The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  Kane got down on his knees beside her, raised her head gently, let it fall again. She had been strangled, the marks of the killer’s fingers discernable on the flesh of her throat.

  He stood up, conscious of a dull ache that pervaded every fibre of his body. Anna could not talk now, couldn’t be forced into giving a word of evidence that might stay the execution of Dorian’s sentence. This was the end of the road, and Kane could see nothing farther.

  It was then 1:16 A.M., and now only four more days….

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Hours of the Fourth Day

  They were the Oliver T. Vickers and definitely nice people. In the warmer months they lived at their country estate near Augusta; but during the winter they occupied a snug seven room apartment on North Meridian Street. Mrs. Vickers said she found the country dreary in winter.

  She was a plump, wall-eyed woman of fifty with a thick neck and short-bobbed, greying black hair. Her housecoat was a gay gypsy thing that became her not at all. She evidently wore her diamonds to breakfast, and the glitter of them illuminated every gesture of her short puffy white hands. She sat in a wing chair in the Vickers apartment, which was directly across the hall from the one which Dorian had rented, and talked to Kane about Dorian and the murder.

  “She was such a dear girl,” she said, probably unconscious of the fact that she was using the past tense. “There never has been the least doubt in my mind—and in Oliver’s too—but that she was entirely innocent. Of course there was a big blonde woman who gave her the aspirin tablet which she in turn gave to her uncle—but these police!”

  Mrs. Vickers had only tongue-clucking for the police.

  Kane, waiting for Mr. Vickers to put in an appearance, said politely, “I deeply appreciate everything you and Mr. Vickers did for Dorian—”

  “Yes, I know,” she broke in. “I can just see her at the door—” Mrs. Vickers indicated what door— “ ‘Oh, Mr. Vickers, I’ve just poisoned Uncle Phineas,’ she said or something like that.” Mrs. Vickers’s smile was pitying. “Poor child! Thinking first of us in her troubles that way—and it all could have happened to anyone! It was only a little while before that I was having such terrific headaches. A drawing sensation, you know? Eyes, of course. Oliver had me to nearly every oculist in town….She could have given me the tablet. The blonde, I mean, if I had been in Dorian’s shoes. Fairly makes one feel faint, thinking about it!”

  Mrs. Vickers felt faint enough to fan her plump face with her jeweled hand. “And, Mr. Kane, just to think that maniac is still at large. Probably poisoning someone right this moment, while poor Dorian—”

  She drew a breath. Kane, at least, was grateful for the breath. One of the mahogany doors into the living room opened and Oliver Vickers entered the room.

  He was a tall man with well-set shoulders and lean hips, a man for tweeds and pipes, for hunting dogs and other men. Perhaps he was for women, too, with that close-clipped grey mustache and his bright white smile. His rather large straight nose was saddled by a pair of Oxford glasses that didn’t go with the tweeds and the pipe; perhaps they were some special concession to his wife. She looked the sort who might try to borrow intellect.

  “Oliver,” said Mrs. Vickers, stirring in her chair, “this is Peter Kane. Dorian’s Peter, you know.”

  Vickers came striding to grip Kane’s hand. His green eyes were cool and keen, his glasses radiantly polished.

  “So you’re the boy our Dorian was always writing to! But then,” he added almost apologetically, “coming out of Italy, Germany, and the Pacific, you’re not boys, any of you.”

  Kane’s smile was slight. “I wasn’t exactly a boy when I went in. I guess they played too rough for me.”

  “Sit down, Kane.” And as Kane sat, Vickers reached to a nearby table for a box of cigarettes, which he passed. “I knew you were in town. Lieutenant Graden at police headquarters told me yesterday.”

  “Oliver has dropped in at the police station nearly every day since the trial,” Mrs. Vickers put in. “He is always hoping something will turn up.”

  “I want to thank you—” Kane began, only to have Vickers check him with a wave of the hand.

  “Not a word, Kane, if you please. We did our best, and it wasn’t good enough. I think my wife and I would rather not be reminded of—er, our inadequacies, shall we say?”

