The Big Book of Reel Murders
Page 204
I watched him, fascinated; and the curious glances of others, too, were turned upon him.
Then, there was an interruption. Across the room a storm of profanity and abuse burst forth—a fury of invective. It was the shrill, high voice of a woman—the voice of Shalimar, the dancer—screaming imprecations at the head of Dallas. The big detective stood beside her, brandishing a paper. Every eye in the room save Lavender’s was on this new and surprising spectacle.
I swung again to look at Lavender—and Jimmie Lavender was looking earnestly into the dead eyes of the corpse.
The chief of the detectives came striding back, dragging the dancer with him. He flung her savagely into a chair and glared at her. The scattered groups drew closer, in spite of the warnings of detectives appointed to keep them apart.
“There’s your murderer, Jimmie!” roared Dallas. “By God, I was right about it all the time! The shot came from behind!”
He flung a small blue pistol onto the table beside the dead man’s head. The weapon was certainly almost small enough to palm.
“Still had it in her pocket,” bellowed Dallas. “No chance to hide it, I suppose. Come on, now, you yellow floosey! Come clean! We’ve got it on you. You tried to shoot the Russian girl, but you missed and got your boy friend—didn’t you?”
The dancer’s eyes were gleaming with hate. They swung from Dallas’s triumphant face to that of Olga Marinoff, who sat half dazed beside Howard Andrews. Then the evil eyes retreated; they were suddenly tragic and bewildered.
“Yes,” said the dull voice of the dancer. “I killed him—I killed the man I loved! It was all a terrible mistake. Take me away! I don’t care what you do with me. But first—let me put on my clothes.”
For a moment Dallas continued to glare down at her. Then he shrugged his mountainous shoulders and cocked an eye at one of his detectives.
“Go with her, Enright,” he ordered. “Bring her back as soon as possible. Get rid of all these people, Cleary. We won’t want any of ’em now. Unless anybody has anything to add?” he questioned, raising his voice to its accustomed bellow.
“That’s that,” said Dallas cheerily, to Jimmie Lavender. “A swift ending to what might have been a pretty nasty case. But I was right in the beginning—although you almost upset me with that woman’s confession! You were pretty smart yourself, Jimmie, not to fall for it. We were thinking right together, all the time.”
“Don’t offer me a position on the force,” said Jimmie Lavender. “I couldn’t bear it. I suppose I ought to congratulate you, Dallas; but I really can’t feel that—Good Lord! What’s that?”
A crash had sounded from the direction of the dressing rooms; it was followed by a frantic shout, and then a rush of heavy feet. Immediately there was a second crash and a thud on the boards.
“Chief…! Chief…!” It was the voice of Enright, screaming from behind the scenes.
Dallas upset a chair, swore brilliantly, and bounded towards the sound. His remaining detectives hurried after him, and I should have been among them had not Lavender put a hand on my arm.
“No hurry, Gilly,” he said. “I thought this was a possibility. Her meekness was so sudden and so surprising. I’m hoping that Miss Shalimar, or whatever the lady’s name may be, has ended our case for us in the most satisfactory manner.”
We reached the dressing room door in time to hear the gist of Enright’s explanation.
“She was too quick for me, Chief! I didn’t have a chance to stop her. First she throws the water bottle at my head, as I’m telling you—and I ducks. Then she jumps for her table. Before I knew what she was after, she had it in her hand—the razor, I mean. I yelled, and made a run at her; but she was too quick for me. It was in her blood, I guess—the razor, I mean! My God, I never seen anything so quick, the way she—”
IV
“What the devil have you got there, Jimmie?” I asked, a few hours later. “What are you doing with that tumbler? And what’s the idea of all this experimenting at four o’clock in the morning?”
He was smiling gently at a liquor glass, turning it slowly in his fingers. For some time he had been fussing with his little stock of chemicals.
