“Oh, Sam,” she whispered. “I can’t do it.”
The short-wave radio beside Sam Wagner’s chair had been jammed with voices the past few minutes. The watch in the dark service station at Van Brocklin and Montgomery had seen a woman get off the bus. The woman might be Lila Wagner. The man in the service station did not know her; he could not be sure.
“Tall?” Sam said. “Gray coat, gray fur hat?”
“Check,” the radio said.
“A bus, for the luvva Mike!” This was Chris Gillespie’s voice. “Why not a cab right to her door?”
“She’s a frugal woman,” Sam said. “She hates cabs. A cab wouldn’t enter her mind.”
“Let’s pick her up,” Chris said.
“This’s Five,” a new voice said. “There’re two women now. The other’s the one we had on Thirty-Fifth. The fat job with the umbrella. She’s behind Mrs. Wagner.”
“Watch her!” Sam said. And then a new thought flashed in his mind. “Chris! Is the fat one a woman?”
Chris said, “Come in, anybody. Is that fat one a woman? Make damn sure. Poole’s fat, and he could wear a fat woman’s clothes. Sufferin’ Joe, come in, somebody! Come in!”
Several voices spoke at once. Then a new voice came in clearly. “Had a look at her under the light at Thirty-Fourth. I wouldn’t bet she’s a woman. Under the umbrella, it’s hard to tell. But the way she walks, it’s not right.”
Chris said, “Let’s move in!”
“Stand fast!” Sam’s voice was harsh. “If that’s Poole, why’s he waiting? He’s not sure it’s Lila. He’s waiting to see if she comes here. If we move in, he’d know we’ve got him boxed and he’ll start shooting. Lila first.”
“Too late,” a voice said. “They’ve crossed.”
Another voice said, “I can stop him with a rifle. He won’t do any shooting after a slug hits him.”
“And if the fat one is a woman?” Sam asked.
Chris said, “You call it, Sam. We’ll do it.”
* * *
—
Leon Poole held the umbrella in his left hand. His right hand was in the pocket of Mrs. Flanders’s coat, holding tight to the butt of the heavy revolver. He was a dozen paces behind the tall, slender woman, walking carefully, trying to remember a woman’s stride was short and clipped. If he broke stride, the sound would frighten the woman. He didn’t want to frighten her. He wanted her to go on, unworried, to turn or not turn when she reached the Wagner residence.
“Not that I can hope she will,” he said.
Granted things could break for him, as well as against him. But too much good luck was suspicious. The wild-goose chase in the Kretlow Hills was all a man could really hope for. Then, after all the struggle and fight and risk, to have Lila Wagner pass within arm’s reach, alone, on a dark and deserted street—that was beyond all bounds of reason.
Her description fitted, yes. He’d often thought the face he’d seen in the courtroom could never change so much that he wouldn’t recognize it anywhere, any time, at a glance. And he’d been certain in the first brief moment. She was thinner, but she was the woman. Then reason had asserted itself. It was more luck than he could hope for. And if he killed the wrong woman here, so close to Wagner’s, the police would know what he intended and guard her well, and his last hope of seeing justice done would vanish.
“I can wait,” he said, “a little longer.”
Lila Wagner would go into the Wagner house. Another woman would continue on. As simple as that. When she turned, if she turned, he would have time—perhaps as she climbed the front steps, perhaps as she opened the door. If she didn’t turn, then he could try the windows. The house had been well lighted when he’d driven by a little while ago. There was someone home. Surely he would be able to find Lila Wagner through one of the windows. If not the woman, then Sam Wagner. He would have to take what he could get now; he was sure he would never get this close again.
He carefully matched his stride with that of the woman ahead, step for step. He felt like a man walking a very high wire, danger on every hand, the goal almost within his reach. And he was confident. He would reach the goal. The Wagner walk was only a few steps away.
