First, I used the mouthpiece of the transmitter as an edge against which to work down the cloth that had been tied over my mouth. Very gently, so I wouldn’t push the phone back or knock it over. Then, I was able to push out the gag with my tongue.
The hardest part was getting hold of the cord of the receiver with my teeth and lifting it off the hook. I bent forward as far as I possibly could and let it fall onto the desk blotter on which the phone stood. A bit of noise, but not much. And maybe, even if they’d heard it downstairs, I’d get my call through in time.
With the receiver lying there on the desk, I could hear the operator’s voice, if not her words. I gave the number of the hotel Armin had mentioned when he’d phoned Lorne from the station.
Then I kept my ears strained until I heard another voice coming from the receiver. That would be the hotel switchboard. I said, “Major Lorne, please. Quickly. It’s important.”
There was the buzzing sound that denotes a number being rung, and then there was a masculine voice from the receiver. I said, “Major Lorne, this is Hank Remmers. I want to give myself up. I’m at 50-16 Oakland. Hurry.”
Just that, because I didn’t want to complicate things and waste time explaining. I heard his voice sputtering questions, but I cut in and repeated what I’d said before, word for word.
There was a click in the receiver, and after a while a crisp feminine voice again. Probably the operator asking why I hadn’t hung up. I told her to trace the call and send the police. I didn’t want to count entirely on Major Lorne, and besides I wasn’t positive I had the address on Oakland right.
That was all I could do, then, and worn to a frazzle by the awful muscular effort of moving that chair to the desk, I leaned back to take the strain off my wrists.
The telephone started clicking at me after a while, in futile signal to have the receiver replaced. And after a while, I heard the clock outside strike eleven. Another ten minutes or so, and a car stopped in front of the house. A car door slammed.
I could hear two men coming up the walk, and I could hear Armin’s voice, as the steps changed from cement to the wood of the porch.
Then there was the sound of other cars, two of them I thought, swinging in to the curb. Again the slam of doors, and I heard Major Lorne’s voice call out, “Armin, wait.”
I must have passed out for a while, then. When I came to, my wrists had been untied. Frank Garland, the FBI man, was untying the knots at my ankles. The room seemed crowded. Besides Lorne and Armin, Walter and Otto were there, and two strangers who might have been either police detectives or FBI men. And another man with a brutal, coarse face who must have been the one Armin had brought for the torture job.
Armin was talking glibly. “It’s all my fault, Major. Don’t blame my friends here. I caught Hank tonight and I just couldn’t resist trying to get an exclusive story out of him before I turned him over.”
Lorne said, “Damn it, you can’t—”
“I know, major. I was wrong. But after all, I had caught him and thought I deserved a scoop on it. I wanted to know why he killed Carr and the cab driver. Sure, he’s crazy, but there must have been some method in his madness, and I wanted the whole story.” His voice was a nice blend of apology and defiance. It was beautiful acting.
Lorne was glaring at Armin, but there was annoyance and not suspicion in his look. I knew that anything I said would be discounted in advance, because I was crazy. Whatever I said, it had to be good and it had to be quick. And then I knew there was only one subject on which I could get Lorne’s serious attention.
“Major,” I said, “have my records from the laboratory been found?”
He turned to look at me then. I knew that would get him. He’d want those papers, whether he thought I was sane or crazy.
“Here,” I said, and watched both his face and Armin’s, because I was guessing. “Here in this house.” And when I saw Armin’s quickly concealed reaction to that, I went further. “Here, in this room.”
Armin cut in smoothly. “That’s absurd, major. He couldn’t have hidden them here, because I just brought him here an hour or so ago. He didn’t have them with him and he’s never been in this house before. It belongs to my friend, Walter Landlahr—”
“Who’s been impersonating Peter Carr,” I interrupted. “Take a look at him, major.”
Lorne stared at Walter, and frowned. He couldn’t help noticing the resemblance. Armin spoke up quickly. “I’ll vouch for Walter, major. I’ve known him for years. I’m afraid Hank’s—”
But Lorne said, “Pipe down, Armin.” He was still staring at Walter. He asked, “Are you a relative of Peter Carr’s, Landlahr?”