“Whether the murderer of Peter Vallance is ever brought to justice,” said Jimmie Lavender, “depends largely on the alertness of the coroner’s staff. For my part, I don’t intend to help them.”
I stood up and crossed the room to stand beside him.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Good Heavens, Jimmie! You don’t mean that it was Sue Vallance, after all?”
“Vallance was poisoned,” he answered. “He was dead when he began to slip towards the Russian actress—you remember? It was assumed that he was about to kiss her shoulder; it was a natural explanation, since he had done that sort of thing before. But he was quite dead, then, or a few moments later. Shalimar’s shot had no bearing on the case. She thought she had killed him, and in that belief she committed suicide. Actually, her bullet merely grazed his skull, over the left ear, making a flesh wound and causing a flow of blood. It couldn’t possibly have killed him. When I had examined the wound, I reached that conclusion—and started my search for the bullet. I found it on the floor, some distance away. It had been deflected, and fortunately had struck no one else.”
He brought the little piece of lead up out of his pocket, while I stared at him in amazement.
“Then I looked at his eyes. They were wide open and somewhat glazed; and there was a considerable dilation of the pupil.”
“Good—”
“Lord!” finished Lavender cheerily. “Right, Gilly! I thought so myself. It was apparent that Vallance had been poisoned some time previously—some time before Shalimar fired her shot—some time before Mrs. Vallance clicked her empty pistol.”
The probable truth struck me between the eyes.
“Andrews!” I said. “He sat at Vallance’s right hand. That’s why you stole that liquor glass! That’s the reason for your early morning experiments! What was it?”
“It was chloral hydrate that put him to sleep,” said Jimmie Lavender. “Good old ‘knockout drops.’ But that was not enough to kill him. Something had to stop his heart while he slept, and do it quickly, without alarming symptoms.”
“Cyanide?” I suggested. “A crystal or two would turn the trick.”
“The post mortem appearances didn’t suggest it; remember the dilation of the pupils. No, it was atropine. It isn’t difficult to get, it’s often prescribed, its action on the heart is well known, and a fatal overdose could easily be dissolved in a very small amount of chloral. It is precisely the sort of drug we might expect to find in Mrs. Vallance’s medicine chest, considering her distraught condition.”
I slapped my knee. “What an idiot I am! There was a bottle of chloral at the house! Then Mrs. Vallance did—”
“She did nothing, Gilly, except try to murder her husband with an empty revolver. In the circumstances, there’s no reason to suppose she had already poisoned him. She could only have done that at home, and the time element is all against it.”
I looked at him in horror.
“Yes,” he said, “I see you’ve got it, at last.”
“It’s impossible,” I cried. “She didn’t leave our side!”
“Oh, yes, she did,” said Jimmie Lavender. “I almost forgot it, too; but suddenly I remembered. She left us to slap that note of Shalimar’s under Vallance’s nose! I have visualized that scene very clearly, after much thinking. The note was in her left hand, and her handkerchief was in her right. Under her handkerchief, I venture to suggest, was a tiny vial containing the stuff. Her finger would be on the mouth of it—and the rest was easy. As she bent across him and put the letter down before him, her hand would rest lightly—even naturally—on his liquor glass; and the entire dose need not have been any more than could be held in
a teaspoon.”
“Barbara Allardyce!” I said. “I can’t believe it.”
“It was a generous action, after a fashion,” said Lavender. “It’s even possible to admire her. She did it for her sister, and she ran a frightful risk. But for Shalimar’s unpredictable shot, there would be only the poison to account for Vallance’s death; and it might very well have been brought home to her. Possibly she thought the Russian would be blamed. Possibly she didn’t care what happened. As it is, there’s a chance for her. I’ve got to reach her, the first thing in the morning, and tell her to keep quiet.”
“There’ll be an autopsy,” I demurred.
