The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  Matt went home after a while but he couldn’t sleep. At one-thirty in the morning he put his clothes back on and went down to the Longdock. What’s the story, and news of Runt?

  Nine days later there was news of Runt. The police department had made contact with Runt, by means of a grappling hook probing the soft, rotten bottom of the river. Runt wasn’t “on borried time” any more. He had paid back every minute of it. Cause of death: accidental drowning. On the night of his disappearance, Runt had been seen wandering the gin mills in a state of inebriation. In other words, bagged. There were no marks of violence on Runt. How could anyone prove he hadn’t slipped. The good old North River, Lippy’s silent partner, had done it again.

  * * *

  —

  It was a good funeral. Everybody in the neighborhood was there—even Lippy Keegan, and Specs and Skelly and the rest of the boys. After the Mass, Father Conley came out on the sidewalk, and Matt and some of the others who were closest to Runt gathered around to hear what the father had to say.

  They had seen the father steamed before but never like this. “Accident my eye,” he said. “If they think we’re going to take this lying down, they’re dumber than I think they are.”

  “What can we do, Father?”

  Everybody looked around. It was Flanagan, who had come up behind Matt; Flanagan, who always played it very cozy with the Keegans. But like most of the others, he had liked having Runt around—that cocky little bantam. The Longdock wouldn’t be the same without him. It looked like Runt, at the bottom of the river, had done more damage to Lippy than when he was around the docks shooting off his mouth.

  Father Conley said, “We’re going to keep this case alive. We’ll question every single person who talked to Runt the day they hit him in the head. We’ll keep needling the police for action. Keegan hasn’t heard the end of Runt Nolan.”

  “Now’s the time to put somebody up to run for president against Lippy,” the Bennett kid said.

  Everybody looked at Matt. Matt looked down at his uncomfortable black shoes. He would have given anything to have been with Runt the night Keegan’s cowboys caught up with the little guy.

  “That’s right, keep pressing them,” Father Conley said. “Maybe they don’t know it yet, but times are changing. One of these days you’re going to knock them out of the box for good.” He looked at Matt and said, “I can help you. But I can’t do it for you. It takes leadership.”

  Matt looked down at the sidewalk. He always felt strange in his dark blue suit. He looked over at Fran, talking with some of the other wives. In his mind, Fran and the storage company and the welfare of the kids were all churning around with Runt and what Father Conley was saying and the faces of these dock workers looking at him and waiting for him….

  * * *

  —

  The morning after the funeral Matt’s alarm clock split the silence at six-thirty. Matt swung his legs over the side of the bed. Fran stirred behind him. “I’ll get up make you some coffee.” She sat up and they looked at each other.

  “I’m sorry, Fran, I—”

  “Don’t be,” she said.

  Even before what happened to Runt, she had felt it coming. And on the way home from church he had said, “All the fellers liked Runt. There’ll be hell to pay. Now’s the time to get ’em movin’ in the right direction.”

  Fran, sitting up in bed behind him, said, “Don’t get in no more trouble than you can help, Matt.”

  Matt stood up and stretched, groaned, and reached for his pants. “Don’t worry, I’m gonna watch myself, I ain’t gonna take no crazy chances like Runt, Lord-’ve-mercy-on-’im.”

  She wasn’t even disappointed about the storage job. A storage man is a storage man, a longshoreman is a longshoreman. In the deepest part of her mind she had known that all along.

  “I’ll get up make you some coffee,” she said again, as she had a thousand times before, as she would—if he was lucky—a thousand times again.

  For a moment he roughed her up affectionately. “You’re gettin’ fat, honey.” Then he was pulling his wool checkerboard shirt on over his long underwear. If there was enough work, Fisheye was liable to pick him, just to make it look good in case there was an investigation.

  The cargo hook felt good in his belt. He zipped up his windbreaker, told Fran not to worry, set his cap at the old-country angle, and tried not to make too much noise on the creaky stairway as he made his way down through the sleeping tenement.

  Flanagan was coming out of his door as Matt reached the bottom landing. The old docker was yawning and rubbing sleep out of his eyes but he grinned when he saw who it was.