The woman ahead faltered. A catch in her stride, a half stumble. Poole’s hand closed tightly on the gun. His every sense became alert. Two more strides and the woman faltered again. Her head was bent, one hand seemed to be at her face. The Wagner walk was only a step or two ahead of her. She straightened to walk firmly, determinedly. She was going past the Wagner house, Poole knew that suddenly and certainly. He cursed softly. This was not the woman.
A stride beyond the walk, Lila turned. She’d met a barrier she couldn’t pass. A barrier within herself. She turned suddenly, glad that she had to turn, glad that she could turn and run, bent low and screaming, toward the front porch. She heard the roar of a gun and fell.
Her sudden movement had surprised Poole. Sure she was going on, he’d relaxed for a moment. Then he’d drawn the gun and fired hurriedly at the bent, fast-moving figure. He missed. He knew he’d missed. He lifted the gun for another shot. It was a shot he never fired.
A wild man vaulted the hedge between Poole and the Wagner walk. A man in shirt sleeves who planted himself on widespread legs, facing Poole, gun in hand. Brilliant light burst upon them both; glaring light. Poole tried to shift his gun for a shot at the man in front of him. Again, too late. Sam Wagner fired first. At ten feet, in bright light, he did not miss. Nor did the others. Rifles boomed across the street, revolvers barked and a submachine gun tore the night with chattering sound. Leon Poole was dead before his body struck the walk.
* * *
—
The night passed. A long night for Lila. A confused night. A night in which her husband proved himself a hard-fisted, swearing, unreasonable tyrant. She remembered him lunging up the front lawn, scooping her up in his arms and slamming into the house with her. She remembered him bellowing, “A doctor! Get a doctor fast!” He’d thrown her on the bed so hard she bounced; he’d petted her until she was black and blue. Had she cried? Of course, she’d cried. She’d been half out of her mind, crying about a dozen things.
“Sam, for the love of Pete!” Chris Gillespie’s voice. “Will you stop pounding on her? She’ll be all right. Do something useful, bar the door. There’s a howling mob out there, and more coming all the time.”
Police, reporters, photographers, curious—hundreds, by the sound of them. She’d heard Sam’s voice roaring above the clamor. “No! No pictures, no stories! Tomorrow, or next week, or never! But not now!”
The doctor, then, “No harm done, Mr. Wagner. Your child will be along on schedule. Your wife’s a strong woman.”
And Sam: “You’re telling me?”
A wonderful thing to sleep on, a wonderful thing to wake up to. And now, in the quiet of her bedroom in the morning, something wonderfully warm to hold in her heart. She’d been afraid, terribly afraid. But still she’d been the wife Sam needed and wanted and had to have. She was grateful that she had, proud that she had. And she was sure, now, that she could always be that kind of wife. Worth it? A hundred times worth it. He was out in the kitchen, a whistling, happy man. In a moment he came into the bedroom with a breakfast tray. When he looked at her, his pale blue eyes were shining.
“What d’you say, sweet? Hungry?”
“Like a horse,” she said. “Both of us. We’re hungry as a team of horses.”
Face Work
CORNELL WOOLRICH
THE STORY
Original publication: Black Mask, October 1937, as by William Irish; first collected in Six Nights of Mystery by William Irish (New York, Popular Library, 1950). Note: The title was changed to “One Night in New York” for its first book publication.
PERHAPS IT IS NOT SURPRISING that Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903–1968) wrote some of the darkest
, most despairing, most heartbreaking noir fiction in the history of American crime literature. The lives he portrayed as sad and hopeless was the life he lived, though without the murders.
Born in New York City, he grew up in Latin America and New York, and was educated at Columbia University, to which he left his literary estate. A sad and lonely man, he was so friendless and isolated that he desperately dedicated books to his typewriter and to his hotel room. Woolrich was almost certainly a closeted homosexual (his marriage was terminated almost immediately) and an alcoholic, so antisocial and reclusive that he refused to leave his hotel room when his leg became infected, ultimately resulting in its amputation.
The majority of his work has an overwhelming darkness and few of his characters, whether good or evil, have much hope for happiness—or even justice. No twentieth-century author equaled Woolrich’s ability to create suspense, and Hollywood producers recognized it early on. Few writers have had as many films based on their work as Woolrich, beginning with Convicted (1938), based on “Face Work,” which starred a very young Rita Hayworth.
