Crime on My Hands

by George Sanders

  He got to his feet. “I think not. You doubtless planned for that deputy to arrive at eight and eavesdrop on our conversation. And to arrest me when I’d made a damaging statement. That’s why I arrived an hour early, not that it matters now.”

  “I expected you to arrive an hour early,” I said, with an attempt at casualness.

  “A bad attempt at a bluff, George. Naturally, I didn’t underestimate you. I watched the house for two hours before I came in, to make certain you didn’t set any traps.”

  He sniffed at the tantalizing odor from the kitchen. “Too bad about the meal, old boy, but I think we had better toddle along.”

  I got to my f eet, too, and moved so that when he faced me his back was toward the open bedroom door. ‘I’m not going with you, Riegleman.”

  “Oh, I think so,” he said pleasantly. “You don’t wish to be killed here, do you?”

  “Not here or anywhere. In fact, I’m not going to be killed.”

  “Oh, I think so.” He was still pleasant. “I’ve rather developed a taste for killing. It makes one somewhat like God. Power of life and death, and all that.”

  “That isn’t why you killed Paul. It was because he asked you about Herman Smith. He remem bered that Smith was a remittance man, and would inherit if his father and elder brother died.”

  Riegleman nodded. “I overheard Paul telephone a friend here in Hollywood and corroborate that fact. When he headed toward your trailer, I killed him. I still hoped, at that time, to get away with it.”

  “I see. I was wrong on a few details, but I came out at the right door.”

  “You did very well. Shall we go now?”

  “Wait a moment. How did you know Lord Cecil was coming to my party?”

  “I invited him, of course.”

  “Why, so did I.”

  Riegleman smiled. “So I learned. I pretended to be you on the telephone, and it was confusing for a while. I explained that I had – or you had – invited so many that it had slipped your mind. So he said he wanted to talk to you, and would come early. He was going to identify me as his cousin, who was the next of kin. The title wouldn’t pass to me, but the money would.”

  “The money has always been your first consideration,” I said. “You waylaid him, tried to kill him, lef t him for dead, and waited for somebody to arrive?”

  “I drove down the street and parked until Wally arrived in a cab. I came in with him, you remember?”

  “I hadn’t noticed. Did you use a hammer on Lord Cecil?”

  “Yes, it’s in my toolbox. I haven’t decided yet whether to use it or a gun on you. Which would you prefer?”

  “Hammers are messy,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to go down in criminal history as a hammer slayer, would you?” I spoke casually, but I could feel every drop of ice-cold sweat on my forehead. “Besides, you’re not going to kill me. I knew you meant to, when I saw your expression yesterday on the set. But naturally, I’m against it.”

  His eyes took on a slight glaze. He brought the gun out of his pocket. “I’ve got to kill you. Right here and now, if necessary.”

  “You won’t,” I said, “because Lamar James has you covered.”

  Riegleman grinned. An unpleasant grin. “That’s a very old gag, George. You thought I was going to turn my head for a moment, and you’d have a chance to dive at me. Sorry. I know the gag too well. I’ve used it in some old B pictures myself.”

  Lamar James’s voice said, right behind him, “Don’t move, Riegleman. I won’t kill you, because I want you to stand trial. But I’ll shoot you at the base of the spine. That would hurt.”

  I’d always thought, “His face turned gray,” was a literary affectation. Watching Riegleman, I found out it could really happen. The gun sagged a little in his hand. He started to turn his head.

  “Don’t move,” Lamar James said. “Hand your gun to George.”

  Riegleman did so. I gripped it. It felt comfortably reassuring in my hand.

  “All right,” I said, loudly. “You can come and get him now.”

  “Okay,” Lamar James’s voice said.

  From the loudspeaker came the click of a telephone being cradled, and then the dial tone. Riegleman jerked his head toward it, then glared furiously at me.

  “He was listening in his hotel room,” I said. “He’ll be along in a moment. I was afraid you might have remembered my telephone set-up here, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered. I could have handled you anyway.”

