So that’s where he’s at now, and he’s went to work and got religion down there, and all the people what comes to see him, why he sings hymns to them and then he speaks them his piece. And I hear tell he knows it pretty good by now and has got the crying down pat. And Lida, they got her down there too, only she won’t say nothing ‘cepting she done it same as Hutch and Burbie. So Burbie, he’s going to get hung, sure as hell. And if he hadn’t felt so smart, he would’ve been a free man yet.
Only I reckon he done been holding it all so long he just had to spill it.
<
* * * *
1938
STEVE FISHER
* * *
YOU’LL ALWAYS REMEMBER ME
Steve (Stephen Gould) Fisher (1912-1980) was born in Marine City, Illinois, and joined the Marines at the age of sixteen, moving to California when he was discharged in 1932. His first short story had been published when he was thirteen, so he soon moved to New York to write for pulps, producing hundreds of stories, mostly mysteries but also stories about war, sex, and romance, graduating to the better-paying “slicks” such as Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post. When Hollywood money looked more enticing, he went to Los Angeles and became an equally prolific writer for motion pictures, with fifty-three screenplays to his credit, including Johnny Angel (1945, with Frank Gruber), Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake (1946), Song of the Thin Man (1947), and Cornell Woolrich’s I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948). Fisher was an even more prolific writer for television, producing more than 200 scripts for such long-running series as McMillan and Wife, Barnaby Jones, Starsky and Hutch, Cannon, and 77 Sunset Strip, among many others.
What had been a moderately successful career changed in 1941 when he wrote I Wake Up Screaming, which was adapted in the same year into what is generally regarded as the first film noir. With the action moving from the novel’s Hollywood setting of palm trees and sunshine to the dark alleys and nightclubs of New York City, it starred Victor Mature, Betty Grable, and Carole Landis. It was remade twelve years later as Vicki, this time set entirely in California, and starred Jeanne Crain, Elliott Reid, Jean Peters, and Richard Boone.
“You’ll Always Remember Me” was first published in the March 1938 issue of Black Mask.
~ * ~
I
could tell it was Pushton blowing the bugle and I got out of bed tearing half of the bedclothes with me. I ran to the door and yelled, “Drown it! Drown it! Drown it!” and then I slammed the door and went along the row of beds and pulled the covers off the rest of the guys and said:
“Come on, get up. Get up! Don’t you hear Pushton out there blowing his stinky lungs out?”
I hate bugles anyway, but the way this guy Pushton all but murders reveille kills me. I hadn’t slept very well, thinking of the news I was going to hear this morning, one way or the other, and then to be jarred out of what sleep I could get by Pushton climaxed everything.
I went back to my bed and grabbed my shoes and puttees and slammed them on the floor in front of me, then I began unbuttoning my pajamas. I knew it wouldn’t do any good to ask the guys in this wing. They wouldn’t know anything. When they did see a paper all they read was the funnies. That’s the trouble with Clark’s. I know it’s one of the best military academies in the West and that it costs my old man plenty of dough to keep me here, but they sure have some dopey ideas on how to handle kids. Like dividing the dormitories according to ages. Anybody with any sense knows that it should be according to grades because just take for instance this wing. I swear there isn’t a fourteen-year-old punk in it that I could talk to without wanting to push in his face. And I have to live with the little pukes.
So I kept my mouth shut and got dressed, then I beat it out into the company street before the battalion got lined up for the flag raising. That’s a silly thing, isn’t it? Making us stand around with empty stomachs, shivering goose pimples while they pull up the flag and Pushton blows the bugle again. But at that I guess I’d have been in a worse place than Clark’s Military Academy if my pop hadn’t had a lot of influence and plenty of dollars. I’d be in a big school where they knock you around and don’t ask you whether you like it or not. I know. I was there a month. So I guess the best thing for me to do was to let the academy have their Simple Simon flag-waving fun and not kick about it.
I was running around among the older guys now, collaring each one and asking the same question: “Were you on home-going yesterday? Did you see a paper last night? What about Tommy Smith?” That was what I wanted to know. What about Tommy Smith.
“He didn’t get it,” a senior told me.
“You mean the governor turned him down?”
“Yeah. He hangs Friday.”
That hit me like a sledge on the back of my head and I felt words rushing to the tip of my tongue and then sliding back down my throat. I felt weak, like my stomach was all tied up in a knot. I’d thought sure Tommy Smith would have had his sentence changed to life. I didn’t think they really had enough evidence to swing him. Not that I cared, particularly, only he had lived across the street and when they took him in for putting a knife through his old man’s back —that was what they charged him with — it had left his two sisters minus both father and brother and feeling pretty badly.
Where I come in is that I got a crush on Marie, the youngest sister. She’s fifteen. A year older than me. But as I explained, I’m not any little dumb dope still in grammar school. I’m what you’d call bright.
