The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  We started back toward it. The driver and a helper had gotten down, were unloading batches of camp chairs and stacking them up against the side of the truck, preparatory to taking them in.

  “For the services tomorrow, I suppose,” Ainslie grunted. He said to the driver: “Who is it that died, bud?”

  “Mean to say you ain’t heard? It’s in alla papers.”

  “We’re from out of town.”

  “Alma Beresford, the heiress. Richest gal in twenty-four states. She was an orphum, too. Pretty soft for her guardian; not another soul to get the cash but him.”

  “What was it?” For the first time since I’d known him, you couldn’t have called Ainslie’s voice toneless; it was sort of springy like a rubber band that’s pulled too tight.

  “Heart attack, I think.” The truckman snapped his fingers. “Like that. Shows you that rich or poor, when you gotta go, you gotta go.”

  Ainslie asked only one more question. “Why you bringing these setups at an hour like this? They’re not going to hold the services in the middle of the night, are they?”

  “Nah, but first thing in the morning; so early there wouldn’t be a chance to get ’em over here unless we delivered ’em ahead of time.” He was suddenly staring fascinatedly at the silvery lining of Ainslie’s hand.

  Ainslie’s voice was toneless again. “Tell you what you fellows are going to do. You’re going to save yourselves the trouble of hauling all those camp chairs inside, and you’re going to get paid for it in the bargain. Lend us those work aprons y’got on.”

  He slipped them something apiece; I couldn’t see whether it was two dollars or five. “Gimme your delivery ticket; I’ll get it receipted for you. You two get back in the truck and lie low.”

  We both doffed our hats and coats, put them in our own car, rolled our shirt sleeves, put on the work aprons, and rang the service bell. There was a short wait and then a wire-sheathed bulb over the entry glimmered pallidly as an indication someone was coming. The door opened and a gaunt-faced sandy-haired man looked out at us. It was hard to tell just how old he was. He looked like a butler, but he was dressed in a business suit.

  “Camp chairs from the Thebes Funerary Chapel,” Ainslie said, reading from the delivery ticket.

  “Follow me and I’ll show you where they’re to go,” he said in a hushed voice. “Be as quiet as you can. We’ve only just succeeded in getting Mr. Hastings to lie down and try to rest a little.” The guardian, I supposed. In which case this anemic-looking customer would be the guardian’s Man Friday.

  We each grabbed up a double armful of the camp chairs and went in after him. They were corded together in batches of half a dozen. We could have cleared up the whole consignment at once—they were lightweight—but Ainslie gave me the eye not to; I guess he wanted to have an excuse to prolong our presence as much as possible.

  You went down a short delivery passageway, then up a few steps into a brightly lighted kitchen.

  A hatchet-faced woman in maid’s livery was sitting by a table crying away under one eye-shading hand, a teacup and a tumbler of gin before her. Judging by the redness of her nose, she’d been at it for hours. “My baby,” she’d mew every once in a while.

  We followed him out at the other side, through a pantry, a gloomy-looking dining room, and finally into a huge cavernous front room, eerily suffused with flickering candlelight that did no more than heighten the shadows in its far corners. It was this wavering pallor that we must have seen from outside of the house.

  An open coffin rested on a flower-massed bier at the upper end of the place, a lighted taper glimmering at each corner of it. A violet velvet pall had been spread over the top of it, concealing what lay within.

  But a tiny peaked outline, that could have been made by an uptilted nose, was visible in the plush at one extremity of its length. That knife of dread gave an excruciating little twist in me, and again I didn’t know why—or refused to admit I did. It was as if I instinctively sensed the nearness of something familiar.

  The rest of the room, before this monument to mortality, had been left clear, its original furniture moved aside or taken out. The man who had admitted us gave us our instructions.

  “Arrange them in four rows, here in front of the bier. Leave an aisle through them. And be sure and leave enough space up ahead for the divine who will deliver the oration.” Then he retreated to the door and stood watching us for a moment.

  Ainslie produced a knife from the pocket of his borrowed apron, began severing the cording that bound the frames of the camp chairs together. I opened them one at a time as he freed them and began setting them up in quadruple rows, being as slow about it as I could.

  There was a slight sound and the factotum had tiptoed back toward the kitchen for a moment, perhaps for a sip of the comforting gin. Ainslie raised his head, caught my eye, speared his thumb at the bier imperatively. I was the nearer of us to it at the moment. I knew what he meant: look and see who it was.

  I went cold all over, but I put down the camp chair I was fiddling with and edged over toward it on arched feet. The taper flames bent down flat as I approached them, and sort of hissed. Sweat needled out under the roots of my hair. I went around by the head, where that tiny little peak was, reached out, and gingerly took hold of the corners of the velvet pall, which fell loosely over the two sides of the coffin without quite meeting the headboard.

  Just as my wrists flexed to tip it back, Ainslie coughed warningly. There was a whispered returning tread from beyond the doorway. I let go, took a quick side-jump back toward where I’d been.

  I glanced around and the secretary fellow had come back again, was standing there with his eyes fixed on me. I pretended to be measuring off the distance for the pulpit with my foot.

