The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  White said, “I found a rosary among her belongings when I cased the flat. If you’re a believer in psychology, I know a simple way to find out for sure whether she was in on it with him or not.”

  “I’ll take a chance. What is it?”

  “It’s half-past six now. Turn her loose, with a tail on her of course. I’ll be able to tell you within half an hour, by seven, whether she’s involved or he did it without her knowledge.”

  “We’ll give it a spin.”

  Mrs. Quinn came in in custody of a police matron. She wasn’t crying any more now. Her face was white and haggard with the horror of this unspeakable thing that had suddenly dropped out of the clouds on the two of them.

  “Sit down, Mrs. Quinn,” said the inspector, in a more considerate voice than he had used toward her husband.

  She spoke first, without waiting for him. “Won’t you believe me that he couldn’t have, that he hasn’t been out of the house at that hour for years—never since I can remember?” she said in a low, pleading voice. “You say it happened at four in the morning. He’s been asleep in the same room with me at that hour every night—not once, not once—”

  “Just let me ask you one question, Mrs. Quinn,” interrupted the inspector crisply. “Have you always, invariably, every night, been awake yourself at four in the morning?”

  The answer was so muffled, those in the room could barely hear it. “Seldom—hardly ever.” Her head drooped downward.

  “Then how do you know he’s always been in the room with you at that time? Let’s pick a night at random. Let’s pick the night of August fourth.”

  She raised a stricken face. She didn’t have to answer. They could tell. She couldn’t remember, couldn’t differentiate that night; all their nights and all their days were so much alike, it was blurred. It was gone beyond hope of recapture, with nothing to distinguish it by, to get a grip on it by, to separate it from the rest.

  “You can go home, Mrs. Quinn,” said the inspector abruptly. One of his men had to open the door to get her to move, she was so dazed. As she went out the inspector raised his thumb out of his clasped hands, at Bob White.

  White called back in a quarter of an hour. “She’s out of it, inspector. You can rely on that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She went straight from the precinct-house to seven o’clock mass, to pray for him in his trouble. She’s in the church right now. Not even the most hardened criminal would have nerve enough to do that, if there was any guilt on his own conscience. I had her typed right.”

  “Good,” said the inspector. “Then the release becomes bona fide. Come on in again. I’m glad she’s out of it. She won’t blur the issue now. He hasn’t got a Chinaman’s chance.”

  * * *

  —

  Quinn was booked at eleven that same morning and bound over for the grand jury. It sat immediately after Labor Day, that is to say, within a month of the time the murder had been committed. The footprint-mold, the actual shoes, the testimony of the clerk who had sold them to Quinn; that of Wontner’s grocer as to the kind of bills he had always received in payment from the old man, that of the clothing and radio salesmen and the renting agent as to the kind they had received from Quinn within a week of the murder, were more than it needed. It was a circumstantial case without a peer. He was indicted for murder in the first degree and trial was set for the following month, October.

  When it came up on the calendar, the lawyer appointed by the court to defend him told him openly, in his cell: “I have taken this case at the court’s order, but I cannot save you, Quinn. Do you know what can save you, what the only thing is? You have one chance in a thousand, and this is it: If you are telling me the truth—and bear in mind that if—and actually found that wallet where you say you did, just outside the exit kiosk of the Brandon Avenue subway station, at or around six P.M. on August 5th, there is a slim chance, a ghost of a chance and no more, that the person who lost it will recognize the circumstances through the publicity it will receive at the trial, and step forward at the last minute to corroborate you. Even if he does, that is by no means sure-fire, you understand, but it is the only ray there is for you. I am going to pound and hammer and dwell on the time and place of your finding it every time I open my mouth, throughout the trial, but it’s still a thousand-to-one shot. The person may be far away by now, where local news (and this trial of yours is after all not big-time) won’t carry. He may have died in the meantime. He may not have been in lawful possession of the money himself at the time, and hence may be afraid to step forward and identify it.”

  He looked narrowly at the indicted man, lidded his eyes suggestively. “He may never have existed at all. You’re the loser, if he didn’t. If there ever was a wallet, and you destroyed it as you say you did, that more than anything else sealed your doom.”

  “I tell you I did! I was obsessed with the idea of keeping the money for myself, wanted to make it as difficult for it to be successfully identified as I could. I cut the wallet up into little pieces with a razor blade, without my wife’s knowledge, and next day when I went to work I threw the pieces into successive waste-receptacles I passed on the street, a few at a time. I thought I was smart, I thought I was clever!”

  Irony. He had once been afraid the rightful owner would put in an appearance, and he would lose the money. Now he was afraid that he wouldn’t, and he would lose his life.

  Crouched there on the cell bunk, he lowered his head resignedly. “I used to think, in the beginning, the first few days after I was arrested, that there was something I could tell them about my shoes that would have cleared me, or given me a fighting chance at least. Gee, what torture it was, trying to think what it could be, never able to! I nearly went crazy, racking my brains. Now I know better. I don’t try for it any more. It wouldn’t come to me at this late day if it didn’t then. I guess I was mistaken.”

