The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  The oncoming tread had entered the bedroom adjacent to me, and a light went on in there. I heard a slatted blind spin down. Then the sound of a valise being shifted out into a more accessible position, and the click of the key used to open it. I could even glimpse the colored labels on the lid as it went up and over. South American hotels. I saw bodyless hands reach down, take things out: striped pajamas and piles of folded linen, that had never seen South America. That had probably lain hidden on a shelf in some public checkroom in the city all this time.

  My heart was going hard. The dried blood on the woodwork at my back, of someone I had killed, seemed to sear me where it touched. My flesh kept crawling away from it in ripples, though my body stood there motionless. It was the blood of someone I had killed, not that this man out there had killed. No matter what happened now, tonight, nothing could absolve me of that. There was no possibility of transfer of blame. Cliff had told me so, and it was true.

  A light went up right outside where I was, and an ice-white needle of it splintered in at me, lengthwise, from top to bottom, but not broad enough to focus anything it fell on—from the outside.

  I could see a strip of his back by it. He had come in and was squatting down by the damaged safe, mirror-covering swung out of the way. He swung its useless lid in and out a couple of times. I heard him give an almost soundless chuckle, as though the vandalism amused him. Then he took things out of his coat-pockets and began putting them in. Oblong manila envelopes such as are used to contain currency and securities, lumpy tissue-wrapped shapes that might have been jewelry. Then he gave the safe-flap an indifferent slap-to. As though whether it shut tight or not didn’t matter; what it held was perfectly safe—for the present.

  Then he stood, before turning to go out.

  This was when, now. I took the gun Cliff had given me, his gun, out of my pocket, and raised it to what they call the wishbone of the chest and held it there, pointed before me. Then I moved one foot out before me, and that took the door away, in a soundless sweep.

  I was standing there like that, when he turned finally. The mirror covering the safe-niche had been folded back until now, so he didn’t see the reflection of my revelation.

  The shock must have been almost galvanic. His throat made a sound like the creak of a rusty pulley. I thought he was going to fall down insensible for a minute. His body made a tortured corkscrew-twist all the way down to his feet, but he stayed up.

  I had a lot to remember. Cliff had told me just what to say, and what not to say. I’d had to learn my lines by heart, and particularly the timing of them. That was even more important. He’d warned me I had a very limited time in which to say everything I was to say. I would be working against a deadline, that might fall at any minute, but he didn’t tell me what it was. He’d warned me we both—this man I was confronting and I—would be walking a tightrope, without benefit of balancing-poles. Everything depended on which one of us made a false step first.

  It was a lot to remember, staring at the man whom I had only known until now as Burg, a fellow rooming-house lodger, and who held the key to the mystery that had suddenly clouded my existence. And I had to remember each thing in the order they had been given me, in the proper sequence, or it was no good.

  The first injunction was, Make him speak first. If it takes all night, wait until he speaks first. Some matter of recognition must have been involved, but I had no leisure for my own side-thoughts.

  He spoke finally. Somebody had to, and I didn’t. “How’d you get here?” It was the croak of a frog in mud.

  “You showed me the way, didn’t you?”

  I could see the lump in his throat as he forced it down, to be able to articulate. “You re— You remembered coming here?”

  “You didn’t think I would, did you?”

  His eyes rolled, as at the imminence of some catastrophe. “You—you couldn’t have!”

  The gun and I, we never moved. “Then how did I get back here again, you explain it.”

  His present situation pierced warningly at him through the muffling layers of his panic. I saw his eyes flick toward the entrance to the alcove. I shifted over a little, got it behind me, to seal him in. I felt with my foot and drew the door in behind me, not fast but leaving only a narrow gap. “How long have you been in here like—like this?”

  “Since shortly after dark. I got in while you were away at the funeral services.”

  “Who’d you bring with you?”

  “Just this.” I righted the gun, which had begun to incline a little at the bore.

