The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  “We’ve got to get him,” I said, “and we’re going to! He’s even been close to breaking down and admitting it to me, at times, when we’re alone together. Then at the last minute he gets leery. I’m convinced he’s guilty. So help me, if I lose Chick tomorrow night, I’m going to shoot Milton with my own hands!”

  “Remember, half an hour. If everything’s under control, cough. If you can get anywhere near the phone, cough! If I don’t hear you cough, I’m pulling the place.”

  I hung up and ran up the stairs tearing at the silver cloth. I jerked open a closet door, found the cobwebby negligee he’d always told me was waiting for me there whenever I felt like breaking it in, and chased back downstairs again in it, more like Godiva than anyone else, grabbed up a cigarette, flopped back full length on the handiest divan, and did a Cleopatra just as the outside door opened and he and two other guys came in.

  Milton had a face full of stormclouds—until he saw me. Then it cleared, the sun came up in it. “Finally!” he crooned. “Finally you wanted a change of scenery! And just tonight somebody had to play a practical joke on me, start me on a fool’s errand to Philly! Have you been here long?”

  I was still trying to get my breath back after the quick-change act, but I managed a vampish smile.

  He turned to the two guys. “Get out, you two. Can’t you see I have company?”

  I’d recognized the one who’d contacted me for the jewel case and knew what was coming.

  “Why, that’s the dame I told you about, Milt,” he said, “that walked off with that little box the other day!”

  “Oh, hello,” I sang out innocently. “I didn’t know you knew Mr. Milton.”

  Milton flared, “You, Rocco! Don’t call my lady friends dames! Now scram! You think we need four for bridge?”

  “All right, boss, all right,” he said soothingly. But he went over to a framed still of me that Milton had brought home from Hell’s Bells and stood thoughtfully in front of it for a minute. Then he and the other guy left. It was only after the elevator light had flashed out that I looked over and saw the frame was empty.

  “Hey!” I complained. “Your friend Rocco swiped my picture, right under your nose!”

  All he saw was a bowl of cream in front of him. “Who can blame him? You’re so lovely to look at.”

  He spent some time working on the theory that I’d finally found him irresistible. After what seemed years of that, I got off the divan just in time.

  He was good and peeved. “Are you giving me the runaround? What did you come here for, anyway?”

  “Because she’s double-crossing you!” a voice said from the foyer. “Because she came here to frame you, chief!”

  The other two had come back. Rocco pulled my picture out of his pocket. “I traced that dummy wire you got, sending you to Philly. The clerk at the telegraph office identified her as the sender from this picture. Ask her why she wanted to get you out of town and come up here and case your layout! Ask her why she was willing to pay thirty bucks for a little wood box when she was living in a seven-buck furnished room! Ask her who she is! You weren’t at the Reading trial, were you? Well, I was! You’re riding for a fall, chief, she’s a stoolie!”

  Milton turned on me. “Who are you? What does he mean?”

  What was the good of answering? It was five to five on the clock. I needed Burns bad.

  The other one snarled, “She’s Chick Wheeler’s sister. I saw her on the stand with my own eyes.”

  Milton’s face screwed up into a sort of despairing agony—I’d never seen anything like it before. He whimpered, “You’re so beautiful to have to be killed.”

  I hugged the negligee around me and looked down at the floor. “Then don’t have me killed,” I said softly. It was two to five now.

  He said with comic sadness, “I got to if you’re that guy’s sister.”

  “I say I’m nobody’s sister, just Angel Face that dances at your club. I say I only came here because—I like soft carpets.”

  “Why did you send that telegram to get me out of town?”

  He had me there. I thought fast. “If I’m a stoolie I get killed, right? But what happens if I’m the other kind of a double-crosser—a two-timer? Do I still get killed?”

  “No,” he said. “Your option hadn’t been taken up yet.”

  “That’s the answer, then, I was going to use your place to meet my steady—that’s why I sent the fake wire.”

  Rocco’s voice was as cracked as a megaphone after a football rally. “She’s Wheeler’s sister, chief. Don’t let her ki—”

  “Shut up!” Milton said.

  Rocco shrugged, lit a cigarette. “You’ll find out.”

  The phone rang. “Get that,” Milton ordered. “That’s her guy now. Keep him on the wire.” He turned and went running up the stairs to the other phone.

  Rocco took out a gun, fanned it vaguely in my direction, and sauntered over. “Don’t try nothing while that line’s open. You may be fooling Milton, you’re not fooling us any. He was always a sucker for a twist.”

  Rocco’s buddy said, “Hello?”

  Rocco, still holding the gun on me, took a lopsided drag on his cigarette with his left hand and blew smoke vertically. Some of it caught in his throat and he started to cough like a seal. You could hear it all over the place.

  I could feel all the blood draining out of my face.

  The third guy was purring, “No, you tell me what number you want first, then I’ll tell you what number this is. That’s the way it’s done, pal.” He turned a blank face. “Hung up on me!”

  Rocco was still hacking away. I felt sick all over. Sold out by Burns’ own signal that everything was under control!

