The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  The big car they had me in was awkwardly stuck there for a minute, on the slant, just short of the entrance. It couldn’t go forward on account of the abandoned cab, it couldn’t detour around it on account of its own length of chassis, and the mechanic had sent down a sort of fireproof inner portcullis behind us, without waiting, keeping us from backing up.

  They weren’t given much time for the implications of the predicament to dawn on them. Denny suddenly straightened up just outside the rear window on one side and balanced a gun over its rim. The district harness-cop did the same on the opposite side. They had them between a threat of cross-fire. It was a strategic gem. They must have sidled around the opposite sides of the garage entrance, bent over below window level and then suddenly straightened up in the narrow channel left between the car and the walls of the ramp.

  Denny said, “Touch the ceiling with them and swing out, one on each side.”

  But he and the cop couldn’t control the man at the wheel, he was a little too far forward and they were wedged in too close. I saw his shoulder give a slight warning dip against the dashboard-glow as he reached for something. I buckled one leg, knee to chin, and shot the flat of my shoe square against the back of his head. His face slammed down into the wheel. He didn’t want to reach for any more guns after that. He just wanted to reach for the loosened front teeth in his mouth.

  It took a little while to marshal them back upstairs, and send in word to Headquarters, and clean out the files and all the other evidence around the garage. They found traces of blood on the cement inner stairs, showing where Doyle had been knifed as he was trying to escape from the death interview with Scarjaw, right name Graziani, kingpin of this particular little dope-ring, small but lucrative.

  Denny said to me while we were waiting around up there: “A guy on the Narcotics Squad recognized this Doyle right away, even from the little I was able to give them over the phone. They’d picked him up several times already, and they were trying to dicker with him to get the names of the higher-ups he worked for. When I got back to the room that open window on the third tipped me off which way you’d gone. From what Officer Kelly here had just finished telling me a little while before, I figured there was something fishy about this garage. He’d seen people drive up at certain hours to try to have their cars serviced, and they’d be turned away. And yet it was never particularly full of cars on the inside. I figured the smart thing to do was arrange a little reception committee at the street entrance, where they weren’t expecting it.”

  The final word, however, wasn’t said until several hours later. He came out of the back room at Headquarters, near daylight, came over to where I’d been waiting. “You didn’t do it, Tom. It’s official now, if that’ll make you feel any better. We’ve been questioning them in relays ever since we brought them in, and we just finished getting it all down on here.” He waved a set of typed sheets at me. “Here’s how it goes. Graziani and his two lieutenants killed Doyle in the garage about midnight last night, just around the time you were arriving at the Sorrells’ party with Fraser. That rooming-house had already come in handy to them once or twice—it’s got a vicious name on the police records—so they used it again, for a sort of dumping ground. Graziani sent one of his stooges around and had him put down fifty cents and take a room on the third floor, within easy access of the garage roof. That was just to obtain a convenient back way in. They smuggled the body across the roof and passed it in to the stooge through the window. But this stooge wasn’t supposed to take a murder rap, he was just acting as middleman. Graziani went out looking for the real stooge, the stooge for murder—that turned out to be you. He’d been to those dizzy parties of the Sorrells before, so he knew all about them. He went there last night, picked you out, got you higher than a kite, brought you over to the rooming-house in his car. He saw to it you were given a room on the second floor, directly under the one where the body lay waiting for transfer, where all the windows were walled up tight. Not only that, he had you sign for it for yourself and for Doyle, who was already dead. Doyle was supposed to be along in a minute or two. He got rid of the fellow in charge of the keys for that minute or two by sending him next door to the Silver Slipper for some coffee to ‘sober’ you up. By the time he got back with it, Doyle was already supposed to have shown up. The original stooge on the third floor spoke loudly to you to show there was somebody up there in the room with you. Graziani said, ‘His friend’s up there with him now, he’ll be all right, I’ll shove off.’ Doyle had shown up, but in a different way. They’d carried him down the stairs from the third-floor room to your room with the bricked-up window. They wiped off the knife handle and planted it on you; they smeared your shirt front with Doyle’s not yet quite congealed blood. You were dazed, in no condition to notice anything that went on around you. Graziani was careful to carry the coffee up only to the door, pass it in to you, come right down again, and leave. Doyle’s ‘voice’ still sounded up there with you in the room, for the fellow at the key-rack to hear.

  “You were given another whiff of coke to hold you steady for awhile. Then the original stooge came down, presumably from the third floor, handed in his key and checked out as if he were dissatisfied, complaining about the vermin.

  “You were left there drugged, with a murdered man in your room, his blood on your shirt, the knife that had been used concealed on your person in newspaper. You even helped the scheme out up to a point; you got the horrors, hid the body in the closet, locked it, piled everything movable you could lay your hands on up against the door. Then you fled for your life. You got a small break, that wouldn’t have helped out any in the end. The guy at the key-rack must have been either dozing or out of his alcove again. I spoke to him just now, and he never saw you leave. That postponed discovery, but wouldn’t have altered its emphasis any when it finally came.

