The Big Book of Reel Murders

by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)

  Curiously, though it is probably the seminal event in the movie, no explanation for the jockey’s death ever is provided.

  Orson Welles had originally been scheduled to direct Tip on a Dead Jockey but the job eventually went to Richard Thorpe, who worked with Robert Taylor on eight films, including Taylor’s best-known chivalric swashbucklers, Ivanhoe (1952) and Knights of the Round Table (1953). Welles had worked on the script with Charles Lederer but the version he favored was not used in the filming.

  The working title during filming was The 32nd Day.

  Shaw’s story had originally been optioned by Alfred Hitchcock but he became immersed instead in two other films, The Wrong Man (1956) and Vertigo (1958), and let the option expire.

  TIP ON A DEAD JOCKEY

  Irwin Shaw

  LLOYD BARBER WAS lying on his bed reading France-Soir when the phone rang. It was only two o’clock in the afternoon, but it was raining for the fifth consecutive day and he had no place to go anyway. He was reading about the relative standing of the teams in the Rugby leagues. He never went to Rugby games and he had no interest in the relative standings of Lille and Pau and Bordeaux, but he had finished everything else in the paper. It was cold in the small, dark room, because there was no heat provided between ten in the morning and six in the evening, and he lay on the lumpy double bed, his shoes off, covered with his overcoat.

  He picked up the phone, and the man at the desk downstairs said, “There is a lady waiting for you here, M. Barber.”

  Barber squinted at himself in the mirror above the bureau across from the bed. He wished he was better-looking. “Did she give her name?” he asked.

  “No, Monsieur. Should I demand it?”

  “Never mind,” Barber said. “I’ll be right down.”

  He hung up the phone and put on his shoes. He always put the left one on first, for luck. He buttoned his collar and pulled his tie into place, noticing that it was frayed at the knot. He got into his jacket and patted his pockets to see if he had cigarettes. He had no cigarettes. He shrugged, and left the light on vindictively, because the manager was being unpleasant about the bill, and went downstairs.

  Maureen Richardson was sitting in the little room off the lobby, in one of those age-colored plush chairs that fourth-rate Parisian hotels furnish their clientele to discourage excessive conviviality on the ground floor. None of the lamps was lit, and a dark, dead, greenish light filtered in through the dusty curtains from the rainy street outside. Maureen had been a young, pretty girl with bright, credulous blue eyes when Barber first met her, during the war, just before she married Jimmy Richardson. But she had had two children since then and Richardson hadn’t done so well, and now she was wearing a worn cloth coat that was soaked, and her complexion had gone, and in the greenish lobby light she seemed bone-colored and her eyes were pale.

  “Hello, Beauty,” Barber said. Richardson always called her that, and while it had amused his friends in the squadron, he had loyally stuck to it, and finally everyone had picked it up.

  Maureen turned around quickly, almost as though he had frightened her. “Lloyd,” she said. “I’m so glad I found you in.”

  They shook hands, and Barber asked if she wanted to go someplace for a coffee.

  “I’d rather not,” Maureen said. “I left the kids with a friend for lunch and I promised I’d collect them at two-thirty and I don’t have much time.”

  “Sure,” Barber said. “How’s Jimmy?”

  “Oh, Lloyd…” Maureen pulled at her fingers, and Barber noticed that they were reddened and the nails were uneven. “Have you seen him?”

  “What?” Barber peered through the gloom at her, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Have you seen him?” Maureen persisted. Her voice was thin and frightened.

  “Not for a month or so,” Barber said. “Why?” He asked it, but he almost knew why.

  “He’s gone, Lloyd,” Maureen said. “He’s been gone thirty-two days. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “Where did he go?” Barber asked.

  “I don’t know.” Maureen took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. She was too distracted to offer the pack to Barber. “He didn’t tell me.” She smoked the cigarette avidly but absently. “I’m so worried. I thought maybe he’d said something to you—or that you’d bumped into him.”