“Not necessarily. After Shalimar’s confession and suicide, there may be no more than a casual examination by a perfunctory coroner’s man. A hasty inquest and a quick verdict would be a triumph for Dallas. You may depend on it, he’ll try to swing it. He’s not overfond of mysteries. But even if she were brought to trial, I doubt that a jury would convict her. We are a sentimental race where a good-looking woman is concerned.”
He stretched and looked at the clock. “I’m abetting a crime, I suppose,” said Jimmie Lavender. “I can’t say that it greatly bothers me. Let Shalimar take the rap. After all, her intentions were murderous enough. As for us, we can afford to be generous. We were not any too bright, either one of us, to let Miss Barbara get away with it!”
No Hard Feelings
FREDERICK NEBEL
THE STORY
Original publication: Black Mask, February 1936
PULP WRITERS WORKING IN THE MIDST of the Great Depression were famously prolific, but few could match Frederick Nebel (1903–1967), who produced prodigious amounts of mystery fiction, primarily in several long-running series, mainly in Black Mask and its closest rival, Dime Detective, in a career that essentially ended after a single decade (1927–1937). His crime-fighting heroes are tough and frequently violent, but they bring a strong moral code to their jobs, as well as a level of realism achieved by few other pulp writers. He was often described as Black Mask’s best writer after Dashiell Hammett stopped writing for it and before Raymond Chandler did.
He pounded out hard-boiled stories about such fixtures of their era as Cardigan, the hard-as-nails Irish operative working for the Cosmos Agency in St. Louis, nearly fifty in all, which ran from 1931 to 1937 in the pages of Dime Detective; the best of them were published in The Adventures of Cardigan (1988).
A popular series featured Donny “Tough Dick” Donahue of the Interstate agency, with twenty-one adventures, all in Black Mask, that ran from 1930 to 1935; a half dozen of the best were collected in Six Deadly Dames (1950).
Perhaps most significantly, Nebel wrote the hugely popular, long-running series about Captain Steve MacBride and the ever-present local reporter, Kennedy, who frequently takes over a story and does as much crime solving as the official member of the police department. Nebel sold the MacBride series to Warner Brothers, which made nine films.
Other films were also based on Nebel’s work, notably his only two novels; Sleepers West (1941) was a Mike Shayne film based on Sleepers East (1933) and Fifty Roads to Town (1937) was based on his 1936 crime novel of the same name. He also wrote the story for The Bribe (1949), which starred Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Charles Laughton, and Vincent Price.
THE FILM
Title: Smart Blonde, 1937
Studio: Warner Brothers Pictures
Director: Frank McDonald
Screenwriters: Kenneth Garnet, Don Ryan
Producers: Jack L. Warner, Hal Wallis
THE CAST
• Glenda Farrell (Torchy Blane)
• Barton MacLane (Steve MacBride)
• Wini Shaw (Dolly Ireland)
• Craig Reynolds (Tom Carney)
Nebel sold the rights to the MacBride and Kennedy characters to Warner Brothers, which made the first film in the series, Smart Blonde, less than one year after “No Hard Feelings” was published in Black Mask. However, in the film version, Kennedy is changed to a perky, wisecracking, female reporter for The Morning Herald named Teresa “Torchy” Blane, who is in love with McBride, a detective.
Glenda Farrell and Barton MacLane were teamed as Torchy and Steve in seven of the nine films in the series, which ran until 1939. Lola Lane and Paul Kelly played the roles in the 1938 film Torchy Blane in Panama and Jane Wyman and Allen Jenkins took over the roles in the last film in the series, Torchy Plays with Dynamite.
Director Frank McDonald knew from the outset that he wanted Glenda Farrell to play Torchy Blane. She had already created the template for the hard-boiled female reporter four years earlier as the heroine of Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), directed by Michael Curtiz. Discovered on Broadway, the Oklahoma native made an impression in Hollywood when it transitioned to sound films with her rapid-fire delivery; it was determined that she could speak nearly four hundred words per minute.
