A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  “Start counting.” The passenger reached across the front seat and tore the microphone free of the two-way radio. “Don’t get out till you reach a thousand. If you do, you won’t have time to be sorry you did. You’ll be dead.” He slid out and slammed the door on six.

  He caught another cab four blocks over, this time without having to use force. It was a twenty-dollar ride out to the posh residential district where Jules Redman lived. He tipped the cabbie five dollars. He had no more use for money.

  The house was a brick ranch-style in a quiet cul-de-sac studded with shade trees. Murch found the hike to the front door effortless; for the first time in hours he was without pain. On the step he took a deep breath, let half of it out, and rang the bell. He took out the gun. Waited.

  After a lifetime the door was opened by a very tall young man in a tan jacket custom-made to contain his enormous chest. It was Randolph, Redman’s favorite bodyguard. His eyes flickered when he recognized the visitor. A hand darted inside his jacket.

  The reports were very loud. Murch fired a split-second ahead of Randolph, shattering his sternum and throwing off his aim so that the second bullet entered the bookkeeper’s left thigh. He had never been shot before; it was oddly sensationless, like the first time he had had sex. The bodyguard crumpled.

  Murch stepped across him. He could feel the hot blood on his leg, nothing else. Just then Redman appeared in an open doorway beyond the staircase. When he saw Murch he froze. He was wearing a maroon velour robe over pajamas and his feet were in slippers.

  The bookkeeper was motionless as well. What now? He hadn’t expected to get this far. He had shot Randolph in self-defense; he couldn’t kill a man in cold blood, not even this one, not even when that was the fate he had planned for Murch.

  Redman understood. He smiled under his mustache. “Like I said before, Charlie, you just don’t live right.”

  Another large man came steadily through a side door, towed by an automatic pistol. He was older than Randolph and wore neither jacket nor necktie, his empty underarm holster exposed. This was the other bodyguard. He held up before the sight that met his eyes.

  “Kill him, Ted,” Redman said calmly.

  Murch’s bullet splintered one of the steps in the staircase. He’d aimed at the banister, but that was close enough. “Next one goes between your boss’s eyes,” he informed the bodyguard.

  Ted laid his gun on the floor and backed away from it, raising his hands.

  The bookkeeper felt no triumph. He wondered if it was fear that was making him numb or if he just didn’t care. To Redman: “Over here.”

  Redman hesitated. Murch cocked the revolver. The racketeer approached cautiously.

  “Pick that up.” Murch indicated Randolph’s gun lying where he had dropped it when he fell. “Slow,” he added, as Redman stooped to obey.

  He accepted the firearm between the thumb and forefinger of his free hand and dropped it carefully into a pocket to avoid smearing the fingerprints. To Ted: “Get the car.”

  Murch was waiting in front with his hostage when the bodyguard drove the Cadillac out of the garage. “Okay, get out,” he told Ted.

  He made Redman get behind the wheel and climbed in on the passenger’s side. “Start driving. I’ll tell you what turns to make.” He spoke through clenched teeth. His leg was starting to ache and he was feeling light-headed from the blood loss.

  The bodyguard watched them until they reached the end of the driveway. Then he swung around and sprinted back inside.

  “He’ll be on the phone to the others in two seconds,” jeered Redman. “How far you think you’ll get before you bleed out?”

  “Turn right,” Murch directed.

  The big car took the bumps well. Even so, each one was like a red-hot knife in the bookkeeper’s thigh. He made himself as comfortable as possible without taking his eyes off the driver, the revolver resting in his lap with his hand on the butt. He welcomed Redman’s taunts. They distracted him from his pain, kept his mind off the drowsiness welling up inside him like warm water filling a tub. He wasn’t so far from content.

  The dead bodyguard would take explaining. But a paraffin test would reveal that he’d fired a weapon recently, and the gun in Murch’s pocket was likely registered to Randolph. Redman’s prints on the butt and the fact that Randolph worked for him, together with the bullet in Murch’s leg and a clear motive in his testimony in the bribery trial, would put his old boss inside for a long time for attempted murder. “Left here.”