  Kane shook his head. “That isn’t the word. You’ve both been kind, helpful, and loyal. You can’t prevent me from being appreciative.” He lighted the cigarette which Vickers had passed him then held the match for Vickers’s pipe. He said, “Anna Nelson was murdered last night.”

  “Anna Nelson?” Mrs. Vickers blinked rapidly. “Oh dear! Someone we know?”

  “The maid dear, the maid,” Vickers explained, somewhat piqued by his wife’s mirror-like memory. His swift glance stabbed at Kane. “And you must have pinned most of your hopes on making that woman talk. But the fact that she was murdered proves something, doesn’t it?”

  Kane nodded. “To me it does.” He told them briefly of his experience on the night before, just as he had told it to Lieutenant Graden of Homicide some hours before.

  “Graden is worried,” he concluded. “But then, like any man who fears he has made a life-and-death mistake, he’s pretty busy looking for alibis. He seems to be working on the theory that Anna Nelson’s death was a crime of passion.”

  “Oh dear,” murmured Mrs. Vickers, shocked.

  “She had an unsavory reputation.”

  Vickers snorted and his Oxford glasses bobbled on his nose. “Yet the court accepted her testimony. It was Anna Nelson who knocked our defense. Dorian’s attorney had firmly established the existence of the big blonde woman. There was such a woman in Fabian’s that afternoon, because two clerks at the handbag department remembered seeing a woman of her description. But then the Nelson woman got up on the stand and said there was no one sitting at the desk opposite the one Dorian had occupied. And that—” he shrugged—“was that.”

  “Anna Nelson lied,” Kane said, “and at least we know why she did.”

  “Oh, do we?” Mrs. Vickers put in alertly.

  “Her first lie to the police was to protect herself. She had either stolen or picked up a lapel pin belonging to the mysterious blonde. If the blonde had been found immediately following the poisoning of Dorian’s uncle, then Anna Nelson might have been accused of theft. Between that time and the trial, I believe somebody got to her, either bribed or threatened her into perjury.”

  * * *

  —

  Kane took from his pocket the soiled worn letter which Dorian had written him on Fabian’s note paper. “Dorian’s letter the day of the poisoning,” he said. “I’d like you to read it.”

  Vickers took the letter, and Mrs. Vickers rustled out of her chair to come over and stand behind her husband, to read over his shoulder. When they had finished, Mrs. Vickers said, “Oh, isn’t that sweet. So like Dorian!” Which drew a reproachful glance from her husband.

  He said, “I believe, Maria, that Mr. Kane wanted us particularly to read about the lapel pin with the sapphire setting.”

  Kane nodded. “That’s all that’s left. We might trace the blonde through a description of the pin.”

  “You’re the authority on jewels in this household, Maria,” Vickers said to his wife. “Have you ever seen anything such as Dorian describes?”

  “I?” She was astonished. “Oh, I’m no authority. I’ve nothing but these old family things.” She spread her short fingers as though her jewels were not sufficiently evident without that. “Lovely, aren’t they? And I’ve a pearl choker—”

  Vickers stopped her with some dry throat-clearing. His eyes had a frosty twinkle. “Maria, Mr. Kane is only interested in the owner of the star sapphire lapel pin.”

  There followed a brief interval of uncomfort
able silence and Kane concerned himself with the ash from his cigarette. He said after a moment, “That pin had a sort of trademark on the back—a keystone with the letter ‘R’ engraved on it.”

  “Oh!” Mrs. Vickers covered her mouth with three fingers as though she had said a naughty word and rolled saucer eyes back and forth between Kane and her husband. “Why, that’s Raymond, the custom jeweler. One of his exclusive designs, no doubt. Remember, Oliver? He’s the one who reset my marquise diamond that belonged to mother.”

  Vickers stood up, smiling confidently at Kane. “You see? We are good for something, aren’t we? Excuse me a moment. I’ll get Raymond on the phone.” And he left the room.

  Mrs. Vickers sighed. “He’s so clever, Oliver is.” She crossed once more to the wing chair, sat down, fussed with her voluminous skirts rather like a fat mama robin building a nest. “Oliver is president of the Rad-Ion Laboratories, you know. They make some terribly essential thing—a little fixed condenser, whatever that is, that goes into the walkie-talkie radios….”

