A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  “I’ll try to,” he said.

  As he drove away from her, drove down the dark road that paralleled the beaches, he thought of her as another chance lost, as another milepost on a lonely road that ended at some unguessable destination. There was a shifting sourness in his mind, an unease that was familiar. He drove with his eyes steady, his face fashioned into its mask of tough unconcern. Each time, you bled a little. And each time the hard flutter of excitement ended in this sourness. Murder for money. It was seldom anything else. It was seldom particularly clever. It was invariably brutal.

  Dinah Davisson’s house was brightly lighted. The other houses on the street were dark. He had asked that he be permitted to inform her.

  She was in the long pastel living room, a man and a woman with her. She had been crying, but she was undefeated. She carried her head high. Something hardened and tautened within him when he saw the red stripes on her cheek, stripes that only fingers could have made, in anger.

  “Mr. Darrigan, this is Miss Davisson and Colonel Davisson.”

  They were tall people. Temple had his father’s hard jaw, shrewd eye. The woman was so much like him that it was almost ludicrous. Both of them were very cool, very formal, slightly patronizing.

  “You are from Guardsman Life?” Colonel Davisson asked. “Bit unusual for you to be here, isn’t it?”

  “Not entirely. I’d like to speak to you alone, Mrs. Davisson.”

  Anything you wish to say to her can be said in front of us,” Alicia Davisson said acidly.

  “I’d prefer to speak to her alone,” Gil said, quite softly.

  “It doesn’t matter, Mr. Darrigan,” the young widow said.

  “The police have found your husband’s body,” he said bluntly, knowing that bluntness was more merciful than trying to cushion the blow with mealy half-truths.

  Dinah closed her lovely eyes, kept them closed for long seconds. Her hand tightened on the arm of the chair and then relaxed. “How—”

  “I knew a stupid marriage of this sort would end in some kind of disaster,” Alicia said.

  The cruelty of that statement took Darrigan’s breath for a moment. Shock gave way to anger. The colonel walked to the dark windows, looked out into the night, hands locked behind him, head bowed.

  Alicia rapped a cigarette briskly on her thumbnail, lighted it.

  “Marriage had nothing to do with it,” Darrigan said. “He was murdered for the sake of profit. He was murdered by a thoroughly unpleasant little man with a greedy wife.”

  “And our young friend here profits nicely,” Alicia said.

  Dinah stared at her. “How on earth can you say a thing like that when you’ve just found out? You’re his daughter. It doesn’t seem—”

  “Kindly spare us the violin music,” Alicia said.

  “I don’t want any of the insurance money,” Dinah said. “I don’t want any part of it. You two can have it. All of it.”

  The colonel wheeled slowly and stared at her. He wet his lips. “Do you mean that?”

  Dinah lifted her chin. “I mean it.”

  The colonel said ingratiatingly, “You’ll have the trust fund, of course, as it states in the will. That certainly will be enough to take care of you.”

  “I don’t know as I want that, either.”

  “We can discuss that later,” the colonel said soothingly. “This is a great shock to all of us. Darrigan, can you draw up some sort of document she can sign where she relinquishes her claim as principal beneficiary?” When he spoke to Darrigan, his voice had a Pentagon crispness.

  Darrigan had seen this too many times before. Money had changed the faces of the children. A croupier would recognize that glitter in the eyes, that moistness of mouth. Darrigan looked at Dinah. Her face was proud, unchanged.

  “I could, I suppose. But I won’t,” Darrigan said.

  “Don’t be impudent. If you can’t, a lawyer can.”

  Darrigan spoke very slowly, very distinctly. “Possibly you don’t understand, Colonel. The relationship between insurance company and policyholder is one of trust. A policyholder does not name his principal beneficiary through whim. We have accepted his money over a period of years. We intend to see that his wishes are carried out. The policy options state that his widow will have an excellent income during her lifetime. She does not receive a lump sum, except for a single payment of ten thousand. What she does with the income is her own business, once it is received. She can give it to you, if she wishes.”