  At least, I thought, The Falcon, and The Saint always could handle such situations. “I had to use the telephone set-up,” I said, “because I didn’t dare have anyone come here. I was afraid you’d be watching.”

  He started to move, and I raked his face with the gun barrel. He raised his hand to the cut.

  “That’s for Peggy,” I said. “You shot her in the back. Just dare to move again, will you?”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It was like an old-fashioned family reunion. Melva looked ecstatic, and Fred was trying to talk into four telephones at once. Wallingford came in just as Carla was released from her cell and rushed into the waiting room. While she mumbled a routine of incoherent thanks, Wallingford shook hands with Lamar James, heaven knows why.

  Wanda had come in with Wallingford, and she and Carla dived at me simultaneously. Both of them began to trickle tears down my neck, while Wallingford shook hands with the jailer, with Fred, and with a man who’d come in to empty the wastebaskets. Everything sort of went all to pieces for a minute.

  “Isn’t it wonderful!” Wanda cried. “Wally’s going to let me do comedy. I’ll be leading woman in your next, George.”

  “George,” Carla said, “I knew, I just knew you wouldn’t let me rot here. Oh, I thank you, I thank you!”

  “And I can wear a bathing suit in one scene,” Wanda said.

  Carla drew back. She looked coolly at Wanda. “How nice,” she said. “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “Not at all, darling,” Wanda said frostily. “Nor would you be – if you were I.”

  Carla shrugged. She turned to me. “What shall we do to celebrate, George?”

  My pulse beat a trifle faster. She was very beautiful.

  “You girls run along,” Wallingford said crisply. “I lost a director just now. We got a picture to finish. Already, it’s a big investment. George, maybe you can help out, huh?”

  I just couldn’t keep the delight out of my eyes. Not only was I playing Hilary Weston, I could direct the rest of the picture.

  “Not for the money you’re paying him,” Melva began indignantly.

  Wallingford waved a hand at her. “Tomorrow we talk business,” he said expansively. “Meantime, have a cigar.” He looked at Melva, caught himself, and said, “All right, have a cigarette. Take the whole pack. Women shouldn’t be agents. A nice girl like you, too!”

  I was in a kind of happy haze. I blinked, and realized that Wanda and Carla were looking at me. Not very amiably, either. Then they looked at each other.

  “All right,” Carla said. “We’ll go celebrate without him.”

  “Fine,” Wanda said. “After all, he’s more interested in the picture than in us.”

  They went off arm in arm. I opened my mouth to call them back. Before I could speak, they said, almost in unison, “See you tomorrow, George.”

  I felt very lonely, all of a sudden.

  Wallingford spoke to me three times before I became aware of him. “How is it, George? Do you direct, or not?”

  “Sure, Wally. I’ll be glad to.”

  “You don’t sound glad.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I’ve got a dinner at home, crying to be eaten. And I have to get there and take my phone apart to hang it up.” I frowned. “There must be some way to fix it so it will hang up.” I finished, “Why don’t you two come home and have dinner with me?”

  “If you feel the way you look,” Lamar James said, “the food is spoiled.”

  “Stop worrying about the girls,” Walli
ngford commanded. “They’ll be back. And if they don’t come back, some others will. If you stand long enough in one place, a good looker will be along.”

  “In the corridor of a jail?” I asked.

  Wallingford stared wildly around at the row of cell doors. “Ever since this picture started, I been spending a lot of time in some jail! If it gets to be a habit, you’re fired, George.”

  He grabbed my arm and hustled me out on the street. We got into Lamar James’s car, and pulled out into traffic. Wallingford turned to me, and he seemed embarrassed.

  “George, I got bad news.”

  “You mean I can’t direct the picture after all?”

  He grinned. “So you forgot about them girls already. No, this ain’t about the picture, George. It’s about that present I promised you. I can’t get one. There ain’t any.”

  I blinked, then remembered I had asked him for a transit, a 22-inch achromatic.