  There was a sound like dry leaves on the stairs and Milton came whisking down again. “Some guy wanted an all-night delicatess—” the spokesman started to say.

  Milton cut his hand at him viciously. “That was Centre Street—police headquarters. I had it traced! Put some clothes on her, she’s going to her funeral!”

  * * *

  —

  They forced me back into the silver dress and Milton came over with a flagon of brandy and dashed it all over me. “If she lets out a peep, she’s fighting drunk.”

  They had to hold me up between them to get me to move. Rocco had his gun buried in the silver folds of my dress. The other had a big handkerchief under my face, as though I were nauseated—but really to squelch any scream.

  Milton followed behind us. “You shouldn’t mix your drinks,” he was saying, “and you shouldn’t help yourself to my private stock without permission.”

  The doorman was asleep again on his bench, like when I’d come in. This time he didn’t wake up. His eyelids just flickered a little as the four of us went by.

  They saw to it that I got in the car first, like a lady should. The ride was one of those things you take to your grave with you. My whole past life flashed before me. I didn’t mind dying so terribly much, but I hated to go without being able to do anything for Chick. But it was the way the cards had fallen, that was all.

  * * *

  —

  The house was on the Sound. By the looks of it, Milton lived in it quite a bit. His houseboy let us in.

  “Build a fire, Juan, it’s chilly,” he grinned. And to me, “Sit down, Angel Face, and let me look at you before you go.” The other two threw me into a corner of a big sofa, and I just stayed that way, limp like a rag doll. He just stared and stared.

  Rocco said, “What’re we waiting for? It’s broad daylight already.”

  Milton was idly holding something into the fire, a long poker of some kind. “She’s going,” he said, “but she’s going out as my property. Show the other angels this when you get up there so they’ll know who you belong to.” He came over to me with the end of the thing glowing dull red. It was flattene
d into some kind of an ornamental design or cipher. “Knock her out,” he said. “I’m not that much of a brute.”

  Something exploded off the side of my head and I lost my senses. Then he was wiping my mouth with a handkerchief soaked in whiskey, and my side burned just above the hip, where they’d found that mark on Ruby Rose Reading.

  “All right, Rocco,” Milton said.

  Rocco took out his gun again, but he shoved it at the third guy, who held it level at me and took the safety off. His face was sort of green and wet with sweat. I looked him straight in the eyes.

  The gun went down like a drooping lily. “I can’t, boss,” he groaned. “She’s got the face of an angel. How can you expect me to shoot her?”

  Milton pulled it away from him. “She double-crossed me! Any dame that double-crosses me gets what I gave Reading!”

  A voice said softly, “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  The gun went off, and I wondered why I didn’t feel anything. Then I saw that the smoke was coming from the doorway and not from Milton’s gun at all. He went down at my feet, like he wanted to apologize for what he’d done to me, but he didn’t say anything and he didn’t get up. There was blood running down the part in his hair in back.

  Burns was in the room, with more guys in uniform than I’d ever seen outside of a police parade. One of them was the doorman from Milton’s place, or at least the dick that Burns had substituted for him to keep an eye on me while I was up there. Burns told me about that later and about how they followed Milt’s little party but hadn’t been able to get in in time to keep me from getting branded.

  I sat holding my side and sucking in my breath. “It was a swell finish,” I panted to Burns, “but what’d you drill him for? Now we’ll never get the proof that’ll save Chick.”

  He was at the phone asking to be put through to Schlesinger in the city. “We’ve got it already, Angel Face,” he said ruefully. “It’s right on you, where you’re holding your side. Just where it was on Reading. We all heard what he said before he nose-dived. I only wish I hadn’t shot him,” he glowered, “then I’d have the pleasure of doing it all over again.”

  Dormant Account

  CORNELL WOOLRICH

  THE STORY

  Original publication: Black Mask, May 1942, as by William Irish; first collected in Borrowed Crime by William Irish (New York, Avon Murder Mystery Monthly, 1946). Note: The title was changed to “Chance” for its first book publication.

  ALTHOUGH THE LIFE of Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903–1968) is known to have been dark and lonely, his early years did not suggest that that was to be his future. He traveled extensively in Latin America with his father, a mining engineer, and enjoyed life in New York with his socialite mother. He spent a number of years in Mexico during the revolutions in the second decade of the twentieth century, enjoying the excitement of the fighting and the numerous school holidays declared when his town was taken alternatively by “Pancho” Villa and Venustiano Carranza.

  While still an undergraduate at Columbia College, he was confined to six weeks in bed with a foot infection and wrote Cover Charge (1926), a well-received romantic novel. The following year, Children of the Ritz (1927), another romantic novel, won a $10,000 prize offered jointly by College Humor magazine and First National Pictures, which produced a film based on the book in 1929. While working on the film script, he married the producer’s daughter, who left him after only a few weeks, almost certainly because she discovered that he was homosexual. He returned to New York and wrote four more novels that earned favorable reviews, more than one comparing him to F. Scott Fitzgerald (Woolrich’s favorite writer).

