The Riddle of the Forty Naughty Girls
STUART PALMER
THE STORY
Original publication: Mystery, July 1934; first collected in Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Stories (Norfolk, VA, Crippen & Landru, 2002). Note: The book has Riddles on the dust jacket but Stories on the title page.
FEW MYSTERY WRITERS OF HIS ERA received more popular and critical praise than Charles Stuart Hunter Palmer (1905–1968). In his introduction to the anthology Maiden Murders (1952), John Dickson Carr wrote: “Here are the old craftsmen, the serpents, the great masters of the game: Mr. Ellery Queen, Mr. Stuart Palmer, M. Georges Simenon.” Frederic Dannay (the editor and historian half of the Ellery Queen writing duo) ranked Palmer with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The leading mystery critic of the era, Anthony Boucher, cited Palmer as among the greatest of the puzzle story writers, along with Erle Stanley Gardner and John Dickson Carr.
Although the Hildegarde Withers character was instantly successful and remained so for as long he penned books and stories in the series, he also wrote other non-Withers novels (including two about Howard Rook, a newspaperman who decides to become a private eye), short stories (two featuring Sherlock Holmes), poetry (he was an aficionado of limericks), fantasy, science fiction, true crime, how-to-write instructional manuals, and nonfiction articles. He took the position that he was a writer rather than a novelist. According to his widow, Jennifer Venola, he often said, “I’ll write anything for money except poison pen letters and ransom notes.”
Palmer also had a successful career in Hollywood, writing thirty-seven feature films, all of which were B mysteries in such popular series as The Lone Wolf, Bulldog Drummond, and The Falcon, as well as such original screenplays as Hollywood Stadium Mystery (1938), Halfway to Shanghai (1942), and Step by Step (1946).
In 1954 his fellow authors elected Palmer president of the Mystery Writers of America.
THE FILM
Title: Forty Naughty Girls, 1937
Studio: RKO Radio Pictures
Director: Edward F. Cline
Screenwriter: John Grey
Producer: William Sistrom
THE CAST
• Zasu Pitts (Hildegarde Withers)
• James Gleason (Oscar Piper)
• Marjorie Lord (June Preston)
• George Shelley (Bert)
There is a very good mystery presented in the story that translates well to this screen version when what appears to be the most airtight possible alibi may not have escaped Hildegarde Withers’s scrutiny. In the short story, the action takes place at a burlesque theater, hence the title that refers to the advertised forty scantily clad young women (though, as wittily pointed out by Palmer, there really were only twenty-four, telling readers all they needed to know about the show and its owner). In the film, Hildegarde and Piper are attending the opening of a Broadway show called Forty Naughty Girls.
Noticing the immediate and potential popularity of the Hildegarde Withers series, it hadn’t taken Hollywood long to make a motion picture based on the first Miss Withers book, The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), one year after the book’s release.
In what turned out to be fortuitous casting, Edna May Oliver took the role of the spinsterish sleuth and James Gleason played Inspector Piper. Gleason was well suited to play the crusty, unrefined cop who forms an uneasy alliance with the dry, reserved schoolmarm. Piper is a bachelor, accustomed to having things his own way, which was difficult with the intractable Miss Withers on the scene; the comic badinage and the hints of middle-age romance that occur in the books and occasionally in the films give the series a great deal of charm.
Though Gleason played Piper in all six films in the series, Oliver wanted to do other things, left RKO, the studio under which she had been under contract, and retired after three, being replaced first by Helen Broderick for one and Zasu Pitts for the final two movies.
The working title for the film during production was The Riddle of the Forty Naughty Girls. It is the last film in the series.
THE RIDDLE OF THE FORTY NAUGHTY GIRLS
Stuart Palmer
AS THE SCREEN WENT DARK, the twelve men who had just crept into the orchestra pit struck up a few bars of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and then without pausing broke into “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?”
Footlights flared on, and the audience roused itself. All through the picture, which filled in between shows at the Diana, they had been drifting in by ones and twos. But the several hundred—mostly masculine—who made up the audience had not left the garish lights of Forty-Second Street and paid their half dollars at the box office to see a movie.
It was the first day of a new show at the Diana Burlesque—its title was one of those Rabelaisian affairs designed to catch the masculine eye. Last week it had been something equally raucous, although except for the change in the big electric sign outside, few could tell the difference. Dapper Max Durkin, who acted as house manager of the Diana, often thought that the long hours he spent working out new gag titles was a waste of time.
He wasn’t wasting his time now, though he lounged in the wings and idly watched the “Forty Naughty Paris Girlies” as they rollicked onto the stage in their opening dance number. He leaned forward and caught a ribbon which formed an essential part of the costume of a handsome, red-haired girl who was waiting for a cue.
It was the ribbon which, if tugged hard enough, would leave Janey Vere de Vere attired in little more than what she had first worn into the world. She whirled suddenly, drawing the ribbon from his fingers, and frowned.
“How about dinner and a little bottle of gin after the show?” he asked.
“Oh—it’s you. Ask me later, will you? I—something’s happened.”
He saw that the big brown eyes were glazed with fear. “What? Spill it, girlie.”