  He couldn’t resist asking it, he wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t asked it, in his present predicament. “Just how much do you remember?”

  I gave him a wise smile, that implied everything without saying so. It was Cliff’s smile, not mine—but formed by my lips.

  “You remember the drive up?” He said it low, but he’d wavered on the wire, that tightrope Cliff had mentioned. “You couldn’t have! You had the look, the typical look—”

  “What look?”

  He shut up; he’d regained his equilibrium.

  “I was holding a thumbtack pressed into the palm of each hand the whole way.”

  “Then why did you do everything I—you were directed to, so passively?”

  “I wanted to see what it was leading up to. I thought maybe there might be some good in it for me later, if anyone went to all that trouble—”

  “You purposely feigned—? I can’t believe it! You didn’t even draw back, exhibit a tremor, when I let you out of the car, put the knife in your hand, sent you on toward the house, told you how to get in and what to do! You mean you went ahead and consciously—?”

  “Sure I went ahead and did it, because I figured you’d pay off heavy afterwards to keep me quiet. And if I’d tried to balk then, I probably would have gotten the knife myself, on the way back, for my trouble.”

  “What happened, what went wrong inside?”

  “I accidentally dropped the knife in the dark somewhere in the lower hall and couldn’t find it again. I went on up empty-handed, thinking I’d just frighten them out the back way and get a chance at the safe myself. But Ayers turned on me and got me down, he weighed more than I do, and he was going to kill me—to keep it from coming out that they were adulterous, and had been caught in the act of breaking into your safe in the bargain. Only by mistake, she put the awl that he cried out for into my hand instead of his. I plunged it into him in self-defense.”

  He nodded as though this cleared up something that had been bothering him. “Ah, that explains the change of weapon that had me mystified. Also how it was that she got out of the house like that and I had to go after her and—stop her myself. Luckily I was crouched behind the hood of Ayers’s car, peering at the open door, when she came running out. She couldn’t drive herself, so she didn’t try to get in, ran screaming on foot down the cut-off. I jumped in without her seeing me, tore after her, and caught up with her. If I hadn’t, the whole thing would have ended in a ghastly failure. I might have known you were under imperfect control—”

  He’d fallen off long ago, gone hurtling down. But I still had a deadline to work against, things to say, without knowing the why or wherefore. “Your control was perfect enough, don’t let that worry you. You haven’t lost your knack.”

  “But you just said—”

  “And you fell for it. I didn’t know what I was doing when you brought me up here, sent me in to do your dirty-work for you that night. Haven’t you missed something from your late wife’s bedroom since you’ve been back? There was a double photo-folder of you and her. The police took that. I happened to see both pictures in one of the papers. I recognized you as Burg. I’d also recognized my own description, by a darned sweater I wore that night, and had a vague recollection—like when you’ve been dreaming—of having been in such a house and taken part in such a scene. Y
ou’ve convicted yourself out of your own mouth to me, right now. I haven’t come back here to be paid off for my participation or take a cut in any hush-money. Nothing you can give me from that safe can buy your life. You picked someone with weak will-power, maybe, but strong scruples. I was an honest man. You’ve made me commit murder. I can’t clear myself in the eyes of the law—ever. You’re going to pay for doing that to me. Now. This way.”

  “Wait, don’t do that—that won’t help you any. Alive, maybe I can do something for you. I’ll give you money, I’ll get you out of the country. No one needs to know.”

  “My conscience’ll always know. I’ve got an honest man’s conscience in a murderer’s body, now. You should have let me alone. That was your mistake. Here you go, Fleming.”

  He was almost incoherent, drooling at the mouth. “Wait—one minute more! Just sixty seconds—” He took out a thin gold pocket-watch, snapped up its burnished lid. He held it face toward me, open that way.

  I saw what he was trying to do. Cliff had warned me to be careful. I dropped my eyes to his feet, kept them stubbornly lowered, brow furrowed with resistance, while I held the gun on him. Something kept trying to pull them up.

