The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  Inez laughed. “Who is he? Where the hell have you been? That damned registered letter. I told you we ought to have cleared out as soon as it came!”

  Bill Redding looked Kane up and down. “He don’t look like much.”

  “All right,” she said. “Beat hell out of him.” Her eyes were bright, her smile fixed. “Look, you weren’t here, Bill. You came in and found this little guy hitting me. And you beat him to a pulp. You killed him, see? It’ll look like that. We’ll call the cops. Go on, Bill. Beat hell out of the little—”

  Kane turned a little way toward Bill and waited. Bill had to wind up. Bill had to tug up first one sleeve of his dressing gown and then the other. Then he came toward Kane crouching, lips peeled back from his teeth.

  “You mean knock hell out of him, huh, Inez? Like this—”

  Kane put out a foot and stamped down hard on Bill’s slippered foot. Bill yelled and hopped back. Kane, not as fast on his feet as he had been before that piece of shrapnel had torn into his leg, was still fast enough for Bill. He stepped in close to the big man, ripped out a left to the body and a right to that concrete jaw. He nearly broke his right fist, but Bill went toppling, reeling back, grasping at straws. The straw he got was the upright of a tier table and he carried it crashing to the floor with him. He made no immediate attempt to get up.

  Kane faced Inez and her gun. “Now,” he said quietly, “you’re next.” He started toward her, his eyes on her face and then on her smooth white throat. “You’d better make up your mind, Inez, because once I get my hands on you I might forget to let go.”

  * * *

  —

  She laughed at him. The little gun in her hand barked and spat flame. It was like snagging himself on barbed wire; he felt the tug of the bullet in the flesh of his side, but he kept right on walking.

  “God, but you’re filthy,” he said.

  She stared at him. She had shot him and he hadn’t stopped. Six feet, five, four—and his eyes kept burning the flesh of her throat. She put one hand up to her throat and screamed. She raised the gun blindly and fired again. And through the wisps of smoke from the little gun there was still his face and his burning eyes.

  He caught her throat, close up beneath her jaw, his thumb and fingers like pincers. He caught her right wrist, forced the gun down, forced her back to the wall.

  “Bill!” she screamed. “Bill!”

  Kane yanked her forward, swung her around so that he could see Bill. The big man was back on his feet. He had a gun in his hand and couldn’t use it, because Inez was in front of Kane, unwillingly shielding him.

  He thought possibly he might have killed Inez then if it hadn’t been for Vickers.

  Vickers opened the door at that moment, and Vickers, too, had a gun. Kane saw Bill swing around toward the door, heard the blast of Vickers’s gun. Bill’s knees buckled, his big body pitched forward to fall thunderously, to kick a little.

  Vickers stood in the doorway, tall and straight in his tweeds, his handsome face set, his bright teeth showing in a strange sort of smile. Kane could see how things were going. He thought happily that this was justice—blind, staggering justice. And he let Inez Polk go. She reeled back from him, saw Bill on the floor, saw the blood. She saw Vickers in the doorway, and her mouth opened wide without screaming. Her blue eyes stared. She half raised the gun in her right hand before Vickers fired again. His bullet took her above the left eye, and her face was ugly, grotesque as she went down.

  Kane got down on his knees. He walked on his knees toward Inez, one hand pressed against his side where his own blood flowed warm across his fingers. A yard from Inez, he collapsed, lying on his side. He closed his eyes an instant, opened them to fight back the red haze. Vickers was stooping over him, the barrel of his gun smoldering in Kane’s face. Vickers’s eyes were cold and bright behind the polished, bobbling glasses.

  “Kane, are you badly hurt?”

  Kane’s small body shivered. “Yeah,” he worked out. “This is it. Get—get the evidence. She keeps it on ice. In the refrigerator in an ice cube tray. Get it, Vickers. Call the cops—the governor—save Dorian….” He rolled his head, face down against the soft carpet, and lay still.

  Vickers moved quickly the length of the living room, through the wide arch into the dining room. He pushed open the swinging door into the kitchen and left it open. Kane raised his head far enough to look over Inez’s prone body. He saw Vickers standing there at the refrigerator door.

