It is Chambers’s screen work that shines more brightly. He wrote the screenplays for such TV series as Surfside 6 and 77 Sunset Strip, as well as numerous films, including Manhandled (1949), a film noir starring Sterling Hayden, in which lowlife Dan Duryea victimizes Dorothy Lamour, and Special Agent (1949), in which William Eythe plays a railroad agent who pursues two brothers who pulled off a huge payroll heist; they are played by Paul Valentine and George Reeves (who later gained fame as television’s Superman). Films based on his novels include The Come On (1956), based on his 1953 novel of the same title, which starred Anne Baxter and Sterling Hayden; Murder on the Campus (1933), based on his 1933 novel The Campanile Murders, featuring Shirley Grey and Charles Starrett; Sinner Take All (1936), based on Murder for a Wanton (1934), starring Bruce Cabot and Margaret Lindsay; and Blonde Ice (1948), based on Once Too Often (1938), with Robert Paige and Leslie Brooks.
“The Old Maids Die” was originally published in the December 26, 1936, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly.
The Old Maids Die
WHITMAN CHAMBERS
THE THREE OF US were playing pinochle in the City Hall press room when we got the flash; Jeff Gervin, who covers night police for the Sun; Spike Kaylor, who holds down the beat for my paper, the Bulletin, and myself. It was a few minutes after midnight.
The radio receiver on top of the battery of phone books blared. “Calling Car 19. Calling Car 19. Go to 748 Myrtle Street. A woman called for help on her telephone and then evidently fainted. Step on it, boys.”
Sour-faced Jeff Gervin grunted. “Go on and call for help. See if I care. Deal, will you, Kane?”
I looked at Spike Kaylor, and Spike looked at me. Jeff Gervin glared, one bushy eyebrow higher than the other, his thin lips twisted in a sneer.
“Don’t be a pair of saps!” Jeff snorted. “If it’s a story, the dicks will bring it in to us. Why borrow trouble? Deal, will you?”
I stood up and Spike Kaylor followed suit.
“Coming, Jeff?” I asked.
“Me? Leave this nice warm press room to go out on a phony call like that? On your way, boobs. Scram.”
We scrammed.
Prowl Car 19 was drawn up in front of 748 Myrtle Street and Spike pulled his rattling old flivver in behind it and we tumbled out.
The big two-story house set well back from the street on a lot that took in half a block. Spike pushed through a sagging gate and led the way up a weed-grown gravel path. From the dim glow of a street lamp half a block away I could see that the garden had gone to seed and the house needed paint.
We climbed the creaking, rickety stairs and found the front door ajar. Spike pushed it open and we walked into a long bare hallway.
We heard voices coming from a room at the rear and started down the hall. Spike caught my arm, gasped:
“Good night! Look!”
I swung around, peered through an open door at the right. All at once I felt sweat coming out on my forehead and the pit of my stomach felt empty and sick.
I was looking into a bedroom, an old-fashioned room with furniture of another day. The bed was longer and wider than they make beds now. The covers and the white counterpane were jumbled.
Half covered by them, with one thin bare leg dragging on the floor, lay an old woman with white hair. The upper part of her face and one side of her head was a bloody pulp.
There was blood on the floor, on the ceiling, on the white bedclothes. It seemed hard to believe that one old woman could have had so much blood in her body.
Beside the bed lay a blood-drenched hammer. A window at the far side of the room was open and the old-fashioned lace curtain was fluttering in the breeze.
“Somebody,” Spike said in an awed voice, “played that game for keeps. A thorough job, I calls it. Let’s see what the bulls have to say.”
We went on down the hall, reached the open door of a large sitting room. On a couch at the far side lay another old woman. She looked exactly like the one in the bedroom.
She was lying motionless, staring at the ceiling with dazed and glassy eyes. Now and then she said dully: “A huge Negro….A huge Negro!”
Two coppers stood diffidently watching her and looking like they wished they were somewhere else. One of them saw us, glared, and demanded: “You guys touch anything in that room?”