She came closer. “You’ve got to get me a new lock for my dressing-room door, Durkin. I tell you—”
“Lock? Say, what have you got that anybody could steal?”
“If you want to know, somebody got into my dressing room while I was out to dinner and stole a gun I kept in my trunk, and that’s what!”
Still Durkin didn’t see anything in this to upset her. “I’ll buy you a dozen pop guns if that’s all you’re worrying about. Now listen, baby—”
His fingers caught the soft flesh of her upper arm. Then came an inopportune interruption. “Say, boss, what lighting goes with the cafe scene?”
The hulking, ape-like form of Roscoe, stage electrician, came between them. Durkin stared into the little pig-like eyes and wished for the tenth time that he had enough on this gorilla to fire him. “You know damn well it gets amber foots and a pair of baby spots from up above, why come busting—”
But Janey Vere de Vere was going out on the stage, as all twenty-four of the Forty Naughty Paris Girlies kicked their way off. Her hand was on her hip, and her throaty contralto voice picked up her song.
There was a little smattering of applause from the darkened house, for Janey was possessed of charms notable even among strip-artists, and she was a newcomer to the Wheel. She went into a slow hip dance as a purple spotlight struck her, body twisting, wide hips surging back and forth beneath the wispy evening gown of revealing black lace—one of those slashed affairs especially designed for dancing.
As the cash customers agreed later, Janey was at her best that night. Which showed that she was a real trouper, for the people backstage knew that she had something on her mind.
“What’s eating Vere de Vere?” Durkin demanded of Murphy, a slapstick comic who approached in a costume composed of a silk hat and a long flannel nightshirt. “She looks scared of something.”
“Her?” The comic grinned. “Must be she’s scared of you, you sheik. Janey ain’t used to this racket yet. She’s been accustomed to better t
hings, says she.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And she moves with a classy crowd, Maxie old thing. Why last week out in Brooklyn there was a dude in a tuxedo came into a box every night, just to see her act.” The comic peered through the wings, past Janey’s gyrating body on the stage, and squinted. “Say, it looks like the same guy—see him, alone in the right front box? Maybe it’s him that she’s scared of.”
Max Durkin took a long greenish-brown cigar from among the half dozen which graced his vest pocket. Murphy also helped himself. “Thanks,” he said. But the manager wasn’t listening.
“So,” he said. “Vere de Vere has got herself mixed up with the Park Avenue crowd. Somebody ought to do something about that.”
“Maybe somebody will,” agreed the comedian. “Me, I’d do anything short of arson if it would get me to first base with her.”
He stared admiringly out onto the stage. Janey’s song was only four minutes long, and at the first encore, when stage lights flared on, her costume was due to go off.
Durkin turned and went through the door, placed just beside Roscoe’s switchboard, which led to the left side aisle and the front of the house.
At that moment Janey Vere de Vere, without breaking the pagan rhythm of her dance, began to fumble with the ribbon at the rear of her costume. A round knee and thigh began to disclose themselves. She was still singing—“…he may have the manners of a country lout, but who wants politeness when the lights are out?…he’s my—”
But that was all anybody was to see of Janey Vere de Vere’s knee that night. Her song was interrupted by a tremendous bang! and a burst of flame which came from the left front box.
A woman screamed somewhere in the audience, and the acrid smell of powder drifted out over the house.
From somewhere came Max Durkin’s voice. “Hit the lights!”
Then the crowd knew that this was not meant to be part of the show. “Roscoe, hit ’em!” shouted Durkin, from the aisle. “Everybody keep their seats!”
Still Roscoe fumbled with his switches, so that instead of casting a flood of brilliance over the auditorium, even the red exit lights went dark. Only the purple spotlight remained, slanting down from the film booth in the balcony. Janey Vere de Vere, her red mouth open wide, stood frozen in the center of the stage. The orchestra died away in a confusion of strings and brass.
Then the spotlight left the girl on the stage, sliding eerily past the white frightened faces of the girls who were crowding into the wings, sliding over the orchestra and the people in the front rows, and finally pouring its soft brilliance into the box from which the shot had come. But it stood empty and bare.
“House lights,” roared Durkin again. This time the house lights came on. The audience straggled into the aisle, staring at each other and muttering questions. There was a long moment of this, and then the forgotten girl on the stage made a throaty, whimpering noise. She pointed—and then suddenly collapsed like a sack. But she had been staring at the right front box—the box in which a little man in a white shirt front was sitting, slumped down in his chair.
He was staring at the stage, but his stare was sightless—for everyone in the audience could see that there was a small round hole in the center of his forehead.
* * *
—
“Hell, on my first night off duty in three weeks,” complained a bulky man who sat in the middle of the house. He forced his way to the aisle and ran back toward the rear of the house. “Leave nobody out!” he commanded as he ran past the ticket-taker. Then he went down the side aisle toward where Max Durkin stood. “I’m Fogarty, Eleventh Precinct!” he said. One hand was fingering his service gun. “How do you get into that box?”
There was a short flight of stairs opening from the aisle. Up these steps the two men plunged.
