suitcase with you. Not a briefcase.”

  I closed my eyes and found that the headache and the thumping in my skull was coming back. “What kind of suitcase?” I asked.

  “Black Gladstone. Pebbled leather. Had clothes in it that seemed to be yours.”

  I said, “I kept a bag like that, already packed, at the laboratory, in case I had to make a rush trip. But I didn’t take it last night, because I was coming back the next day and figured I wouldn’t need it. And the briefcase—It was gone?”

  “You didn’t have it with you, if that’s what you mean. But it’s still on your desk at the laboratory. With papers in it—and your assistant, Carr, says they’re the ones you were going to take to Washington.”

  “Then I didn’t—I mean, you think I didn’t take the briefcase at all, but—”

  “We haven’t traced yet what you did between the time you left your house—that was at half-past six—and the time you were found in Burgoyne Street at two in the morning. You must have gone to the laboratory, but taken the Gladstone instead of the briefcase. After that, we don’t know. How much money did you have when you left home?”