  “It was a gag, Wally. There’s one on Mount Wilson, I know, but it’s very special. Maybe I can get an engineering outfit to make one just like it.”

  “Engineering?” he asked incredulously. “You crazy?”

  “Why, no. I should think a manufacturer of engineering supplies should be able to build a transit.”

  “What’s all this transit stuff?” he demanded.

  “An achromatic, twenty-two inch transit. That’s what I asked for.”

  “Oh!” he cried loudly. “And I wired every circus in the world for a twenty-two inch acrobat!”

  About the Author

  George Sanders was born in St Petersburg in 1906. He left Russia in 1917 with his family, who settled in England and had George educated at Bedales and Brighton College.

  He made his British film debut in 1929, but it was in 1930’s Hollywood that he honed his distinctive, charming-yet-dangerous screen persona – the quintessential cad. Sanders co-starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent (both 1940), and went on to win an Academy Award for his signature role, that of Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (1950). He continued to work in films up until the year of his death in 1972.

  In the 1940’s, Sanders’ film-star status was the impetus for his two crime novels, both featuring recognizably Sanders-esque heroes: Crime on My Hands (1944) and Stranger at Home (1946). In 1960 came a third book: his autobiography, fittingly titled Memoirs of A Professional Cad in which the line between fiction and fact is blurred even more convincingly – and wittily – than in the novels. All three works are available as ebooks from Dean Street Press.

  Also by George Sanders

  Stranger at Home

  Memoirs of A Professional Cad

  Stranger at Home – Chapter One

  The street hadn’t changed any. It lay curving in the shadows, the single street lamp lost in the soft heavy branches of a Chinese elm, and there was nothing different about it. Not a thing.

  The same gates, spaced widely apart. The same distant gleam of windows screened from the world by the rich green of banknotes. If he walked forward, just up there where the pavement swerved out of sight, he would see his own house.

  He would not do that. Not yet. Not quite yet. His hands were shaking. He thrust them into his jacket pockets, and then laughed, because his fingers had come through the rotten fabric. He turned his back on the street, facing out the way he had come, and went on foot up the steep hill.

  From here there was no hill, only what seemed to be a sheer edge, and beyond it was the city, very small and far away. He could look west to the dark sea, and south to the low slim line of the hogback where the oil wells were, and east to the rough knees of the mountains. In the hollow circle of these things lay Los Angeles, with Hollywood and Beverly Hills and all the swarming little suburbs tugging at her flanks like cubs around a wolf bitch. The lights were beautiful.

  It hadn’t changed, either. Even the soft veil of fog was there, the smell of the sea. He shivered as the sweat chilled on his body after the long climb.

  He turned and began to walk up along the street. He did not hurry. He could hear his footsteps, one after the other, like the ticking of a clock.

  He rounded the bend, and saw ahead where the pavement ended.

  The jacaranda trees were still in front of the gate. Four times, he thought, they’ve blossomed since I saw them last. He could remember how the curling petals used to fall and drift the grass like blue snow. Four times. Four years.

  He walked to the gate and reached out and touched it, and the spring catch was just the same as he remembered it. He swung open one side and went through and closed it again behind him. Then he stood still.

  He could feel the smooth concrete under the broken soles of his shoes, and the ground under the concrete. It had a different feel from any other ground in the world. It was his ground.

  He walked on up the drive, and the wolfhounds came roaring at him suddenly down the broad sweep of the lawn.

  He stood quite still, his hands at his sides, and said, “Coolin.” And then, “Dee.” The larger of the two hounds broke stride, and his voice died away uncertainly. The smaller one, puzzled, stopped also, but she kept up a vicious snarling. They were Irish, two huge gray shadows, lighter than blown smoke.

  The man said to the smaller one, “You’re not Dee. She had a white rift on her chest.”

  The one called Coolin shivered and moaned and then leaped. The man’s arms went around him and they stood swaying, the hound erect and slightly taller than the man, crying like a woman in his throat, and the man saying idiotically over and over again, “It’s me. Pappy. Remember me, boy? It’s Pappy.”

