The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  Honey, it really oughtn’t to make any difference to me how you made your living before the war. It just isn’t any of my business, but…

  She broke off. She thought, There you go bush-beating again. You’ve got to tell him. It’s not so much what old Uncle Phineas will or won’t do. It’s just that, you’d never sleep a wink if you married a—

  “Is it hard to say, dearie?”

  Startled from her thoughts, Dorian looked up and across at the blonde. She uttered a nervous laugh. “It’s hard to say when you’ve got a headache. I just can’t think.”

  “I can’t think either, damn it,” Inez admitted. “But it’s not a headache with me, thank God.” She tossed her cigarette to the floor, stepped it out, kicked the lipstick-stained butt away from the desk. A maid in one of Fabian’s dark blue uniforms and an organdy apron saw the butt, came over to the desk with a light broom in one hand and a long-handled brass dustpan in the other. She swept up the butt and the ashes.

  The maid was odd-looking, Dorian thought. Forty, maybe, with dull, light brown hair, with yellowish streaks like dead seaweed. She had narrow, concealing eyes, with dark tapering lines extending from them back to her temples. Dorian was reminded of instructions on a child’s cut-out—“Slit along dotted line and insert eyes here.”

  “How about an aspirin.” The big blonde had opened her purse and removed a cardboard aspirin box from it. She extended the box across the intervening stationery rack and shook it. “Just one in there,” she said tactlessly.

  “Oh, but I couldn’t take your last aspirin,” Dorian demurred. Something that her mother had pounded into her head as a child echoed now from memory: Never take candy or money or anything from strangers.

  “Go ahead,” the blonde insisted. “I’m not due for a headache.”

  Dorian accepted the pillbox, dropped it into her purse. “Thanks so much. I’ll just dash off another line or two and then go find a drinking fountain. I can’t swallow pills without water….So thoughtful of you.”

  “Don’t mention it, dearie.” Inez picked up Dorian’s pencil and began her blackmail letter.

  Dear Noll: (she wrote) I find five hundred a month isn’t enough. Make it seven hundred next time. I repeat the same word of warning: Make no attempt to find out who I am or the police will learn who killed Joyce Revers three years ago.

  Pencil poised, Inez raised cold blue eyes from the paper, casually covered what she had written with her hand. She hadn’t noticed until now, but that damned maid was hovering around again. Ugly little pale-faced thing, she thought, with nasty, envious eyes.

  “Modom’s coat has slipped,” the maid murmured. She had a flat completely impersonal voice. She moved back of Inez’s chair, pulled the mink coat up, turned the arm holes out over the corners of the chair back. Inez leaned back into the brocaded satin lining, her big-featured face composed, untroubled.

  As the maid moved away, the crisp organdy of her apron brushed the edge of the desk, touched one of Fabian’s envelopes which Inez had addressed and placed face down. There was a short apprehensive gasp from Inez as the envelope fluttered to the floor. She leaned sideways in the chair, big hand darting for the envelope, arrested a gesture of protest as the maid stooped and recovered the envelope. It had landed address side up….

  * * *

  —

  At the opposite desk, Dorian rubbed her forehead and thought she’d better lick this thing right now. If you were going to marry a man you had to be perfectly frank with him. If his love for you was so small that a little thing like this would make a difference, the marriage wouldn’t work anyway. So…

  What I’m trying to say, darling, (she wrote) is that when the war is over and you’re out of the Army, I hope you’ll find another profession. Because I just don’t think I’d ever sleep a wink. Is this too much to ask?

  “Here’s your pencil, dearie, and thanks loads.”

  Dorian looked up, found the big blonde holding out the mechanical pencil. She took it, smiling shyly. “You’re quite welcome.”

  Inez pushed back from the desk, stood up, put on her coat. She tucked the big saddle leather purse and her magazine under her arm, smiled her lazy smile at Dorian.

  Dorian watched the woman cross to the mezzanine stair. She laughed a little to herself, went back to her letter.