We didn’t pay any attention to him, for from the open door of the small darkened room at one side came a clear cool voice we knew well—too well!
* * *
—
Katie Blayne, better known as the Duchess, was already on the job. Katie covers day police for the Sun. She had no more right to be out on this story than—than I had!
“Jeff Gervin?” Katie was saying. “No, he’s not out here yet. To be charitable, he’s hardly had time. I live only two blocks away, you know, and I happened to have my radio tuned to the police band. So I ran over.
“Here’s the lay. These twin spinsters, Malvina and Alva Perkins, live in this old house with their nephew, John Perkins. The nephew is a nightwatchman at the Western Chemical Works, and on the job tonight.
“Alva Perkins was a cripple. She slept in a bedroom on the lower floor. Malvina slept upstairs, where she had a bell that her sister could ring if she wanted anything.
“Somewhere around midnight the bell rang frantically. Malvina rushed downstairs to her sister’s room. She was just in time to see a big Negro leap out of the open window and disappear. Alva had been beaten to death with a hammer which lay beside the bed.
“Malvina staggered into the hall, yelled help a couple of times into the telephone and then fainted. She was just coming around when the two officers in the prowl car got here, with me on their heels. The cops sent for Captain Wallis and looked things over perfunctorily.
“They found where the window had been jimmied. There weren’t any tracks under it because it opens on a gravel path….No, there was no attempt at robbery. The Negro probably heard the other sister coming down the stairs and took a powder….
“Yes, the cops have sent out a general pick-up order….No, they didn’t search the neighborhood. The fellow had plenty of time to make a getaway….
“Yes, that’s about all now. I’ll turn the story over to Jeff when he gets here—if ever.”
Katie came out into the sitting room, nodding to Spike and me.
“Sometime,” the red-headed, peppery Mr. Kaylor sputtered, “I hope to come out on a story and not find you ahead of me. Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Yeah,” said an angry voice from the hall doorway, “and don’t you ever mind your own business?” It was Jeff Gervin, winded, red-faced, smelling of gin. “It seems to me that a guy by the name of Gervin is covering night police for the Sun. If I’m wrong, wise me.”
Katie smiled but didn’t say anything. One of the coppers asked: “How’d you get here so pronto, Gervin?”
“I came with Captain Wallis. He and McNaught are in the front room with the body.”
The old woman on the couch moaned: “A huge Negro!”
Spike started for the telephone in the little room adjoining. Jeff Gervin began to take the Duchess over the coals for butting in on the story. And the two bulls headed for the front bedroom with me on their heels.
We found Captain Wallis and Mike McNaught, his fingerprint expert, looking over the scene of the murder. The coppers told them Miss Perkins’s story.
“This,” Wallis said slowly, “is bad. There are twenty thousand Negroes living within a radius of a mile from this house. H-m. Any prints on the hammer, Mike?”
“Not a print,” Mike McNaught said.
“Try the window he jimmied. Where’s this other sister?”
We had started back along the hall when we heard the door bell buzz. One of the cops answered it. A taxi driver said: “Somebody ring for a cab?”
Katie Blayne came runni
ng down the hall. “I did,” she called.
I fell in behind her and we went out to the street. Katie paused as the driver threw open the cab door.
“Good night, Pinky. It’s been nice to have seen you again.”
“Where you bound, Duchess?”
“Home, of course.”
“You’re calling a cab to drive you two blocks? Tell me another, Katie.”
“I’ll tell you plenty, Pinky Kane,” she retorted sharply. “Dust!”
“Suppose I don’t choose to dust?”
Katie glared at me. Then she turned, leaped into the cab, and jerked the door shut behind her. I reached for the door handle. The taxi driver said:
“Hold it, pal.”
I looked the big gorilla over and decided I wanted none of him.
“Right,” I said, and turned toward the house.
II
As the cab rolled off, I ran back to the street and hopped into Spike Kaylor’s flivver. Luckily he’d left the ignition key in the lock. I turned it on, revved up the motor and lit out after the cab.
