The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  “I lit matches,” he said. “I went over every square inch of those two yards, even climbed over the fence in my robe. They must have gone in somebody’s open window on one of the lower floors, on that side facing us.”

  “Well then, why didn’t you ring their doorbells, find out for sure?”

  “Wake people up at this hour, asking for my shoes? What kind of a sap d’you think I want them to take me for? They’d laugh in my face!” It was true; it was one of those things that the average man finds it strangely difficult to bring himself to do. He doesn’t mind appearing ridiculous to his wife, but with outsiders it’s a different matter.

  “Well, don’t expect me to go down there and ask for them back for you,” she said. “You were the one threw them—now you can do without them! We’re so well off we can’t get away out of this awful heat, like most of the people that live around us, but you can afford to throw ten-dollar shoes out of the window.”

  Tom Quinn was back in bed again. He looped the clothing around his upturned ear once more, not against the cats this time but against his wife’s reproaches—which he had a sneaking suspicion were well-earned.

  He heard a good deal about it the next morning, more than he cared to. He went off to his work still tingling all over from her verbal thrusts and jabs. He expected to hear a good deal about it that evening when he returned, too, and in fact for several days to come. It would be a week before he heard the end of it. Not that Mrs. Quinn was a nagger—quite the opposite. She was cheerful and easy to get along with as a rule. The heat, which had been unabated for three weeks now, was probably telling on her. And then outside of that, he could see her point in this case. They were not well off, quite the reverse. Things had been getting worse for several years now with him, instead of better. His shoes, because of his arch deformity, were one of the largest items of expense they had. Unlike most couples, he paid twice as much for his as she did for hers. And the more he thought about the way he had thrown them away, the more childish and stupid he had to admit he’d been. So childish and stupid that it became doubly impossible for him to go around to the flats on the next street and make inquiries about them, or even have the janitor of his own building do it for him. The way the people were in this neighborhood, whoever had them would probably deny finding them, keep them—he tried to console himself. But it was no use.

  He even toyed with the idea of buying himself a new pair, rubbing a little dust on them, and pretending to his wife that they were his former ones returned, to avoid being subjected to her sarcasm, but he found it impossible to do that because he didn’t have the necessary ten dollars to spare.

  However, when he returned from work that evening expecting to hear quite a good deal more about those shoes and none of it complimentary, he found her opening remarks bewildering. She seemed to have no further complaint to make.

  “Well,” she said admiringly, “I’m glad you had spunk enough to go around and demand them back, like I told you to. I really didn’t think you would.”

  She pointed, and he saw the shoes there side by side on the floor, on a sheet of newspaper they’d been wrapped in.

  She took it for granted it was his doing that they had been restored. “Guess you didn’t have time to come back upstairs with them yourself this morning, did you? You were late for work as it was,” she went on, answering her own question.

  “Oh, then you didn’t see who brought them?” Quinn pumped.

  “No, I found them standing out there at the door, wrapped up in paper, when I went out at noon. Funny they didn’t ring the bell and hand them over personally. Still, it was nice of them to go to all the trouble of climbing those four flights of stairs. Who had them?”

  Quinn decided he might as well bask in her good opinion, even if he hadn’t earned it. The shoes were back, so what difference did it make? If he admitted it hadn’t been through him they were returned, she might start in criticizing him all over again. “Somebody across the way,” he said vaguely. That was undoubtedly the truth of the matter anyway, since they certainly hadn’t been able to do a boomerang loop in the air and fly in some window on this same side of the court.

  She didn’t press him for further details.

  He picked the shoes up and looked them over curiously, but they looked no different to his untrained eye than they had when he had taken them off last night and parked them under his bed. They needed a shine, but they had then too; he decided he’d celebrate their return by blowing them to one. He got about one shine a year, as a rule.

  At the same time he was wondering how the mysterious person had known which flat to return them to. She’d turned on the light in the bedroom, he remembered, when he went down to look for them, and he supposed the finder had judged by that. But then why hadn’t they rung the bell when they were returning them and waited a minute to make sure they had the right party? Or for that matter, if they’d been awake at the time and seen the tell-tale lighted window, why hadn’t they called out to him then and there, while he was down there in the yard looking? Why wait until today?

  The only explanation he could find for that was that they had been awake and had seen the window light up, but didn’t discover that the shoes were in the same room with them until today, in the daylight. Maybe they didn’t sleep in the room the shoes had landed in, therefore didn’t hear them tumble. Or if they did (and most people’s bedrooms were at the back in these flats), maybe the shoes had landed on a carpeted floor or in the seat of an overstuffed sofa. It was certainly uncanny that they had both passed through one and the same window, and avoided smashing the pane.

  In any case, Quinn felt, the whole thing was too trivial, too unimportant one way or the other, to waste time wondering about. He’d miraculously gotten his shoes back, and that was all that mattered. By the following morning he and his wife had both practically forgotten the episode. By the following evening they definitely had. By the second morning after it was so completely erased that only direct mention of it could have brought it back into their minds, and they were the only ones who knew about it, so who else was to mention it to them?