  “No,” Barber said carefully. “He didn’t say anything.”

  “It’s the queerest thing. We’ve been married over ten years and he never did anything like this before,” Maureen said, trying to control her voice. “He just came to me one night and he said he’d got leave of absence from his job for a month and that he’d be back inside of thirty days and he’d tell me all about it when he got back, and he begged me not to ask any questions.”

  “And you didn’t ask any questions?”

  “He was acting so strangely,” Maureen said. “I’d never seen him like that before. All hopped up. Excited. You might even say happy, except that he kept going in all night to look at the kids. And he’s never given me anything to worry about in the—the girl department,” Maureen said primly. “Not like some of the other boys we know. And if there was one thing about Jimmy, it was that you could trust him. So I helped him pack.”

  “What did he take?”

  “Just one Valpak,” Maureen said. “With light clothes. As though he was going off on a summer vacation. He even took a tennis racket.”

  “A tennis racket,” Barber nodded, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for husbands to take tennis rackets along when disappearing. “Did you hear from him at all?”

  “No,” Maureen said. “He told me he wouldn’t write. Did you ever hear of anything like that?” Even in her anguish, she permitted herself a tone of wifely grievance. “I knew we shouldn’t have come to Europe. It’s different for you. You’re not married and you were always kind of wild anyway, not like Jimmy—”

  “Did you call his office?” Barber asked, interrupting. He didn’t want to hear how wild people thought he was, or how unmarried.

  “I had a friend call,” Maureen said. “It would look too fishy—his wife calling to ask where he was.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They said that they had expected him two days ago but he hadn’t come in yet.”

  Barber took one of Maureen’s cigarettes and lit it. It was the first one in four hours and it tasted wonderful. He had a little selfish twinge of gratitude that Maureen had come to his hotel.

  “Lloyd, do you know anything?” Maureen asked, worn and shabby in her damp, thin coat in the foggy green light.

  Barber hesitated. “No,” he said. “But I’ll put in a couple of calls and I’ll telephone you tomorrow.”

  They both stood up. Maureen pulled on gloves over her reddened hands. The gloves were worn and greenish black. Looking at them, Barber suddenly remembered how neat and shining Maureen had been when they first met, in Louisiana, so many years before, and how healthy and well-dressed he and Jimmy and the others had been in their lieutenants’ uniforms with the new wings on their breasts.

  “Listen, Beauty,” Barber said. “How are you fixed for dough?”

  “I didn’t come over for that,” Maureen said firmly.

  Barber took out his wallet and peered judiciously into it. It wasn’t necessary. He knew exactly what was there. He took out a five-thousand-franc note. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “Try this on for size.”

  Maureen made a motion as though to give it back to him. “I really don’t think I should…” she began.

  “Sh-h-h, Beauty,” Barber said. “There isn’t an American girl in Paris who couldn’t use five mille on a day like this.”

  Maureen sighed and put the bill in her pocketbook. “I feel terrible about taking your money, Lloyd.”

  Barber kissed her forehe
ad. “In memory of the wild blue yonder,” he said, pocketing the wallet, with its remaining fifteen thousand francs, which, as far as he knew, would have to last him for the rest of his life. “Jimmy’ll give it back to me.”

  “Do you think he’s all right?” Maureen asked, standing close to him.

  “Of course,” Lloyd said lightly and falsely. “There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll call you tomorrow. He’ll probably be there, answering the phone, getting sore at me for sucking around his wife when he’s out of town.”

  “I bet.” Maureen smiled miserably. She went through the cavelike murk of the lobby, out into the rainy street, on her way to pick up the two children, who had been sent out to lunch at the home of a friend.

