A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

“Nothing from the lab, either,” Martin said. “Her clothes came from any bargain basement. No laundry marks. Washed them herself. No scars or identifying marks. No bridgework in the mouth. We’ll run the fingerprints, but I’m not hopeful. The P.M. will establish the cause of death as resulting from compound fracture of the skull, probably late last night.”

  “None of it will tell us who she is,” I said.

  “That’s what I’m saying. But somebody will turn up, asking for her. Somebody will claim her. Girl that young—she can’t die violently and disappear without it affecting someone. Meantime, all we got is this clasp.”

  We took it to all the pawnshops in the city. No watch with such a clasp missing had been pawned.

  Martin next picked up every punk who had a mugging or mugging attempt on his record. We questioned each one of them. The task ate up two days, and when it was over we had placed nobody near Hibernia Park at the right time.

  The girl’s body remained in the morgue. No one inquired about her. She wasn’t reported missing. She continued to be an unclaimed Jane Doe.

  “It means,” Martin said, “that she has no family here. She must have come here to work, maybe from a farm upstate. Lucky for us that we live in a reasonably small city. We’ll check all the rooming houses—places where such a girl might have lived.”

  We did it building by building, block by teeming block, from landlord to landlady to building super.

  Martin would take one side of the street, I the other. Our equipment was a picture of the girl, and the question was always the same. So were all the answers.

  We spent two fatiguing, monotonous days of this. Then about midafternoon the third day, I came disconsolately from a cheaper apartment building and saw Martin waving to me from a long porch across the street.

  I waited for a break in traffic and crossed over. The rooming house was an old gables-and-gingerbread monstrosity, three stories, a mansion in its day, but long since chopped into small apartments and sleeping rooms.

  A small, gray, near-sighted woman hovered in the hallway behind Odus Martin.

  “This is Mrs. Carraway,” Martin said.

  The landlady and I nodded our new acquaintance.

  “May we see Mary Smith’s room?” Martin asked.

  Mary Smith, I thought. I’d begun to think you’d remain Jane Doe forever, Mary Smith.

  “Since you’re police officers I guess it’s all right,” Mrs. Carraway said.

  “You’ve seen my credentials,” Martin said. “We’ll take full responsibility.”

  We followed Mrs. Carraway to a small clean room at the end of the hallway. She stood in the open doorway while we examined the room.

  The furnishings were typical—mismatched bed, bureau, chest of drawers, and worn carpet, faded curtains.

  A neat person, Mary Smith. The few items of clothing she’d owned were pressed and properly placed in the closet and chest of drawers.

  The room reflected a lonely life. There were no photos, no letters. Nothing of a personal nature except the clothing and a few magazines on a bedside table.

  “How long she lived with you?” Martin asked.

  “A little over two months,” Mrs. Carraway said in her cautious, impersonal voice.

  “When did you see her last?”

  “A week ago Thursday when she paid a month’s rent.”

  “She have any callers?”

  “Callers?”

  “Boy friend, perhaps.”

  “Not that I know of.” Mrs. Carraway pursed her lips. “I’m not a nosy landlady. She seemed like a quiet, nice girl. So long as they pay their rent and don’t raise a disturbance—that’s all I’m concerned with.”

  “Know where she came from?”

  “No. She came and looked at the room and said she’d take it. She said she was employed. I checked, to make sure.”

  “Where was that?”

  “At the Cloverleaf Restaurant. She’s a waitress.”

  Martin thanked her, and we started from the room.

  Mrs. Carraway said, “Is she in serious trouble?”

  “Pretty much,” Martin said. “I’m sure she won’t be coming back.”

  “What’ll I do with her things?”

  “We’ll let you know.”

  Mrs. Carraway followed us to the front door. “I’ve told you everything I know. I’m not an unkind person. But whatever she’s done is none of my business. You’d just be wasting my time to be calling me in as a witness.”

  “We’ll trouble you no more than we have to,” Martin said.

  We returned to the unmarked police car parked in the middle of the block. Martin got behind the wheel and drove in silence.

  “Any doubt of her identity?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. We’ll check fingerprints in the room against the Jane Doe to be sure. But the landlady showed no hesitation when she saw the picture. She was Mary Smith, right enough.”