Except for four chairs and a litter of cigar and cigarette butts the box was empty. Patrolman John Fogarty bit his tongue as he saw, on the floor, a small calibre target pistol, with a long and wicked barrel. This he swiftly picked up with his handkerchief, and dropped into his pocket.
Then he whirled on Durkin. “You the manager? Who sat in this box tonight?”
Max Durkin shook his head. “Nobody. We don’t have many customers for these dollar seats.”
Fogarty was staring across the auditorium, in which the crowd still muttered and milled about, to where the man in the dinner jacket sat slumped in his chair with a hole in his forehead. “Well, you had one customer, while he lasted,” said Fogarty grimly. “Come on.”
They crossed the house. “None of you gets out of here, so you might just as well sit quiet,” Fogarty told them. He climbed to the right front box, an exact duplicate of the one opposite, and bent briefly over the man in the tuxedo. He was a small, flabby man of perhaps forty, and there was no doubt at all that he would never grow any older.
“Croaked deader’n a codfish,” pronounced Fogarty. That ended his sleuthing. He folded his arms and became a bulwark of the law. “You get to a phone and notify Headquarters,” he commanded. “Scram, now.” Max Durkin scrammed.
* * *
—
In a wide attic room at Centre Street, a sergeant leaned over a vast and glass-topped map of the city of New York. He chose a brass tag, read its number aloud, and turned it upside down to show that the car it represented was on a call.
Across the room another sergeant snapped a switch, and the place began to hum. “Calling car eleven seventeen, car eleven seventeen,” he said. “Go to Diana Burlesque, Forty-Second near Eighth, Forty-Second near Eighth, code number five, code number five, that is all.”
That was enough. The wheels of the world’s second most famous murder machine had begun to turn.
Oscar Piper, gray and grizzled inspector of the Homicide Squad, climbed out of a green roadster perhaps twenty minutes later, and stared up with distaste at the flaring sign on the Diana facade. Then he stalked toward the theater entrance.
Inspector Piper was prepared for almost anything, knowing the setting. But he was not prepared to see the angular figure of Miss Hildegarde Withers before him. The meddlesome school teacher was engaged in a furious argument with the uniformed officer at the door.
“I tell you the show’s over for tonight!” he was protesting.
“Young man, the show hasn’t even begun!” Then Miss Withers saw the inspector, and brightened. Which was more than can be said for Oscar Piper.
“Hildegarde—how in blazes—?”
“Don’t be profane, Oscar! I guess I can own a short wave radio set just like anybody else—and it was you yourself who told me what code number five means.” She pointed to the brass buttons. “But this man won’t let me in.”
The inspector smiled wearily. “It’s all right, she’s my secretary,” he told the guardian of the portal. That was the old fiction which had served so many times to cover the old maid school-teacher’s meddling in crime investigation. They passed into the lobby, and Miss Withers wrinkled her nose at the mingled odors of humanity and stale tobacco.
Piper paused. “Now see here, Hildegarde—”
“I know. This is no place for a woman.” Miss Withers pointed with the handle of her umbrella toward the stage, where were grouped most of the scantily-clad ladies of the ensemble. “All the same, there are a number of women here beside myself. Perhaps I’m not dressed for the party, but—”
The inspector was already half-way toward the right lower box, where detectives and photographers were grouped around the assistant medical examiner and his grim piece de resistance. Taking his silence for passive permission, Miss Withers hurried in his wake.
“Hello, folks,” Dr. Levin greeted them. “Nice business, this. You can move him whenever you like.” He scribbled an order. “Nice shot—smack on the frontal ridge. Slug is still in him—we’ll find that it came from the little .32 the boys found in the op
posite box. He went out without knowing what hit him.”
Piper scrutinized the revolver, and Miss Withers peered over his shoulder. “Prints?”
“Not a print,” he was told. “One shot fired.”
The inspector broke the gun, and sniffed. “Old-fashioned black powder, eh? That ought to give us a line.” He dropped the gun into his pocket and leaned over the dead man. “Got any dope on who he is?”
Cards in the dead man’s pocket informed them that his name was David M. Jones, proprietor of the Loop Autosales Agency, Chicago. “I know that place,” cut in a sergeant. “A half block of show windows near Halstead Street. Probably in town for the auto dealers’ convention— Say, this is a bigger case ’n I thought.”
“Yeah,” agreed Piper. “Get the manager of this place up here.” He drew Miss Withers into the rear of the box, where hung a heavy pair of ancient red plush curtains. “Well, here’s a shot fired in front of several hundred people, and we can’t get a lead. The opposite box was empty—so anybody on that side of the audience could have sneaked up here and fired the shot, and then got back to his seat before the lights went on. Ditto, anybody backstage could have sneaked through the door and got back the same way—”
She nodded. “You’ve narrowed your suspects down to just about everybody who was here tonight, haven’t you?”
“Everybody but the girl who was wiggling on the stage when the shot was fired,” said Piper sadly. “And she’s—”
He broke off as Max Durkin appeared. “Look here, inspector,” began that worthy gentleman. “Isn’t there some way you can fix it to let the audience out of here? We can’t keep them here all night…”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 72