  * * *

  —

  The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there. It wasn’t a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit tenements on one side of it, lumberyards and ice-plants and tall stacks on the other.

  The house was set far back from the street, hemmed in by the blank walls that rose around it.

  The inspector, who was a heavily-built man, looked doubtfully up at it as he stepped in under the warped porch-shed. “I hope I don’t put my foot in the wrong place and bring it tumbling down on top of us.”

  “Living in a place like this was asking for it,” one of the men with him remarked. “A regular corner-pocket; it must be pitch-dark all the way back here at night.”

  The house was bigger on the inside than it gave the impression of being from the front. They passed down a tunnel-like hall to a room at the back, which kept lighting up, bright blue, as though there were a short circuit in there. A couple of men lugging a camera came hustling out, nodded, and left, trailing an acrid odor of flashlight powder behind them.

  The inspector went in, said: “So that’s him, eh?”

  There was a man lying dead on the floor, with a section of clothesline wound around his neck. Although the activity going on all around stemmed from him, nobody was paying much attention to him any more. One of the detectives even stepped over him to save time getting from one side of the room to the other.

  A pyramid of empty tin cans had toppled down in the corner. A terrified mouse darted out, around, and
in again. Its long tail stayed visible between two of the cans, then vanished more slowly than the rest of it had.

  The inspector said, “I’m only surprised it didn’t happen long ago.”

  “He only went out once a month to buy canned goods. Never left the place outside of that. I guess that’s how he managed to stay alive as long as he did.”

  “Well, he’s going out now and it ain’t to buy canned goods,” the inspector said. He called out into the hall: “Morgue! We don’t need him any more.” A couple of men waiting out there came in with a basket.

  “How’d they get in, whoever it was?” the inspector wanted to know.

  “Right there.” One of them indicated a wide-open window, facing the back. “The old guy would never open the front door for anyone of his own accord. Too suspicious. It was still locked on the inside when we got here, anyway. He must have left this window open a little on account of the awful heat. In came death.”

  “Hidden hoard motive, like with all these recluses,” suggested the inspector. “Well, did they get it? How does it look to you men?”

  A man riffling a sheaf of old papers, letters, and clippings through his fingers, and sneezing from the dust at intervals, spoke up. “I think they did get something. There’s not a sign of a bank book, safe deposit key, or memorandum of any investments anywhere around, and it’s a cinch he didn’t live on air. The storekeeper where he got his monthly groceries says he never showed up with anything smaller than a twenty-dollar bill. The large old-fashioned kind that don’t circulate any more.”

  “How does he look?” asked the inspector crisply.

  “Okay at first sight. He was the one notified us. You see, this Wontner had been buying from him so long, he knew just which day to expect him in. Always the first of the month. It never varied. So when he didn’t show, today being the day, the grocer came around and knocked, thinking the guy might be ill and need help. When he didn’t get any answer, he tipped off a cop.”

  “It happened last night, the examiner tells me.”

  “Yep, somewhere within the past twenty-four hours. The killer was unaware of Wontner’s habits, otherwise he could have timed it different and given himself a whole month’s head-start on us. By doing it last night, he cut himself down to within twenty-four hours’ margin of safety. If it had happened tonight, after he got his groceries, no one would have been any the wiser for a whole thirty days to come. The guy was a complete hermit.”

  “Well, they got his hoard, proof enough,” said the inspector. “Now one of the first things we want to watch out for is sudden signs of mysterious prosperity around here in the immediate neighborhood. They’ll lie low at first, think they’re smart, but they won’t be able to hold out for long. Anyone that breaks out in a new suit or starts dolling his wife up, or moves kind of sudden to a new flat, or starts setting them up for the boys down at the corner, we’ll keep our eyes open for that kind of thing.” He added abruptly, “Where’d the rope come from? Think that’ll do us any good?”

  “No, we’ve already traced it. He picked it up right out in back here. Wontner used to hang his shirts on it to dry.”

  The inspector went over to the open window, peered out. Something like a high-powered lightning bug was flashing on and off around the side of the house, where there was a narrow chasm between it and the warehouse wall that towered over it. “Who’s out there?” he asked.

  “Bob White, digging for worms.”

  The gleam went out, and a man in horn-rimmed glasses, his collar open and his necktie-knot pulled nearly around to his shoulder to lessen the heat, came up to the outside of the window.

  “Just in time, inspector,” he said. “I’ve got a beauty out here, a pip! Come on out and take a look.”

  Bob White didn’t look much like a detective. He suggested a college student of the post-war generation, of the earnest, not frivolous, variety; not so much because of a youthful appearance as because of an air of enthusiasm and seriousness combined. His mates pretended to laugh at him, and they secretly admired him.

  The inspector went out onto the plot of ground behind the house, littered with empty tin cans and rubbish discarded over a period of years by the murdered eccentric. The others came out after him one by one, trying to look disinterested and not succeeding.