  Kane crawled nearer to Inez. He reached across her shoulders to her right hand, disengaged it from her gun. His fingers closed on the gun and then he drew back to rest his right arm across Inez’s hips. The refrigerator door was open. Vickers’s right hand was targeted against the inner white of it, reaching into the ice cube tray compartment. Kane looked deliberately across the sights and triggered smoothly.

  Vickers’s hand jerked back as though the ice had burned him. He turned bewilderedly toward the swinging door to face Kane. His right hand fumbled helplessly in an attempt to get his gun out. He came stumbling into the dining room, trying to draw his gun from his right trousers pocket with his left hand. He couldn’t. The tail of his coat kept getting in his way. His right hand, bleeding and dangling, got in his way. It was funny and Kane laughed at him.

  “You should have killed me just now, when you thought you were going to have to,” he jeered at Vickers. “Because I’m not going to die. Dorian’s not going to die either. Just Bill, and Inez, and you, Noll. Dear Noll!”

  Vickers was just standing there facing the little gun in Kane’s hand, wondering what the hell he was going to do, when the door opened and Detective-Lieutenant Graden came in with a squad of cops at his back. Two of the cops seized Vickers, got the gun out of his pocket, clamped bracelets on him. He just stood there, wondering what he was going to do, when now it was fairly obvious that he wasn’t going to do anything.

  Graden looked about, a little bewilderedly. He cursed.

  “We were right on Vickers’s tail,” he said, “but he got across the tracks half a block ahead of us and we had to wait for the world’s longest freight train.”

  Kane laughed a little, sitting there on the floor beside Inez Polk’s body. He said, “That’s all right. It’s better like this—now you go to the refrigerator and find out why Inez Polk took an ice cube tray from the Lindstrum Apartments. I think she’s got a package of negatives frozen in the ice—photos that will prove Vickers killed Joyce Revers in New York….And get the Governor on the phone, and—”

  Graden bent over, saw the blood that flowed out through Kane’s fingers. He said, “You just relax. I’ll attend to everything. And—and thanks.”

  * * *

  —

  Graden was one of those men who didn’t easily get over his own mistakes. The first evening that Kane and Dorian were at home following their honeymoon, Graden came to their apartment to sit uncomfortably on the edge of a chair and twirl his hat. He seemed to have a lot to say, but didn’t know how to go about saying it. Dorian slipped out into the kitchen after a while to see if a shaker of cocktails wouldn’t do something for Graden’s tongue. Through the door, she crooked a finger at Kane.

  She said as Kane came in, “Absolutely, Peter, the poor lieutenant’s conscience is killing him. You don’t think he’ll jump into the Seine like that poor policeman in Les Miserables, do you?”

  “I hardly think so,” Kane said, laughing. “If for no other reason, then because we haven’t got a Seine. He just thinks he has wronged you and he doesn’t know how to fix things up. We’ll see if the cocktails will loosen him.”

  Dorian nodded, brown eyes dancing. “If they don’t, we’ll get out a rubber hose.”

  Kane went back into the living room, stood in front of the lieutenant. “Did you hear that? Dorian’s going to use a rubber hose on you, if you don’t give out with your gr
ief.”

  Graden looked uneasily toward the kitchen. “Does she mind if we talk about the murder? After all, she was pretty damned close to—ahem!”

  Dorian was coming in with the cocktails. She dimpled at Graden. “You’re worried because you don’t see how my smart husband figured that Oliver Vickers was the killer, isn’t that it?”

  “Wel-l-l—” Graden scowled. He scowled particularly at Kane. “I get it partly. Of course, we’ve got Vickers’s confession—”

  Kane snapped his fingers. “That’s fine. We’ll trade. There are a few points I don’t know about the solution. I’ll tell you how and why I picked Vickers, if you’ll give us a preview of what the D.A. is going to show the jury at the trial.”

  Graden nodded his agreement. “And don’t start out with that line about the solution being right under my nose.”