  “I guess,” said the lawyer dryly, “you were.”

  * * *

  —

  “Was the defendant—that’s that man sitting there—a regular customer of yours at the corner where you keep your shoe-shine box, Freddy?”

  “Him? Naw! He lived right down the block. He passed me twice a day coming and going, and he never got a shine for years. You coulda wrote your name on his kicks, the dust was always so thick. I gave up paging him long ago. Then one day in August he comes up to me of his own accord for a work-out. I nearly keeled over.” (Laughter.)

  “Can you tell the court anything in particular about that shine, Freddy?”

  “I can tell ’em he needed it.” (Laughter.) “It was so long since he had one last he thought the price was still a nickel, didn’t even know we organized and went up to a dime.” (Laughter.)

  “Anything else, Freddy? Can you remember anything about his shoes, outside of the fact they needed polishing badly?”

  “They had steel beams underneath ’em. One of ’em was so ganged-up with dry mud or clay, not on top, but underneath, that it kept dropping off and getting in my way, so finally I took me a knife and scraped it clean for him.”

  “Your witness.”

  “No questions.”

  * * *

  —

  “Exactly where did you find this wallet, Mr. Quinn?”

  “Just outside the street exit of the Brandon Avenue subway station, the uptown side.”

  “What date?”

  “Wednesday, August 5th.”

  Remark from the bench: “The defendant and his counsel needn’t shout so. They’re perfectly audible all over the room.”

  “What time of day was it?”

  “Around six in the evening.”

  “Take the witness.”

  “Just two questions, Quinn. A subway station at six in the evening, you say. Was there a very large crowd around you or was there not?”

  “There was
a—pretty large crowd around me.”

  “What is this I am holding in the palm of my hand, Quinn?”

  “I can’t tell. You’re standing too far away.”

  “I shouldn’t be, for anyone with normal eyesight. Is your sight defective or isn’t it? Answer my question!”

  “I’m—nearsighted.”

  “And yet you and you alone, out of all those people coming up the subway stairs, the majority of whom must have had unimpaired eyesight—you and you alone were the one to see this wallet. The State rests its case.”

  * * *

  —

  “Well, we didn’t get a nibble,” the lawyer said bitterly to Quinn in his cell, while the jury was out. “Every day since the trial first started, at least once a day, I made a point of emphasizing where and when you found that wallet, how much was in it, what it looked like. No one, not even a fake, popped up, hoping to get his hands on the money. That would have been something, created a certain effect of probability for us at least. Now it’s too late. It’s over. He won’t step forward now any more. Because he never existed anyway, except in your own imagination. If I wanted to explain how I got hold of a certain sum of money, I would have been more clever about it.”

  Quinn said dismally, “But the truth is never clever. This was the truth.”

  “Here he comes to bring you back again. They must have agreed already. Twelve-and-a-half minutes, by my watch! I don’t have to go in there with you. I can tell you what it’s going to be right now before I even hear it, when they’re out such a short time.”

  “I’m like a dreamer dreaming a dream,” Quinn said as the court attendant unlocked the cell gate, “and I never seem to wake up.”

  * * *

  —

  “We have, your honor. We find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  “I sentence you to death in the electric chair, in the week beginning December 26th, said sentence to be carried out by the warden of the State Prison at—”

  “My shoes! I gotta remember something about my shoes! Oh, somebody help me, help me to remember! I don’t want to die!”

  * * *

  —

  Bob White, homeward bound on Christmas Eve, the collar of his ulster turned up around his stinging ears, met a cop he knew by sight, hustling a seedy-looking individual with silvery stubble on his face along in custody. The prisoner was not guilty of an important infraction, White could tell that by the willingness the arresting officer showed to linger and exchange a word or two with him, cold as it was. Their breaths were white nebulae floating from their mouths.

  “This is a hell of a night to be running anyone in,” White kidded. “What’s he done?”

  “It’s that old Wontner place, down near the river, on my beat. Him and every other vag for miles around have been pulling it apart for weeks, carting it away piece by piece for firewood. Every time we board it up they bust in all over again and carry off some more of it. They been warned time and again to stay away from there, and now we’re cracking down. I’ve got strict orders from my captain to bring any of ’em in I catch doing it from now on.”

  “That place still standing?” said White in surprise. “I thought it was pulled down long ago. I was on that case. The guy gets the jolt sometime right this week, I think.”

  The old stumblebum, stamping his feet fretfully on the frosty ground, whined: “Aw, hurry up and take me to the lock-up where it’s warm!” He delivered an impatient kick at the cop’s ankle to spur him on.

  The latter jolted, lifted him nearly clear of the ground by the scruff of the neck, shook him wrathfully like a terrier. “Warm, is it, eh? I’ll make it warm for ye, I will!” He complained to White: “It’s all week long I’ve been doing this. There’ll be another one at it by the time I get back.”

  “I’ll go down there, keep an eye on it for you till you get back,” the detective offered. “May as well. I got nothing to go home for on Christmas Eve anyway. Just four walls and a hatrack.”

