The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  What would Dr. Baume say about this? “Don’t fool yourself, Bowen. Nobody can handle the kind of drinking you do, least of all you. Give it up. It’s dangerous for you, more dangerous than you’ve any idea….”

  * * *

  —

  The memory of the dream returned suddenly, filled with shadowy violence and confused movement. Dr. Baume had been in it, and Emily, and Lila too. It had been some sort of play, a tragedy, in which Roger had played the leading role. Afterward, still dreaming, and full of an uneasy sense that he’d left something vital undone which would surely return to plague him, he had sat down at his typewriter to get the whole thing down on paper.

  Roger shuddered. He saw himself, with the curiously refracted movements of nightmare, typing out a title on his portable: PURPLE LIKE GRAPES. A NEW PLAY BY ROGER BOWEN. As he struck the final key, blood spurted out on the page. He saw himself jump up, gagging, and run out of the house. But the horror was not ended. The words were after him. He’d created them, endowed them with a loathsome propulsive life of their own and now they followed as he ran deeper and deeper into the dark, brushing against him, pawing him, whispering hideous, unbelievable things.

  What a dream! The words stood in his mind now empty of meaning, empty of everything but the memory of terror being hauled, like a bloody carcass, across his mind. PURPLE LIKE GRAPES. What in the world was that? Was it really the title of something, he’d once thought of writing? No—what could he be thinking of? It was gibberish. But from what dark alley of consciousness had it come, mouthing, to make hideous the night?

  He could take it up with Dr. Baume, of course. Gibberish was Dr. Baume’s special province. The good doctor would take that moronic phrase and hurry it back and forth across the Dark Continent of the Unconscious, skin it alive, haul and stretch and lop it until it fitted finally into one of those shopworn psychoanalytic backdrops that even the movies were beginning to boggle at. You’d once seen your father, in a rage, tear a grape to tatters and ever since, the sight of purple gave you the screaming meemies. You’d once surprised your mother in the greenhouse, with the second gardener, sawing a grape in half and ever since, etc. The possibilities were endless and at twenty-five dollars an hour Dr. Baume would doubtless be willing to explore them all.

  Only—he remembered—he was no longer seeing Dr. Baume, as of Saturday afternoon last. Cured? No. Enlightened? No. Neurosis just disappear one night? Not at all. His “neurosis” was still flourishing mightly, according to Dr. Baume. It seemed, however, the good doctor had decided finally that Roger was immune to the gospel according to St. Sigmund Pity. He would miss those afternoon sessions. The man was fundamentally an ass, of course, but there had been a certain fascination in watching him juggle his little bag of tricks, like a witch doctor with his fetishes.

  Aggression, obsession, regression, traumatic, psychosomatic…What a pattern! It was doing the rounds of all the cocktail bars in town. You could hardly step around a potted palm these days without running into someone’s id, all done up in that intellectual pig Latin which for conversational bounce had the handy-andys of a few years ago backed off the boards.

  What a bomb that man Freud had thrown at language! And above all at the concept of personality. That ancient, tragic, comic, eternally various, and imponderable battleground of God and the devil, now reduced to just a dreary little museum with perhaps a dozen exhibits. “Oh look, here’s Mrs. Forsythe’s little problem. And this would be Mr. Culpepper’s alter ego. We met him at his daughter’s coming-out party, he was wearing tails, three of them apparently, and a paternal smile. The nasty man…Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With private hells, and stifled yells, and incest all in a row.”