  “You men are rather slow about it,” he said, thin-lipped.

  “You want ’em just so, don’t you?” Ainslie answered. He went out to get the second batch. I pretended one of the stools had jammed and I was having trouble getting it open, as an excuse to linger behind. The secretary was on his guard. He lingered too.

  The dick took care of that. He waited until he was halfway back with his load of camp chairs, then dropped them all over the pantry floor with a clatter, to draw the watchdog off.

  It worked. He gave a huff of annoyance, turned, and went in to bawl Ainslie out for the noise he had made. The minute the doorway cleared, I gave a cat-like spring back toward the velvet mound. This time I made it. I flung the pall back—

  Then I let go of it, and the lighted candles started spinning around my head, faster and faster, until they made a comet-like track of fire. The still face staring up at me from the coffin was Alice’s.

  * * *

  —

  I felt my knees hit something, and I was swaying back and forth on them there beside the bier. I could hear somebody coming back toward the room, but whether it was Ainslie or the other guy I didn’t know and didn’t care. Then an arm went around me and steadied me to my feet once more, so I knew it was Ainslie.

  “It’s her,” I said brokenly. “Alice. I can’t understand it; she must—have—been this rich girl, Alma Beresford, all the time—”

  He let go of me, took a quick step over to the coffin, flung the pall even further back than I had. He dipped his head, as if he were staring nearsightedly. Then he turned and I never felt my shoulder grabbed so hard before, or since. His fingers felt like steel claws that went in, and met in the middle. For a minute I didn’t know whether he was attacking me or not; and I was too dazed to care.

  He was pointing at the coffin. “Look at that!” he demanded. I didn’t know what he meant. He shook me brutally, either to get me to understand or because he was so excited himself. “She’s not dead. Watch her chest cavern.”

  I fixed my eyes on it. You could tell only by watching the line where the white satin of her burial gown met the vio
let quilting of the coffin lining. The white was faintly, but unmistakably and rhythmically, rising and falling.

  “They’ve got her either drugged or in a coma—”

  He broke off short, let go of me as if my shoulder were red-hot and burned his fingers. His hand flashed down and up again, and he’d drawn and sighted over my shoulder. “Put it down or I’ll let you have it right where you are!” he said.

  Something thudded to the carpet. I turned and the secretary was standing there in the doorway, palms out, a fallen revolver lying at his feet.

  “Go over and get that, Cannon,” Ainslie ordered. “This looks like the finale now. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  There was an arched opening behind him, leading out to the front entrance hall, I suppose, and the stairway to the upper floors. We’d come in from the rear, remember. Velvet drapes had been drawn closed over that arch, sealing it up, the whole time we’d been in there.

  He must have come in through there. I bent down before the motionless secretary, and, with my fingers an inch away from the fallen gun at his feet, I heard the impact of a head blow and Ainslie gave the peculiar guttural groan of someone going down into unconsciousness.

  The secretary’s foot snaked out and sped the gun skidding far across to the other side of the room. Then he dropped on my curved back like a dead weight and I went down flat under him, pushing my face into the parquet flooring.

  He kept aiming blows at the side of my head from above, but he had only his fists to work with at the moment, and even the ones that landed weren’t as effective as whatever it was that had been used on Ainslie. I reached upward and over, caught the secretary by the shoulders of his coat, tugged and at the same time jerked my body out from under him in the opposite direction; and he came flying up in a backward somersault and landed sprawling a few feet away.

  I got up and looked. Ainslie lay inert, face down on the floor to one side of the coffin, something gleaming wet down the part of his hair. There was a handsome but vicious-looking gray-haired man in a brocaded dressing gown standing behind him holding a gun on me, trying to cow me with it.

  “Get him, Mr. Hastings,” panted the one I’d just flung off.

  It would have taken more than a gun to hold me, after what I’d been through. I charged at him, around Ainslie’s form. He evidently didn’t want to fire, didn’t want the noise of a shot to be heard there in the house. Instead, he reversed his gun, swung the butt high up over his shoulder; and my own headfirst charge undid me. I couldn’t swerve or brake in time, plunged right in under it. A hissing, spark-shedding skyrocket seemed to tear through the top of my head, and I went down into nothingness as Ainslie had.

  * * *

  —

  For an hour after I recovered consciousness I was in complete darkness. Such utter darkness that I couldn’t be sure the blow hadn’t affected my optic nerve.

  I was in a sitting position, on something cold—stone flooring probably—with my hands lashed behind me, around something equally cold and sweating moisture, most likely a water pipe. My feet were tied too, and there was a gag over my mouth. My head blazed with pain.

  After what seemed like an age, a smoky gray light began to dilute the blackness; so at least my eyesight wasn’t impaired. As the light strengthened it showed me first a barred grate high up on the wall through which the dawn was peering in. Next, a dingy basement around me, presumably that of the same New Hampshire Avenue house we had entered several hours ago.

  And finally, if that was any consolation to me, Ainslie sitting facing me from across the way, in about the same fix I was. Hands and feet secured, sitting before another pipe, mouth also gagged. A dark stain down one side of his forehead, long since dried, marked the effect of the blow he had received.