So that was it; they were going to swing Tommy after all, and Marie would be bawling on my shoulder for six months. Maybe I’d drop the little dame. I certainly wasn’t going to go over and take that for the rest of my life.
I got lined up in the twelve-year-old company, at the right end because I was line sergeant. We did squads right and started marching toward the flagpole. I felt like hell. We swung to a company front and halted.
Pushton started in on the bugle. I watched him with my eyes burning. Gee, I hate buglers, and Pushton is easy to hate anyway. He’s fat and wears horn-rimmed glasses. He’s got a body like a bowling ball and a head like a pimple. His face looks like yesterday’s oatmeal. And does he think being bugler is an important job! The little runt struts around like he was Gabriel, and he walks with his buttocks sticking out one way and his chest the other.
I watched him now, but I was thinking more about Tommy Smith. Earlier that night of the murder I had been there seeing Marie and I had heard part of Tommy’s argument with his old man. Some silly thing. A girl Tommy wanted to marry and the old man couldn’t see it that way. I will say he deserved killing, the old grouch. He used to chase me with his cane. Marie says he used to get up at night and wander around stomping that cane as he walked.
Tommy’s defense was that the old boy lifted the cane to bean him. At least that was the defense the lawyer wanted to present. He wanted to present that, with Tommy pleading guilty, and hope for an acquittal. But Tommy stuck to straight denials on everything. Said he hadn’t killed his father. The way everything shaped up the state proved he was a drunken liar and the jury saw it that way.
Tommy was a nice enough sort. He played football at his university, was a big guy with blond hair and a ruddy face, and blue eyes. He had a nice smile, white and clean like he scrubbed his teeth a lot. I guess his old man had been right about that girl, though, because when all this trouble started she dropped right out of the picture, went to New York or somewhere with her folks.
I was thinking about this when we began marching again; and I was still thinking about it when we came in for breakfast about forty minutes later, after having had our arms thrown out of joint in some more silly stuff called setting-up exercises. What they won’t think of! As though we didn’t get enough exercise running around all day!
Then we all trooped in to eat.
I sat at the breakfast table cracking my egg and watching the guy across from me hog six of them. I wanted to laugh. People think big private schools are th
e ritz and that their sons, when they go there, mix with the cream of young America. Bushwa! There are a few kids whose last names you might see across the front of a department store like Harker Bros., and there are some movie stars’ sons, but most of us are a tough, outcast bunch that couldn’t get along in public school and weren’t wanted at home. Tutors wouldn’t handle most of us for love or money. So they put us here.
Clark’s will handle any kid and you can leave the love out of it so long as you lay the money on the line. Then the brat is taken care of so far as his parents are concerned, and he has the prestige of a fancy Clark uniform.
There wasn’t another school in the state that would have taken me, public or private, after looking at my record. But when old man Clark had dough-ray-me clutched in his right fist he was blind to records like that. Well, that’s the kind of a bunch we were.
Well, as I say, I was watching this glutton stuff eggs down his gullet which he thought was a smart thing to do even though he got a bellyache afterward, when the guy on my right said:
“I see Tommy Smith is going to hang.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s rotten, ain’t it?”
“Rotten?” he replied. “It’s wonderful. It’s what that rat has coming to him.”
“Listen,” said I, “one more crack like that and I’ll smack your stinking little face in.”
“You and how many others?” he said.
“Just me,” I said, “and if you want to come outside I’ll do it right now.”
The kid who was table captain yelled: “Hey, you two pipe down. What’s the argument anyway?”
“They’re going to hang Tommy Smith,” I said, “and I think it’s a dirty rotten shame. He’s as innocent as a babe in the woods.”
“Ha-ha,” said the table captain, “you’re just bothered about Marie Smith.”
“Skirt crazy! Skirt crazy!” mumbled the guy stuffing down the eggs.
I threw my water in his face, then I got up, facing the table captain and the guy on my right. “Listen,” I said, “Tommy Smith is innocent. I was there an hour before the murder happened, wasn’t I? What do you loudmouthed half-wits think you know about it? All you morons know is what you read in the papers. Tommy didn’t do it. I should know, shouldn’t I? I was right there in the house before it happened. I’ve been around there plenty since. I’ve talked to the detectives.”
I sat down, plenty mad. I sat down because I had seen a faculty officer coming into the dining room. We all kept still until he walked on through. Then the table captain sneered and said:
“Tommy Smith is a dirty stinker. He’s the one that killed his father all right. He stuck a knife right through his back!”
“A lie! A lie!” I screamed.
“How do you know it’s a lie?”
“Well, I — I know, that’s all,” I said.
“Yeah, you know! Listen to him! You know! That’s hot. I think I’ll laugh!”
“Damn it,” I said. “I do know!”
“How? How? Tell us that!”
“Well, maybe I did it. What do you think about that?”
“You!” shouted the table captain. “A little fourteen-year-old wart like you killing anybody! Ha!”