  “I couldn’t accept that sort of . . . charity,” the colonel said stiffly. “You heard her state her wishes, man! She wants to give up all claims against the policies.”

  Darrigan allowed himself a smile. “She’s only trying to dissociate herself from you two scavengers. She has a certain amount of pride. She is mourning her husband. Maybe you can’t understand that.”

  “Throw him out, Tem,” Alicia whispered.

  The colonel had turned white. “I shall do exactly that,” he said.

  Dinah stood up slowly, her face white. “Leave my house,” she said.

  The colonel turned toward her. “What do—”

  “Yes, the two of you. You and your sister. Leave my house at once.”

  The tension lasted for long seconds. Dinah’s eyes didn’t waver. Alicia shattered the moment by standing up and saying, in tones of infinite disgust, “Come on, Tem. The only thing to do with that little bitch is start dragging her through the courts.”

  They left silently, wrapped in dignity like stained cloaks.

  Dinah came to Darrigan. She put her face against his chest, her brow hard against the angle of his jaw. The sobs were tiny spasms, tearing her, contorting her.

  He cupped the back of her head in his hand, feeling a sense of wonder at the silk texture of her hair, at the tender outline of fragile bone underneath. Something more than forgotten welled up within him, stinging his eyes, husking his voice as he said, “They aren’t worth . . . this.”

  “He . . . was worth . . . more than . . . this,” she gasped.

  The torment was gone as suddenly as it had come. She stepped back, rubbing at streaming eyes with the backs of her hands, the way a child does.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She tried to smile. “You’re not a wailing wall.”

  “Part of my official duties, sometimes.”

  “Can they turn this into . . . nastiness?”

  “They have no basis. He was of sound mind when he made the provisions. They’re getting enough. More than enough. Some people can never have enough.”

  “I’d like to sign it over.”

  “Your husband had good reasons for setting it up the way he did.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Do you have anyone to help you?” he asked impulsively. He knew at once he had put too much of what he felt in his voice. He tried to cover by saying, “There’ll be a lot of arrangements. I mean, it could be considered part of my job.”

  He detected the faintly startled look in her eyes. Awareness made them awkward. “Thank you very much, Mr. Darrigan. I think Brad will help.”

  “Can you get that woman over to stay with you tonight?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  He left her and went back to the beach to his room. In the morning he would make whatever official statements were considered necessary. He lay in the darkness and thought of Dinah, of the way she was a promise of warmth, of integrity.

  And, being what he was, he began to look for subterfuge in her attitude, for some evidence that her reactions had been part of a clever act. He ended by despising himself for having gone so far that he could instinctively trust no one.

  In the morning he phoned the home office. He talked with Palmer, a vice-president. He said, “Mr. Palmer, I’m sending through the necessary reports approving payment of the claim.”

  “It’s a bloody big one,” Palmer said disconsolately.

  “I know that, sir,” Darrigan said. “No way out of it.”

  “Well, I su
ppose you’ll be checking in then by, say, the day after tomorrow?”

  “That should be about right.”

  Darrigan spent the rest of the day going through motions. He signed the lengthy statement for the police. The Drynfellses were claiming that in the scuffle for the paper, Davisson had fallen and hit his head on a bumper guard. In panic they had hidden the body. It was dubious as to whether premeditation could be proved.

  He dictated his report for the company files to a public stenographer, sent it off airmail. He turned the car in, packed his bag. He sat on the edge of his bed for a long time, smoking cigarettes, looking at the far wall.

  The thought of heading north gave him a monstrous sense of loss. He argued with himself. Fool, she’s just a young, well-heeled widow. All that sort of thing was canceled out when Doris left you. What difference does it make that she should remind you of what you had once thought Doris was?

  He looked into the future and saw a long string of hotel rooms, one after the other, like a child’s blocks aligned on a dark carpet.

  If she doesn’t laugh in your face, and if your daydream should turn out to be true, they’ll nudge each other and talk about how Gil Darrigan fell into a soft spot.