  “As I said, the subconscious is a great thing. In all your terror, and stupefied as you were, you somehow found your way back to where you lived. You didn’t wake up in the same room with the dead man, like they were counting on your doing, and raise an outcry, and thereby sew yourself up fast then and there. You had a chance to talk it over with me first; we had a chance to put our heads together on the outside, without you being in the middle of it.”

  It was getting light when we got back to our own place together. The last thing I said to him, outside the door, was: “Tell the truth, Denny, up to the time it broke, did you really figure I did it?”

  His answer surprised me more than anything else about the whole thing. “Hell, yes!” he said vigorously. “I could have eaten my hat you did!”

  “I did too,” I had to admit. “In fact, I was sure of it!”

  All at Once, No Alice

  CORNELL WOOLRICH

  THE STORY

  Original publication: Argosy, March 2, 1940, as by William Irish; first collected in Eyes That Watch You by William Irish (New York, Rinehart, 1952)

  ALTHOUGH CORNELL GEORGE HOPLEY-WOOLRICH (1903–1968) was a prolific writer, mainly for the pulps, he helped ramp up his output by stealing from his own work, cannibalizing one short story to produce another, and then pulling essential material from his short fiction to produce novels.

  He was not alone in this practice, of course, and one of the best at it was his fellow pulp writer Raymond Chandler, who gathered storylines, parts of characters, settings, and more from his magazine stories to construct his novels.

  “All at Once, No Alice,” one of Woolrich’s best-known and most suspenseful stories, pulled many elements from “You’ll Never See Me Again,” published only four months earlier. Readers of both stories also will be reminded of Phantom Lady (1942), his most famous novel, which employs the central element of a person who has seemingly vanished from the planet—if she ever existed at all.

  A familiar tale, “All at Once, No Alice” is a masterful retelling of an urban legend about a man who leaves his bride
in a hotel room for a short time on his wedding night but, when he returns, there is no guest in the room, the hotel clerk and staff claim never to have seen her, her name is not on the register, and everyone with whom they had come in contact that day denies ever having seen her.

  THE FILM

  Title: The Return of the Whistler, 1948

  Studio: Columbia Pictures

  Director: D. Ross Lederman

  Screenwriters: Edward Bock, Maurice Tombragel

  Producer: Rudolph C. Flothow

  THE CAST

  • Michael Duane (Theodore Anthony “Ted” Nichols)

  • Lenore Aubert (Alice Dupres Barkley)

  • Richard Lane (Gaylord Traynor)

  • James Cardwell (Barkley)

  The Return of the Whistler, the eighth and final film in the series about the shadowy figure who introduces the story, is a good adaptation of Woolrich’s tale. Whistling a haunting tune, his shadow looms in the night while he tells the audience, “I am the whistler, I know many strange tales.”

  The Whistler, the popular radio series that had been modeled after the enormously successful The Shadow, lasted for nearly seven hundred episodes from 1942 to 1954. The Shadow, meanwhile, ran from 1930 to 1954 and at its peak had an audience of more than fifteen million.

  Created by J. Donald Wilson, the Whistler radio series told mainly dark stories, just as the movies did—providing an ideal market for Woolrich. After introducing the story, the titular character disappears until the end when his voice, filled with irony, describes what happens to the protagonist, chuckling with glee at the villain’s fate, just as the Shadow did. Wilson was hired to write the first Whistler film and established the template for those that followed.

  Certain elements of Woolrich’s story were changed in The Return of the Whistler, most notably the ending (hint: the story is better) but the disappearance of the woman, the crux of the plot, remains intact, and the suspense, especially in the first half of the film, is intense.

  A television series titled The Whistler aired on CBS in 1954–1955 and ran for thirty-nine episodes. The voice of the titular character was William Forman, who also provided narration.

  ALL AT ONCE, NO ALICE

  Cornell Woolrich

  IT WAS OVER SO QUICKLY I almost thought something had been left out, but I guess he’d been doing it long enough to know his business. The only way I could tell for sure it was over was when I heard him say: “You may kiss the bride.” But then, I’d never gone through it before.

  We turned and pecked at each other, a little bashful because they were watching us.

  He and the motherly-looking woman who had been a witness—I guess she was his housekeeper—stood there smiling benevolently, and also a little tiredly. The clock said one fifteen. Then he shook hands with the two of us and said, “Good luck to both of you,” and she shook with us too and said, “I wish you a lot of happiness.”

  We shifted from the living room, where it had taken place, out into the front hall, a little awkwardly. Then he held the screen door open and we moved from there out onto the porch.

  On the porch step Alice nudged me and whispered, “You forgot something.”

  I didn’t even know how much I was supposed to give him. I took out two singles and held them in one hand, then I took out a five and held that in the other. Then I went back toward him all flustered and said, “I—I guess you thought I was going to leave without remembering this.”

