The Lady in the Morgue

by Jonathan Latimer

  The Lady in the Morgue

  A Bill Crane Mystery

  Jonathan Latimer

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  INTRODUCTION

  Screwball.

  It’s a term best applied to those antic, side-of-the-mouth, quintessentially American motion pictures of the Depression era and after that blew one big, lubricious, democratic razzberry at conventional behavior. With civilized society at home and abroad coming spectacularly and emphatically apart, only two responses seemed remotely appropriate – laughter or tears; and the sassier cinematic artists, refusing to cry in their beer, dropped an egg in it instead. Director Howard Hawks comes immediately to mind, with insouciant offerings like Twentieth Century (1934) and Bringing Up Baby (1938), fast, flip and steeped in sexual innuendo.

  So does writer Dashiell Hammett, whose 1934 detective novel The Thin Man became pretext for a scapegrace series of five screen exploits through 1947 of cocktail-bibbing Nick and Nora Charles, whom audiences pronounced outrageous but their creator deemed only smug.

  And, perhaps less instantly though every bit as visibly, former journalist Jonathan Latimer (1906-1983), whose tongue remained at once tough-tart and poked firmly in his cheek, not only in bestselling hard and paperback murder tales but a number of slick screenplays as well, one of which became the top treatment of Hammett’s The Glass Key with Alan Ladd in 1942.

  Screwball.

  That’s Latimer’s hand in Topper Returns, the Roland Young-Joan Blondell 1941 romp featuring disappearing bodies, cops locked in an ice box and an assortment of secret passages. At one juncture, after a stabbing, a shooting and the dropping of hapless Eddie “Rochester” Anderson through a trap door into the subterranean soup, Topper thinks to use the telephone for assistance. The cord, of course, has been cut.

  Young: “This thing is dead.”

  Blondell: “It’s epidemic!”

  Latimer had nothing to do with the shooting script for his own The Lady in the Morgue, which by consequence became a routine programmer for Preston Foster in 1938. But, with others, he did write lively action and dialogue for crisp features like Nocturne (1946) with George Raft, The Big Clock (1947) with Charles Laughton and Alias Nick Beal (1949) with Ray Milland. Notes critic Leonard Maltin of Latimer’s 1939 Lone Wolf Spy Hunt with Warren William, Ida Lupino and Rita Hayworth: “an excellent, chic, entertaining film by any standards.”

  Which is to say that funny as he was, the inventor of hard-boiled and half-boiled private eye Bill Crane was a steady professional with a pervasive, film-influence emphasis on patter and pace. He may not have taken his subjects seriously, sniping away persistently at starlets, police officers and the fourth estate, but Latimer was quite serious about his craft. Not, one can safely add, about himself.

  He clearly was responsible for the authorial jacket blurb that appeared beneath his squinty, cigarette-sucking photo on Black is the Fashion for Dying (Random House, 1959). This reads: “Jonathan Latimer was born in Chicago, the setting for his early successful novels. He now lives in California, where he writes movies and an occasional brilliant novel.”

  Screwball.

  The author graduated from Knox College, Galesburg, Ill., magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. His first job was with the City News Bureau as a police reporter for the Chicago Herald-Examiner in 1929, where he remained until 1935. He dude-ranched in Montana, did movie stunt work and provided publicity for former Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, moving on to screenwriting at Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

  During World War II Latimer was executive officer on a destroyer escort doing convoy duty in the Atlantic.

  He had two marriages, one daughter and two sons. From 1960 to 1965 Latimer wrote for the Perry Mason television series, adapting 50 of Erle Stanley Gardner’s books for the show and providing 45 original scripts of his own. He died of lung cancer June 23, 1983, in La Jolla, California.