  The lights of the 14th Precinct were visible down the block. Detective Sergeant Kirdy’s precinct, the home of the kind, proud grandfather who had protected Murch during the trial. Murch told Redman to stop the car. It felt good to give him that last order. Charlie Murch had stopped being one of the used.

  He recognized Kirdy’s blocky shape hastily descending the front steps as he was following Redman out the driver’s side and called to him. The sergeant shielded his eyes with one hand against the glare of the headlamps, squinted at the two figures coming toward him, one limping, the other in a bathrobe being pushed out ahead. He drew his magnum from his belt holster. Murch gestured to show friendship. The noise the policeman’s gun made was deafening, but Murch never heard it.

  “That was quick thinking, sergeant.” Hands in the pockets of his robe, Redman looked down at his late captor’s body spread-eagled in the gutter. A crowd was gathering.

  “We got the squeal on your kidnapping a few minutes ago,” Kirdy said. “I was just heading out there when you two showed.”

  “You ought to make lieutenant for this.”

  The sergeant’s kind eyes glistened. “That’d be great, Mr. Redman. The wife and kids been after me for years to get off the street.”

  “You will if there’s any justice. How’s that pretty granddaughter of yours, by the way?”

  STUART M. KAMINSKY

  Stuart M. Kaminsky (1934– ) made his first reputation as the author of the fast, furious, and funny Toby Peters series set in Hollywood of the forties.

  He made his second and third reputations as the writer of the Porfiry Petrovich Bostnikov books set in contemporary Moscow and the Abe Lieberman novels set in contemporary Chicago.

  Series seem to be his speciality. He knows how to keep them vital, even after a long sequence of novels. The Tobys, for example, are up to twenty now, and each one gets better and better.

  He may be slightly undervalued (despite winning the Edgar for best novel) because he works quickly and prolifically. We all know that’s a nono, right?

  But his books are consistently inventive, human, humane, and page-turning good. And he deserves to be held in higher regard than he sometimes is. His work will endure long beyond that of many flavors of the month.

  Busted Blossoms

  (Toby Peters)

  Darkness. I couldn’t see, but I could hear someone shouting at me about Adolf Hitler. I opened my eyes. I still couldn’t see. Panic set in before memory told me where I was. I pushed away the jacket covering my head. After a good breath of stale air, I realized where I was, who I was, and what I was doing there.

  It was 1938, February, a cool Sunday night in Los Angeles, and I was Toby Peters, a private investigator who had been hired to keep an eye on a washed-up movie director who had come in from out of town and picked up a few death threats. I was getting fifteen dollars a day, for which I was expected to stay near the target and put myself in harm’s way if trouble came up. I was not being paid to fall asleep.

  My mouth tasted like ragweed pollen. I reached over to turn off the radio. When I had put my head back to rest on the bed and pulled my suede zipped jacket over me, Jeanette MacDonald had been singing about Southern moons. I woke up to the news that Reichsführer Hitler had proclaimed himself chief of national defense and had promoted Hermann Wilhelm Göring, minister of aviation, to field marshal. I was just standing when the door opened and D. W. Griffith walked in.

  “Mr. Peters,” he said, his voice deep, his back strai
ght, and, even across the room, his breath dispensing the Kentucky fumes of bourbon.

  “I was on my way down,” I said. “I was listening to the news.”

  Griffith eyed me from over his massive hawk of a nose. He was about five-ten, maybe an inch or so taller than me, though I guessed he weighed about 180, maybe twenty pounds more than I did. We both seemed to be in about the same shape, which says something good for him or bad for me. I was forty-one, and he was over sixty. He was wearing a black suit over a white shirt and thin black tie.

  “I have something to tell you,” Griffith said.

  So, I was canned. It had happened before, and I had a double sawbuck in my wallet.

  “I really was coming down,” I said, trying to get some feeling in my tongue.

  “You were not,” Griffith said emphatically. “But that is of little consequence. A man has been murdered.”

  “Murdered?” I repeated.