  I.M.P.-for-Imp just left, and she really wasn’t fat. Just one of those big beautiful blondes. Do you like big beautiful blondes? Please say no, because that’s just what I’m not! But she gave me an aspirin for my aching head.

  Dear boy, I’ve got to run. Uncle Phineas is coming to my apartment for dinner, and I ought to be home catering to his indigestion. Wonder if all rich uncles have indigestion? Love and kisses—Dori.

  Dorian enclosed the letter in an envelope, addressed it carefully. She drew the veil of her little brown hat down over her face. Gathering up her purse and the letter, she pushed back from the desk, walked to the stair, and down to the main floor.

  Halfway along the row of elevator shafts was a glass mail chute. Dorian put the letter into the slot. As she saw the white downward flash of it, her heart lurched, trembled.

  Please, God, don’t let him stop loving me! And for a moment she stood there, staring at the chute as though to draw the letter back in defiance of gravity. It was done now. Done. There was an utter finality in the word that sickened her. She took a short breath, turned, hurried toward the check room.

  A drinking fountain gurgled near the checkroom door, and Dorian was reminded of the aspirin tablet in her purse. But she didn’t take the pill. She wouldn’t have taken it. Not that she was suspicious of the tablet or the woman who had given it to her. It was simply something deeply ingrained in her that kept her from taking it—the memory of those grave, frightening warnings her mother had given her as a child: Never take candy or money or anything from strangers.

  Such a simple explanation for not taking the aspirin herself that no one was to believe her. Neither the police, nor the judge and jury were to believe her….

  * * *

  —

  Inez Marie Polk knew nothing about the matter until the following morning when she turned out of bed around eleven. In pajamas, robe, and furry scuffs, she went to the door of her flat for the paper; the war had done that, even for Inez. She glanced at the front page on her way to the kitchen. Her sleep-puffy eyes were caught, but not securely by a headline:

  P. C. SHARROD OF

  LOGANSPORT IS

  POISON VICTIM

  She yawned at it. She said aloud and to no one: “Being from Logansport he won’t know he’s dead.” She tossed the paper onto the kitchen table, shuffled over to the stove to light the gas under what remained of some coffee she had made for Bill Redding when he had brought her home the night before. She stood with one elbow on the stove top, ducked her head to tangle her big fingers with her straw-yellow hair.

  She rubbed her scalp drowsily.

  “Aw, Bill,” she murmured. Another yawn erased her lazy smile. She was thinking that when Bill was tight he talked big and his eyes got hot and bright.

  The coffee bubbled and roiled. She carried it to the table, poured some from the pot into an unwashed cup, sagged into a chair. It was when she reached for the sugar that her eyes passed the name, “Dorian Westmore,” on the front page of the paper. She frowned, remembering the name on the pencil which she had borrowed from the little brown-eyed girl on Fabian’s mezzanine the previous afternoon. Her eyes went back carefully, searched curiously to find the name again in a prominent position in the item about the Logansport man who had been poisoned. The column carried a local dateline.

  No longer sleepy, her eyes pecked fragments from the column.

  Police here held for questioning Miss Dorian Westmore, pretty brunette niece of Mr. Phineas Sharrod, we
althy Logansport man. According to Oliver Vickers, Miss Westmore rushed into the Vickers’ apartment at 6:30 P.M. to announce, “I’ve poisoned Uncle Phineas!” Police found a packet containing atropine sulphate in Miss Westmore’s medicine cabinet….

  “I have no idea how the poison got there,” Miss Westmore persisted after hours of questioning. “I didn’t even approach the medicine cabinet at any time that evening. Uncle Phineas complained of a headache and asked for an aspirin tablet. I had only one aspirin and it was in my purse. I gave that to him, but nothing else. Returning from the kitchen where I was preparing dinner, I found Uncle Phineas dead on the floor.”