  He began to write mystery stories for the pulps in 1934 and never looked back.

  “Dormant Account” is a nice variation on the plot of several books and films in which someone attempts to assume another person’s identity (see Stanley Ellin’s “The Best of Everything” in this collection and Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 book, The Talented Mr. Ripley). Here, a vagrant goes after the money in another man’s dormant bank account and becomes the target of a killer.

  THE FILM

  Title: The Mark of the Whistler, 1944

  Studio: Columbia Pictures

  Director: William Castle

  Screenwriter: George Bricker

  Producer: Rudolph C. Flothow

  THE CAST

  • Richard Dix (Lee Selfridge Nugent)

  • Janis Carter (Patricia Henley)

  • Porter Hall (Joe Sorsby)

  • Paul Guilfoyle (“Limpy” Smith)

  The Whistler was the title of a successful CBS radio series that ran from 1942 to 1955; it was regional to the West Coast for a time but still became popular nationally and had one of radio’s best-known mystery formats. Reminiscent of The Shadow, the even more popular radio series that preceded it, the show had a “man of mystery” as its host, beginning each broadcast with what can only be described as the voice of fate, fighting for justice with malevolent glee:

  I am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes, I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak…

  Columbia Pictures decided to make a film based on the character. Titled The Whistler (1944), it began in the same manner as the radio series, with the shadowy figure whistling a haunting tune, introducing himself and then introducing the story. When the film drew to its close, he would return to describe the fate of the protagonist.

  Although it had not been planned as a series, the reviews and audience response to The Whistler were so positive that seven additional films were produced. Woolrich’s dark stories were perfect for the foggy, chilling motion picture, and “Dormant Account” became the second film in the series. Later, another of his stories, “All at Once, No Alice,” also in this collection, was adapted as The Return of the Whistler (1948), the final entry in the series.

  DORMANT ACCOUNT

  Cornell Woolrich

  1

  I often think, what a strange thing Chance is. I often wonder what would have happened if I had picked the name above it, the name below it. Or any of the others. Nothing, probably. But out of all of them, I singled out that one. How? Why?

  Chance.

  It was in an ad in the paper. The paper was in a waste-bin in the park. And I was in the park on the bum. To make it worse, I was young enough yet to refuse to take it lying down. The old are resigned. I wasn’t. I was sore with a burning sense of injustice, bitter about it, and ripe for Chance. And Chance got its devious work in.

  I came along a certain pathway in the park. It could have been any other, I had nowhere to go and all of them were alike to me; but it wasn’t, it was that particular one. I came to a bench and I sat down; it could have been any other, but it was that one. Nearby there was a paper-bin. I’d already passed half a dozen others without looking into them, but now I got up, went over to this one, and looked into it to see if I could find a discarded newspaper to read while I was sitting there. Most of them were messed-up. There was one in it standing on end, fresh as though it had been thrown away by someone after just one reading. I took that one out, went back to the bench with it, started meandering through it.

  I came to the ad. It would have been impossible to miss, it took up half the page. It must have cost a good deal to insert, but the state banking law (I found out later) required it. It said:

  STANDARD SAVINGS BANK

  List of Dormant Accounts, Unclaimed for Fifteen Years or More

  And then the five columns of names, each with the last known address given next to it.

  I let my eye stray over them desultorily. Money waiting for each one. And most of them didn’t know about it. Had forgotten, or were dead, or had vanished foreve
r into the maw of the past. Money waiting, money saying, “Here I am, come and get me.” I started to turn the page, to go on with my idle browsing. My last thought, before the list passed from sight, was a rueful, “Gee, I wish I was one of them.”

  And then suddenly, so unexpectedly it almost seemed to come from somewhere outside of me, “Well, why don’t you be?”

  My hand turned the page back again.

  I was asking myself two things. One: Is it worth trying, would there be enough in it to repay the risk?

  The second was: Can I get away with it?

  * * *

  —

  The first thing they’d ask me was what the original amount was. How was I going to answer?

  That didn’t stop me. I wasn’t going to. I just didn’t know, that was all. After fifteen years, wasn’t it natural if I’d forgotten? If I didn’t remember having the account itself until I saw my own name in the paper, how could they expect me to recall how much was in it?

  Next, I’d have to verify my identity in some way, prove it. They weren’t just going to hand out the money to me on demand. Just how did they check?

  Every depositor has to sign his own name on a reference-card. First of all, handwriting. That didn’t worry me so much; handwriting can change in fifteen years. If the discrepancy turned out to be too glaring, I could always plead some disability during the intervening years, rheumatism or joint-trouble that had cost me the use of my hands for a while and forced me to learn to write all over again. I might get away with it. Something else did worry me, though.

  Every depositor is asked his age when he opens an account, whether it’s transcribed in his own handwriting or that of the bank-official. How was I to guess the right age that went with any of these names? That was one thing I couldn’t plead forgetfulness of. Even after fifteen years, I was expected to know my own age.