A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  “Well,” Latimer said. He sighed and started across the room toward the hallway leading to his bedroom. It had been a storage room, but Nolan had fixed it up with a bed and a table for Latimer’s typewriter when Helen insisted the photographer stay on the island. Latimer paused by the hallway. “Sure you won’t come with us this afternoon?”

  Nolan didn’t bother to answer. He couldn’t answer. If he had tried, he knew he might have shouted, even cursed—maybe actually gone at the man with his bare hands.

  He would not use his bare hands. He wouldn’t soil them. He would use the gun. He listened as Latimer left the room, and sat there breathing stiffly, his fingers clenched into the magazine’s crumpled pages.

  Yes, that’s what he would do. Latimer’s saying he was going to remain on the island longer still clinched it. Nolan knew why Latimer had said that. He wasn’t fooling anybody. Taking advantage of hospitality for his own sneaking reasons. Didn’t Helen see what kind of a man Latimer was? Was she blind? Or did she want it this way?

  The very thought of such a thing sent Nolan out of the chair, stalking back and forth across the room. He could hear Latimer’s typewriter ticking away from the far side of the house.

  Their paradise. Their home. Their love. Torn and twisted and broken by this insensitive person. He heard Helen call them to lunch then, and, moving toward the table in the dining room, he felt slightly relieved. He knew that while they were gone this afternoon, he would get everything ready.

  With Latimer’s unconscious aid, Nolan knew exactly how he was going to do it. He sat at the table, picking at his food, listening to them talk and laugh. He tried vainly to concentrate away from the sounds of their voices.

  “This salad’s terrific,” Latimer said. “Helen, you’re wonderful! You two’ve got it made, out here!”

  Helen lowered her gaze to her plate. Nolan stared directly at Latimer and Latimer reddened and looked away. Nolan grinned inside. He had caught the man. But the victory was empty. The long afternoon, thinking about her out there with Latimer would be painful.

  They finished lunch in silence. Almost before Nolan realized it, the house was again empty. He could hear them laughing still, their voices growing faint as they moved down along the beach.

  Helen had even insisted on taking several bottles of cold beer wrapped in insulated bags to keep cool, and carried in the old musette.

  Nolan could not stand still. He paced back and forth across the extent of the house, thinking about tonight. If he didn’t do it tonight, it might be too late. He did not want Helen too attached to Latimer and he felt sure it had gone very far already.

  He knew Latimer intended to stay on and stay on—until he could take Helen away with him. But tonight would end it. He would go along with Latimer to the mainland. Only Latimer would never reach the mainland. The boat would swamp.

  Nolan knew how to swamp a boat. He knew Latimer wasn’t much of a swimmer, and anyhow, a man couldn’t swim with a .45 slug in his heart. But Nolan could swim well. He would kill Latimer, take him out into the Gulf, weight him and sink him. Then he’d bring the boat in and swamp it and swim ashore. He would report it, and rent a boat and come home. He knew they were in for a bit of heavy weather tonight. It would be just perfect.

  And Helen and he would be happy again. The way they had always been.

  He looked back, thinking over the good times. The time before they’d come to the island, when he’d been hard-working at the glass-cutting business he’d inherited from his father. Then more and more he’d become conscious of Helen’s beauty and the effect she had on men. And loving her as wildly as he did, he could no longer bear the endless suspense; the knowledge that sooner or later, she would leave him. So he sold the business, retired. His little lie. So far as she knew, he simply wanted island life—quite, unhurried, alone with her. It was true. But not a complete truth.

  All this time they had been happy. Until now. Somebody’d got wind of the beauty of the island and Latimer had shown up, to do his story. Under conditions imposed by Nolan—no pictures of either himself or Helen. He had allowed one fuzzy negative of them standing against a blossoming hibiscus near the house, at twilight—that was all.

  Wandering through the house, trying not to think of what they were doing now, he found himself in Latimer’s room. The unmade bed, the photographic equipment, the typewriter set up on the table.

