The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  Another requirement: the given name of one parent, preferably the mother. That was another thing you didn’t forget all your life.

  For a minute or two I was on the point of giving the whole thing up. I wouldn’t let myself. The paper kneaded into ridges at the margins with the stubborn determination of my grip on it. I said to myself: “Don’t quit. Don’t be yellow. Some way may come up of getting around those two hitches. Try it anyway. If you don’t try it, you’ll go on sitting on a park bench, reading newspapers out of a bin. If you do try it, you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance. You may still be sitting on a park bench, reading newspapers out of a bin, after they turn you loose. Or you may find yourself with anywhere from fifteen to five-hundred dollars in your pocket. Which prospect appeals to you most?”

  That didn’t need any answer.

  But now the most important thing of all. Which name? Who was I going to be? In one way, it didn’t make much difference which one I picked. In another, it made all the difference in the world. One of these names might bring me a thousand dollars; the very next one under it might bring only twenty. One might spell immunity, its rightful owner might be dead; the very next one might mean sure-fire exposure. But there was no way of controlling this, it was ruled by sheer unadulterated chance. That being the case, the way to choose was by sheer unadulterated chance as well.

  I turned the page over, covering the ad. I took a pin I had in my lapel, and I circled it blindly a couple of times, and then I punched it through, from the back. Then I turned the page back again, with the pin skewering it, and looked to see where its point was projecting.

  It had pierced the ‘e’ of Nugent, Stella.

  I grimaced, got ready to try it again. That was one thing I couldn’t be, a woman. Then I happened to look closer as I withdrew the pin.

  Nugent, Stella, in trust for Lee Nugent, 295 Read Street.

  Good enough. She was probably dead, and he must have been a kid at the time. That made it a lot more plausible. I would have had a hard time shaving fifteen years off my own right age without putting myself back into short pants.

  I folded the paper and put it in my pocket. That was me, from now on. Sink or swim, win or lose, that was me.

  * * *

  —

  Less than an hour later I was reconnoitering Read Street, on the odd-numbers side. I came to 291 halfway down the block, and right after that there was a triple-width vacant lot. The building had been torn down, and so had the ones on either side of it. Gone from the face of the earth, I stood around a while pondering.

  But I wasn’t ready to give up yet. I loitered there, scanning the other buildings roundabout. They were all pretty old. If there had ever been a building in that vacant gap, these survivors were easily its contemporaries. But you can’t ask a building questions.

  I watched the people that occasionally came or went from the doorways. Kids were no good to me. Neither were the younger grown-ups. I needed someone good and old. Finally I saw what I wanted. She was about seventy and she’d come to one of the ground-floor windows in the building directly opposite the empty space, to water some geraniums.

  I sauntered over, trying not to seem too anxious. I didn’t know how to begin, but the old are like children, you don’t have to be quite so wary with them. I tipped my hat. “I’m a real estate man looking over likely sites for development, ma’am.” Her eyesight couldn’t have been too keen, or I’d never have gotten away with that in my shabby condition. “Could you tell me about how long ago the buildings over there were torn down?”

  “They weren’t torn down,” she piped. “They had a big fire there once, and then they just cleared away what was left of them afterwards.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said politely. “You couldn’t tell me about just how long ago that was?”

  “Ages ago. That was before even we moved around here, and we’ve been living here the longest of anybody on the whole block.”

  I turned and drifted away. I didn’t want to ask questions of anyone else; too many questions weren’t good. If she hadn’t known, nobody else would. I was little better off than I had been before. There once had been a 295 Read Street. But I still didn’t know if there’d ever been anyone named Nugent living in it. Or if there had been, how old he’d been.

  I roamed around, without straying very far from the immediate neighborhood. I didn’t actually know what I was looking for—or that I was looking for anything—until I’d suddenly sighted it: a red-brick building with a yawning wide-open ramp for an entrance. There was a Dalmatian stretched out on the sidewalk in front of it. I stopped to caress him. Then from that I worked into a harmless, friendly chat with the fireman sitting by in his suspenders reading a newspaper.

  Something like this: “Keeping pretty busy these days?”

  “Oh, we’re still getting them now and then.”

  “Had any real big ones?”

  “Not lately.”

  “That must have been a pretty big one that took down those three buildings over on Read Street. Know where I mean?”

  “That was before my time,” he said. “Yeah, that was a wow, from what I’ve heard. Five-bagger.”

  “No kidding?” I said, continuing to play with the Dalmatian’s ear. “About what year was that?”

  “Oh—fifteen, seventeen years ago. I used to hear some of the older fellows speak of it. Spring of ’24, I guess. Well, it was either ’24 or ’23, somewhere thereabouts.”

  * * *

  —

  I had a little something more now. I went, from there, to the reference room of the main library and I put in a requisition for the bound volume 1922–23 of the Herald-Times. It split like that, in the middle of the calendar year. I started at January first, 1923, and worked my way from there on. Just skimming headlines and inside-page column-leads. If it had been a five-alarm fire it must have made headlines at the time, but I wasn’t taking any chances on how accurate his memory was; he’d gotten it second-hand after all, and with firemen a blaze never shrinks but enlarges in retrospect.