  Well he was through with psychoanalysis and with Dr. Baume. So much for that. He hadn’t told Emily yet—or had he? Now he thought of it, it seemed to him that they’d had some words about it yesterday, before she left. Well, anyway, there wouldn’t be any words about it today. She was gone, to Boston, God bless her, and God bless the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad too and all trunk lines going west, east, north, and south with Emily on them. God bless the displaced children of Lower Slobbovia, too. By now Emily was ensconced in the Burgundy-colored, early morning gloom of her family’s fine old Early American house, in the fine old Early American spool bed, where Amy Lowell had composed “Lilacs,” or Betsy Ross had stitched the flag, or something. Presently, at seven-fifteen, she would be roused from slumber to go down to breakfast with her father, who had some stringy, New Englandish notion that he still had to show up at his office at eight o’clock, because the office boy got there then, and of course he must have his family around him at the breakfast table. And Emily would answer all their questions dutifully. What was Roger doing now? Was he writing something new? “Dear, me, still gathering material! It certainly took a great deal of time to plan a book. Let’s see, it was more than five years since his last.” And at this point, Mr. Selkirk would bring his hand down on the fine old Tudor table at which Emerson had sat, and maybe Cotton Mather, and possibly St. Paul himself. And he would say, “Why in heaven’s name don’t you leave the rotter, Emily?” And Emily, dear Emily, would surely say something impossibly quaint and lavenderish, like “Because I love him, Father.”

  Roger almost wished he were there. It was probably the only place left on earth where one could hear such dialogue.

  * * *

  —

  He looked at his watch. Quarter to six. He went to the window, pulled back the drape, and looked out. Night was paling there, the bare, proud forms of the trees came up out of the purplish dark as he watched. Quarter to six of a Monday morning and he was home in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Alone in the house, if he remembered correctly. Emily had let the servants go for the week end, they wouldn’t be back for an hour or more. By then he ought to have some rough idea of what he was in for today, whom he’d insulted, what apologies he had to make, what repairs to authorize. He would be lucky if it was only smashed bric-a-brac he had to clean up.

  At least Emily would be gone for a few days, which would be pleasant. He could spend the time with Lila in town, without having to arrange things. Say what you would, the need for those small habitual lies did something nasty to a relationship….

  Wait a minute. An unpleasant realization nudged his thoughts. He’d had a date to meet Lila in town last night. For dinner. Had he gone into town? After Emily left? He must have. He seemed to remember now walking into the Baroque and seeing Lila at their accustomed table, wearing a tiny minaret of tulle on her distinguished head and long black gloves almost to the sharp little elbows…and two spots of color on those tantalizing shadowed cheeks, always the danger signal….Oh, Lord. Now it came back. No wonder he’d been ducking it. He’d been late, hours late, and Lila had been furious with him. And when he’d tried to joke about it she’d picked up a glass of water and flung it in his face. And he’d reached over and slapped her!

  Roger stared unbelievingly at the recollection.

  Emily just gone to Boston, making him a present of the little island of days he and Lila were always hoping for, secure against interruption, free of the nagging little precautions and lies that somehow gnawed away the laughter—and they’d sat brawling over it, in public, like a pair of Hollywood characters. It wasn’t possible. He must have dreamed it. He couldn’t have been that drunk.

  Or could he? He groaned, half humorously. The dog raised his head and glanced at Roger, blinking, instantly anxious. Yes, I know, Fred. You’d like to help me. If you could take my headache and wear it in that dumb skull of yours you’d regard it as a privilege. You’d have all my hang-overs for me, gladly, you’d go get analyzed for me, you’d do my writing for me if you could. Anything to oblige. I know, I know.

  He rubbed the dog’s ears. The dog sighed, puffing out his dewlaps with a little wind of happiness, and put his head heavily down onto Roger’s knee, burrowing a
little into his clothes. If you could only get into my skin, Roger thought. How happy you’d be. You think!

  * * *

  —

  He went back, like a weary accountant, to the ledger marked Sunday. It promised to add up to quite a day when he got it all tallied. There’d been something with Emily, before she’d left, he was sure of that now. Something about the analysis? Was that why he’d got drunk? If only he could remember what it was she’d said, or done. The trouble was that the dream kept coming up on him now like an undigested dinner so it was hard for him to know what belonged to fact and what to fancy.