  We just stared at each other, unable to communicate. We could turn our heads. He shook his from side to side deprecatingly. I knew what he meant: “Fine spot we ended up in, didn’t we?” I nodded, meaning, “You said it.”

  But we were enjoying perfect comfort and peace of mind, compared to what was to follow. It came within about half an hour at the most. Sounds of activity began to penetrate to where we were. First a desultory moving about sounded over our heads, as if someone were looking things over to make sure everything was in order. Then something heavy was set down: it might have been a table, a desk—or a pulpit.

  This cellar compartment we were in seemed to be directly under that large front room where the coffin was and where the obsequies were to be held.

  A dawning horror began to percolate through me. I looked at Ainslie and tried to make him understand what I was thinking. I didn’t need to, he was thinking the same thing.

  She’d been alive when we’d last seen her, last night. Early this same morning, rather. What were they going to do—go ahead with it anyway?

  A car door clashed faintly, somewhere off in the distance outside. It must have been at the main entrance of this very house we were in, for within a moment or two new footsteps sounded overhead, picking their way along, as down an aisle under guidance. Then something scraped slightly, like the leg rests of a camp chair straining under the weight of a body.

  It repeated itself eight or ten times after that. The impact of a car door outside in the open, then the sedate footsteps over us—some the flat dull ones of men, some the sharp brittle ones of women—then the slight shift and click of the camp chairs. I didn’t have to be told its meaning; probably Ainslie didn’t either. The mourners were arriving for the services.

  It was probably unintentional, our having been placed directly below like this; but it was the most diabolic torture that could ever have been devised. Was she dead yet, or wasn’t she? But she had to be before—

  They couldn’t be that low. Maybe the drug she’d been under last night was timed to take fatal effect between then and now. But suppose it hadn’t?

  The two of us were writhing there like maimed snakes. Ainslie kept trying to bring his knees up and meet them with his chin, and at first I couldn’t understand what his idea was. It was to snag the gag in the cleft between his two tightly pressed knees and pull it down, or at least dislodge it sufficiently to get some sound out. I immediately began trying the same thing myself.

  Meanwhile an ominous silence had descended above us. No more car-door thuds, no more footsteps mincing down the aisle to their seats. The services were being held.

  The lower half of my face was all numb by now from hitting my bony up-ended knees so many times. And still I couldn’t work it. Neither could he. The rounded structure of the kneecaps kept them from getting close enough to our lips to act as pincers. If only one of us could have made it. If we could hear them that clearly down here, they would have been able to hear us yell up there. And they couldn’t all be in on the plot, all those mourners, friends of the family or whoever they were.

  Bad as the preliminaries had been, they were as nothing compared to the concluding stages that we now had to endure listening to. There was a sudden concerted mass shifting and scraping above, as if everyone had risen to his feet at one time.

  Then a slow, single-file shuffling started in, going in one direction, returning in another. The mourners were filing around the coffin one by one for a last look at the departed. The departed who was still living.

  After the last of them had gone out, and while the incessant cracking of car doors was still under way outside, marking the forming of the funeral cortege, there was a quick, businesslike converging of not more than two pairs of feet on one certain place—where the coffin was. A hurried shifting about for a moment or two, then a sharp hammering on wood penetrated to where we were, and nearly drove me crazy; they were fastening down the lid.

  After a slight pause that might have been employed in reopening the closed room doors, more feet came in, all male, and moving toward that one certain place where the first two had preceded them. These must
be the pallbearers, four or six of them. There was a brief scraping and jockeying about while they lifted the casket to their shoulders, and then the slow, measured tread with which they carried it outside to the waiting hearse.

  * * *

  —

  I let my head fall inertly downward as far over as I could bend it, so Ainslie wouldn’t see the tears running out of my eyes.

  Motion attracted me and I looked blurredly up again. He was shaking his head steadily back and forth. “Don’t give up, keep trying,” he meant to say. “It’s not too late yet.”

  About five or ten minutes after the hearse had left, a door opened surreptitiously somewhere close at hand; and a stealthy, frightened tread began to descend toward us, evidently along some steps that were back of me.

  Ainslie could see who it was—he was facing that way—but I couldn’t until the hatchet-faced maid we had seen crying in the kitchen the night before suddenly sidled out between us. She kept looking back in the direction from which she’d just come, as if scared of her life. She had an ordinary kitchen bread knife in her hand. She wasn’t in livery now, but black-hatted, coated and gloved, as if she had started out for the cemetery with the rest and then slipped back unnoticed.

  She went for Ainslie’s bonds first, cackling terrifiedly the whole time she was sawing away at them. “Oh, if they ever find out I did this, I don’t know what they’ll do to me! I didn’t even know you were down here until I happened to overhear Mr. Hastings whisper to his secretary just now before they left, ‘Leave the other two where they are, we can attend to them when we come back.’ Which one of you is her Jimmy? She confided in me; I knew about it; I helped her slip in and out of the house that whole week. I took her place under the bedcovers, so that when he’d look in he’d think she was asleep in her room.