  Hello, Mary Smith, I thought. Hello, stranger. Who were you?

  A man named Blakeslee was the owner of the Cloverleaf, a large drive-in on the south side of town. He was a slender, dark, harried-looking fellow, about forty.

  He was checking the cash register when we arrived. We showed him our credentials, and with a gesture of annoyance he led us to a small office off the kitchen.

  “Well,” he said, closing the door, “what’s this all about?”

  “Got a Mary Smith on your payroll?” Martin asked.

  “I did have. She quit without notice. A lot of them do. You’ve no idea what it is to keep help nowadays.”

  “What were the circumstances?”

  “Circumstances?” He shrugged. “She didn’t show up for a couple of days, so I put another girl on. There weren’t any circumstances, as you put it.”

  “Did you wonder if maybe she was sick?”

  “I figured she’d have called in. She’s not the first to quit like that. I haven’t time to be running around checking on them. What’s your interest in her?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “What’s that?” After his initial start, Blakeslee raised his hand and stroked his chin. “Why, that’s too bad,” he said in a tone without real meaning.

  “The papers carried a story,” Martin said. “Unidentified girl murdered.”

  “I don’t recall seeing it. Probably wouldn’t have connected it with Mary Smith anyway. How did it happen?”

  “She was apparently on her way home. We think she was knocked down for whatever of value she was carrying.”

  “It couldn’t have been much.”

  “Can you tell us anything about her?”

  “Only that she came to work here. She seemed nice enough, always on time. Too quiet to make many friends.”

  “Where did she work formerly?”

  “She came here from Crossmore.” Blakeslee spread his hands. “I wish I could help. But after all, what was she to me?”

  Martin and I took the expressway out of town. The drive to Crossmore, a small town in the next county, required only forty minutes.

  I wondered how many restaurants there were in Crossmore. Very few, I guessed. We had at least that much in our favor.

  However, Martin drove right on through the village.

  “I’m playing a hunch,” he said.

  Just beyond Crossmore, overlooking the busy highway, were the rolling hills and meadows and buildings of the county-supported orphanage.

  Martin turned into a winding driveway which was shaded by tall pines. He stopped before an old colonial-type home that had been converted into an administration building. More recent structures of frame and brick housed dorms and classrooms. Beyond there were barns and workshops.

  A few minutes later we were in the office of Dr. Spreckles, the superintendent. A wiry, sandy man, Spreckles struck me as being a pleasant individual who nevertheless knew how to run things.

  He looked at the picture of Mary Smith that the lab boys had made.

  “Yes,” he said. “She was on
e of our girls.” His lips tightened slightly. “We hope she has done nothing to reflect on the training she received here.”

  “She hasn’t,” Martin assured him. “Who were her people?”

  Spreckles went behind his desk and sat down. “She had none. She was born out of wedlock in the county hospital to a woman who gave her name only as Mary Smith. As soon as she was able to get about, the mother abandoned the child.”

  “The girl grew up here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Never adopted?”

  “No,” Spreckles said slowly, resting his elbows on his desk and steepling his fingers. “As a child, she was quite awkward, too quiet, too shy. She lived here until she was eighteen.”

  “Who were her friends?”

  “Strangely enough,” Spreckles frowned, “I can’t say. I don’t think she had any really close ones. She was a face in a crowd, you might say. Never precocious. Not at the bottom of her classes, you understand, but not at the top. I do wish you’d tell me what difficulty she’s in.”

  “She’s dead,” Martin said. “A mugger killed her during a robbery attempt.”

  “How terrible!” Spreckles made an honest attempt to muster genuine grief, but he simply didn’t have it. He was shocked and upset by the passing forever of an impersonal image, but that was all . . .

  As we drove back through Crossmore, Martin broke his silence—with a single utterance. It was softly spoken but the most vicious oath I’d ever heard. It was so unlike Martin that I stared at him out of the corner of my eyes.

  But I let the silence return and stay that way. Right then, he had the look about him of a heavy-chested, steel-gray tomcat whose wounds have been rubbed with turpentine and salt.