  “Matt me lad, we’ll be needin’ ya, that’s for sure.”

  We. It had taken Flanagan a long time to get his mouth around that we. There wasn’t any we over at the storage company. Matt nodded to Flanagan, a little embarrassed, and fussed with his cap like a pitcher.

  “Once a stand-up guy, always a stand-up guy, huh, Matt?”

  Matt grunted. He didn’t want them to make too much of a deal out of it. Matt felt better when he got outside and the wind came blowing into his face. It felt good—like the cargo hook on his hip, familiar and good.

  As they reached the corner, facing the elevated railroad tracks that ran along the river, two figures came up from a basement—Specs Sinclair and young Skelly. Specs had a bad cold. He was a sinus sufferer in the winter-time. He wished he was down in Miami scoring on the horses.

  “So you want more?” he said to Matt, daubing his nose with a damp handkerchief. “We run you out of here once but you ain’t satisfied. What’s a matter, you lookin’ to wear cement shoes?”

  Matt gazed at him and felt pleased and excited that he was back with this old hoodlum Sinclair and this punk Skelly. They were like old friends in reverse.

  “Quit racing your motor,” Matt said. “It ain’t gonna be so easy this time. None of us is gonna go wanderin’ around alone half gassed like Runt Nolan. We’re stickin’ together now. And Father Conley’s got the newspapers watchin’. You hit me in the head and next thing you know they’ll hit you with ten thousand volts.”

  Specs looked at Skelly. Everything was getting a little out of hand, there was no doubt about it. In the old days you could knock off an old bum like Nolan and that was the end of it. This Matt Gillis, why didn’t he stay in cold storage? For the first time in his life Specs worried whether Lippy Keegan would know the next move.

  Matt crossed the street and pushed open the door of the Longdock. Everybody knew he was back. Everybody was going to be watching him. He wished Runt would come over and stick him in the side with a left hand. He knew it wasn’t very likely, but it made him feel better to wonder if that scrappy little son-of-a-biscuit-eater was going to be watching too.

  The Chink and the Child

  THOMAS BURKE

  THE STORY

  Original publication: Colour, October 1915; first collected in Limehouse Nights (London, Grant Richards, 1916)

  SYDNEY THOMAS BURKE (1886–1945) was born in the London suburb of Clapham, but when he was only a few months old his father died and he was sent to the East End to live with his uncle until the age of ten, when he was put into a home for respectable middle-class children without means. He sold his first story, “The Bellamy Diamonds,” when he was fifteen. His landmark volume, Limehouse Nights (1916), collected romantic but violent stories of the Chinese district of London. It was enormously popular and, though largely praised by critics, there were objections to the depictions of interracial relationships, opium use, and other “depravities.”

  Lucy Burrows, a beautiful child, lives with her brutal, drunken, prizefighting father, who incessantly abuses her. In one of his rages, he throws her out of their home after beating her and she finds refuge in the apartment of a gentle Chinese shopkeeper who cares for and falls in love with her. When her father d
iscovers her whereabouts, he drags her back home in a drunken fury, resulting in tragedy.

  THE FILM

  Title: Broken Blossoms, 1919

  Studio: United Artists

  Director: D. W. Griffith

  Screenwriter: D. W. Griffith

  Producer: D. W. Griffith

  THE CAST

  • Lillian Gish (Lucy Burrows)

  • Richard Barthelmess (Cheng Huan)

  • Donald Crisp (Battling Burrows)

  The story line of the silent film closely follows that of the story, though the hero, Cheng Huan, has been made more palatable for movie audiences. In Burke’s story, he is a dirty, lazy former sailor from Shanghai who is now living in London’s Chinatown where he spends his meager funds in opium dens and whorehouses.

  Griffith, known for his efforts to battle intolerance, changes Cheng Huan into a Buddhist priest who came to England to teach Westerners the gentle spirituality of his religion.

