A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

“No. Nothing in particular. She must have been one of Nick’s girls. He always had girls.”

  “Why would Harry cover for her?”

  “What do you mean, cover for her?”

  “She left a leopardskin coat behind. Harry hid it, and paid me not to tell the police.”

  “Harry did that?”

  “Unless I’m having delusions.”

  “Maybe you are at that. If you think that Harry paid that girl to shoot Nick, or had anything—”

  “I know. Don’t say it. I’m crazy.”

  Mrs. Nemo laid a thin hand on my arm. “Anyway, lay off Harry. Please. I have a hard enough time handling him as it is. He’s worse than my first husband. The first one was a drunk, believe it or not.” She glanced at the lighted cottage across the street, and I saw one half of her bitter smile. “I wonder what makes a woman go for the lame ducks the way I did.”

  “I wouldn’t know, Mrs. Nemo. Okay, I lay off Harry.”

  But I had no intention of laying off Harry. When she went back to her cottage, I walked around three-quarters of the block and took up a new position in the doorway of a dry-cleaning establishment. This time I didn’t smoke. I didn’t even move, except to look at my watch from time to time.

  Around eleven o’clock, the lights went out behind the blinds in the Nemo cottage. Shortly before midnight the front door opened and Harry slipped out. He looked up and down the street and began to walk. He passed within six feet of my dark doorway, hustling along in a kind of furtive shuffle.

  Working very cautiously, at a distance, I tailed him downtown. He disappeared into the lighted cavern of an all night garage. He came out of the garage a few minutes later, driving a prewar Chevrolet.

  My money also talked to the attendant. I drew a prewar Buick which would still do seventy-five. I proved that it would, as soon as I hit the highway. I reached the entrance to Nick Nemo’s private lane in time to see Harry’s lights approaching the dark ranch house.

  I cut my lights and parked at the roadside a hundred yards below the entrance to the lane, and facing it. The Chevrolet reappeared in a few minutes. Harry was still alone in the front seat. I followed it blind as far as the highway before I risked my lights. Then down the highway to the edge of town.

  In the middle of the motel and drive-in district he turned off onto a side road and in under a neon sign which spelled out TRAILER COURT across the darkness. The trailers stood along the bank of a dry creek. The Chevrolet stopped in front of one of them, which had a light in the window. Harry got out with a spotted bundle under his arm. He knocked on the door of the trailer.

  I U-turned at the next corner and put in more waiting time. The Chevrolet rolled out under the neon sign and turned towards the highway. I let it go.

  Leaving my car, I walked along the creek bank to the lighted trailer. The windows were curtained. The cerise convertible was parked on its far side. I tapped on the aluminum door.

  “Harry?” a girl’s voice said. “Is that you, Harry?”

  I muttered something indistinguishable. The door opened, and the yellow-haired girl looked out. She was very young, but her round blue eyes were heavy and sick with hangover, or remorse. She had on a nylon slip, nothing else.

  “What is this?”

  She tried to shut the door. I held it open.

  “Get away from here. Leave me alone. I’ll scream.”

  “All right. Scream.”

  She opened her mouth. No sound came out. She closed her mouth again. It was small, fleshy and defiant. “Who are you? Law?”

  “Close enough. I’m coming in.”

  “Come in then, damn you. I got nothing to hide.”

  “I can see that.”

  I brushed in past her. There were dead Martinis on her breath. The little room was a jumble of feminine clothes, silk and cashmere and tweed and gossamer nylon, some of them flung on the floor, others hung up to dry. The leopardskin coat lay on the bunk bed, staring with innumerable bold eyes. She picked it up and covered her shoulders with it. Unconsciously, her nervous hands began to pick the wood-chips out of the fur. I said:

  “Harry did you a favor, didn’t he?”

  “Maybe he did.”

  “Have you been doing any favors for Harry?”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as knocking off his brother.”

  “You’re way off the beam, mister. I was very fond of Uncle Nick.”

  “Why run out on the killing then?”