  It was slow work, but in an hour and a half I’d reached the end of the volume. I went back and changed it for 1923–1924.

  It came up after about another half-hour or so of page-scanning. I couldn’t very well have missed it. It was all the way over in November, so that fireman’s accuracy as to time of year hadn’t been so hot after all. At least he’d approximated the year. I finally found it on November fifth:

  TENEMENT HOLOCAUST TAKES 5 LIVES

  I didn’t care much about the details. I was looking for proper names, hoping against hope. The five dead were listed first. Rabinowitz, Cohalan, Mendez—no, nothing there. Wait a minute, two unidentified bodies. Maybe it was one of them. I followed the thing through to the back. There it was, there it was! It seemed to fly up off the page and hit me in the eye like cinders. Nugent. I devoured the paragraph it was imbedded in.

  A sudden gap in the smoke, caused by a shift of wind, revealed to the horrified spectators a woman and her two children balanced precariously on a narrow ledge running under the top-floor windows, their escape cut off by the flames mushrooming out both below and above them, at the fifth-floor windows and from the roof. The woman, later identified as Mrs. Stella Nugent, 42, a newcomer who had moved in only the day before, pushed both children off ahead of her into the net the firemen had hastily stretched out below to receive them, and then followed them down herself. All three landed safely, but it was found on examination that both children, Lee, 9, and Dorothy, 11, as well as the mother, had suffered badly-gashed throats, probably from thrusting their heads blindly through the broken glass of shattered window-panes to scream down for help. The mother lapsed into unconsciousness and little hope is held for her recovery. Neither child could give a coherent account of what had happened immediately preceding their appearance on the window-ledge, no
r could it be learned at once whether there were any other members of the family—

  I went on to the next day’s paper, the sixth. There was a carry-over in it. “Mrs. Stella Nugent, one of the victims of yesterday’s fire on Read Street, died early today in the hospital without regaining consciousness, bringing the total number of casualties to—”

  I went ahead a little further. Then on the ninth, three days later:

  FIRE CLAIMS SEVENTH VICTIM

  Dorothy Nugent, 11, who with her mother and brother—etc., etc.—succumbed late yesterday afternoon from loss of blood and severe shock. The Nugent girl, although unharmed by the fire itself, suffered severe lacerations of the throat from broken window-glass in making her escape from the flat, a fact which has somewhat mystified investigators. Her younger brother, who was injured in the same way, remains in a critical condition—

  I followed it through just to see, but that was the last, there wasn’t any more after that. I quit finally, when I saw I’d lapped over into December. He’d either died by then or recovered, and either way it wasn’t of topical consequence enough any more to rate specific mention.

  So I still didn’t know one way or the other. But outside of that, I had about everything else, more than I’d ever dared hope to have! Given names, ages, and all! I had my age now. If he was nine in November 1923, I was twenty-seven now. And by a peculiar coincidence, I was actually twenty-six years old myself.

  I was about ready. I had about all the background I’d ever have, so there was nothing more to wait for. Even the handwriting obstacle had melted away, since the account had been opened in trust for me and therefore I hadn’t signed it anyway. I considered that an auspicious omen. Present identification wasn’t very difficult. The prosperous, the firmly-rooted, have a hard time changing identities. To a bird of passage like me, rootless, friendless, what was one identity more or less? No close friends, no business associates, to hamper my change of skin. I was just “Slim” to the few of my own kind who knew me by sight, and “Slim” could be anybody, right name Palmer or right name Nugent.

  I took two days for present identification, that was all it needed. I realized of course that meanwhile, from one minute to the next, a real Nugent, the real Nugent, might show up, but I went right ahead.

  That was one bracket of the fifty-fifty chance that I’d willingly accepted from the start.

  2

  The two days were up, and now for it. I left myself looking pretty much as I was. To look too trim might invite suspicion quicker than to look down-at-heel, as I had been all along. I wasn’t pretending to be anything other than what I was; I was only pretending my name was different.

  I headed for the bank and I went straight inside. I didn’t hesitate, nor loiter around the entrance reconnoitering, nor pass back and forth outside it trying to get my courage up. My courage was up already. If I didn’t plunge right in I was afraid it would start oozing away again.

  I still had the original newspaper with me. I stalked up to one of the guards and I tapped the ad with my fingernail. “What do you do about this? My name’s listed here.” He sent me over to one of the officers, sitting at a desk in an enclosure to one side of the main banking-floor.

  I can’t say that I was particularly nervous. I was keyed-up, yes; keyed-up to a point of unnatural calm. I didn’t want to overdo the calm, either; that wouldn’t have been in character. Paradoxically, I found it strangely difficult to feign the certain amount of excitement that I knew I was expected to show.

  I repeated what I’d said to the guard. He pressed a buzzer, had the records of the account brought to him, to familiarize himself with them before doing anything further. Not a word out of him so far. I tried to read his face. He shot me a searching look, but I couldn’t figure out what it was meant to convey. The documents were old and yellowed, you could tell they’d been on file a long time. He was holding them tipped toward him.