I said, “Never mind that, major. If you want those records, they’re in this room.”
I had his attention again. He said, “Where?”
“Look for them,” I told him. Lorne stared at me uncertainly, and I didn’t crowd my luck by saying anything more. Even a touch of uncertainty was a gain for me.
Lorne said to Garland, “Damn it, I do want those papers. Maybe you’d better take a look, just on the chance—”
Garland nodded and turned toward the desk.
Armin sighed. “Well, major, sorry I tried to pull one on you and I hope there’s no hard feeling. Guess I’d better run down to the paper and write this up—without Remmers’s story.”
Very casually he picked up a briefcase and sauntered toward the door. But I saw Walter Landlahr tense a trifle and try not to look at Armin.
“Major,” I said quickly, “the papers are in that briefcase!”
Garland turned from the desk and looked at Armin, who kept on moving. Maybe he’d have got away with it, if Walter Landlahr hadn’t been too jumpy. He stepped in between Armin and the rest of us, and a gun materialized in his hand; I didn’t even see what pocket he got it from. His eyes were blazing, and his voice hoarse.
“Stay back, you—”
And then Garland dived at him and the gun went off. The other man, Otto, threw himself against the door as it slammed shut behind Armin. He had a gun, too.
There was a fusillade of shots, for the two plainclothesmen were firing, too. The man who’d just come in with Armin was down. Garland had taken a bullet, but he’d knocked down Walter, and Lorne’s foot caught Walter’s gun and kicked it out of his hand across the room.
Armin’s footsteps could be heard as he ran down the stairs. Otto was down, but his body blocked the closed door, which opened inward and one of the two detectives was trying to drag him out of the way. By the time he reached the stairs, Armin would be out of the house.
There was only one way of stopping him, and the others hadn’t seen it, nor was there time to tell them.
I’d stood up the minute the trouble started, and now I ran to the front window. Armin would go out the front way, of course, regardless of the risk of being shot at from up here, for his car was parked in front and he’d need it for a getaway.
There wasn’t any time to raise the sash. I doubled my arms over my head and butted right through the glass, stepping out onto the porch roof just as the front door downstairs opened.
I didn’t even try to gain my balance on the sloping roof. I just kept going because the sound of the door and the footsteps on the porch told me my timing would be about right.
And it was. I landed on top of him, and—fortunately for me—the momentum of my fall carried us off the cement walk onto the lawn. Even so, it knocked the wind out of me.
Lorne, with a gun in his hand, was leaning out the window. He yelled, “Hank, are you all right?”
I thought I was, but couldn’t make any more answer than a grunt.
By the time the cavalcade came downstairs, I’d managed to get to my feet and found out that my legs still worked. I seemed to be bruised, but nothing worse.
Lorne grabbed the briefcase and bent over Armin. He
cried, “You’ve killed the guy! His neck’s busted.”
“That’s great,” I said, and I meant it.
Lorne stood up slowly, hanging onto the briefcase as though it were part of his arm. He stared at me. “Hank, what the hell’s this all about?”
“Let’s go some place where I can sit down,” I said. “It’ll take a while, and I can’t stand up that long right now.”
He nodded. “Guess you’ve been through plenty. We’ll take you to a hospital for a nice quiet rest and then—”
“The hell you will,” I told him. “Tomorrow morning I start work at the lab. Four days ago you scheduled me for a nice quiet rest, and I couldn’t live through another one for all the coffee in Brazil!”
Lady Killer!
G. T. FLEMING-ROBERTS
THE STORY
Original publication: Detective Tales, July 1945
“LADY KILLER!” is one of the more than three hundred stories written for the pulps by G. T. Fleming-Roberts (1910–1968), who was born George Thomas Roberts but changed his name when an agent convinced him that he needed something more colorful. Born in Indiana, Roberts lived there most of his life, graduating from Purdue University, where he had studied veterinary medicine.