“Face Work” is a story that appears to have been particularly close to Woolrich’s heart and is one of his most anthologized. He wrote a similar plotline in “Murder in Wax,” which was first published in the March 1, 1935, issue of Dime Detective, which he rewrote and changed the title of in order to be able to sell it to Black Mask. He continued to like it so much that he expanded it to become one of his most successful novels, The Black Angel (1943), which inspired its own motion picture, Black Angel (1946), which starred Dan Duryea, Peter Lorre, and June Vincent.
THE FILM
Title: Convicted, 1938
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Director: Leon Barsha
Screenwriter: Edgar Edwards
Producer: Kenneth J. Bishop (uncredited)
THE CAST
• Charles Quigley (Police Detective Burns)
• Rita Hayworth (Jerry Wheeler)
• Marc Lawrence (Milton Militis)
An unusually short film (fifty-eight minutes), its brevity allows it to closely adhere to the central element of Woolrich’s outstanding short story.
A man, Chick Wheeler (played by Edgar Edwards, the writer of the screenplay), has been framed for a murder and Jerry Wheeler, his sister, a nightclub entertainer known as “the Mistress of the Rhumba,” played by the gorgeous nineteen-year-old Rita Hayworth, tries to prove his innocence. Convinced that the real killer is the owner of a nightclub, she gets a job there to try to find evidence but he soon realizes what she is doing and plans to dispose of her.
Although he arrested and helped convict Chick, the cop on the case comes to believe he’s arrested the wrong man and tries to help Jerry free her brother. He also tries to help himself by coming on to Jerry, calling her “Angel Face.” Who can blame him?
FACE WORK
Cornell Woolrich
I HAD ON MY BEST HAT and my warpaint when I dug into her bell. You’ve heard makeup called that a thousand times, but this is one time it rated it; it was just that—warpaint.
I caught Ruby Rose Reading at breakfast time—hers, not mine. Quarter to three in the afternoon. Breakfast was a pink soda-fountain mess, a tomato-and-lettuce—both untouched—and an empty glass of Bromo Seltzer, which had evidently had first claim on her. There were a pair of swell ski slides under her eyes—she was reading Gladys Glad’s beauty column to try to figure out how to get rid of them before she went out that night and got a couple more. A maid had opened the door and given me a yellowed optic. “Yes, ma’am, who do you wish to see?”
“I see her already,” I said, “so skip the Morse code.” I went in up to Ruby Rose’s ten-yard line. “Wheeler’s the name,” I said. “Does it mean anything to you?”
“Should it?” She was dark and Salome-ish. She was mean. She was bad medicine. I could see his finish right there, in her eyes. And it hadn’t been any fun to dance at Texas Guinan’s or Larry Fay’s when I was sixteen, to keep him out of the orphan asylum or the reformatory. I hadn’t spent most of my young girlhood in a tinseled G-string to have her take apart what I’d built up just to see what made him tick.
I said, “I don’t mind coming right out with it in front of your maid—if you don’t.”
But evidently she did.
She hit her with the tomato-and-lettuce in the left eye as preamble to the request: “Whaddo I pay you for, anyway? Take Foo-Too around the block a couple of times.”
“I took him once already, and he was a good boy” was the weather report she got on this.
“Well, take him again. Maybe you can kid him it’s tomorrow already.”
The maid fastened something that looked like the business end of a floor mop to a leash and went out shaking her head. “You sure didn’t enjoy yourself last night. That Stork Club never agrees with you.”
As soon as the gallery was out of the way I said, “You lay off my brother!”
She lit a cigarette and nosed the smoke at me. “Well, Gracie Allen, you’ve come to the wrong place looking for your brother. And, just for the record, what am I supposed to have done to him, cured him of wiping his nose on his sleeve or something?”
“He’s been spending dough like wild, dough that doesn’t come out of his salary.”
“Then where does it come from?” she asked.