  “Bring in one of your dreams, let’s have a look at it,” the good doctor had kept urging him, much as, once upon a time, in the dear, dead days beyond recall, he might have asked Roger to bring in a specimen of urine. The only trouble was that Roger, even after six months of analysis, had never been able to see himself stretched out on a couch, talking about a dream. There were some things a grown man just didn’t do. Baiting the doctor was something else again. That had been amusing, even enjoyable, to lie back for an hour, toying with the man, observing the famous analyst, almost predictably, hold out one after another of his little stock of inflated cliches, for Roger to puncture. Hostility, aggression, rejection, inhibition—“Step right up, folks. Tell you what I’m gonna do. Not one, not two, but thirty-seven complexes, and one island of undigested experience, all for the price of a small yacht, a mere ten thousand dollars.”

  Gone, gone, the days when Nana took you to Dr. Lamb’s office on Elm Street, the big, soiled, friendly house, the big, soiled man who smelled so pleasantly of carbolic and Sen-Sen. “He’s been having nightmares again, doctor, can you give him something?…” And the dear, innocent man would thump your chest and feel your pulse. “Been eating before you go to bed?—stomach feel upset?—let’s see that tongue….”

  Ah, the simple-hearted days when nightmares first in the dooryard bloomed, no more mysterious than a green apple or a coated tongue. What would Dr. Lamb say of his tongue now? Or his larynx for that matter? Or the treacherous little sinuses; or the trachea, more or less fouled by industrial vapors; or the lungs that drew breath more or less gaspingly; or the non-mechanical heart that galloped and staggered, paused and then staggered on again; or the little glands that manufactured terror—trade name, Adrenalin. He would not even pause at any of the way stations of heartburn and malaise. His was the dark bourne of the Medulla, home of the Unconscious—that deep flowing river, one whose wavery shores one’s Aggressions slithered, like adders, in primordial mist.

  Work with your dreams, the good doctor had urged. There were all the mysteries contained, and there too the key to the mysteries. As if there was any mystery, really—unless you wanted to call Buchenwald a mystery, or Hiroshima. The real mystery was how so-called “normal” people went briskly about their “un-neurotic” concerns—working, writing, wenching, blithely acquiescing in their own imminent and horrible destruction. The mystery was that you didn’t have nightmares every night.

  * * *

  —

  The dream rose in his mind again, threw a momentary shadow, shapeless and huge over his thoughts. There was that sense of violence, of uncontrollable rage, and then running, running with those words after him, that idiotic phrase, filled with menace….There was a new wrinkle to the chase motif. Like a Walt Disney cartoon. Pandora’s box. Of course, Dr. Baume would have an explanation for that too. He’d always harped on the fact that words had a special significance for Roger.

  “One of the reasons you can’t write any more, Bowen, is that words have lost their proper function for you.” That had been the theme of one of their first discussions—or “consultations” as they appeared on the bill. “Words are no longer instruments of communication for you, but weapons—of revenge and destruction.”

  The words in the dream, of course, had been after him, trying to destroy him. But a little irrelevance like that wouldn’t trouble the good doctor. Like the Delphic oracle, he was never left voiceless by any arrangement of chicken bones and entrails, however senseless it might appear to anyone else. The good doctor had a pipeline to the source of all mystery, and all light.

  “Words have always been weapons, Doctor,” Roger had said in a bored voice. “That’s what they’re supposed to be. Weapons against smugness, hypocrisy, bigotry, stupidity, ignorance. If that’s neurotic, then every man with a conscience and a voice who ever lived was a neurotic.”

  “You’re no longer using them for that purpose, Bowen. You’ve stopped writing. You’re like a small boy who’s walked away from the feast because you’re hurt or angry, and you’re going to get back at everybody now by not eating.”

  Roger had yawned elaborately. “I suppose we’ll have the one about my mother next. I’m really revenging myself on her because when I was two years old she used to forsake me regularly to go and have long talks with the gardener under the peony bush.”

  “What’s your actual recollection of your mother?”