  MISS WESTMORE’S STORY “FANTASTIC”

  “A big blonde woman in a mink coat and red hat gave me the aspirin tablet on the mezzanine floor of Fabian’s Department Store,” Miss Westmore told Lieutenant Graden of the Homicide Squad. Anna Nelson, maid employed by Fabian’s, was questioned about the “big blonde in a mink coat”….

  “I remember Miss Westmore well,” Miss Nelson testified, “but there was no ‘big blonde’ at that corner desk when she was there. In fact, that desk was vacant all the time.”

  “Yeah?” Inez said. “Oh, yeah?” She looked up and away at the wall, but not for long. Her eyes were back, digging out the meat of the story.

  Lieutenant Graden dubbed Miss Westmore’s story “a fantastic fabrication. Suppose there was a ‘big blonde,’ as Miss Westmore insists, contrary to Miss Nelson’s testimony, why didn’t Miss Westmore herself take the aspirin tablet instead of giving it to her uncle some hours later?”

  Ample motive for murder was seen in letters from the deceased to Miss Westmore, in which Mr. Sharrod threatened to disinherit his niece unless she married a certain Logansport banker whose name was withheld….

  Inez stood up. She gnawed at a polished thumbnail, stared down at the paper. She ran a hand up the back of her neck following a cold, prickling sensation that spread up into her scalp.

  “Geez!” she said. Then “Geez!” The aspirin tablet she had given the Westmore girl—it wasn’t aspirin. It was poison. Atropine something, whatever that was. Poison intended for Inez herself. That meant he knew! He had trailed her some way. He had broken into her flat and planted the poison tablet in her aspirin box. He had finally put his finger on her. She, formerly the huntress, was now the hunted. He would kill her. He had made one stab at it already. He would try again.

  “Ohmigawd!” she said. She ran from the kitchen, leaving one of her scuffs behind. She kicked off the other slipper in the living room, ran barefooted into the bedroom. She knelt beside the bed, drew a flat trunk from beneath it, unhasped the lid. She swooped for the closet, stepped on the ball end of a shoetree lying on the floor and hopped, holding her injured foot in one hand.

  Come on, Inez! she spurred herself. What’s a foot or even a busted leg? You got to get the hell out of here!

  She started throwing things into the trunk and into suitcases, piling things in, tramping them down. She had to get out, because he would be back. She had a tiger by the tail and couldn’t let go. That is, she wouldn’t let go—not with all that money dropping into her mailbox regularly. He wouldn’t find her again. The only possible way he could have found her this time was by watching her post office box….Well, he must have watched through binoculars! It was a holy cinch she had never seen him hanging around the postal sub-station when she went for her mail! But it wouldn’t happen again.

  “Once is enough for little Inez!” she said. She scooped up her jewel case from the dresser, looked into it and wondered vaguely what she had done with the star sapphire pin she had worn the day before. Well, it would turn up….She closed the case and dropped it into the open suitcase….Too bad about the Westmore girl, she thought. But they’d never send a big-eyed little doll like that to the chair.

  Anyway—she yanked a drawer from the dresser and up-ended it over the trunk, it’s no skin off my nose.

  That was the morning of January 12th.

  * * *

  —

  Anna Nelson—she was the maid on Fabian’s mezzanine—dined in a Chinese restaurant on Monument Circle that evening. She didn’t particularly care for chop suey, but it did make her feel sort of exotic to be eating it. She wondered if Gene Tierney ate chop suey. She had never read anything in the movie fan magazines about Gene Tierney eating chop suey, but she thought possibly Gene Tierney did. Anna Nelson spent a good deal of her time—when she wasn’t sweeping up ashes and cigarette butts—thinking about what Gene Tierney did and didn’t do, because she always thought of herself as the Gene Tierney type. Not exactly what you could call a resemblance, but she was certainly the type. Exotic, like.

  Anna Nelson took her time with her meal. She was killing time at the cost of a dollar—eighty-five cents and a fifteen cent tip—but that was all right because she was on to a good thing. That was practically the only advantage in being a maid at Fabian’s, you could sure run into a good thing once in a while if you kept your eyes and ears open, and once in a while sort of brushed envelopes off desks and things like that.