  She’ll laugh in your face.

  He phoned at quarter of five and caught Palmer. “I’d like to stay down here and do what I can for the beneficiary, Mr. Palmer. A couple of weeks, maybe.”

  “Isn’t that a bit unusual?”

  “I have a vacation overdue, if you’d rather I didn’t do it on company time.”

  “Better make it vacation, then.”

  “Anything you say. Will you put it through for me?”

  “Certainly, Gil.”

  At dusk she came down the hall, looked through the screen at him. She was wearing black.

  He felt like a kid trying to make his first date. “I thought I could stay around a few days and . . . help out. I don’t want you to think I—”

  She swung the door open. “Somehow I knew you wouldn’t leave,” she said.

  He stepped into the house, with a strange feeling of trumpets and banners. She hadn’t laughed. And he knew in that moment that during the years ahead, the good years ahead of them, she would always know what was in his heart, even before he would know it. And one day, perhaps within the year, she would turn all that warmth suddenly toward him, and it would be like coming in out of a cold and rainy night.

  JAMES M. CAIN

  Not many writers of crime fiction can claim to have been a seminal influence on the great French writer Albert Camus. Yet throughout his career Camus praised the novels of James M. Cain (1892–1977) and, indeed, structured two of his novels along Cainian lines.

  Cain, when all the arguments and arguers have been silenced, may just be the great crime fiction writer of all time. Chandler wrote B-movie fantasies; Hammett, a better writer, wrote well of his mean streets but buried his passion beneath a stoic style. Objective prose narrows the field of vision. Cain gave us criminals as they frequently are—confused, trapped, self-pitying, not terribly bright people who more often than not stumble into crime rather than seek it out. He did so in a style that was almost diarylike in its intimacy and yet was far richer in implication than anything done by Chandler or Hammett. The last chapter of Double Indemnity is beyond the talent of virtually all crime fiction writers. Camus himself might not have been capable of writing it.

  In addition to straight crime, he gave us Mildred Pierce, in which he did something very few writers of any kind can ever do—made the life of a fundamentally decent and mostly unremarkable woman profoundly interesting and valuable.

  Cigarette Girl

  I’d never so much as laid eyes on her before going in this place, the Here’s How, a nightclub on Route 1, a few miles north of Washington, on business that was 99 percent silly, but that I had to keep to myself. It was around eight at night, with hardly anyone there, and I’d just taken a table, ordered a drink, and started to unwrap a cigar when a whiff of perfume hit me, and she swept by with cigarettes. As to what she looked like, I had only a rear view, but the taffeta skirt, crepe blouse, and silver earrings were quiet, and the chassis was choice, call it fancy, a little smaller than medium. So far, a cigarette girl, nothing to rate any cheers, but not bad either, for a guy unattached who’d like an excuse to linger.

  But then she made a pitch, or what I took for a pitch. Her middle-aged customer was trying to tell her some joke, and taking so long about it the proprietor got in the act. He was a big, blond, blocky guy, with kind of a decent face, but he went and whispered to her as though to hustle her up, for some reason apparently, I couldn’t quite figure it out. She didn’t much seem to like it, until her eye caught mine. She gave a little pout, a little shrug, a little wink, and then just stood there, smiling.

  Now I know this pitch and it’s nice, because of course I smiled back, and with that I was on the hook. A smile is nature’s freeway: it has lanes, and you can go any speed you like, except you can’t go back. Not that I wanted to, as I suddenly changed my mind about the cigar I had in my hand, stuck it back in my pocket, and wigwagged for cigarettes. She nodded, and when she came over said: “You stop laughing at me.”

  “Who’s laughing? Looking.”

  “Oh, of course. That’s different.”

  I picked out a pack, put down my buck, and got the surprise of my life: She gave me change. As she started to leave, I said: “You forgot something, maybe?”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “For all this I get, I should pay.”

  “All what, sir, for instance?”

  “I told you: the beauty that fills my eye.”