“Aw, go to hell,” I said, “that’s what you can do. Go straight to hell!”
“A little wart like you killing anybody,” the table captain kept saying, and he was holding his sides and laughing.
~ * ~
All that Monday I felt pretty bad thinking about Tommy, what a really swell guy he had been, always laughing, always having a pat on the back for you. I knew he must be in a cell up in San Quentin now, waiting, counting the hours, maybe hearing them build his scaffold.
I imagine a guy doesn’t feel so hot waiting for a thing like that, pacing in a cell, smoking up cigarettes, wondering what it’s like when you’re dead. I’ve read some about it. I read about Two Gun Crowley, I think it was, who went to the chair with his head thrown back and his chest out like he was proud of it. But there must have been something underneath, and Crowley, at least, knew that he had it coming to him. The real thing must be different than what you read in the papers. It must be pretty awful.
But in spite of all this I had sense enough to stay away from Marie all day. I could easily have gone to her house, which was across the street from the campus, but I knew that she and her sister, Ruth, and that Duff Ryan, the young detective who had made the arrest — because, as he said, he thought it was his duty — had counted on the commutation of sentence. They figured they’d have plenty of time to clear up some angles of the case which had been plenty shaky even in court. No, sir. Sweet Marie would be in no mood for my consolation, and besides I was sick of saying the same things over and over and watching her burst into tears every time I mentioned Tommy’s name.
I sat in the study hall Monday evening thinking about the whole thing. Outside the window I could see the stars crystal clear; and though it was warm in the classroom I could feel the cold of the air in the smoky blue of the night, so that I shivered. When they marched us into the dormitory at eight-thirty, Simmons, the mess captain, started razzing me about Tommy being innocent again, and I said:
“Listen, putrid, you wanta get hurt?”
“No,” he said, then he added: “Sore head.”
“You’ll have one sore face,” I said, “if you don’t shut that big yap of yours.”
There was no more said, and when I went to bed and the lights went off I lay there squirming while that fat-cheeked Pushton staggered through taps with his bugle. I was glad that Myers had bugle duty tomorrow and I wouldn’t have to listen to Pushton.
But long after taps I still couldn’t sleep for thinking of Tommy. What a damn thing that was — robbing me of my sleep! But I tell you, I did some real fretting, and honestly, if it hadn’t been for the fact that God and I parted company so long ago, I might have even been sap enough to pray for him. But I didn’t. I finally went to sleep. It must have been ten o’clock.
I didn’t show around Marie’s Tuesday afternoon either, figuring it was best to keep away But after chow, that is, supper, an orderly came beating it out to the study hall for me and told me I was wanted on the telephone. I chased up to the main building and got right on the wire. It was Duff Ryan, that young detective I told you about.
“You’ve left me with quite a load, young man,” he said.
“Explain,” I said. “I’ve no time for nonsense.” I guess I must have been nervous to say a thing like that to the law, but there was something about Duff Ryan’s cool gray eyes that upset me and I imagined I could see those eyes right through the telephone.
“I mean about Ruth,” he said softly, “she feels pretty badly. Now I can take care of her all right, but little Marie is crying her eyes out and I can’t do anything with her.”
“So what?” I said.
“She’s your girl, isn’t she, Martin?” he asked.
“Listen,” I said, “in this school guys get called by their last name. Martin sounds sissy. My name is Thorpe.”
“I’m sorry I bothered you, Martin,” Duff said in that same soft voice. “If you don’t want to cooperate—”
“Oh, I’ll cooperate,” I said. “I’ll get right over. That is, provided I can get permission.”
“I’ve already arranged that,” Duff told me. “You just come on across the street and don’t bother mentioning anything about it to anyone.”
“OK,” I said, and hung up. I sat there for a minute. This sounded fishy to me. Of course, Duff might be on the level, but I doubted it. You can never tell what a guy working for the law is going to do.
I trotted out to the campus and on across to the Smith house. Their mother had died a long while ago, so with the father murdered, and Tommy in the death house, there were only the two girls left.
Duff answered the door himself. I looked up at the big bruiser and then I sucked in my breath. I wouldn’t have known him! His face was almost gray. Under his eyes were the big
gest black rings I had ever seen. I don’t mean the kind you get fighting. I mean the other kind, the serious kind you get from worry. He had short clipped hair that was sort of reddish, and shoulders that squared off his figure, tapering it down to a nice V.
Of course, he was plenty old, around twenty-six, but at this his being a detective surprised you because ordinarily he looked so much like a college kid. He always spoke in a modulated voice and never got excited over anything. And he had a way of looking at you that I hated. A quiet sort of way that asked and answered all of its own questions.
Personally, as a detective, I thought he was a big flop. The kind of detectives that I prefer seeing are those giant fighters that blaze their way through a gangster barricade. Duff Ryan was none of this. I suppose he was tough but he never showed it. Worst of all, I’d never even seen his gun!
The Best American Noir of the Century Page 5