  “I panicked,” she said. “It would happen to any girl. I was asleep when he got it, see, passed out if you want the truth. I heard the gun go off. It woke me up, but it took me quite a while to bring myself to and sober up enough to put my clothes on. By the time I made it to the bedroom window, Harry was back, with some guy.” She peered into my face. “Were you the guy?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought so. I thought you were the law at the time. I saw Nick lying there in the driveway, all bloody, and I put two and two together and got trouble. Bad trouble for me, unless I got out. So I got out. It wasn’t nice to do, after what Nick meant to me, but it was the only sensible thing. I got my career to think of.”

  “What career is that?”

  “Modeling. Acting. Uncle Nick was gonna send me to school.”

  “Unless you talk, you’ll finish your education at Corona. Who shot Nick?”

  A thin edge of terror entered her voice. “I don’t know, I tell you. I was passed out in the bedroom. I didn’t see nothing.”

  “Why did Harry bring you your coat?”

  “He didn’t want me to get involved. He’s my father, after all.”

  “Harry Nemo is your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that. What’s your name?”

  “Jeannine. Jeannine Larue.”

  “Why isn’t your name Nemo if Harry is your father? Why do you call him Harry?”

  “He’s my stepfather, I mean.”

  “Sure,” I said. “And Nick was really your uncle, and you were having a family reunion with him.”

  “He wasn’t any blood relation to me. I always called him uncle, though.”

  “If Harry’s your father, why don’t you live with him?”

  “I used to. Honest. This is the truth I’m telling you. I had to get out on account of the old lady. The old lady hates my guts. She’s a real creep, a square. She can’t stand for a girl to have any fun. Just because my old man was a rummy—”

  “What’s your idea of fun, Jeannine?”

  She shook her feathercut hair at me. It exhaled a heavy perfume which was worth its weight in blood. She bared one pearly shoulder and smiled an artificial hustler’s smile. “What’s yours? Maybe we can get together.”

  “You mean the way you got together with Nick?”

  “You’re prettier than him.”

  “I’m also smarter, I hope. Is Harry really your stepfather?”

  “Ask him if you don’t believe me. Ask him. He lives in a place on Tule Street—I don’t remember the number.”

  “I know where he lives.”

  But Harry wasn’t at home. I knocked on the door of the frame cottage and got no answer. I turned the knob and found that the door was unlocked. There was a light behind it. The other cottages in the court were dark. It was long past midnight, and the street was deserted. I went into the cottage, preceded by my gun.

  A ceiling bulb glared down on sparse and threadbare furniture, a time-eaten rug. Besides the living room, the house contained a cubby-hole of a bedroom and a closet kitchenette. Everything in the poverty-stricken place was pathetically clean. There were moral mottoes on the walls, and one picture. It was a photograph of a tow-headed girl in a teen-age party dress. Jeannine, before she learned that a pretty face and a sleek body could buy her the things she wanted. The things she thought she wanted.

  For some reason, I felt sick. I went outside. Somewhere out of sight, an old car-engine muttered. Its muttering grew on the night. Harry Nemo’
s rented Chevrolet turned the corner under the streetlight. Its front wheels were weaving. One of the wheels climbed the curb in front of the cottage. The Chevrolet came to a halt at a drunken angle.

  I crossed the sidewalk and opened the car door. Harry was at the wheel, clinging to it desperately as if he needed it to hold him up. His chest was bloody. His mouth was bright with blood. He spoke through it thickly:

  “She got me.”

  “Who got you, Harry? Jeannine?”

  “No. Not her. She was the reason for it, though. We had it coming.”

  Those were his final words. I caught his body as it fell sideways out of the seat. I laid it out on the sidewalk and left it for the cop on the beat to find.

  I drove across town to the trailer court. Jeannine’s trailer still had light in it, filtered through the curtains over the windows. I pushed the door open.

  The girl was packing a suitcase on the bunk bed. She looked at me over her shoulder, and froze. Her blond head was cocked like a frightened bird’s, hypnotized by my gun.