  Broken Blossoms was only the second film ever released by the new movie company United Artists and it proved a financial bonanza as critics praised it and audiences flocked to theaters to see it. Its production and subsequent success are all the more remarkable considering that there was a strong anti-Chinese sensibility in both England and the United States following the Boxer Rebellion and fears of the Yellow Peril, inflamed by William Randolph Hearst and his newspapers.

  The film was remade in 1936 by Twickenham Studios in England, opening in May of 1936 in England and in the United States early in 1937. It was directed by John Brahm, produced by Julius Hagen, and had a screenplay by Emlyn Williams, who also starred as Cheng; Dolly Haas played Lucy Burrows and Arthur Margetson was Battling Burrows.

  THE CHINK AND THE CHILD

  Thomas Burke

  IT IS A TALE OF LOVE and lovers that they tell in the low-lit Causeway that slinks from West India Dock Road to the dark waste of waters beyond. In Pennyfields, too, you may hear it; and I do not doubt that it is told in far-away Tai-Ping, in Singapore, in Tokio, in Shanghai, and those other gay-lamped haunts of wonder whither the wandering people of Limehouse go and whence they return so casually. It is a tale for tears, and should you hear it in the lilied tongue of the yellow men, it would awaken in you all your pity. In our bald speech it must, unhappily, lose its essential fragrance, that quality that will lift an affair of squalor into the loftier spheres of passion and imagination, beauty and sorrow. It will sound unconvincing, a little…you know…the kind of thing that is best forgotten. Perhaps…

  But listen.

  It is Battling Burrows, the lightning welter-weight of Shadwell, the box o’ tricks, the Tetrarch of the ring, who enters first. Battling Burrows, the pride of Ratcliff, Poplar, and Limehouse, and the despair of his manager and backers. For he loved wine, woman, and song; and the boxing world held that he couldn’t last long on that. There was any amount of money in him for his parasites if only the damned women could be cut out; but again and again would he disappear from his training quarters on the eve of a big fight, to consort with Molly and Dolly, and to drink other things than barley-water and lemon-juice.

  Wherefore Chuck Lightfoot, his manager, forced him to fight on any and every occasion while he was good and a money-maker; for at any moment the collapse might come, and Chuck would be called upon by his creditors to strip off that “shirt” which at every contest he laid upon his man.

  Battling was of a type that is too common in the eastern districts of London; a type that upsets all accepted classifications. He wouldn’t be classed. He was a curious mixture of athleticism and degeneracy. He could run like a deer, leap like a greyhound, fight like a machine, and drink like a suction-hose. He was a bully; he had the courage of the high hero. He was an open-air sport; he had the vices of a French decadent.

  It was one of his love adventures that properly begins this tale; for the girl had come to Battling one night with a recital of terrible happenings, of an angered parent, of a slammed door….In her arms was a bundle of white rags. Now Battling, like so many sensualists, was also a sentimentalist. He took that bundle of white rags; he paid the girl money to get into the country; and the bundle of white rags had existed in and about his domicile in Pekin Street, Limehouse, for some eleven years. Her position was nondescript; to the casual observer it would seem that she was Battling’s relief punch-ball—an unpleasant post for any human creature to occupy, especially if you are a little girl of twelve, and the place be the one-room household of the lightning welter-weight. When Battling was cross with his manager…well, it is indefensible to strike your manager or to throw chairs at him, if he is a good manager; but to use a dog-whip on a small child is permissible and quite as satisfying; at least, he found it so. On these occasions, then, when very cross with his sparring partners, or over-flushed with victory and juice of the grape, he would flog Lucy. But he was reputed by the boys to be a good fellow. He only whipped the child when he was drunk; and he was only drunk for eight months of the year.