  I reached my hand down to his and brought it back empty. He kept right on smiling, as if this happened nearly every time too, the bridegroom forgetting like that. It was only after I turned away and rejoined her that I glanced down at my other hand and saw which it was I’d given him. It was the five. That was all right; five thousand of them couldn’t have paid him for what he’d done for me, the way I felt about it.

  We went down their front walk and got into the car. The lighted doorway outlined them both for a minute. They raised their arms and said, “Good night.”

  “Good night, and much obliged,” I called back. “Wait’ll they go in,” I said in an undertone to Alice, without starting the engine right away.

  As soon as the doorway had blacked out, we turned and melted together on the front seat, and this time we made it a real kiss. “Any regrets?” I whispered to her very softly.

  “It must have been awful before I was married to you,” she whispered back. “How did I ever stand it so long?”

  I don’t think we said a word all the way in to Michianopolis. We were both too happy. Just the wind and the stars and us. And a couple of cigarettes.

  We got to the outskirts around two thirty, and by three were all the way in downtown. We shopped around for a block or two. “This looks like a nice hotel,” I said finally. I parked outside and we went in.

  I think the first hotel was called the Commander. I noticed that the bellhops let us strictly alone; didn’t bustle out to bring in our bags or anything.

  I said to the desk man, “We’d like one of your best rooms and bath.”

  He gave me a sort of rueful smile, as if to say, “You should know better than that.”…“I only wish I had something to give you,” was the way he put it.

  “All filled up?” I turned to her and murmured, “Well, we’ll have to try someplace else.”

  He overheard me. “Excuse me, but did you come in without making reservations ahead?”

  “Yes, we just drove in now. Why?”

  He shook his head compassionately at my ignorance. “I’m afraid you’re going to have a hard time finding a room in any of the hotels tonight.”

  “Why? They can’t all be filled up.”

  “There’s a three-day convention of the Knights of Balboa being held here. All the others started sending their overflow to us as far back as Monday evening, and our own last vacancy went yesterday noon.”

  The second one was called the Stuyvesant, I think. “There must be something in a city this size,” I said when we came out of there. “We’ll keep looking until we find it.”

  I didn’t bother noticing the names of the third and fourth. We couldn’t turn around and go all the way back to our original point of departure—it would have been midmorning before we reached it—and there was nothing that offered suitable accommodations between; just filling stations, roadside lunch-rooms, and detached farmsteads.

  Besides she was beginning to tire. She refused to admit it, but it was easy to tell. It worried me.

  The fifth place was called the Royal. It was already slightly less first-class than the previous ones had been; we were running out of them now. Nothing wrong with it, but just a little seedier and older.

  I got the same answer at the desk, but this time I wouldn’t take it. The way her face drooped when she heard it was enough to make me persist. I took the night clerk aside out of her hearing.

  “Listen, you’ve got to do something for me, I don’t care what it is,” I whispered fiercely. “We’ve just driven all the way from Lake City and my wife’s all in. I’m not going to drag her around to another place tonight.”

  Then as his face continued impassive, “If you can’t accommodate both of us, find some way of putting her up at least. I’m willing to take my own chances, go out and sleep in the car or walk around the streets for the night.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said, hooking his chin, “I think I could work out something like that for you. I just thought of something. There’s a little bit of a dinky room on the top floor. Ordinarily it’s not used as a guest room at all, just as a sort of storeroom. You couldn’t possibly both use it, because there’s only a single cot in it; but if you don’t think your wife would object, I’d be glad to let her have it, and I think you might still be able to find a room for yourself at the Y. They don’t admit women, and most of these Knights have brought their wives
with them.”

  I took a look at her pretty, drawn face. “Anything, anything,” I said gratefully.

  He still had his doubts. “You’d better take her up and let her see it first.”

  A colored boy came with us, with a passkey. On the way up I explained it to her. She gave me a rueful look, but I could see she was too tired even to object as much as she felt she should have. “Ah, that’s mean,” she murmured. “Our first night by ourselves.”

  “It’s just for tonight. We’ll drive on right after breakfast. It’s important that you get some rest, hon. You can’t fool me, you can hardly keep your eyes open any more.”

  She tucked her hand consolingly under my arm. “I don’t mind if you don’t. It’ll give me something to look forward to, seeing you in the morning.”

  The bellboy led us along a quiet, green-carpeted hall, and around a turn, scanning numbers on the doors. He stopped three down from the turn, on the right-hand side, put his key in. “This is it here, sir.” The number was 1006.

  The man at the desk hadn’t exaggerated. The room itself was little better than an alcove, long and narrow. I suppose two could have gotten into it; but it would have been a physical impossibility for two to sleep in it the way it was fitted up. It had a cot that was little wider than a shelf.

  To give you an idea how narrow the room was, the window was narrower than average, and yet not more than a foot of wall-strip showed on either side of its frame. In other words it took up nearly the width of one entire side of the room.

  I suppose I could have sat up in the single armchair all night and slept, or tried to, that way; but as long as there was a chance of getting a horizontal bed at the Y, why not be sensible about it? She agreed with me in this.