  Latimer’s mystery fiction begins black and darkens. Murder in the Madhouse (1934) starts in an asylum, Headed for a Hearse (1935) in a death-house cell and The Lady in the Morgue (1936) in the Cook County slabworks, punctuated by the laughter of an insane woman in the nearby Psychopathic Hospital. The protagonist of these high-spirited grotesques (and star of two subsequent, The Dead Don’t Care and Red Gardenias) is New York agency operative William Crane, who likes women and whiskey and whiskey, and not necessarily in that order. Latimer quotes his hero: “‘Never drink when I’m on a job,’ he lied …”

  Morgue moves like a body snatcher berserk upon a skateboard. In and out, over and down the dance hall dives, penthouses and even creaky-door crypts of Depression Chicago heat stalks Crane, customarily oiled, and gum-shoe cohorts Doc Williams and Tom O’Malley, wrapped in the sound of Louis Armstrong and the scent of Guerlain’s Shalimar. The book is very much of a place and time. At moments, Latimer’s blinkless regard captures photographic scraps of the past, as in this tight snapshot of the contents to a murdered girl’s medicine chest:

  Tall silver-labeled jars stood next to squat white jars; three Dr. West toothbrushes were sprouting from a red, flower-potlike container; a round cardboard box was half-filled with pale orange dusting powder; loose platinum-shaded Hump hairpins were scattered along one shelf; on another lay a tube of lpana toothpase, a metal-sheathed lipstick …

  Pages from a curling and discarded calendar. Too, the lens can move, recording without comment. Witness this Gatsbyesque party vignette:

  A girl was dancing on the terrace in an orange-colored chemise. Somebody was smashing crockery in the kitchen. Two men were being dissuaded from fighting. A baby-faced blonde borrowed a dollar from Crane for cab fare home. A couple were necking on one of the davenports. Three men were bitterly arguing politics on the other.

  A man in shirt sleeves asked O’Malley if he was having a good time.

  O’Malley asked him what the hell business it was of his …

  In these segments, some of the laughter stops. But it is never very far away, nor is there much opportunity to muse over matters of heavy import. O’Malley has occasion to recap the breakneck progress of the cockeyed threesome three-quarters of the way through the book. He grumps:

  “In two days we start a fight in a taxi-dance joint, find a murdered guy and don’t tell the police, crash in on Braymer and his dope mob, bust in on a party, kidnap a gal and rob a graveyard.”

  And we haven’t even made off with the dead woman’s restless remains—yet.

  Private eye fiction has traditionally been the literature of exhaustion as readers follow a succession of sleepless knights to their undaunted if fagged-out finishes. Latimer has his fun with this convention. Crane, whom we first encounter flat on his back on morgue bench, head pillowed by a folded flannel coat, spends a good deal of his time prone or comatose, even to ending up under an operating table in Chapter 22; between these bookend respites are sundry other snoozes, a session in the sack, an interview on a davenport, and assorted interludes upon the leather seat of a Packard, a bathtub and a rolling morgue gurney.

  It’s all that exertion, of course.

  Or perhaps the consequence of a relentless inbibition of scotches and soda, single and double martinis, champagne, Planter’s punch, Seagram’s V.O., stout, Mumm’s, Martell’s, Bushmill’s, Gilbey’s, Liebfraumilch, Bass ale and Pilsner.

  Crane does disdain the formaldehyde, however.

  Too stiff.

  William Ruehlmann

  Norfolk, Virginia

  September, 1987

  William Ruehlmann, Ph.D., is an award-winning feature writer for The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star and author of Saint with a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye.

  Chapter One

  THE MORGUE attendant jerked
the receiver from the telephone, choked off the bell in the middle of a jangling ring. “Hello,” he said. Then impatiently: “Hello! Hello! Hello!” Wan electric light, escaping like Holstein cream from a green-shaded student desk lamp, made the sweat glisten on his lemon-yellow face. His lips, against the telephone mouthpiece, twitched. “You want Daisy? Daisy! Daisy who?”

  Elbows leaning hard on the golden-oak rail dividing the morgue office from the waiting room, two newspaper reporters idly stared at the attendant’s white coat. Their shirts were open at the collar; their arms were bare; their ties, knots loosened, hung limply around their necks; their faces were moist in the heat. On the wall beside them a clock with a cracked glass indicated it was seventeen minutes of three.

  “Oh, y’ want Miss Daisy Stiff,” said the morgue attendant. “She told ya to call her here, did she?” He screwed up one eye at the others. “Well, she can’t come to the phone. She’s downstairs with th’ other girls.”