  “Where are you off to, kid?”

  “Out of this town. I’m getting out.”

  “You have some talking to do first.”

  She straightened up. “I told you all I know. You didn’t believe me. What’s the matter, didn’t you get to see Harry?”

  “I saw him. Harry’s dead. Your whole family is dying like flies.” She half-turned and sat down limply on the disordered bed. “Dead? You think I did it?”

  “I think you know who did. Harry said before he died that you were the reason for it all.”

  “Me the reason for it?” Her eyes widened in false naivete, but there was thought behind them, quick and desperate thought. “You mean that Harry got killed on account of me?”

  “Harry and Nick both. It was a woman who shot them.”

  “God,” she said. The desperate thought behind her eyes crystallized into knowledge. Which I shared.

  The aching silence was broken by a big diesel rolling by on the highway. She said above its roar:

  “That crazy old bat. So she killed Nick.”

  “You’re talking about your mother. Mrs. Nemo.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you see her shoot him?”

  “No. I was blotto like I told you. But I saw her out there this week, keeping an eye on the house. She’s always watched me like a hawk.”

  “Is that why you were getting out of town? Because you knew she killed Nick?”

  “Maybe it was. I don’t know. I wouldn’t let myself think about it.”

  Her blue gaze shifted from my face to something behind me. I turned. Mrs. Nemo was in the doorway. She was hugging the straw bag to her thin chest.

  Her right hand dove into the bag. I shot her in the right arm. She leaned against the doorframe and held her dangling arm with her left hand. Her face was granite in whose crevices her eyes were like live things caught.

  The gun she dropped was a cheap .32 revolver, its nickel plating worn and corroded. I spun the cylinder. One shot had been fired from it.

  “This accounts for Harry,” I said. “You didn’t shoot Nick with this gun, not at that distance.”

  “No.” She was looking down at her dripping hand. “I used my old police gun on Nick Nemo. After I killed him, I threw the gun into the sea. I didn’t know I’d have further use for a gun. I bought that little suicide gun tonight.”

  “To use on Harry?”

  “To use on you. I thought you were on to me. I didn’t know until you told me that Harry knew about Nick and Jeannine.”

  “Jeannine is your daughter by your first husband?”

  “My only daughter.” She said to the girl: “I did it for you, Jeannine. I’ve seen too much—the awful things that can happen.”

  The girl didn’t answer. I said:

  “I can understand why you shot Nick. But why did Harry have to die?”

  “Nick paid him,” she said. “Nick paid him for Jeannine. I found Harry in a bar an hour ago, and he admitted it. I hope I killed him.”

  “You killed him, Mrs. Nemo. What brought you here? Was Jeannine the third on your list?”

  “No. No. She’s my own girl. I came to tell her what I did for her. I wanted her to know.”

  She looked at the girl on the bed. Her eyes were terrible with pain and love. The girl said in a stunned voice:

  “Mother. You’re hurt. I’m sorry.”

  “Let’s go, Mrs. Nemo,” I said.

  GIL BREWER

  Gil Brewer (1922–1983) came out of World War II determined to become a writer. He held all the usual menial jobs.

  He seemed, by nature, to have been the prototypical working-class stiff—hard-drinking, hard-loving, hard-dreaming. Right time right place, too. He wrote the kind of tough-tender hard-boiled novels and stories that the men and women of his generation preferred. The Golden Age of crime fiction was waning. People wanted a more believable kind of story, one that had at least a passing emotional connection to their own lives. They were never in danger of becoming a Duke and solving mysteries before a cozy Victorian fire. But they could see themselves trapped in a painful romance with somebody who was dragging them into trouble.

  He’s largely forgotten now. But at his very best—A Killer Is Loose, The Red Scarf—he was very much his own man. There is a Woolrichian darkness and desperation in his best work. It stays with you a long, long time.

  The Gesture

  Nolan placed both hands on the railing of the veranda, and unconsciously squeezed the wood until the muscles in his arms corded and ached. He looked down, across the immaculately trimmed green lawn, past the palms and the Australian pines, to the beach, gleaming whitely under the late morning sun.