  Kane shrugged. “Where else? I found it in the newspaper, of all places. In the papers of January twelfth, it was said that when Dorian found her uncle dead, she ran across to the Vickers apartment for help. Thus Vickers got into Dorian’s apartment before you did, and Vickers consequently heard the story about the blonde who gave Dorian the aspirin before you did. Vickers knew the blonde existed, knew the aspirin was poisoned—because he had poisoned it. So he left some atropine sulphate in Dorian’s apartment, planted it while he was playing good neighbor to Dorian.”

  “Yeah, but that’s mostly guessing on your part,” Graden complained. “It holds water, sure, but—”

  Kane was shaking his head. “It had to be that way. Because I learned that Inez Marie Polk moved out of the Lindstrum Apartments the morning of January twelfth—moved suddenly and unexpectedly. Why did she move? Because she had read the murder story in the papers that morning. Because she knew Dorian’s ‘fantastic’ story wasn’t fantastic. More than that, there was Oliver Vickers’s name in the newspaper story—Vickers who lived across the hall from Dorian, who had ample opportunity to plant poison in Dorian’s apartment while he was playing good neighbor.

  “Inez had an advantage over all of us, because she knew that Vickers had killed Joyce Revers. She knew that Vickers would also kill her if he could get his hands on her, in order to check the blackmail. Therefore, she knew the aspirin tablet had been poisoned with atropine sulphate and that it had been intended for her. Nothing else explains Inez’s hurry to move. She was afraid Vickers would try again, possibly even before dark.”

  “Okay,” Graden said gruffly. “Vickers confessed that he had been trying to get at Inez for a long time. But with her using that post office box address, she wasn’t easy to trail. What he finally did, in desperation, was to camp for hours at a time in the loft of an old garage building across from the postal substation where Inez had her box.”

  “Golly, he must have had wonderful eyes,” Dorian commented.

  “Field glasses,” Graden explained. “Finally, when he saw the woman who took the mail from box five hundred eighteen, he trailed her. Up until that time, he actually had not known the identity of the woman who was blackmailing him. Inez’s safety depended on his not knowing. After that, of course, he found an opportunity to break into Inez’s apartment and plant the poisoned aspirin tablet.”

  Kane said, “I was exposed to a few other clues you didn’t have a chance to ponder over. Mrs. Vickers told me that prior to the murder she had been having trouble with her eyes and that her husband had taken her to nearly every oculist in town. That’s how he got hold of the atropine. Oculists use it to dilate the pupils of the patient’s eyes. Vickers picked some of it up when the doctor was busy with Mrs. Vickers. He thought it was a poison that couldn’t be traced to him.

  “Another thing, of course, was the way Inez opened her blackmail letter—‘Dear Noll.’ That must have been what Joyce Revers called Oliver Vickers. Joyce was English, and the English diminutive for ‘Oliver’ is ‘Noll.’ We’d call him ‘Ollie’ probably.”

  “But why did Vickers kill this poor Joyce girl in the first place?” Dorian wanted to know.

  “It’s like this,” Graden said ponderously. “Joyce and Inez were a couple of nightclub girls in New York, Mrs. Kane, and they were working a racket. Joyce would pick up with a much-married man who looked like dough, and Inez would flick her candid camera. Joyce would get the man up to her flat and turn the heat on him to make him buy those negatives. Vickers confessed that he just blew his top and strangled the girl when she tried it on him.”

  Kane said, “And Anna Nelson?”

  “Both blackmail and bribery there,” Graden said. “To stall police investigation which might have eventually led to Vickers, Dorian had to be found guilty. That’s why Vickers paid Anna to perjure herself, though like you pointed out before, Anna would have lied anyway because she had swiped that pin off Inez Polk’s coat. Vickers confessed that as soon as he found you were back in town, he knew something had to be done to see that Anna Nelson stayed quiet, because he figured you were pinning all of your hopes of freeing Dorian on making Anna talk.”

  Which seemed to settle everything except Lieutenant Graden’s conscience. The way he looked at Dorian and batted his eyelids, you could tell he was suffering.

  “Look,” Kane said finally, “the next time you drop in, bring a nice big chest of sterling silver tableware, why not?”

  “Huh?” Graden blinked now at Kane, and Dorian said, “Why, Peter, what a thing to say!”