  Beside the machine was a typewritten letter.

  Nolan turned away. But something drew him over to the table. Pure curiosity in this man Latimer. He stood there, staring down at the obviously unfinished letter. An addressed envelope lay beside it. There was a half-completed sentence on the sheet in the typewriter, numbered Page Two.

  The letter was addressed to the editor of the magazine where Latimer worked.

  Nolan began reading, at first leisurely, then feverishly.

  “Dear Bart:

  Really have this thing wrapped up, but I’m staying on a while longer, just to settle a few things in my own mind and maybe I’ll come up with a bunch of pix and a yarn that’ll knock your head off . . . sure beautiful scenery on the island . . . house is a regular bamboo and cypress mansion . . . unhealthy, Bart, really sick . . . he watches her like a hawk. He’s ripped with jealousy and it would be laughable, except that they’re both so very old. He must be in his eighties, but she’s a bit harder to read. I did a lousy thing. I confronted her with it. You would have, too. She’s so obviously just enduring everything for his sake. Humoring him. My God, think of it! All these years he’s kept her out here, away from everybody, imprisoned. It’s pure hell. She as much as admitted it. I’m staying on, just to see if I can’t work it somehow. Get her back to civilization, if only for a vacation, Bart. She deserves it. You should hear her ask how things are out there—it would break your damned heart . . .”

  There was more and Nolan read all of it through twice. For a moment longer, he stood there, seeing everything clearly for the first time in nearly a half century.

  Then he walked through the house to his study, opened the desk drawer, took out the .45 automatic. He sat down in his chair by the desk, put the muzzle of the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  DAVID GOODIS

  David Goodis (1917–1967) wrote what was probably the darkest, most existential fiction of all the post–World War II noir writers. His first four novels were published to great critical and public acclaim, with one of them, Dark Passage, filmed with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. His next books, published in paperback, were darker than any that had gone before, tales of men and women trying to fight against the inexorable suffering fate had in store for them.

  Every one of his books follows this pattern, men and women clinging to any desperate shred of hope, yet knowing deep down inside that nothing will save them. Alcoholism, poverty, crime, failure, hopelessness form an urban whirlpool that sucks down anyone who gets caught in it. His short fiction followed this same pattern, but condensed, so that the pain and suffering fairly leap off the page.

  The Plunge

  Seven out of ten are slobs; he was thinking. There was no malice or disdain in the thought. It was more a mixture of pity and regret. And that made it somewhat sickening, for he was referring specifically to the other men who wore badges, his fellow-policemen. More specifically still, he was thinking of the nine plainclothesmen attached to the Vice Squad. Only yesterday they’d been caught with their palms out, hauled in before the Commissioner, and called all sorts of names before they were suspended.

  But, of course, the suspensions were temporary. They’d soon be back on the job, their palms extended again, accepting the shakedown money with the languid smile that seemed to say, It’s all a part of the game.

  He’d never believed in that cynical axiom, had never let it touch him during his seventeen years on the city payroll. From rookie to Police Sergeant and on up to Detective Lieutenant he’d stayed away from the bribe, rakeoff and conniving and doing favors for certain individuals who
required official protection to remain in business.

  Of course, at times he’d made mistakes, but they were always clean mistakes. He’d been trying too hard or he was weary from nights without sleep. It was honest blundering and it put no shadows on his record. In City Hall he was listed Grade-A and they had him slated for promotion.

  His name was Roy Childers and he was thirty-eight years old. He stood five-feet-ten and weighed a rock-hard one-ninety. It was really rock-hard because he was a firm believer in physical culture and wholesome living. He kept away from too much starches and sweets, smoked only after meals, had a beer now and then, but nothing more than that, and the only woman he ever slept with was his wife.

  They’d been married eleven years and they had four children. In a few months Louise would be having the fifth. Maybe five was too many, considering his salary and the price of food these days. But, of course, they’d get along. They’d always managed to get along. He had a fine wife and a nicely arranged way of living and there was never anything serious to worry about.