I kept about two blocks behind. The driver, apparently, never knew he was tailed until, half an hour later, we drew up before a large factory building on the other side of the city. For the first time I realized what Katie had on her mind.
We met on the sidewalk beside the cab. The Duchess said with a sigh: “I might have known it. Don’t you ever get tired following me around?”
“Not ever. You see, Duchess, I like you. And I want to see that no harm befalls you in your various wanderings over the city after nightfall.”
Katie said something that sounded suspiciously like “Nuts!”
The driver leaned out of his cab. “Lady, I can take this lug like Grant took Richmond. How’s about it?”
The Duchess shrugged wearily. “Skip it,” she said. “How much do I owe you?”
She paid him off, got a receipt to send in with her weekly swindle sheet, and turned again to me.
“I’d appreciate your letting me handle this interview,” she said. “I have an idea about this murder. You needn’t ask what it is, because I’m not putting out anything, but I’d like a free hand when we talk to Perkins. O.K.?”
“I won’t say a word, Katie. At least not very many. I have an idea or two myself. Let’s go.”
We rang a bell at the main entrance of the plant and after a long wait the door was opened by a tall thin man of fifty or thereabouts. He eyed us with disapproval as he asked: “What you want?”
“We’re from the Sun and the Telegram, Mr. Perkins,” Katie said. “One of your aunts, Miss Alva, was killed tonight. We want to talk to you about it.”
He stood there in the doorway blinking at us, an unpleasant-looking fellow with close-set eyes, thin gray hair, and a stoop.
“You can come in, I guess,” he said finally.
He led the way along a corridor with offices on either side, down a flight of stairs to the basement, and into a small windowless room which was furnished with three or four uncomfortable chairs, a row of lockers against the wall, and a deal table. On a one-burner gas plate a pot of coffee was boiling. The whole place reeked of acid fumes.
“You can sit down, I guess,” John Perkins said heavily. “What happened to Aunt Alva?”
Katie told him. During the brief recital he poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it black and scalding hot. He asked no questions. He seemed hardly interested.
“We were wondering,” Katie said finally, “if you knew anything about the killing of your Aunt Alva?”
He didn’t bat an eye at the pointed insinuation. “No,” he said, “I don’t guess I know anything about it. A big Negro you say? No, I don’t know any big Negroes.”
Katie’s eyes glittered. “By the way, Mr. Perkins, have you been the sole support of your two aunts?”
“Me? I should guess not.” His voice, now, was bitter. “Them two old women are worth a hundred thousand dollars, more or less.” He poured himself another cup of coffee, added heavily: “My father left it to them in trust. When they die, I get it.”
“And in the meantime, you’re working as a night watchman at fifty or sixty dollars a month?” Katie remarked.
“Forty-five,” the drab Mr. Perkins corrected.
“And you’re not the least bit resentful?” Katie pursued.
He looked her coldly in the eye; his mouth was grim. “If you think I’m not, you’re crazy!” he snapped. And then he chuckled harshly. “I see what you’re getting at, I guess. Well, you’re wrong. Didn’t Aunt Malvina say it was a Negro killed Aunt Alva?”
“That’s what she said,” Katie admitted. “But she might have made a mistake.”
“Aunt Malvina,” John Perkins declared, “doesn’t make mistakes. Howsomever, I got something here I ought to show you, just in case you and the police get any foolish ideas about me.”
We followed him upstairs. He stopped at a time clock near the outer door, took a card from the big rack, handed it to Katie. I peered over her shoulder.
It was Perkins’s card. The last stamp on it showed the date and the time: 1:01 A.M. The previous stamp read: 11:59 P.M.
“I have to ring in, you see, every hour,” John Perkins explained.
I looked at the clock. I knew the type. I had punched one like it in a warehouse where I worked before I broke into the newspaper racket. Another fellow and I had tried to to set it back when we got to work late one day. We’d discovered it couldn’t be rigged.