  “The pleasure’s all yours,” said the cop. He and his wriggling prisoner went zigzagging up the street one way, White turned down the other toward the bleak wintry waterfront, wondering what impulse was making him go near such a place on such a night of all nights. He’d heard of murderers revisiting the scene of their crimes, but never detectives.

  It was a cavernous maw of inky blackness between the enshrouding warehouse-walls. His torch scarred the frozen ground before him as he sauntered idly up to it. He shifted the light upward against the face of the building itself when he got in close enough. It had looked bad enough that day last August when they came here to find Wontner’s murdered body, but it had been a mansion then compared to the shape it was in now. He could understand the cop’s exhausted patience with the neighborhood vandals. The porch-shed and porch-flooring before the door had disappeared in their entirety. There wasn’t a pane of glass left in the windows. The door was gone too, and so were the window-frames and casings. Even the very boards that the police had nailed across the apertures had been ripped out again.

  He went around to the back, through that passageway where he had found the damning footprint. It was worse, if anything, back there; the vandals had been able to work with less danger of discovery from the street.

  In the dead silence, while he stood there gazing ruefully at the ruin, he heard a scuttling sound somewhere inside. Rats, probably, alarmed by the penetrating rays of his torch through the fissures of the loosened clapboards. Something fell heavily, with a tinny thud, rolled restlessly, finally quieted again.

  Rats undoubtedly, but he was just policeman enough to decide to go in and take a look, for the luck of it. He hadn’t intended to until now, taking it for granted Donlan, whose beat it was on, had everything under control.

  He made his entrance through the gaping back door, picked clean of every impediment; he advanced weaving his torch slowly downward before him, not through caution so much as to make sure of his footing. It was a highly necessary precaution. In the room where they had found Wontner, whole sections of the flooring had been pulled up bodily, laying bare the skeletal cross-beams underneath. You could look right down through them, in places, to some kind of a sub-cellar or basement. The sound came again, from down there. Whisk! Whisht! And then a clinking, like chains. More of that loose rolling.

  He advanced a cautious step or two out along one of the denuded cross-beams, like a tightrope-walker; aimed his torch downward through the interstices. There was a flurry of agitated scampering beneath. Sure, rats. The place was alive with them, crawling with them. It was a menace to the vicinity. The Board of Health should have done something about pulling the wreck down. Red tape, he supposed. But if kids ever got in here in the daytime and started playing around—

  A gray torpedo-shaped object scurried by underneath, plainly visible in the attenuated pool of light cast by his torch. A second one followed, hesitated midway, turned back again. His gorge rose involuntarily.

  He did something wrong. Maybe the slight motion of his head, following their movements down there, was enough to throw him off-balance. Maybe the rotted plank had just been waiting for the excuse to crumble. There was a bang, a sickening sagging, and he shot forward and down, legs out before him, like a kid riding a banister-rail. A lot of dust and junk came down around him.

  It wasn’t much of a fall, six feet at the most. And the place underneath wasn’t bricked or cemented, just hard-packed earth; more like a shallow dugout or trough than an actual cellar. Perhaps excavated by hand by Wontner over a period of years, the soil carted away a little at a time. He was lucky. His torch, spun into a loop by the fall, came down after him, miraculously failed to go out. It rocked there a few feet away, casting a foreshortened eye of light. He quickly snatched it up again, got to his feet. It lessened the grisliness of the situation a little. The redoubled rustling all around him, the imagined feel of lo
athsome squirming bodies directly under him. He let out a yell; anyone would have. Stood there sweeping the light all around him in a circle, to keep them back.

  Their frightened darts in and out of the radius of his light seemed like vicious sorties and retreats. He expected to be attacked at any minute, and knew if one did, all would follow. The shadows were lousy with them all around him. There was that clinking again, and something cylindrical rolled against his foot. He jumped spasmodically, whipped his torchbeam down at it. It was only a can, dislodged by one of the rodents in its scampering.

  He snatched it up to use as a missile, poised it in his right hand, sighted the torch in his left. It caught one out midway across the earthen floor. He let fly with an involuntary huff of repulsion. The can struck it squarely, stunned it. He grabbed up a second can—the place was strewn with them—and sent that at it to finish it off. Instead the can struck the first one and split open. The top shot up, as though it had been crudely soldered by hand under the paper label. The rat, recovering, side-wound off again with a broken back or something.

  White forgot it and the rest of the rats, forgot where he was, forgot to shout up for help. He just stood there staring at what lay revealed within the pool of light. Not shriveled, spoiled food, but a tightly-rolled bone-shaped wad of money was peering from the burst can.

  What attracted Donlan, the cop, inside from the street sometime later was the sound White was making shattering can after can down there with a large rock.

  “It’s me,” White said, when the second torch peered down on him through the shattered floor-beams. “I fell through. Watch your own step up there.”

  Donlan said, “Watcha got?”

  “I’ve got ninety-two thousand dollars—so far—out of old tin cans down here, and there’s still more to go. Gimme a hand up, quick! Don’t you see, that guy couldn’t have done it after all. Because this is the hoard, down here, still intact—not that two thousand we nabbed him with!”