“I haven’t found out. I hope his firm never does, either.” I shifted gears, went into low—like when I used to sing “Poor Butterfly” for the customers—but money couldn’t have dragged this performance out of me, it came from the heart, without pay.
“There’s a little girl on our street—oh, not much to look at, thinks twelve o’clock’s the middle of the night and storks leave babies, but she’s ready to take up where I leave off, pinch pennies and squeeze nickels along with him, build him into something, get him somewhere, not spread him all over the landscape. He’s just a man who doesn’t know what’s good for him, doesn’t know his bass from his oboe. I can’t stand by and watch her chew her heart up. Give her a break, and him, and me. Pick on someone your own size, someone who can take it. Have your fun and more power to you—but not with all I’ve got!”
She banged her cigarette to death against a tray. “Okay, is the screen test about over? Now, will you get out of here, you ham actress, and lemme get my massage?”
She went over and got the door ready for me. Gave a traffic-cop signal over her shoulder with one thumb. “I’ve heard of wives pulling this act, and even mothers, and in a pitcher I saw only lately—Camilly, it was called—it was the old man. Now it’s a sister!” She gave the ceiling the once-over. “What’ll they think of next? Send grandma around tomorrow—next week East Lynne. Come on, make it snappy!” she invited, and hitched her elbow at me. If she’d touched me, I think I’d have murdered her.
“If you feel I’m poison, why don’t you put it up to your brother?” she signed off. And very low, just before she walloped the door after me: “And see how far you get!”
* * *
—
She was right.
I said, “Chick, you’re not going to chuck your job, you’re not going to Chicago with that dame, are you?”
He looked at me funny and he said, “How did you know?”
“I saw your valise all packed when I wanted to send one of your suits to the cleaners.”
“You ought to be a detective,” he said, and he wasn’t pally. “Okay, now that you mention it,” and he went in and he got it to show me the back of it going out the door.
But I got over to the door before he did and pulled a Custer’s Last Stand. I skipped the verse and went into the patter chorus. And, boy, did I sell it, without a spot and without a muted trumpet solo, either! At the El-Fay in the old days they would have been crying into their gin and wiring home to mother.
“I’m n
ot asking anything for myself. I’m older than you, Chick, and when a girl says that you’ve got her down to bedrock. I’ve been around plenty, and ‘around’ wasn’t pretty. Maybe you think it was fun wrestling my way home each morning at five, and no holds barred, just so—so—Oh, I didn’t know why myself sometimes—just so you wouldn’t turn out to be another corner lizard, a sharp-shooter, a bum like the rest of them. Chick, you’re just a punk of twenty-four, but as far as I’m concerned the sun rises and sets across your shoulders. Me and little Mary Allen, we’ve been rooting for you all along. What’s the matter with her, Chick? Just because her face don’t come out of boxes and she doesn’t know the right grips, don’t pass her by for something that ought to be shampooed out of your hair with gasoline.”
But he didn’t have an ear for music. The siren song had got to him like Ulysses. And once they hear that—
“Get away from the door,” he said, way down low. “I never raised a hand to you in my life, I don’t want to now.”
The last I saw of him he was passing the back of his hand slowly up and down his side, like he was ashamed of it. The valise was in the other one. I picked myself up from the opposite side of the foyer where he’d sent me, the place all buckling around me like seen through a sheet of water. I called out after him through the open door: “Don’t go, Chick! You’re heading straight for the eight-ball! Don’t go to her, Chick!” The acoustics were swell—every door in the hall opened to get an earful.
He stood there a split-second without looking back at me, yellow light gushing out at him through the porthole of the elevator. He straightened his hat, which my chin against his duke had dislodged—and no more Chick.
* * *
—
At about four that morning, I was still sniveling into the gin he’d left behind him and talking to him across the table from me—without getting any answer—when the doorbell rang. I thought it was him for a minute, but it was two other guys. They didn’t ask if they could come in, they just went way around to the other side of me and showed me a couple of tin-heeled palms. So I did the coming in after them. I lived there, after all.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 40