His prolific pulp career began in 1933 with “A Devil’s Highball” in Ten Detective Aces and flourished under several pseudonyms, including Brant House, C. K. M. Scanlon, Ray P. Shotwell, Ralph Powers, Rexton Archer, and Frank Rawlings, creating or writing new adventures for such popular pulp heroes as “The Ghost” (sometimes “The Green Ghost”), “Secret Agent X,” “The Black Hood,” “Diamondstone,” “Captain Zero,” “Jeffrey Wren,” “Pat Oberron,” and “Dan Fowler,” specializing in stories about magicians.
In “Lady Killer!,” Dorian Westmore, a sweet young woman shopping in a department store, decides to write a letter to her fiancé and sits opposite Inez Marie Polk, a big beautiful blonde who also is writing a letter but a very different kind—it is a blackmail note demanding an increased monthly payment.
When Dorian complains of a headache, Inez offers her an aspirin. Dorian remembers her mother’s words about never taking candy from a stranger and puts the aspirin in her purse. Later, she gives it to her wealthy uncle, who dies after taking it. Inez reads the story in the paper and realizes that the blackmail victim had tried to poison her.
Dorian is arrested and convicted of murdering her uncle but her fiancé, Peter Kane, knows she could not have done it and follows clues while racing against the clock before the execution is scheduled.
THE FILM
Title: Lady Chaser, 1946
Studio: Producers Releasing Corporation
Director: Sam Newfield
Screenwriter: Fred Myton
Producer: Sigmund Neufeld
THE CAST
• Robert Lowery (Peter Kane)
• Ann Savage (Inez Marie Polk/Palmer)
• Inez Cooper (Dorian Westmore)
• Frank Ferguson (J. T. Vickers)
• William Haade (Bill Redding)
A peculiarity between the original story and the motion picture made from it is that the latter very closely follows the story line of the former but utterly changes its tone. Whereas the Fleming-Roberts story is dark, violent, and suspenseful, the film has been reset as a light comedy, making blackmail and murder and their investigation into a fun-filled romp, though it still has its share of violence. It does have less suspense than one might have expected as the murderer is identified relatively early.
The working title during filming, not surprisingly, was Lady Killer.
Robert Lowery appeared in more than seventy films, most notably in such action pictures as The Mark of Zorro (1940), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), and Dangerous Passage (1944). He also was the second actor to play Batman, starring in the 1949 serial Batman and Robin.
Ann Savage had a prolific career, almost exclusively in the 1940s, mainly in B pictures, most famously as the villain Vera in Detour (1945). In 2007, Time magazine rated her role one of the “Top 10 Movie Villains,” while ranking Detour as one of the hundred best movies in spite of its low budget and B movie status.
In addition to “Lady Killer!,” Fleming-Roberts’s crime story “Blackmail with Feathers,” published in the August 1942 issue of Detective Novels, also served as the basis for a movie, the 1943 Warner Brothers film, Find the Blackmailer, starring Jerome Cowan and Faye Emerson.
LADY KILLER!
G. T. Fleming-Roberts
CHAPTER ONE
Unhurried Death
Her name was Inez Marie Polk and she came into Fabian’s main floor that Monday afternoon wearing a mink coat and a silly little red pancake hat plastered over one eye. The tiny hat didn’t do a thing for her except accent the largeness of her face. It took quite a bit of staring to get used to a face like that, but after a while the inevitable conclusion was that it was pretty. She was a tall blonde, plump and pillowy above but tapering down through slim hips to absurdly small feet. The effect was top-heavy, like an inverted Indian club. And like an inverted Indian club balanced on a table set with priceless china, she was disquieting.
She got into the small shifting crowd of women about a handbag counter, picked up an alligator purse very specially priced at forty-seven dollars and fifty cents.
“Well,” she said, “it certainly doesn’t look like genuine alligator to me.”