  “I mean it,” Kane continued placidly. “Cross Dorian’s palm with the silver and maybe she’ll forgive you for trying to put her in the electric chair.”

  Graden scowled at him. “Why—why damnit, that’s blackmail!” Then he burst out laughing. “But damn me if I don’t do just that, Kane!”

  Tip on a Dead Jockey

  IRWIN SHAW

  THE STORY

  Original publication: The New Yorker, March 6, 1954; first collected in Tip on a Dead Jockey and Other Stories by Irwin Shaw (New York, Random House, 1957)

  ALTHOUGH LESS OFTEN READ TODAY than at the peak of his popularity, Irwin Shaw (1913–1984) produced several works that are an essential part of the American literary pantheon, notably his short story, “Girls in Their Summer Dresses” (first published in the February 4, 1939, issue of the New Yorker) and The Young Lions (1948), his hugely successful first novel that tells the stories of three soldiers—two American and one German—whose destinies cross on the battlefields of World War II. It is famously grouped with Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951) as the three great American novels about World War II; it was released in 1958 with Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando.

  Born in the South Bronx as Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he changed his name to Irwin Shaw when he entered Brooklyn College, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1934. When the United States entered World War II, he joined the Army in July of 1942 and adapted some of his wartime experiences for The Young Lions.

  A prolific playwright, his greatest stage success was Bury the Dead, which was produced on Broadway in 1936. His novel Rich Man, Poor Man (1969) was made into a highly rated television miniseries of six two-hour episodes shown from February 1 to March 15, 1976, starring Peter Strauss, Nick Nolte, and Susan Blakely; it was nominated for twenty-three Emmys, winning four of those, as well as four Golden Globes.

  Shaw’s books sold more than fourteen million copies in the United States alone and were translated into twenty-five languages. Among his numerous literary awards were the O. Henry Prize in 1944 and again in 1945 and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Grant in 1946. In an interview, he said, ‘‘Well, you have to get something for working so hard for so many years.’’

  In “Tip on a Dead Jockey,” American Lloyd Barber, a nearly broke former pilot, is living in Paris after World War II. He is being pressured by Bert Smith, an international figure who e
arns his living in highly questionable ways, to fly a shipment of English money between France and Egypt. Although offered a small fortune ($25,000) to make the trip, he sees a jockey killed at a racetrack and takes it as a bad omen and turns down the offer. His friend Jimmy Richardson, also an ex-pilot, agrees to make the flight, which appears to have serious complications.

  THE FILM

  Title: Tip on a Dead Jockey, 1957

  Studio: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

  Director: Richard Thorpe

  Screenwriter: Charles Lederer

  Producer: Edwin H. Knopf

  THE CAST

  • Robert Taylor (Lloyd Tredman)

  • Dorothy Malone (Phyllis Tredman)

  • Marcel Dalio (Toto del Aro)

  • Martin Gabel (Bert Smith)

  • Gia Scala (Paquita Heldon)

  • Jack Lord (Jimmy Heldon)

  The plotline in the film is significantly more complicated and should have been much more exciting. The locale has been moved to Madrid and it is now the 1950s. Lloyd Tredman (Lloyd Barber in the story), deeply depressed after his Korean War experiences, is a drunk and a gambler who has written to his wife asking for a divorce because he’s not the man she married. She comes to find him in Madrid.

  He has agreed to fly a load of cash from Egypt to France. He knows that the flight entails smuggling contraband currency but the big payday is enticing. He bets his last $1,000 on a horse race, stating that if he wins he won’t have to make the flight. The jockey riding the horse on which he bet is killed in a fall.

  Convinced that there was foul play, engineered by Bert Smith, a smarmy international smuggler, Lloyd refuses to fly the plane, so his friend and fellow pilot Jimmy Heldon agrees to replace him. He takes off and the plane goes missing for a while. Jimmy returns safely, but Lloyd is convinced something will go wrong so he knocks out his friend and takes to the cockpit himself. Interpol becomes aware of the airplane and chases it. Lloyd lands and tries to hide the money and discovers that the cargo also includes heroin.