  I am not the most sophisticated sight even when I’m combed, shaved, and operating on a full stomach. My face is dark and my nose mush, not from business contacts, but from an older brother who every once in a while thought I needed redefinition. I sold that tough look to people who wanted a bodyguard. Most of my work was for second-rate clothing stores that had too much shoplifting, hard-working bookies whose wives had gone for Chiclets and never came back, and old ladies who had lost their cats, who were always named Sheiba. That’s what I usually did, but once in a while I spent a night or a few days protecting movie people who got themselves threatened or were afraid of getting crushed in a crowd. D. W. had no such fears. No one was looking for his autograph anymore. No one was hiring him. He seemed to have plenty of money and a lot of hope; that was why he had driven up from Louisville. He hoped someone would pick up the phone and call him to direct a movie, but in the week I had worked for him, no one had called, except the guy who threatened to lynch him with a Ku Klux Klan robe. D. W. had explained that such threats had not been unusual during the past two decades since the release of Birth of a Nation, which had presented the glories of the Ku Klux Klan. D. W. had tried to cover his prejudice with Intolerance and a few more films, but the racism of Birth wouldn’t wash away.

  “Mr. Peters.” He tried again, his voice now loud enough to be heard clearly in the back row if we were in a Loews theater. “You must rouse yourself. A man has been murdered downstairs.”

  “Call the police,” I said brilliantly.

  “We are, you may recall, quite a distance from town,” he reminded me. “A call has been placed, but it will be some time before the constabulary arrives.”

  Constabulary. I was in a time warp. But that was the way I had felt since meeting Griffith, who now touched his gray sideburns as if he were about to be photographed for Click magazine.

  “Who’s dead?” I asked.

  “Almost everyone of consequence since the dawn of time,” Griffith said, opening the door. “In this case, the victim is Jason Sikes. He is sitting at the dinner table with a knife in his neck.”

  “Who did it?” I began.

  “That, I fear, is a mystery,” Griffith said. “Now let us get back to the scene.”

  I walked out the door feeling that I was being ushered from act one to act two. I didn’t like the casting. Griffith was directing the whole thing, and I had the feeling he wanted to cast me as the detective. I wanted to tell him that I had been hired to protect his back, not find killers. I get double time for finding killers. But one just didn’t argue with Dave Griffith. I slouched ahead of him, scratched an itch on my right arm, and slung my suede jacket over my shoulder so I could at least straighten the wrinkled striped tie I was wearing.

  What did I know? That I was in a big house just off the California coast about thirty miles north of San Diego. The house belonged to a producer named Korites, who Griffith hoped would give him a directing job. Korites had gathered his two potential stars, a comic character actor, and a potential backer, Sikes, to meet the great director. I had come as Griffith’s “associate.” D. W. had left his young wife back at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, and we had stopped for drinks twice on the way in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes. In the car Griffith had talked about Kentucky, his father, his mother, who had never seen one of his films—“She did not approve of the stage,” he explained—and about his comeback. He had gone on about his youthful adventures as an actor, playwright, boxer, reporter, and construction worker. Then, about ten minutes before we arrived, he had clammed up, closed his eyes, and hadn’t said another word.

  Now we were going silently down the stairs of the house of Marty Korites, stepping into a dining room, and facing five well-dressed diners, one of whom lay with his face in a plate of Waldorf salad with a knife in his back.

  The diners looked up when we came in. Korites, a bald, jowly man with Harold Lloyd glasses, was about fifty and looked every bit of it and more. His eyes had been resting angrily on the dead guest, but they shot up to us as we entered the room. On one side of the dead guy was a woman, Denise Giles, skinny as ticker tape, pretty, dark, who knows what age. I couldn’t even tell from the freckles on her bare shoulders. On the other side of the dead guy was an actor named James Vann, who looked like the lead in a road-show musical, blond, young, starched, and confused. He needed someone to feed him lines. Griffith was staring at the corpse. The great director looked puzzled. The last guest sat opposite the dead man. I knew him, too, Lew Dollard, a frizzy-haired comedian turned character actor who was Marty Korites’ top name, which gives you an idea of how small an operator Marty was and what little hope Griffith had if he had traveled all the way here in the hope of getting a job from him.