She wasn’t talking to anyone. She was just talking. She quite often just talked, and if nobody answered her that was all right. About the only way you could shut her up would have been to strangle her or cut her throat. Several people had seriously considered going to just such extremes.
“Alligator calf, probably,” she said and tossed the handbag back onto the counter. “God knows alligators don’t have calves.” She smiled at her own joke, a lazy come-easy smile, was aware of dagger glances directed toward her. She didn’t care about that. She was just a big unsquelchable woman with the exquisite tact of a steam roller. And she was deliberate about it.
She made her way unhurriedly to the rear of the department store and to the foot of the stairs. A moment later she seated herself at one of the writing desks that were paired off, back to back, in one corner of the mezzanine. She put down her purse and a copy of Vogue, wriggled her mink coat off her shoulders, withdrew her arms from the satin-lined sleeves. She hung the top of the coat over the back of the chair, from which it immediately slipped down, to ball at her back. She didn’t care about that. She was just a big careless woman who paid six dollars for a pair of nylons on black market and then didn’t bother straightening the seams. Her lapel pin was of platinum, set with a star sapphire, and it was pinned none too securely to the frothy front of her blouse. The thin gold lighter with which she tried to light her cigarette seldom worked, because she couldn’t remember to put fluid in it.
Inez Marie Polk etched angular designs in the brown blotting pad with her thumbnail and thought that Fabian’s mezzanine was an odd place to write a blackmail letter. The other women up here, she was sure, were dashing off notes to people they cared about or who cared about them, whereas Inez Marie Polk was about to write to a murderer. The idea was sufficiently grotesque to provoke a low, lazy laugh.
* * *
—
She reached for a pen and a piece of note paper that Fabian’s supplied, only to discover that somebody had used the pen to pick walnuts, or something. She put the pen down and looked at the girl directly opposite her. Quite chummy the way these desks were arranged, she thought. You couldn’t look up from the writing surface without encountering the eyes of a stranger. This stranger’s eyes were large and brown, a bit wistful. She had hair the color of polished buckeyes and a sweet mouth that smiled shyly at Inez. Then she looked down quickly at her letter, rested her left elbow on the desk, and rubbed the center of her f
orehead with the tips of her fingers, massaging upwards.
“Headache?” Inez asked.
The brown-eyed girl was startled. “Why, yes.”
Inez nodded. “You need glasses,” she prescribed without hesitation. “Is there an extra pen over there, dearie?”
“No-o-o.” The brown eyes searched eagerly, then lifted to Inez. “But I have a pencil if that will help. It has a hard lead, though.”
“That’ll be fine.” Inez waited for the girl to open a purse and take out a mechanical pencil, then she reached across the stationery rack. “A pencil’s good enough. This is just a note to”—she uttered a low, amused laugh—“to—uh—the milk man.”
As she took the pencil from the girl’s fingers, she noticed the name “Dorian Westmore” stamped in gold on the blue plastic barrel. She picked up her cigarette from the ashtray, flicked the ashes onto the floor. She dated her letter, “January 11, 1945.” After that, she drew deeply on her cigarette and space-stared thoughtfully….
Dorian Westmore picked up the pen that Fabian’s had provided and continued:
Darling, you should see the lady seated opposite me. She just borrowed my pencil because the pen at her desk is broken. She has a big saddle-leather purse with large initials I.M.P. on it. Doesn’t that spell “Imp”? But you’ve never seen anything less impish unless it would be the Statue of Liberty. One of those pass-the-chocolates-I’ll-reduce tomorrow figures. (Catty, aren’t I?) But quite pretty in the face. She’s wearing mink and the loveliest pin you ever saw—like the dial on a compass with a star sapphire as big as a dime in the center.
Dorian stopped writing. She thoughtfully nibbled the end of the pen until it occurred to her that a number of other people had probably nibbled it. She put the tips of her fingers to her forehead and massaged. Her headache was worry over the letter she was writing. She had tried to write it before, but she had never succeeded in doing anything but beat about the bush. Because she loved him so—she drew an audible breath and once more set pen to paper.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 119