  Suddenly, into the privacy of the rough gray neck, he said rapidly, almost savagely, “Pappy. God-damned silly name. Where is she, boy? Four years I haven’t seen her. Where is she?”

  He thrust the hound away and began to walk, swiftly, across the grass. Coolin stayed beside him, his muzzle thrust under the man’s hand, and his mate followed, grumbling. The man didn’t see them, or hear them. All he saw now was the house, low and gracious along the crest of the rising ground, with the lamps burning in the long windows. He crossed the drive and went up the steps and across the terrace, and the door was open, as it had always been. It swung wide under his hand, and he was home.

  To his right, in the sunken living room, a woman put down her book and rose. She was pale-blonde, well-built and handsome, with a rather smug air of authority. She wore a flowing hostess gown of oyster-colored silk and reading glasses with straight bows that didn’t bother her coiffure. She removed these as she turned toward the door, and then, abruptly, in the act of turning, she stopped, the glasses held frozen in mid-air. Her dark eyes stared and did not blink, and around them her face broke apart like something sculptured in dry sand.

  The man in the hallway said quietly, “Hello, Joan. Where’s Angie?”

  The woman began to move toward him. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. Within ten feet of him she stopped and said, “Michael Vickers.” She put out her left hand and caught the edge of a polished inlaid table and stood leaning against it.

  ‘I’m alive,” said Vickers. “Don’t faint. Where’s Angie?”

  Again she did not answer. She looked at him, up and down, and he stood waiting, framed in the hallway arch, with the hounds beside him. A tall man, three inches over six feet, his big gaunt frame covered with dirty odds and ends of clothing that, simply because they were on him, acquired a certain raffish dignity. His face was neither handsome nor ugly, but it was a face you looked at. The pertinent adjective now seemed to be “hungry.” A white scar ran from under his hairline across his right temple.

  Joan whispered, “I don’t believe it’s you.” Beads of sweat came through the face powder, made a glittering rim above the perfect line of her liprouge. She went on staring, senselessly.

  Vickers said impatiently, “For God’s sake, Joan! Come out of it.”

  She drew a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly, and moved away from the table, balancing hersel
f carefully on her feet, her head drawn erect. “Where have you been, Michael? What’s happened to you?”

  There was a picture of himself as he had been four years ago. It stood on the table beside Joan. Himself, groomed and conditioned like a prize horse, his well-fed face half smiling and contemptuous. Vickers studied it briefly.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Where’s Angie?”

  This time she answered. She had folded her hands tightly at her waist and her face had a closed look, but there was nothing in her voice. “She’s not here, Michael. She went down to the beach.”

  “Alone?”

  “No. There’s a party.”

  “Still the same bunch?”

  “Just about.”

  “Good,” said Vickers. His eyelids drooped, giving his face the look of a death mask. “Yes. That’s good. Are my things still upstairs?”

  “Yes. We – didn’t know...”

  “No. All right, Joan. I’m going up and see what I can do about myself. And don’t call her, Joan. You understand? I’m going down there myself, and I don’t want you to call her.”

  Her eyes widened. “But why? I should think...”

  “Should you?”

  He saw the curtain of subservience drawn back into place. She said, “Very well, Michael.”

  He laughed. “That sounded like the old Vickers, by God!” He turned away. Over his shoulder he said, “Get yourself a drink, Joan. You look horrible.”

  As he went upstairs he heard her say sulkily, “You might have let us know.”

  At the top of the stairs he paused, then turned right to Angie’s bedroom instead of left to his own. The house was silent. The servants, of course, would be at the beach. The hounds were still at his heels, and the bitch had finally stopped growling.

  Angie was there as soon as he opened her door. The faint exciting spice of her perfume, her self in the bright draperies and the pictures and the yellow satin bedspread. He walked across to the huge double bed and touched the satin, and then he opened the closet door ­ a vast closet, full of lovely colors and textures, empty now of shape, waiting. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath, and the picture of her came before him clearly.