  Ballooning dingy curtains, waves of hot night air rolled in through the west windows, rasped the reporters’ faces, made their lungs hurt.

  The morgue attendant said, “I don’t care if y’ did have a date with her; she can’t come to the phone.” He chuckled harshly. “She’s stretched out.”

  The reporter from the Herald and Examiner was named Herbert Greening; he was twenty-two years old and he still thought newspaper work fascinating. He was pudgy and when he laughed his plum-purple cheeks quivered.

  The morgue attendant held a palm over the telephone mouthpiece. “He says he’s worried because some dame he met last night didn’t show up for a midnight date.” His laughter ended in a fit of coughing. He put his lips to the instrument. “Buddy, do ya’ know who you’re talking to?” He coughed again, spat blood-streaked rheum on the marble floor. “This is the Cook County Morgue, and if your Daisy’s here you’ll hafta come down an’ get her.” He flipped the receiver onto the hook.

  Fat Reporter Greening was trembling all over now in mirth. “I’d like to see that guy’s face,” he said between gasps. “Yes, sir, I’d like to see it.” His hand plopped against the golden-oak rail.

  The morgue attendant swung back in his swivel chair, smiled dourly. “I bet I get twenty calls like that a day.” Coughing made his face drip with sweat. “The gals trim some sucker, then give him this number to call ’em. Tell him t’ ask for Joan Stiff, or Daisy Still or somethin’ like that. We keep changin’ the number, but it don’t seem to do no good.”

  The reporter from the City Press was named Jerry Johnson. His face had an unhealthy pallor; his black eyes were set deep in discolored sockets; he was drinking himself to death as fast as he could on a salary of twenty-six dollars a week. He said: “Aw, you wanta keep all them babes down there for yourself.” He lifted his elbows from the oak rail, straightened his back, balanced himself with difficulty, as though the floor were pitching under his feet.

  “I’m a married man, and I don’t like your accusations, Mister Johnson,” said the morgue attendant with pretended indignation. “You know I wouldn’t touch one of ’em except in the way of business.”

  Johnson said, “Not much, you wouldn’t.” He faced Greening. “That’s what the coroner says, too. But I notice he finds some business down here every time they get hold of a pretty girl’s body.”

  The attendant giggled. Mister Johnson was right. Mister Johnson certainly knew the chief. “She don’t even have to be especially pretty,” he added.

  Greening watched them with circular blue eyes. His mouth had dropped open and he was breathing through it.

  “It’s a wonder he hasn’t been down to see that little honey they brought in this afternoon,” said Johnson. “She must have had plenty on the ball.”

  “Plenty!” The attendant rubbed the back of his hand across his face. “She’s the best I seen since that nightclub singer was carved up by her Mexican boy friend.” He wiped the sweat from his hand to his white coat. “I don’t understand why nobody has been able to identify her.”

  The curtains ballooned again in the hot air. In the distance a woman began to utter clear, high-pitched peals of mirthless laughter, unhysterical and unhurried, like one of those laughing phonograph records, except in her case there was not even an intent to be funny. She laughed, caught her breath in gasps, laughed again.

  The morgue attendant paid no attention to the noise. “They carried a front-page story about her in every paper in town,” he continued. “You’d think somebody that knew her would have seen it.”

  “Lots of times, when they commit suicide, they go as far away from home as they can,” said Johnson. “They don’t want to disgrace their families.”

  Greening pursed his thick lips. “That’s probably what she did. My editor says that Alice Ross is an assumed name. Too short. That’s why he wants me to get the name of everybody who asks to see her. Maybe we can trace her that way, he says, even if somebody who knows her decides not to identify her.”

  “Editors always tell you that,” said Johnson.

  The attendant said, “It’s goddamn funny, anyway. That girl had class, yet she was living in that honky-tonk hotel.”

  “Maybe she was trying to hide herself,” said Johnson. He pulled an unlabeled pint whiskey bottle half filled with pearl-cloudy liquid from his hip pocket. “Maybe she was going to have a baby or something.”