  Finally he put them down, cleared his throat. This was the first test, coming up now. I knew there would be others, if I passed this one O.K. This was just the preliminary. I braced myself for it. “So you’re Lee Nugent?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any identification on you?”

  I fumbled around in my clothing haltingly, as though I hadn’t been expecting to be called on for documentary proof, was caught off-guard. I produced a carefully-prepared scrap or two, just about as much as a fellow in my circumstances would have been likely to have on him. I wasn’t counting on it to be enough, I’d known it wouldn’t be. He shook his head. “Haven’t you got anything more than that? We can’t just turn over a sum of money to you, you know, on the strength of your word alone.”

  “I know that, sir,” I said docilely.

  He said: “Can you get anyone to vouch for you? Someone that’s known you for several years?”

  I’d expected that. For that matter, I could hardly have gotten anyone to vouch for me as George Palmer. That gave me the right line to take. I said, promptly and unqualifiedly, “No. I can’t. Not one single person, as far as I know. You’ve got me there.”

  He spread his hands. “Why not? What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve been footloose, I’ve been drifting around. I’ve got acquaintances here and there, yes. They don’t know me by name. I’m ‘Slim’ to most of them.”

  “Well, you’ve worked at times, haven’t you?”

  “Sure, whenever I could, which wasn’t often.”

  I mentioned two or three jobs I’d actually had, which I knew wouldn’t be any good to him. Hand-labor jobs in which my name hadn’t even been down on any pay-roll, just “Slim” to the foreman and paid off in line according to bulk; fruit-picking jobs in orchards on the West Coast and stuff like that.

  He took up the file-cards again. “Answer a few questions, please. Your age?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “Date of birth?”

  “I can’t give you that,” I said unhesitatingly. “You see, I lost both parents and my older sister when I was nine. If my mother ever told me what my exact birth-date was—and I guess she must have—I’ve forgotten it long since.”

  “Place of birth?”

  “Right here.” That was an out-and-out guess. If it had backfired, I was going to give him the same stall as on the previous question. I must have hit it right, I noticed he didn’t pick me up on it.

  “Mother’s given name?”

  “Stella.”

  “Can you give me her age at the time of her death?”

  “She died in 1923 and she was forty-two at the time.”

  “You didn’t know of the existence of this account until now?”

  “It’s the first I ever heard of it. She may have told me at the time, I can’t remember. If she did, I was just a kid, I didn’t even know what she meant.”

  “No passbook, I suppose?”

  “My mother lost her life in a fire. The passbook must have been destroyed along with all the rest of her belongings at the same time.”

  He put the checked answers away. He brought out some other kind of a paper, said, “Sign this.”

  I looked it over carefully. It was an application, a claim on the account. I wasn’t afraid of the handwriting angle any more. I wrote “Lee Nugent” unstudiedly, unselfconsciously, in my own script. I let it stream out. I saw him watching intently as I did, to see if I’d hesitate or think twice.

  He blotted for me. “All right,” he said. “That’s all for now. We’ll notify you at—”

  I gave him the name and address of a cheap lodging-house.

  They were going to check. As far as they were able to, and that wasn’t going to be terribly far.

  I said, “Thanks,” turned away. I hadn’t expected to walk out with it then and there. I didn’t. I hadn’t even learned what the amount was yet. I didn’t ask
him; there was time enough for that. For the present, the main thing was to see if I was going to get it or not.

  It came within three days after that. Came to the “desk” of this thirty-cents-a-night flop-house where I’d been stopping for three days past as “Lee Nugent,” in order to have some place to receive it. That was even quicker than I’d expected. It worried me a little. It didn’t say one way or the other, when I’d tremblingly torn it open. Just a typed paragraph:

  Kindly call at the bank in reference to Unclaimed Account Number 24,612.

  I went up at once. It was harder to force myself to go inside than the first time. This was the crucial time, now. I could feel moisture at the palms of my hands, and I dried them against my sides before I pushed the revolving doors around.

  I went straight over to him. He said, “Hello, Nugent,” non-committally.

  He got out all the data again, with new data that had been added to it since the last time. It made quite a sheaf by now. He patted it all together, and then he said: “What do you want to do, leave it in?”

  I was getting it! I swallowed twice before I could trust myself to make an answering sound. I managed to bring out in a studious monotone, “Then it’s O. K.?”

  “We’re satisfied it’s rightfully yours. You want to withdraw it, that right?”

  I sure did. The real Nugent might appear from one moment to the next.

  He said, “Sign this.” This time it was a blank withdrawal slip. I passed it back and he filled in the rest of it for me himself. The date, the account number, most important of all—the amount involved. He wrote it in script, not ciphers, and it was upside-down from where I was; I still couldn’t tell how much it was. He scrawled his official O. K. on it, sent it over to the teller by messenger. He said, “It’ll take a minute or two,” leaned back in his chair.