  “Almost none. She either wasn’t there, or she was smothering me in fake tenderness.”

  “You don’t think it’s possible you still carry a feeling of resentment toward her?”

  “Oh, anything’s possible, I suppose. Maybe I’m revenging myself on God for showing me a glimpse of paradise and then banishing me to hell.”

  “That may be part of it—if you substitute ‘father’ for ‘God.’ We don’t know what your hostility stems from yet. These things sometimes go very far back into infancy——”

  “Further than that too, I fancy. Into absurdity.”

  “You’re a sick man, Bowen. Don’t you want to get well?”

  “I’m probably the healthiest man you know.”

  “Why have you stopped writing?”

  “I’ve nothing I want to write about.”

  “Why do you drink?”

  “For the best reason in the world. I enjoy it.”

  * * *

  —

  And so round and round it had gone. Why don’t you write, why do you drink, why do you think…He shook his head violently, grimaced with pain. He’d never get things straightened out if he didn’t settle down now, organize his thoughts, separate the wheat from the chaff.

  Let’s see. Emily had left on the four o’clock train, and he’d got dressed and gone into town. That much seemed clear. He seemed to recall, too, stopping in at the Coulters sometime during the evening. Was that last evening? Or was it a week ago Sunday he was thinking about? No, there was a girl he’d been talking to, he couldn’t be mistaken about that—an English girl, quite young. Surely he hadn’t dreamed her up. He could see her quite clearly, blonde, small, with a very short upper lip—very attractive in a sec sort of way. Nobody could tell him he hadn’t actually seen that girl somewhere, talked to her? What about? He couldn’t remember now. But he did remember thinking that only a Frenchwoman could look chic with short legs and only an Englishwoman attractive with buck teeth….

  If he’d got into a conversation with her at the Coulters it was quite possible, as he knew from past experience, that he’d been late for dinner with Lila. As a matter of fact, he seemed to remember the girl dropping him at the Baroque. That’s right, she was stopping at the Savoy and she’d offered to give him a lift—good Lord! It wasn’t possible she’d been a witness to that Grand Guignol at the Baroque?

  He rubbed a palm over his damp forehead. Anyway, it was beginning to make some sort of sense. But what had happened after Lila blew her top? That was a complete blank. How had he got home? There was a nice little problem in aerodynamics. He must have driven himself home, no one else was going to drive him forty miles from New York, certainly not Lila in a rage, or an English girl he’d never met before in his life. He must have been at the wheel himself. But it wasn’t possible. How could he have gone those forty miles, past two toll stations, without remembering anything, without hav
ing run off the road, or hit something, or somebody?

  For that matter, how did he know he hadn’t hit somebody? Well, it was fairly obvious he hadn’t, or he’d be in a ditch somewhere right now, or in a hospital, or in a police station. But suppose it hadn’t been a collision? Suppose it had been just a lonely figure on the road, a child crossing the street….

  He hanged his fist down on the desk. Damn it all, it was all very well to be lighthearted about hangovers but this was no joke. He might have killed somebody driving in that condition. Whatever else he might be he certainly was no murderer….

  He paused, in his thoughts, and grimaced. At least not in his own estimation. Dr. Baume seemed to have other ideas on the subject.

  “You don’t believe in psychoanalysis, do you, Bowen?”

  “Believe in it? I believe it’s a phenomenon of our time. Like vitamin pills, bebop, and singing commercials.”

  “Why do you continue to come here? Waste your time and money?”

  “My time, doctor. Emily’s money. She’s keen about the stuff, has some quaint notion it’ll bring us closer together. I don’t mind humoring her.”

  “You don’t believe it can benefit you?”

  “Frankly, no. But don’t get self-conscious about it. I don’t expect any benefit from movies either, and I go quite regularly. I’ve a certain curiosity in observing how far the lunacy and vulgarity of my contemporaries can go. I’m able to report that the possibilities seem endless.”