  A flash from the burnished metal of the inside of the watch-lid wavered erratically across my chest-front for an instant, like when kids tease you with sunlight thrown back from a mirror.

  “Look up,” he kept pleading, “look up. Just one minute more. See—the hands are at six-to. Look, just until they get to here.”

  Something was the matter with the trigger of the gun, it must have jammed. I kept trying to close the finger that was hooked around it, and it resisted. Or else maybe it was the finger that wouldn’t obey my will.

  I kept blinking more and more rapidly. The flash slithered across my shuttering eyes, slid off, came back again. They wanted so bad to look up into it; it prickled.

  There was a slight snap, as though he had surreptitiously pulled out the stem-winder, to set the watch back. That did it. I glanced up uncontrollably. He was holding the watch up, brow-high—like he had the candle that night—as if to give me a good, unobstructed look at its dial. It was in about the position doctors carry those little attached head-mirrors with which they examine throats.

  I met his eyes right behind it, and all of a sudden my own couldn’t get away any more, as though they’d hit glue.

  A sort of delicious torpor turned me into wax; I didn’t have any ideas of my own any more. I was open to anyone else’s. My voice-control lasted a moment longer than the rest of my functions. I heard it say, carrying a left-over message that no longer had any will-power behind it, “I’m going to shoot you.”

  “No,” he said soothingly. “You’re tired, you don’t want to shoot anybody. You’re tired. The gun’s too heavy for you. Why do you want to hold that heavy thing?”

  I heard a far-away thump as it hit the floor. As far-away as though it had fallen right through to the basement. Gee, it felt good to be without it! I felt lazy all over. The light was going out, but very gradually, like it was tired too. The whole world was tired. Somebody was crooning, “You’re tired, you’re tired—you dirty bum now I’ve got you!”

  There was a white flash that seemed to explode inside my head, and hurt like anything. Something cold and wet pressed against my eyes when I tried to flicker them open. And when I had, instead of getting lighter as when you’re slowly waking up, the world around me seemed to get darker and weigh against me crushingly, all over. The pain increased, traveled from my head to my lungs. Knives seemed to slash into them, and I couldn’t breathe.

  I could feel my eyeballs starting out of their sockets with strangulation, and my head seemed about to burst. The pressure of the surrounding darkness seemed to come against me in undulating waves. I realized that I was underwater and was drowning. I could swim, but now I couldn’t seem to. I tried to rise and something kept holding me down. I weaved there like a writhing seaweed, held fast to the bottom.

  I doubled over, forced myself down against the surrounding resistance, groped blindly along my own legs. One seemed free and unencumbered, I could lift it from the mucky bottom. About the ankle of the other there was a triple constriction of tightly-coiled rope, like a hideous hempen gaiter. It was tangled hopelessly about a heavy iron cross-bar. When I tried to raise this, one scimitar-like appendage came free, the other remained hopelessly hooked into the slime it had slashed into from above. It must have been some sort of a small but weighty anchor such as is used by launches and fishing-craft.

  I couldn’t release it. I couldn’t endure the bend of position against my inner suffocation. I spiraled upright again in death-fluid. My jaws kept going spasmodically, drinking in extinction.

  A formless blur came down from somewhere, brushed lightly against me, shunted away again before I could grasp it, shot up out of reach. I couldn’t see it so much as sense it as a disturbance in the water.

  There were only fireworks inside my skull now, not conscious thoughts any more. The blurred manifestation shot down again, closer this time. It seemed to hang there, flounderingly, upside-down, beside me. I felt a hand close around my ankle. Then a knife grazed my calf, withdrew. I could feel a tugging at the rope, as if it were being sliced at.

  Self-preservation was the only spark left in my darkening brain. I clutched at the hovering form in the death-grip of the drowning. I felt myself shooting up through water, together with it, inextricably entangled. I wouldn’t let go. Couldn’t. Something that felt like a small ridged rock crashed into my forehead. Even the spark of self-preservation went out.