  * * *

  —

  Barber went to his room and picked up the phone and waited for the old man downstairs to plug in. There were two suitcases standing open on the floor, with shirts piled in them, because there wasn’t enough drawer space in the tiny bureau supplied by the hotel. On top of the bureau there were: a bill, marked overdue, from a tailor; a letter from his ex-wife, in New York, saying she had found an Army pistol of his in the bottom of a trunk and asking him what he wanted her to do with it, because she was afraid of the Sullivan Law; a letter from his mother, telling him to stop being a damn fool and come home and get a regular job; a letter from a woman in whom he was not interested, inviting him to come and stay with her in her villa near Eze, where it was beautiful and warm, she said, and where she needed a man around the house; a letter from a boy who had flown as his waist-gunner during the war and who insisted that Barber had saved his life when he was hit in the stomach over Palermo, and who, surprisingly, had written a book since then. Now he sent long, rather literary letters at least once a month to Barber. He was an odd, intense boy, who had been an excitable gunner, and he was constantly examining himself to find out whether he and the people he loved, among whom he rather embarrassingly included Barber, mostly because of the eight minutes over Palermo, were living up to their promise. “Our generation is in danger,” the boy had typed in the letter on the bureau, “the danger of diminution. We have had our adventures too early. Our love has turned to affection, our hate to distaste, our despair to melancholy, our passion to preference. We have settled for the life of obedient dwarfs in a small but fatal sideshow.”

  The letter had depressed Barber and he hadn’t answered it. You got enough of that sort of thing from the French. He wished the ex-waist-gunner would stop writing him, or at least write on different subjects. Barber hadn’t answered his ex-wife, either, because he had come to Europe to try to forget her. He hadn’t answered his mother, because he was afraid she was right. And he hadn’t gone down to Eze, because no matter how broke he was, he wasn’t selling that particular commodity yet.

  Stuck into the mirror above the bureau was a photograph of himself and Jimmy Richardson, taken on the beach at Deauville the summer before. The Richardsons had taken a cottage there, and Barber had spent a couple of weekends with them. Jimmy Richardson was another one who had attached himself to Barber during the war. Somehow, Barber was always being presented with the devotion of people whose devotion he didn’t want. “People hang on to you,” a girl who was angry at him once told him, “because you’re an automatic hypocrite. As soon as somebody comes into the room, you become gay and confident.”

  Jimmy and he had been in bathing trunks when the picture was snapped, and Barber was tall and blessed with a blond, California kind of good looks next to Jimmy, who seemed like a fat, incompetent infant, standing there with the sunny sea behind him.

  Barber peered at the photograph. Jimmy didn’t look like the sort of man who would ever be missing from anywhere for thirty-two days. As for himself, Barber thought wryly, he looked automatically gay and confident.

  He leaned over and took the picture down and threw it into a drawer. Then, holding the phone loosely, he stared around him with distaste. In the glare of the unshaded lamp, the dark woodwork looked gloomy and termite-ridden, and the bed, with its mottled velours spread, the color of spoiled pears, looked as though it had been wallowed on by countless hundreds of obscenely shaped men and women who had rented the room for an hour at a time. For a second, he was piercingly homesick for all the rooms of all the Hotel Statlers he had slept in and all the roomettes on trains between New York and Chicago, and St. Louis and Los Angeles.

  There was a whistling, static-like sound in the phone, and he shook himself and gave the number of the George V. When he got the George V, he asked for M. Smith, M. Bert Smith. After a while, the girl said M. Smith was no longer at the hotel. Barber asked hurriedly, before the girl could cut him off, whether M. Smith was expected to return shortly or if he had left a forwarding address. No, the girl said after a long wait, he was not expected to return and there was no forwarding address.

  Barber hung up. He was not surprised about Bert Smith. He was a man who wandered mysteriously from hotel to hotel, and he might have used a half-dozen names besides Smith since Barber had spoken to him last.

  With a conscious effort, Barber tried not to think about Jimmy Richardson or his wife, who was called, as a friendly squadron joke, Beauty, or about Jimmy Richardson’s two small sons.