  Bob White beckoned them on, turned back into the narrow alleyway running through to the front. “Stay on that plank I’ve laid down there, will you, fellows?” he suggested. “There’s a few fainter ones back along here, and you may want more than one. But this one—zowie!”

  He stopped and pointed. The others craned their necks over the inspector’s shoulders; the hindmost one squatted down frog-like and stuck his head out from behind them all.

  “There’s either a drain- or water-pipe somewhere close under the surface here. It must be defective from age, and keeps the ground damp above it. Now look at that, right in the middle of it! What more could any of you ask for?”

  The footprint was crystal clear as his torch played caressingly over it.

  “The thing’s over, before it’s even halfway begun.” The inspector didn’t waste any more time. “Hurry up. Phone the lab to get some guys up here with moulage and take the impression of it. We can build the whole man up out of that thing. We’ll know what he looks like and everything about him by the time we’re through. This is as good as a photograph.”

  “He made it when he was leaving,” Bob White pointed out. “Not on his way in. The toe’s pointed out toward the street. He was lucky the first time, missed the soggy patch. His feet landed on the hard stubbly ground before and after it. But his luck didn’t hold up on the return trip; his foot came right down smack in the middle of it.”

  The inspector said grimly, “His luck’s run out now—whoever he is.”

  * * *

  —

  “You can quote me,” said the inspector, bouncing a pencil up and down on its point atop his desk, “that we are confident of making an arrest shortly. The case is proceeding satisfactorily. And now, gents, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to my work.”

  “Aw, inspector, can’t you do better by us than that?” one of the reporters whined. “That’s the same old gag.”

  “Now boys, don’t be hogs. I’ll send for you when I’ve got something more for you. Don’t slam the door on your way out.”

  When they’d shoved their copy paper into their pockets and gone, he picked up his desk phone, asked for the police laboratory.

  “How’s that mold coming along?”

  “It’s come through pretty. I’m sending you over a sketch of the man we reconstructed from it.”

  “Good. I’ll have it photostated and pass it around among my men.”

  “Here are some of the details. The man you want is five foot ten, weight around one hundred seventy-five or eighty. He takes a nine shoe. He’s flat-footed; this shoe has a special built-in arch, a sort of steel rib between the heel and toe to give him support. You know, cantilever principle. That should narrow it down immensely; the firms that sell those things usually keep a list of their customers, like a doctor does patients. His occupation is sedentary; doesn’t do much walking or even standing—the heel is hardly worn down at all. Look for some kind of a white-collar worker.”

  “You’ve practically handed him to me on a silver platter,” said the inspector gratefully.

  A messenger had arrived with the sketch and the plaster mold in twenty minutes. Photostatic copies of the former were ready within half an hour after that. The inspector called the men he’d detailed to the case in and handed one to each.

  “There’s the man,” he said. “The facial features have been left out, but study the silhouette, the build, and carriage. All we need to know now is his name and present whereabouts. I want every one of you to go to a different firm specializing in arch-support shoes, check the customers on record b
y the measurements on this sketch; they may be able to identify him for you by the shoe alone. If he got those shoes in this city, we’ll know who he is inside the next twenty-four hours. And even if he didn’t, we’ll have him inside a week at the most. Give me that classified directory. I’ll detail you. Keller, you take them down to the E’s, Easy-Walk Shoes, Incorporated. Michaels—” And so on.

  Within five minutes he was sitting alone in his office. It was now forty-eight hours after the discovery of the murder.

  Bob White had drawn the S’s to the Z’s. He phoned in at about five. “I’ve got him, inspector,” he said. “Second place on my list. Supporta Shoes. They keep a litmus-paper graph of the shape of the customer’s foot, to keep track of any improvement as he goes along. It matches our shoe-print like a hand does a glove. No possibility of error. But the salesman was almost able to identify him from the sketch, without that, anyway. Now here’s what their records have to say: Thomas J. Quinn. Thirty-eight years old. Height five-ten. Weight one hundred and seventy. Occupation, bookkeeper for a millinery concern.” White paused, then gave an address. “They keep a complete record, you see, go into it scientific, even take X-rays of the foot and all that. Bought his current pair late last spring. Grouses a lot about the expense each time, to the best of the salesman’s recollection.”

  “Well, that’s another little nail in his coffin.” The inspector was jubilant. “He lives just a little farther away than I’d expected, but well within the radius of opportunity to soak up neighborhood gossip about the old miser, and also temptation to commit it. Five blocks west and one north of where Wontner lived. Ten minutes’ walk, even for a guy with flat feet.” He finished jotting, closed his notebook. “Great, White. I’ll call the rest in. Meanwhile you get over there quick. If he’s lit out already, report in to me immediately and we’ll send out an alarm. If he’s still there, keep your eye on him. Don’t let him out of your sight. I’m not pulling him in right away. I’m going to keep him under observation a little while yet, see if any of the miser’s hoard shows up. We’ve got him now, so we don’t need to be in a hurry. The stronger the case we can build up against him, the less work it is for us in the end.”