  The Gulf was crisply green today, and calm, broken only by the happy frolicking of the man and woman—laughing, swimming. His wife, Helen, and Latimer, the photographer from the magazine in New York, down to do a picture story of the island.

  Nolan turned his gaze away, lifted his hands and stared at his palms. His hands were trembling and his thin cotton shirt was soaked with perspiration.

  He couldn’t stand it. He left the veranda, and walked swiftly into the sprawling living room of his home. He paced back and forth for a moment, his feet whispering on the grass rug. Then he stood quietly in the center of the room, trying to think. For two weeks it had been going on. At first he’d thought he would last. Now he knew it no longer mattered, about lasting.

  He would have to do something. He strode rapidly across the room into his study, opened the top drawer of his desk, and looked down at the.45 automatic. He slammed the drawer shut, whirled and went back into the living room.

  Why had he ever allowed the man entrance to the island?

  Oh, he knew why, well enough. Because Helen had wanted it. And now he couldn’t order Latimer away. It would be as good as telling Helen the reason. She knew how much he loved her; why did she act this way? Why did she torture him? She must realize, after all these years, that he couldn’t stand another man even looking at her beauty.

  Why did she think they lived here—severed from all mainland life?

  He stiffened, making an effort to wipe away the frown on his face. He reached for his handkerchief, and swabbed at the perspiration on his arms and forehead. They were coming, laughing and talking, up across the lawn.

  Quickly, he selected a magazine from the rack and settled into a wicker chair with his back to the front entrance. He flipped the periodical open and was engrossed in a month-old mystery story when they stomped loudly across the veranda.

  Every step was a kind of unbearable thunder to Nolan. He was reaching such a pitch of helpless irritability that he nearly screamed.

  “Darling!” Helen called. “Where are you—oh, there!”

  She stepped toward him, her bare feet softly thumping the grass rug. He half-glanced up at her. She was coffee-brown, her eyes excited and happier than he’d seen them in a long time. She wore one of the violent-hued red, yellow and gree
n cloth swimming suits that she’d designed for herself.

  He abruptly realized how meager the suit was and his neck burned. He had contrived to have her make the suit with the least expenditure of material. It was his pleasure to look at her.

  But not now—not with Latimer here!

  “What have you been doing?” she asked.

  He started to reply, looking across at Latimer standing at the entranceway, but she rippled on. “You really should have come swimming with us, dear. It was wonderful this morning.” She reached out and tousled his hair. “You haven’t been near the water in days.”

  Nolan cleared his throat. “Well,” he said. “Well, Mister Latimer. About caught up? About ready with your story?”

  He wanted to shout: When are you leaving! He could not. He sat there, staring at Latimer. The sunny days here on the island had done the man good. He was bronzed and healthy and young and abrim with a vitality that had not been present when he’d first come over from the mainland.

  “A few more days, I guess,” Latimer said. “I wish you’d call me Jack. And I sure wish you two would pose for a few pictures. It’s nice enough, the way you’ve been about letting me photograph the island, your home, but—” Latimer left the protest unspoken, smiling halfheartedly.

  Nolan glanced at his wife. She reached down and touched his arm, her fingers trembling. “After lunch Jack and I are going to take a walk, clear around the island,” she said. “You know, we haven’t done that in a terribly long while. Why don’t you come along?”

  “Sorry,” Nolan said quickly. “I’ve some things I’ve got to attend to.”

  “Sure wish you’d come,” Latimer said.

  Nolan said nothing.

  “Well,” Latimer said. “I’ve got to write a letter. Guess I’ll do it while you’re fixing lunch, Helen.”

  “Right,” Helen said. “I’d better get busy.” She turned, and hurried off toward the kitchen, humming softly.

  “By the way,” Latimer said to Nolan. “Anything you’d like done in town? I’ll be taking the boat across this evening, so I can mail some stuff off.”

  “Thank you,” Nolan said. “There’s nothing.”