  That is, aside from his job. On the job he worried plenty. It was purely technical worriment because he took the job very seriously and when things didn’t go the way he expected, he’d lose sleep and it would hurt his digestion. When he’d been with the Vice Squad, it hadn’t happened so frequently. But a year ago he’d become fed up with the Vice Squad, with all the shenanigans and departmental throatcutting and, of course, the never-ending shakedown activity he saw all around him.

  He’d requested a transfer to Homicide, and within a few months his dark brown hair showed grey streaks, pouches began to form under his eyes, the unsolved cases put creases at the corners of his mouth. But mostly it was the fact that Homicide also had its slobs and manipulators, its badge-wearing bandits who’d go in for any kind of deal if the price was right.

  On more than one occasion he’d been close to grabbing a wanted man when someone tipped off someone who tipped off someone else, with the fugitive sliding away or building an alibi that caused the District Attorney to shrug and say, “What’s the use? We’ve got no case.”

  So that now, after eleven months of working with Homicide, there was a lot of grey in Childers’ hair, and his mouth was set tighter, showing the strain of work that demanded too much effort and paid too little dividends.

  He was sitting at his desk in Homicide, which was on the ninth floor of City Hall. His desk was near the window and the view it gave him from that angle was the slum area extending from Twelfth and Patton Avenue to the river. Along the riverfront the warehouses looked very big in contrast to the two-story rat-traps and fire-traps where people lived or tried to live or didn’t care whether they lived or not.

  But he wasn’t focusing on the slum-dwellings that breeded filth and degeneracy and violence. His eyes sought out the warehouses, and narrowed in concentration as they came to rest on the curved-roof structure labeled “No. 4” where not so very long ago there’d been a $15,000 payroll robbery, with one night-watchman killed and another permanently blinded from a pistol-whipping.

  He’d been assigned to the case three weeks ago, after coming to the Captain and saying it looked like a Dice Nolan job. For one thing, he’d said, Dice Nolan was a specialist at payroll robbery, going in for warehouses along the riverfront and using a boat for the getaway. Nolan had used that method several times before they’d caught up with him some ten years ago.

  They gave him ten-to-twenty, and according to the record he’d been let out on parole this year—in the middle of March. Now it was the middle of April and that just about gave him time enough to get a mob together and plan a campaign and make a grab for loot.

  Another angle was the pistol-whipping. Dice Nolan had a reputation for that sort of thing, always going for the eyes for some weird reason planted deep in his criminal brain. Childers had said to the Captain, “What makes me sure it’s Nolan, I’ve checked with the parole officers and they tell me he hasn’t reported in for the past ten days. He’s on a strict probation and he’s supposed to show them his face every three days.”

  The Captain had frowned. “You figure he’s still in town?”

  “I’m betting on it,” Childers had said. “I know the way he operates. He wouldn’t be satisfied with a fifteen-grand haul. He’ll stick around for a while and then go for another warehouse. He knows every inch of that neighborhood.”

  “How come you’re wise to him?”

  “It goes back a good many years,” Childers had said. “We were raised on the same street.”

  The Captain was quiet for some moments. And then, without looking at Childers, he’s said, “All right, go out and find him.”

  So he’d gone out to look for Nolan and the search took him along Patton Avenue going toward the river, past the rows of tenements where now they were strangers who’d been his childhood playmates, past the gutters where he’d sailed the matchbox-boats, unmindful of the slime and filth because it was the only world he’d known in that far-off time of carefree days.

  Days of not knowing what poisonous roots were in the squalor of the neighborhood. Until the time when ignorance was ended and he saw them going bad, one by one, Georgie Mancuso and Hal Berkowski and Freddie Antonucci and Bill Weiss and Dice Nolan.