  Scowling, Barber went over to the window. The winter rain of Paris was seeping down into the narrow street, blurring it with the unproductive malice of city rain, chipping colorlessly at the buildings opposite, making it impossible to imagine what they had looked like when they were new. A workman was unloading cases of wine from a truck, looking persecuted by the weather, the Paris sound of clinking bottles muted and made hollow and mournful by the flow of gray water from the skies and from window ledges and signs and rolled awnings. It was not a day for a husband to be missing, for a friend to be missing. It was not a day to be alone or to have only fifteen thousand francs in your pocket or to be in a narrow hotel room where the heat was off from ten in the morning till six at night. It was not a day to be without a job or cigarettes or lunch. It was not a day on which to examine yourself and realize that no matter how many excuses you gave yourself, you were going to wind up knowing that, finally, you were responsible.

  Barber shook himself again. There was no sense in just staying in the room all day. If he was going to do any good, he would have to find Bert Smith. He looked at his watch. It was nearly two-thirty. He tried to remember all the places he had ever seen Bert Smith at two-thirty in the afternoon. The fancy restaurant near the Rond-Point, where the movie people and the French newspaper owners and the rich tourists ate; the bistro on the Boulevard Latour-Maubourg, on the Left Bank; the restaurants at Auteuil and Longchamp and St. Cloud. Barber looked at the newspaper. They were running at Auteuil today.

  If he was not at the races and if he was still in Paris, Bert Smith was likely to be in one art gallery or another in the middle of the afternoon. Bert Smith was an art lover, or at least he bought pictures, shrewdly and knowingly. Since Smith lived in hotel rooms, which were unlikely places for a collection, it was probable that he bought paintings on speculation or as an agent or, when they were important ones that the government did not wish to have leave the country, to be smuggled out of France.

  Barber had also seen Smith late in the afternoons in the steam room at Claridge’s, a small, round man with surprisingly well-shaped legs, sitting in the vapor, wrapped in a sheet, growing pinker and pinker, smiling luxuriously in the steam, sweating off the fat that he had accumulated in many years of eating in the best restaurants in Europe.

  He had also seen Smith several times around six o’clock in the evening in the barbershop at the George V getting shaved, and after that in the bar upstairs, and in the bar at the Relais Plaza and the English bar downstairs at the Plaza-Athénée. And late at night he had seen him at various night clubs—L’Eléphant Blanc, Carroll’s, La Rose Rouge…

  Barber thought unhappily of the last fifteen thousand francs in his walle
t. It was going to be a long, wet, hard, expensive day. He put on his hat and coat and went out. It was still raining, and he hailed a taxi and gave the driver the address of the restaurant near the Rond-Point.

  * * *

  —

  It had started about two months before, in the stand at Auteuil just before the sixth race. The day was misty and there weren’t many spectators, and Barber had not been doing very well, but he had got a tip on the sixth race, on an eight-to-one shot. He put five thousand down on the nose and climbed high up in the stand to get a good view of the race.

  There was only one other spectator near him in the stand, a small, round man wearing an expensive-looking velours hat, and carrying a pair of binoculars and a rolled umbrella, like an Englishman. He smiled at Barber and nodded. As Barber smiled back politely, he realized that he had seen the man many times before, or his brother, or a half-dozen other men who looked like him, in restaurants and in bars and on the street, usually with tall girls who might have been lower-class mannequins or upper-class tarts.

  The man with the umbrella moved over to him along the damp concrete row of seats. He had little, dapper feet and a bright necktie, and he had a well-cared-for, international kind of face, with large, pretty dark eyes, fringed by thick black lashes. He had what Barber had come to call an import-export face. It was a face that was at the same time bland, cynical, self-assured, sensual, hopeless, and daring, and its owner might be Turkish or Hungarian or Greek or he might have been born in Basra. It was a face you might see in Paris or Rome or Brussels or Tangier, always in the best places, always doing business. It was a face, you felt somehow, that was occasionally of interest to the police.