  She left the restaurant at eight o’clock, walked to Washington Street and west to Illinois where she turned south. It was a neighborhood where you could go to be picked up if you wanted to be cheap. Passing the pool halls and taverns she was aware of the loafers giving her the eye, but she kept her head up and looked straight ahead toward the track elevations that ran into Union Station.

  There was chill yellow fog that found its way through everything. Anna Nelson’s shiver was one third cold, one third excitement, and one third fear. For she knew the man she was going to meet was a murderer. He’d killed a Joyce somebody-or-other in New York—that much Anna had glimpsed on the note the big blonde woman had written on Fabian’s mezzanine the day before.

  If you didn’t take chances, though, you never got anywhere. Look at the risks Gene Tierney ran—but of course that was in the movies, and this was real. It became increasingly real as she walked into the concrete cavern beneath the tracks, where the few widely spaced lights in the fog were as worn spots in a grey blanket.

  “Miss Nelson—”

  She stopped in her tracks, her heart bounding up into her mouth. This was not the appointed spot. He was supposed to have met her in a beer parlor farther on. But he was here, knowing that she would have had to come this way. He stood less than a yard away from her, his back to a huge pillar of concrete, his figure a dim and sinister shadow among inanimate shadows. If he had not spoken, she would have passed him by.

  “I thought we would have more seclusion here, Miss Nelson,” he whispered. And when she said nothing, he uttered a dry, rustling laugh. “I have some money for you. But first I should like to ask you a question. Why did you lie to the police about the big blonde woman?”

  “None of your business!” She was on the defensive. And then, remembering that it was she who had the whiphand of things, she said, “Aren’t you a little mixed up? I’m the one who’s got something on you.”

  The rustling laugh was accompanied by the crisp rattle of bills. He crushed the money into her hand, crushed her hand over the money, let her feel the strength of his fingers.

  “See that you stick to your story, Miss Nelson, when you are on the witness stand. There was no big blonde woman seated at the desk opposite the Westmore girl in Fabian’s yesterday afternoon. That’s your story. Stick with it. Otherwise, I shall be forced to kill you.”

  He released her fingers then, but there was lingering pain in her knuckles. Anna Nelson turned, took three steps before yielding completely to the impulse to run in blind panic back toward the brassy lights and the pool room loafers who leered and whistled. They, at least, were human….

  CHAPTER TWO

  End of the Road

  Peter Kane stood in the alley behind Fabian’s Department Store and waited. He thought you were always wa
iting for something, either good or bad. The poet who had written, I am the master of my fate, must have had his tongue in his cheek. Because you never really became the master of anything unless it was waiting. When you didn’t know if the thing you waited for would be good or bad you got butterflies in your stomach. Like right now. This was as H-Hour on D-Day, and like Christmas morning when you were a kid. A combination of both occurring, peculiarly, in Indianapolis and toward the end of March. Kane wished he had a good stiff drink and, lacking that, he lit a cigarette.

  He was a short, slight man, as blond and hard as a knot of hemp rope. Grey had come suddenly across his temples, perhaps there on the beach at Salerno, perhaps in the hospital in North Africa. In the hospital, most likely, for it was there that he had received the first letter which Dorian had written from the women’s prison.

  Kane pulled down his hat and turned up the collar of his topcoat against the rain. It was cold, viscid rain that crawled on the surfaces it touched, except on the piles of soot-blackened slush where it froze, or down in the sewers where it went off chuckling.

  Monday, March twenty-sixth, he thought. He had five days. Dorian had five days. There were five days left of the world for him and Dorian. You couldn’t do anything about time. Not now. Maybe once you could have done something about time just by not inventing clocks and calendars. But having invented time, it ruled you. So you waited and counted the minutes and the hours and the days.

  Dorian wasn’t in the women’s prison now. They had moved her to Michigan City because the chair was there. It hadn’t happened to many women in Indiana, but it was happening to Dorian. Incredibly, it was happening to Dorian.