  He’d pulled away from it with a teeth-clenched frenzy, like someone struggling out of a messy pit. He’d promised himself that he’d never breathe that rotten air again, never come near that dismal area where the roaches thrived and a switchblade nestled in almost every pocket. He’d gone away from it, telling himself the exit was permanent, feeling clean. And that was the important thing, to be clean, always to be clean.

  He’d been acutely conscious of his own cleanliness as he’d questioned the men in the taprooms and poolrooms along Patton. They looked at him with hostile eyes but were careful to keep the hostility from their voices when they told him, “I don’t know” and “I don’t know” and “I don’t know.”

  And some of them went so far as to state they were unacquainted with anyone named Dice Nolan. They’d never even heard of such a person. Of course he knew their lying and evasive answers were founded more on their fear of Nolan than on their instinctive dislike of the Police Department.

  It told him his theory was correct. Nolan had engineered the payroll heist, and certainly Nolan was still in town.

  But that was as far as he’d got with it. There were no further leads, and nothing that could come to a lead. Night after night he’d come home with a tired face to hear his wife saying, “Anything new?” And he’d try to give her a smile as he shook his head.

  But it was getting more and more difficult to smile. He knew if he didn’t come in with something soon, the Captain would take him off the case. He hated the thought of being taken off the case, he was so very sure about his man, so acutely sure the man was hiding somewhere near. Very near—.

  The ringing phone sliced into his thoughts. He lifted it from the hook and said hello and the switchboard girl downstairs said to hold on for just a moment. Then a man’s voice said, “This Childers?”

  Instantly he had a feeling it was something. He could almost smell it. He said, “Yes,” and waited, and heard the man saying, “I’m gonna make it fast before you trace the call. Is that all right with you?”

  He didn’t say anything. For a moment he felt awfully weary, thinking: It’s just some crank who wants to call me some dirty names—.

  But then the man was saying, “It’s gonna be good if you wanna use it. I got some personal reasons for not liking Dice Nolan. Thing is, I can get you to his girl friend.”

  Childers reached automatically for a pencil and a pad. The man gave him a name and an address, and the pencil moved very rapidly. Then the call hung up, and Childers leaped from the desk, ran out of the office and down the hall to the elevator.

  It was a seventeen-story apartment house on the edge of Lakeside Park. He went up to the ninth floor and down the corridor to room 907. It was early afternoon and he doubted she’d
be there. But his finger was positive and persistent on the doorbell-button.

  The door opened and he saw a woman in her middle-twenties, and his first thought was, a bum steer. This can’t be Dice Nolan’s girl.

  He was certain she couldn’t be connected with Nolan because there was nothing in her make-up that indicated moll or floosie or hard-mouthed slut. She wore very little paint and her hair-do was on the quiet side. There was no jewelry except for a wrist-watch. Her blouse was pale grey, the skirt a darker shade, and he noticed that her shoes didn’t have high heels. Again he thought, Sure, it’s a bum steer. But anyway, he said, “Are you Wilma Burnett?”

  She nodded.

  “Police,” he said, turning his lapel to show her the badge.

  She blinked a few times, but that was all. Then she stepped aside to let him enter the apartment. As he walked in, the quiet neatness of the place was impressed upon him. It was simply furnished. The color motif was subdued, and there wasn’t the slightest sign of fast or loose living.

  He frowned slightly, then got rid of it and put the official tone in his voice as he said, “All right, Miss Burnett. Let’s have it.”

  She blinked again. “Let’s have what?”

  “Information,” he said. “Where is he?”

  “Who?” She spoke quietly; her expression was calm and polite. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Dice.” He said it softly.

  It seemed she didn’t get that. She said, “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “Dice Nolan,” he said.

  For a moment she said nothing. Then, very quietly, “I know a Philip Nolan, if that’s who you mean.”

  “Yes, that’s him.” And he thought, Let’s see if we can rattle her. His voice became a jabbing blade, “I figured you’d know him. He pays your rent here, doesn’t he?”

  It didn’t do a thing. There was no anger, not even annoyance. All she did was shake her head.