In a letter to Time magazine in 1988, Superman cocreator Jerry Siegel admitted that he and partner Joe Shuster had based Clark Kent’s Daily Planet colleague and love interest Lois Lane on the indefatigable Torchy, with Glenda Farrell serving as the physical model while the character’s surname came from Torchy Blane in Panama star Lola Lane.
The story was adapted again as the 1941 film A Shot in the Dark. The movie’s working title during filming was No Hard Feelings, just as it had been for Smart Blonde.
The radio series Meet MacBride, based on Nebel’s Black Mask series, made its debut on CBS on June 13, 1936.
NO HARD FEELINGS
Frederick Nebel
CHAPTER I
The train slouched in through the outer yards of Richmond City and Kennedy hopped it at Tower B. It was a fine night, mellow with stars. The air was mild, it was moistened just enough by a lazy east breeze. Kennedy swung up to the observation platform, crumpled his hat beneath his coat, under his armpit, and drifted into the lounge car. It was bright and cheerful with lights. The porter was gathering up magazines.
Kennedy found the Pullman conductor in the smoking compartment of the third car from the rear. The conductor was busy getting his papers in order and did not look up. Kennedy said:
“Are we on time?”
“On the nose,” the conductor said.
“Where can I find George Torgensen?”
The conductor said, without looking up, “Drawing Room A, next car ahead.”
Kennedy went through the narrow corridor into the vestibule, crossed the shifting apron to the next vestibule and entered a car named Xanthus. He rippled his knuckles down the door of Drawing Room A and when a voice said, “Come in,” he opened the door and was thrown in by a lurch of the car. He reeled around, got the door shut, was thrown a second time and landed on a narrow green settee.
“Haven’t got my sea legs,” he said, with a dusty smile. “Glad to make your acquaintance, Mr. Torgensen.”
“What’ve you got to be glad about?”
“My name is Kennedy.”
“Am I supposed to be glad to meet you?”
They looked at each other for half a minute. Torgensen began to smile. He was a short, round, moon-faced man. His hands were short and chubby and very well taken care of. The beginnings of his smile made his face look rosy, jolly, and presently he began to shake with noiseless laughter. He had his derby on and a pair of lightweight gray gloves lay on his left knee. His bags had been taken out.
“Okey, boy,” he said good-temperedly. “I was only kidding. What’s on your mind?”
“I’m from the press—”
“Sure. Coppers and newspapermen—I can tell ’em in the dark.”
“Do you think you’re going to like Richmond City?”
“I can learn to like any place.”
“What do you think of Fitz Mularkey going idealistic?”
Kennedy nodded. “Do you know that quite a number of guys in this town have overbid you?”
Torgensen waved his hand. “I didn’t bid, boy. Fitz came to Boston and said, ‘George, I’m bailing out. I’m going to get hooked with a good gal, I’m going in partners with a real estate broker and I’m going to live like a human being. You can dig in on the old gravy for a million flat. Five hundred thousand down and the rest in five years.’ So I didn’t bid. I understand he got an offer of a million and two hundred grand, and several others. But we’re old buddies, boy.”
“Can I print what you’ve just said?”
“Print it? Hell, yes! And you can print more. You can tell the town that George Torgensen comes to it with his feet washed. I’m going to run the Eastmarsh Track, the Town Arena, and the Million Club the way Fitz ran ’em—on the level.” He picked up his gloves and leaned forward. “And that’s the reason, boy, that Fitz is selling to me. He could have sold to any number of punks, at more than I’m giving him—but he wants to leave his babies in good hands. He wants to live like what he calls a human being. That’s his business. Me, well—I like it like I am, a little rough, a little tough, and a little nasty. But”—he pointed and looked along his level finger with a sharp, squinted eye—“on the level.” Then he stood up. “Well, here we are.”
Kennedy stood up too. He smiled. “You sound like good oats, Mr. Torgensen.”