  Eyes on the bottle, the attendant said, “When they posted the body they found she didn’t have no baby.”

  Johnson uncorked the bottle, wiped the mouth on the seat of his blue serge pants and drank, ignoring the attendant.

  “She was broke and couldn’t get a job,” said Greening. “They only found four dollars in her room.”

  The woman was laughing again, louder this time and higher-pitched and jangling, as though she were being tortured by having her feet tickled. The sound was off key and chalk-on-blackboard shrill.

  A man’s head appeared above the back of a bench at the rear of the morgue office. “Holy Kar-rist!” he said. “What in hell’s that?” His name was William Crane, and he was a private detective; he had been sleeping on the bench for three hours, his gray flannel coat under his head.

  The morgue attendant said over his shoulder, “It’s a crazy dame in the psychopathic hospital. She’s been there three days and she laughs all the time. They gotta dope her up to keep her quiet.”

  Johnson supplemented, “They pulled her out of a Wilson Avenue cat house.”

  Crane sat up on the bench. “I wish they’d slip her a shot,” he said. His shirt, where he had been lying on it, clung to his chest, and his regimental striped tie was twisted around so that it hung over his back. “She gives me the creeps.” His face was clear-skinned and young and tan: he rubbed his eyes vigorously. He looked about thirty, and was thirty-four.

  Sliding over the rail dividing the office from the waiting room, Johnson offered Crane the bottle. Crane accepted it with interest, lifted it to the light, smelled it, then quickly handed it back. “Never drink when I’m on a job,” he lied, and asked, “What’s in it, anyway?”

  “Alky and water. I don’t fool around with sissy drinks like whiskey and gin.”

  Crane pursed his mouth, blew air softly through it.

  Greening joined them. “Are you the detective who broke the Westland case?” he asked. His stare was curious, unoffensive.

  Johnson said, “This is Greening of the Herald-Examiner. He relieved the fellow who was here when you came.” He put the bottle back in his hip pocket. “His uncle’s an attorney for Hearst.”

  “An attorney for Hearst,” repeated Crane, impressed. “That’s pretty important.”

  “My uncle didn’t have anything to do with my getting this job,” Greening said to Johnson, “And anyway, what if he did?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  The clock with the cracked face struck three times.

  Crane said, “I’ve been asleep since twelve.”

  The morgue attendant said, “And how! I was
just getting ready to move you downstairs to the cold-storage room.”

  “I read all about the Westland mystery in the papers,” said Greening. “What do you attribute your breaking the case to?”

  Crane said, “I ate two heaping dishes of Post Toasties for breakfast every morning.”

  Johnson said, “I’d a hell of a lot rather be in that cold-storage room downstairs than up here. It must be ninety.”

  The attendant looked at a table thermometer set in ivory-painted celluloid. “It’s ninety-one.”

  “Why don’t they cool the whole morgue, instead of just the downstairs?” Crane asked.

  “The stiffs stink,” said Johnson; “while we just suffer without doing anything objectionable.”

  “It stinks up here,” said the attendant; “with the wind coming right over the stockyards.”

  The madwoman was laughing again.

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Johnson. “It’s a game I used to play when I was first on this West beat.”

  Crane said, “Anything to keep from hearing that dame.”

  “But how did you find the pistol in the Westland case?” Greening persisted. He edged around in front of Crane, peered into his face. “The papers said you did it with a stop watch.”

  Crane said, “A little bird told me.”

  “The idea is this,” said Johnson. “We go down into the vaults where they keep the stiffs and start at one end. One guy takes white men, one takes buck niggers, and the other gets both white and black women. There’s a dime on each vault. That is, if Crane here had the white men, and it was a white man, the other two would owe him a dime. Sort of like golf syndicates.”

  “I’ll take women,” said Crane. “I like women.”

  The attendant flicked the sweat off his yellow forehead. “I remember that game. I lost plenty of dimes at it.”

  “Yeah,” said Johnson indignantly. “You did until you went and shifted all the bodies around one night and won every syndicate.”

  The attendant giggled reminiscently.