  When I came to I was lying out on a little pier or stringpiece of some kind, and there were stars over me. I was in shorts and undershirt, wringing wet and shivering, and water kept flushing up out of my mouth. Somebody kept kneading my sides in and out, and somebody else kept flipping my arms up and down.

  I coughed a lot, and one of them said: “There he is, he’s all right now.” He stood up and it was Cliff. He was in his underwear and all dripping too.

  A minute later Waggoner stood up on the other side of me. He was equally sodden, but he’d left on everything but his coat and shoes. There hadn’t been any time by then, I guess. He said, “Now get something around him and then the three of us better get back to the house fast and kill the first bottle we find.”

  There was light coming from somewhere behind us, through some fir trees that bordered the little lake. It played up the little pier. By it, I could see my own outer clothes neatly piled at the very lip of it. There was a paper on top of them, pressed down by one of my oxfords. Cliff picked it up and brought it over and read it to us.

  “I’m wanted for the murder of those two people at the Fleming house, they’re bound to get me sooner or later, and I have no chance. I see no other way but this.

  Vincent Hardy.”

  It was in my own handwriting; the light was strong enough for me to see that when he showed it to me.

  He looked at Waggoner and said, “Do we need this?”

  Waggoner pursed his lips thoughtfully and said, “I think we’re better off without it. These coronery-inquest guys can be awfully dumb sometimes, it might sort of cloud their judgment.”

  Cliff took a match from his dry coat and struck it and held it to the note until there wasn’t any to hold any more.

  I was feeling better now, all but the shivering. I was sitting up. I looked back at the glow through the trees and said, “What’s that?”

  “Fleming’s car,” Cliff answered. “He tried to take a curve too fast getting away from here, when we showed up on his tail, and turned over and kindled.”

  I grimaced sickly. That was about all that could have still stirred horror in me after the past ten days: a cremation alive.

  “I shot him first,” Cliff said quietly.

  “One of us did,” Waggoner corrected. “We all three fired after hi
m. We’ll never know which one hit him. We don’t want to anyway. The machine telescoped and we couldn’t get him out. And then I had to give Dodge a hand going down after you, he’s no great shakes of a swimmer.”

  “We had to hit him,” Cliff said. “It was the only way of breaking the hypnosis in time. You were drowning down there by your ‘own’ act, and there was no time to chase him and force him at gun-point to release his control, or whatever it is they do. We only found out about the anchor after we’d located you—”

  A figure was coming back toward us from the glow, which was dwindling down now. It was the deputy. He said, “Nothing left now; I wet it down all I could to keep it from kindling the trees.”

  “Let’s get back to the house,” Cliff said. “The kid’s all goose-pimples.”

  We went back and I got very soused on my third of the bottle. I couldn’t even seem to do that properly. They let me sleep it off there, the four of us spent the night right there where we were. I found out later it was Fleming’s own bed I’d occupied, but at the time I wouldn’t have cared if it was the mirror-closet itself, with Ayers’s body still in it.

  In the morning Cliff came in and had a talk with me before the other two were up. I knew where I was going to have to go with him in a little while, but I didn’t mind so much any more.

  I said, “Did that help any, what I did last night? Did it do any good?”

  “Sure,” he said. “It was the works; it was what I wanted, had to have. What d’you suppose I was doing around here all day yesterday, before he got back? Why d’you suppose I warned you to make him stay right there in the alcove with you, not let the conversation drift outside? I had it all wired up, we listened in on the whole thing. The three of us were down in the basement, taking it all down. We’ve got the whole thing down on record now. I’d emptied that gun I gave you, and I figured he’d be too smart to do anything to you right here in his own house. Only, he got you out and into his car too quick, before we had a chance to stop him. We darned near lost you. We turned back after one false start toward the city, and a truckman told us he’d glimpsed a car in the distance tearing down the lake road. That gave us the answer.