  “The best things in life are free.”

  “On that basis, fair lady, some of them, here, are tops. Would you care to sit down?”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not allowed. We got rules.”

  With that she went out toward the rear somewhere, and I noticed the proprietor again, just a short distance away, and realized he’d been edging in. I called him over and said: “What’s the big idea? I was talking to her.”

  “Mister, she’s paid to work.”

  “Yeah, she mentioned about rules, but now they got other things too. Four Freedoms, all kinds of stuff. Didn’t anyone ever tell you?”

  “I heard of it, yes.”

  “You’re Mr. Here’s How?”

  “Jack Conner, to my friends.”

  I took a V from my wallet, folded it, creased it, pushed it toward him. I said: “Jack, little note of introduction I generally carry around. I’d like you to ease these rules. She’s cute, and I crave to buy her a drink.”

  He didn’t see any money, and stood for a minute thinking. Then: “Mister, you’re off on the wrong foot. In the first place, she’s not a cigarette girl. Tonight, yes, when the other girl is off. But not regular, no. In the second place, she’s not any chiselly-wink that orders rye, drinks tea, takes the four bits you slip her, the four I charge for the drink—and is open to propositions. She’s class. She’s used to class—out west, with people that have it, and that brought her east when they came. In the third place she’s a friend, and before I eased any rules I’d have to know more about you, a whole lot more, than this note tells me.”

  “My name’s Cameron.”

  “Pleased to meet you and all that, but as to who you are, Mr. Cameron, and what you are, I still don’t know—”

  “I’m a musician.”

  “Yeah? What instrument?”

  “Any of them. Guitar, mainly.”

  Which brings me to what I was doing there. I do play the guitar, play it all day long, for the help I get from it, as it gives me certain chords, the big ones that people go for, and heads me off from some others, the fancy ones on the piano, that other musicians go for. I’m an arranger, based in Baltimore, and had driven down on a little tune detecting. The guy who takes most of my work, Art Lomak, the band leader, writes a few tunes himself, and had
gone clean off his rocker about one he said had been stolen, or thefted as they call it. It was one he’d been playing a little, to try it and work out bugs, with lyric and title to come, soon as the idea hit him. And then he rang me, with screams. It had already gone on the air, as twenty people had told him, from this same little honky-tonk, as part of a ten o’clock spot on the Washington FM pickup. He begged me to be here tonight, when the trio started their broadcast, pick up such dope as I could, and tomorrow give him the lowdown.

  That much was right on the beam, stuff that goes on every day, a routine I knew by heart. But his tune had angles, all of them slightly peculiar. One was, it had already been written, though it was never a hit and was almost forgotten, in the days when states were hot, under the title “Nevada.” Another was, it had been written even before that, by a gent named Giuseppe Verdi, as part of the Sicilian Vespers, under the title “O Tu Palermo.” Still another was, Art was really burned and seemed to have no idea where the thing had come from. They just can’t get it, those big schmalzburgers like him, that what leaks out of their head might, just once, have leaked in. But the twist, the reason I had to come and couldn’t just play it for laughs, was: Art could have been right. Maybe the lift was from him, not from the original opera, or from the first theft, “Nevada.” It’s a natural for a three quarters beat, and that’s how Art had been playing it. So if that’s how they were doing it here, instead of with “Nevada’s” four fourths, which followed the Verdi signature, there might still be plenty of work for the lawyers Art had put on it, with screams, same like to me.

  Silly, almost.

  Spooky.

  But maybe, just possibly, moola.

  So Jack, this boss character, by now had smelled something fishy and suddenly took a powder, to the stand where the fiddles were parked, as of course the boys weren’t there yet, and came back with a Spanish guitar. I took it, thanked him, and tuned. To kind of work it around in the direction of Art’s little problem, and at the same time make like there was nothing at all to conceal, I said I’d come on account of his band, to catch it during the broadcast, as I’d heard it was pretty good. He didn’t react, which left me nowhere, but I thought it well to get going.