  She prattled on about Oliver, how he had hoisted himself by his boot-straps, how his keen judgment and executive ability had almost doubled the small fortune which her father had left her. Kane kept nodding. He hoped he was nodding in the right places, because he was paying very little attention. He was thinking that the thread of hope was as thin and fragile as spider floss. But while it was there you could dangle from it and kick your puny legs against the inevitable.

  Then Vickers came back into the room, closed the door quietly behind him, turned—and there was no longer hope. Vickers’s narrow face was grave. He met Kane’s eager glance, shook his head, and his wobbling glasses shimmered. Kane stood up, conscious of a ringing within his head and a swift rush of blackness across his eyes that formed a vignette about Vickers’s tall figure.

  “You—you mean the jeweler doesn’t know?” he asked hoarsely.

  “He knew,” Vickers said. “He had the woman’s name and address. The pin was made for a Miss Inez Marie Polk. I.M.P.—the initials in Dorian’s letter. She lived at the Lindstrum Apartments. I immediately called Lindstrum—the owner and manager of the apartment building, and he tells me that Miss Polk moved out suddenly at noon on January twelfth, the day after Dorian’s uncle was poisoned.”

  “But my God, she couldn’t have just vanished!” Kane gasped. “She must have left a forwarding address. Could she have got a moving van that soon?”

  “She didn’t have to,” Vickers said. “The apartment was a furnished one. All that she owned in it were her clothes, dishes, glassware, linen, and cooking utensils. And she took only her clothes.”

  Kane tossed his cigarette into an ashtray, turned to Mrs. Vickers. “My coat,” he said, and remembered, “please.”

  She was up from her chair then, rustling to the closet, protesting his departure. “At least have a cup of coffee with us, Mr. Kane—” And Vickers was asking anxiously, “What are you doing to do, Kane? Good lord, she’s been gone nearly three months. Her apartment is occupied by somebody else—”

  “I just won’t quit,” Kane said grimly. He uttered a short, bitter laugh. “When there’s nothing to hang onto, you hang onto nothing.”

  Vickers strode across to the closet, even as his wife left it with Kane’s hat and coat. He said, “I’m going to drive that boy to the Lindstrum. It’s the least I can do.”

  * * *

  —

  They didn’t talk of Dorian or the murder or the woman named Inez Marie Polk during the drive to the Lindstrum Apartments on Delaware Street. Vickers spoke of fixed condensers that the Rad-Ion Laboratories were making, perhaps with the idea of taking Kane’s mind from his troubles. Not that he could have possibly succeeded. Dorian’s face was forever before Kane’s eyes.

  He liked taking it apart—the knobby little chin, the soft sweet mouth, the warm apricot tint of her skin, the chestnut of her hair, the short straight nose with its shell-pink nostrils, the wistful, out-of-this-world beauty of her brow and eyes. He put all the pieces together again and had something that was delicate and rare, to be kept under glass beyond the touch of sullying fingers.

  That was Dorian. That was Dorian who was to die….

  “…then after the war, with frequency modulation making all broadcast receivers obsolete,” Vickers’s voice came enthusiastically out of somewhere, “we’ll market a complete radio receiver—”

  This was after the war for Kane. This was the homecoming, the peace.

  Kane stared straight ahead into rain that came down like steel knitting needles. He had to look at the thing omnisciently. Only by accepting cold logic could he divorce himself from bitterness. Had Kane, a detective, not known Dorian personally he would have made the same fatal errors the police had made. There was everything against Dorian, and nothing for her—motive, opportunity, the weapon, the corpse. The master link to the truth had been Anna Nelson, always obscure and now nonexistent.

  He found his mind dropping into the worn groove, following its tortuous trail of fact and circumstance to come inevitably against the same obstacle: What if I find Inez Marie Polk and she admits having given Dorian the aspirin? What would it prove?

  “This is the place,” Vickers said.

  The car had stopped in front of a squarish, three story apartment building of smooth buff brick with the name LINDSTRUM chiseled in limestone above the entry, with heavy, unframed plate glass doors.