  For just over twelve years this bruised little body had crept about Poplar and Limehouse. Always the white face was scarred with red, or black-furrowed with tears; always in her steps and in her look was expectation of dread things. Night after night her sleep was broken by the cheerful Battling’s brute voice and violent hands; and terrible were the lessons which life taught her in those few years. Yet, for all the starved face and the transfixed air, there was a lurking beauty about her, a something that called you in the soft curve of her cheek that cried for kisses and was fed with blows, and in the splendid mournfulness that grew in eyes and lips. The brown hair chimed against the pale face, like the rounding of a verse. The blue cotton frock and the broken shoes could not break the loveliness of her slender figure or the shy grace of her movements as she flitted about the squalid alleys of the docks; though in all that region of wasted life and toil and decay, there was not one that noticed her, until…

  Now there lived in Chinatown, in one lousy room over Mr. Tai Fu’s store in Pennyfields, a wandering yellow man, named Cheng Huan. Cheng Huan was a poet. He did not realize it. He had never been able to understand why he was unpopular; and he died without knowing. But a poet he was, tinged with the materialism of his race, and in his poor listening heart strange echoes would awake of which he himself was barely conscious. He regarded things differently from other sailors; he felt things more passionately, and things which they felt not at all; so he lived alone instead of at one of the lodging-houses. Every evening he would sit at his window and watch the street. Then, a little later, he would take a jolt of opium at the place at the corner of Formosa Street.

  He had come to London by devious ways. He had loafed on the Bund at Shanghai. The fateful intervention of a crimp had landed him on a boat. He got to Cardiff, and sojourned in its Chinatown; thence to Liverpool, to Glasgow; thence, by a ticket from the Asiatics’ Aid Society, to Limehouse, where he remained for two reasons—because it cost him nothing to live there, and because he was too lazy to find a boat to take him back to Shanghai.

  So he would lounge and smoke cheap cigarettes, and sit at his window, from which point he had many times observed the lyrical Lucy. He noticed her casually. Another day, he observed her, not casually. Later, he looked long at her; later still, he began to watch for her and for that strangely provocative something about the toss of the head and the hang of the little blue skirt as it coyly kissed her knee.

  Then that beauty which all Limehouse had missed smote Cheng. Straight to his heart it went, and cried itself into his very blood. Thereafter the spirit of poetry broke her blossoms all about his odorous chamber. Nothing was the same. Pennyfields became a happy-lanterned street, and the monotonous fiddle in the house opposite was the music of his fathers. Bits of old song floated through his mind: little sweet verses of Le Tai-pih, murmuring of plum blossom, rice-field and stream. Day by day he would moon at his window, or shuffle abo
ut the streets, lighting to a flame when Lucy would pass and gravely return his quiet regard; and night after night, too, he would dream of a pale, lily-lovely child.

  And now the Fates moved swiftly various pieces on their sinister board, and all that followed happened with a speed and precision that showed direction from higher ways.

  It was Wednesday night in Limehouse, and for once clear of mist. Out of the colored darkness of the Causeway stole the muffled wail of reed instruments, and, though every window was closely shuttered, between the joints shot jets of light and stealthy voices, and you could hear the whisper of slippered feet, and the stuttering steps of the satyr and the sadist. It was to the café in the middle of the Causeway, lit by the pallid blue light that is the symbol of China throughout the world, that Cheng Huan came, to take a dish of noodle and some tea. Thence he moved to another house whose stairs ran straight to the street, and above whose doorway a lamp glowed like an evil eye. At this establishment he mostly took his pipe of “chandu” and a brief chat with the keeper of the house, for, although not popular, and very silent, he liked sometimes to be in the presence of his compatriots. Like a figure of a shadowgraph he slid through the door and up the stairs.

  The chamber he entered was a bit of the Orient squatting at the portals of the West. It was a well-kept place where one might play a game of fan-tan, or take a shot or so of li-un, or purchase other varieties of Oriental delight. It was sunk in a purple dusk, though here and there a lantern stung the glooms. Low couches lay around the walls, and strange men decorated them: Chinese, Japs, Malays, Lascars, with one or two white girls; and sleek, noiseless attendants swam from couch to couch. Away in the far corner sprawled a lank figure in brown shirting, its nerveless fingers curled about the stem of a spent pipe. On one of the lounges a scorbutic nigger sat with a Jewess from Shadwell. Squatting on a table in the center, beneath one of the lanterns, was a musician with a reed, blinking upon the company like a sly cat, and making his melody of six repeated notes.