“You told me,” Perkins said, “that Aunt Alva was killed about midnight. I rung in here at one minute to twelve. It takes me a half hour to drive home. You can draw your own conclusions, I guess.”
* * *
—
Katie stared at him for a long moment before she asked quietly: “What’s the current rate in the Black Belt for a job like that?”
John Perkins grinned. “A hundred dollars, I understand.” Then his jaw set and all at once his ice-blue eyes were hard. “I’m not sorry my aunt is dead. She was an old harridan and she got what’s been coming to her for a long time. I’m only sorry the fellow didn’t kill Aunt Malvina too. Now I guess that’s about all I got to say. You people can get the hell out of here.”
Which we did.
Just before I left Katie at her home she said abstractedly:
“I talked to Malvina Perkins. She’s a mean old woman. And she’s a little queer. Perhaps she’s even crazy. I wonder—?”
“You wonder if maybe Malvina killed her sister and cooked up the story about the Negro?”
The Duchess merely said “Good night, Pinky. Pleasant dreams.”
I drove off laughing to myself. That was Katie. If her first hunch proved to be a dud, she lost no time in giving birth to another. Katie Blayne can produce hunches faster than a cigarette machine turns out coffin nails.
When I got back to the City Hall I found Jeff Gervin and Spike Kaylor having a drink in the press room.
“I’ll have one of those,” I said.
“Yes, and I’ll have the key to my car,” Spike shot back. “What was the brilliant idea?”
“I was riding herd on the Duchess. We had a talk with John Perkins. We discovered that those two old maids are plenty wealthy and Perkins is their heir. The dough was left to them by Perkins’s father, and Perkins is pretty bitter about it. But—Perkins’s time card was punched at one minute to twelve and it’s a half hour’s run from that factory to his home.”
Jeff Gervin grunted. “You and the Duchess get the damnedest ideas. The guy who knocked off the old dame is now cooling in the can. Name of Jim Brown.”
I choked on Jeff’s bourbon, reached for the water.
“They picked up this Jim Brown just after you ran off with my car,” Spike explained. “He was only three blocks
away. A big Negro, dead drunk, with a cut on his head and blood all over his hands. He was staggering along the street talking to himself.”
“Lyle and Allen spotted him,” Jeff took up the story. “They dragged him into their prowl car, took him in to the Perkins dame, and she went into hysterics.”
“Identified him on the spot,” Spike concluded.
“So that’s that,” Jeff said. “Nice work, I calls it. Have another drink?”
I had another drink and went home.
The next day about noon I saw Katie Blayne talking to John Forsythe in the anteroom of the Detective Bureau. Forsythe is one of our better criminal lawyers, a fellow who won’t look at a case unless important money is involved, but a right guy at that.
A little later, when Forsythe dropped into the press room, I jumped him.
“You’re not, by any chance, going to defend this Negro, are you?”
“I am,” Forsythe said flatly.
The room at the moment happened to be crowded with a few reporters and more than a few press room habitués: bail bond brokers, politicians, coppers off duty, and other riff-raff that is constantly getting in our hair. Everybody looked at the tall, immaculate, gray-haired, lean-faced lawyer.
“What’s the answer to that one?” fat, moon-faced Willie Blake of the Sentinel demanded. “I mean, who’s putting up the dough?”
“The Sun,” Katie Blayne declared, “is putting up the dough.”
“How come?” I asked.
“Miss Blayne,” said Forsythe, “has convinced her publisher that the boy is innocent. And I am forced to agree.”
“Who wouldn’t agree,” Willie grinned, “for a couple of G’s?”
“What makes you think this Jim Brown is innocent?” lanky lantern-jawed Pete Zerker of the Bulletin asked reasonably. “How about the identification? How about the blood all over him?”
“The old lady could be mistaken in identifying him,” Forsythe pointed out. “And the blood was Jim Brown’s own. He had fallen down, you know, and had cut his head.”
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 44