  As Kane pushed down the door latch, Vickers asked anxiously, “You’re all right, Kane?”

  Kane looked at him, felt the edge of that searching green-eyed glance. He smiled slightly. “I’m okay,” he said. He was. He was outside himself, like a shucked clam, sprawling, unfettered, relaxed.

  “If—” Vickers began, and then substituted, “when—when you find out anything, let me know, let me know at once, won’t you? I’ll be in my office. Give me a ring.”

  Kane nodded, and got out into the rain.

  Albert Lindstrum was behind the first floor door indicated by the word Superintendent. He was a stocky, vigorous middle-aged man in a bright blue suit. When Kane announced his business, Lindstrum’s smile was wide and welcoming. He put out a hand that felt a good deal like a rubber glove filled with lukewarm water.

  “From the police, no doubt,” he deduced as he ushered Kane into what must have been an office and a living room. Kane sat down in a leather lounge chair beside a businesslike desk, pushed his hat up from his small, worried face.

  “Why from the police?” he asked.

  Lindstrum had a quick, nervous shrug. “Oh, it seemed strange, that’s all. Very, ver-ree strange.” His shaggy black eyebrows walked an inch up his broad brow. “A tenant ordinarily doesn’t move out a week after paying the rent. Not without an explanation. And there wasn’t any explanation from Miss Polk. Merely a note under my door, saying she had left.”

  “And you haven’t any idea whether she left town or what?”

  “No idea, Mr. Kane. None whatever.” He shook his head. “Very strange. Packed her clothes and left. Left what dishes she had—and what linen—behind her. Took, of all things, one of the ice cube trays out of the refrigerator.” The quick, energetic shrug again. “But that’s nothing. Sometimes a tenant will take window blinds or curtain rods that they can’t possibly have any use for. I’ve had ’em walk out with all the lighting fixtures.” He wagged a partially bald head. “Yes sir, they’ll take anything that isn’t set in concrete.”

  Kane hooked an ankle over a knee, laced his fingers across his chest. “All right. What do you know about her?”

  Lindstrum drummed thoughtfully on the top of his desk, finally wagged his head. “Not a damned thing. Right after Mr. Vickers phoned, I began trying to remember. I’ve got to conclude that I never knew a tenant less than I knew Miss Polk. She gave a bank reference when she moved in. It was satisfactory. She was
from New York, and while she gave her previous residence, I didn’t check with her former landlord. Lost the address. For no reason at all, I concluded she might be a grass widow with plenty of alimony coming in. Don’t ask me why. I’ve just always thought of her as that—a damn good-looking woman if you could get used to the size of her face.”

  “She must have had friends or callers,” Kane suggested.

  “She might have. I wouldn’t know. A very odd person, now that I think of it.”

  “How odd?” Kane persisted.

  “Wel-l-l, always talking. But not saying anything. Small talk. The weather, prices, rationing. Almost as though it was all patter, hiding something.” Lindstrum laughed uneasily. “Don’t repeat that, please, Mr. Kane. She might have been a welfare worker for all of me.”

  “And in her hurry to move away, she left nothing except dishes and linen?”

  “Unless you mean dirt. And cobwebs. Even garbage. She wasn’t much of a housekeeper. She just didn’t give a damn—she left a lot of fashion magazines.”

  * * *

  —

  Kane’s heart skipped a beat. “And the magazines?” he asked gently, fearfully.

  Lindstrum blinked at him, snapped his fingers. “That reminds me, I’ve got to call somebody to come and get those magazines and newspapers in the basement. A regular fire hazard. They certainly will accumulate.”

  “You mean the magazines that were taken from Miss Polk’s apartment may still be in the building?”

  Lindstrum shrugged. “I suppose so. Unless the janitor did something with them. Mighty few tenants will bother to take care of magazines and papers when they move out. Just chuck them into a closet—”

  “I’d like to look them over,” Kane interrupted.

  Lindstrum stared at him, leaned back in his swivel chair. “They’ll be all mixed up. Naturally, I had no reason to have Miss Polk’s magazines kept separate. What’s your idea? You think you might possibly discover what ones she subscribed to and get her new address from the publishers?”