  “Mr. Griffith says you’re a detective, not a film guy,” Korites said, his eyes moving from the body to me for an instant and then back to the body. I guessed he didn’t want the dead guy to get away when he wasn’t looking.

  “Yeah, I’m a detective,” I said. “But I don’t do windows and I don’t do corpses.”

  Dollard, the roly-poly New York street comic in a rumpled suit, looked up at me.

  “A comedy writer,” he said with a smile showing big teeth. I had seen one of Dollard’s movies. He wasn’t funny.

  “Someone killed Sikes,” Korites said with irritation.

  “Before the main course was served, too,” I said. “Some people have no sense of timing. Look. Why don’t we just sit still, have a drink or two, and wait till the police get here. We can pass the time by your telling me how someone can get killed at the dinner table and all of you not know who did it. That must have been some chicken liver appetizer.”

  “It was,” said Griffith, holding his open palm toward the dead man, “like a moment of filmic chicanery, a magic moment from Méliès. I was sipping an aperitif and had turned to Miss Giles to answer a question. And then, a sound, a groan. I turned, and there sat Mr. Sikes.”

  We all looked at Sikes. His face was still in the salad.

  “Who saw what happened?” I asked.

  They all looked up from the corpse and at each other. Then they looked at me. Dollard had a cheek full of something and a silly grin on his face. He shrugged.

  “A man gets murdered with the lights on with all of you at the table and no one knows who did it?” I asked. “That’s a little hard to believe. Who was standing up?”

  “No one,” said Vann, looking at me unblinking.

  “No one,” agreed Griffith.

  There was no window behind the body. One door to the room was facing the dead man. The other door was to his right. The knife couldn’t have been thrown from either door and landed in his back. The hell with it. I was getting paid to protect Griffith, not find killers. I’d go through the motions till the real cops got there. I had been a cop back in Glendale before I went to work for Warner Brothers as a guard and then went into business on my own. I knew the routine.

  “Why don’t we go into the living room?” Korites said, starting to get up and glancing at the corpse. “I could have Mrs. Windless�
�”

  “Sit down,” I said. “Mrs. Windless is . . . ?”

  “Housekeeper,” Korites said. “Cook.”

  “Was she in here when Sikes was killed?”

  I looked around. All heads shook no.

  “Anyone leave the room before or after Sikes was killed?” I went on.

  “Just Mr. Griffith,” said Vann. The woman still hadn’t said anything.

  “We stay right here till the police arrive. Anyone needs the toilet, I go with them, even the dragon lady,” I said, trying to get a rise out of Denise Giles. I got none.

  “What about you?” said Dollard, rolling his eyes and gurgling in a lousy imitation of Bert Lahr.

  “I wasn’t in the room when Sikes took his dive into the salad,” I said. “Look, you want to forget the whole thing and talk about sports? Fine. You hear that Glenn Cunningham won the Wanamaker mile for the fifth time yesterday?”

  “With a time of 4:11,” said Denise Giles, taking a small sip of wine from a thin little glass.

  I looked at her with new respect. Griffith had sat down at the end of the table, the seat he had obviously been in when murder interrupted the game. Something was on his mind.

  “Who was Sikes?” I asked, reaching down for a celery stick.

  “A man of means,” said Griffith, downing a slug of bourbon.

  “A backer,” said Korites. “He was thinking of bankrolling a movie D. W. would direct and I would produce.”

  “With Vann here and Miss Giles as stars?” I said.

  “Right,” said Korites.

  “Never,” said Griffith emphatically.

  “You’ve got no choice here,” Korites shouted back. “You take the project the way we give it to you or we get someone else. Your name’s got some curiosity value, right, but it doesn’t bring in any golden spikes.”

  “A man of tender compassion,” sighed Griffith, looking at me for understanding. “It was my impression that the late Mr. Sikes had no intention of supplying any capital. On the contrary, I had the distinct impression that he felt he was in less than friendly waters and had only been lured here with the promise of meeting me, the wretched director who had once held the industry in his hand, had once turned pieces of factory-produced celluloid into art. As I recall, Sikes also talked about some financial debt he expected to be paid tonight.”