  We returned to grinding routine. The pawnshops. Still no watch. The vicinity of Hibernia Park—questioning all the people, one by one, who lived in the area. No one had glimpsed a man coming from the park about the time she was killed.

  At night I was too tired to sleep. I wondered what this was getting us, if we’d ever catch the man. Yet there wasn’t the slightest letdown in Martin’s determination. I only wished I shared it . . .

  Martin and I returned to the squadroom late Wednesday afternoon. A few minutes afterward, a uniformed policeman walked in and handed Martin an inexpensive woman’s watch.

  My scalp pulled tight. I crossed to Martin’s desk as he opened a drawer. He shook the golden clasp from a small manila envelope. The clasp matched the broken band of the watch perfectly.

  Martin stood up. His nostrils were flaring. “Where’d this come from?”

  “The personal effects of a guy named Biddix,” the man in uniform said. “He was in a poker game we just broke up in an old loft. The desk sergeant said you’d want to see the watch.”

  Martin’s big hand closed over the tiny timepiece. I followed him out of the office.

  Biddix was a dried-up, seedy little fellow in his late sixties. He’d been separated from the other poker players and put in a solitary cell.

  When the cell door opened, Biddix took one look at Martin’s face and backed against the wall.

  Martin held out his hand and opened it. “Where’d you get this?”

  “Look . . .” Biddix swallowed. “If it’s stolen, I swear I had nothing to do with it.”

  “It was torn from a murdered girl’s wrist,” Martin said.

  The dead-gray of Biddix’s beard stubble suddenly blended exactly with the color of his skin.

  “A guy put the watch in the game,” Biddix said. “And that’s the truth, so help me!”

  “Which one?”

  “He left before he was raided.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Edgar Collins.”

  “Know where he lives?”

  “Sure. In a flop on East Maple Street, number 311.”

  We went out. The cell door clanged behind us. Biddix came over and stood holding the bars. “I didn’t know anything about the watch.”

  “Sure,” Martin said.

  “You’ll put me in with the others now, won’t you?”

  “No,” Martin said. “Not yet.”

  We got the location of Edgar Collins’s room from the building super, went up one flight, and eased to the door.

  The house was hot and the hallway smelled of age and many people. We listened. After a little, we heard a bedspring creak.

  We put our shoulders to the door, and it flew open. A stringy, big-boned, bald-headed man sprang off the bed and dropped the tabloid he’d been reading. He was tall and stooped. He wore dirty khaki pants and a dirty undershirt.

  “What’s the big idear?” he demanded.

  “Your name Edgar Collins?” Martin asked.

  “So what if it is?”

  “We’re police officers. We want to talk to you.”

  “Yeah? What about?”

  “A girl who was killed in Hibernia Park. If you’re innocent, you got nothing to worry about. If not . . . We’ve got a shoe-track moulage to start. We’ll find plenty of other things with the help of the lab boys, once we know where to start looking.”

  Collins stared at us. An explosion took place behind his pale eyes. He lunged toward the open window.

  Martin got between me and Collins and grabbed the man first. He dragged Collins back in the room. Collins threw punches at Martin in blind panic.

  Martin hit him three times in the face. Collins fell on the floor, wrapped his arms about his head, and began rolling back and forth.

  “I didn’t mean it,” he said, babbling. “She fell on the stone. She was a stranger, nothing to me. It was an accident . . . please . . . give me a break! I didn’t mean it, I tell you.”

  For a moment I thought Odus Martin was going to start hitting the man again.

  A volunteer minister performed graveside rites the next morning. Martin and I stood with our hats in our hands.

  I looked at the casket and thought: Good-bye, Mary Smith—that name will do as well as any. No father, no mother, no one. Killed by a man who never saw you before.

  The sun was shining, but the day felt bleak and dismal.

  Then, as we returned to headquarters, it came to me that Odus Martin had been right. There are no absolute strangers in this world, no zeros.

  The death of Mary Smith had affected Odus Martin. Because I was his partner, it had affected me. Through us, it seemed to me, the human race had recognized the importance of her and expressed its unwillingness to let her die as an animal dies.

  Mary Smith had lived and died in loneliness, but she had not been alone.

  I didn’t say anything of this to Odus Martin. He was a hard man to talk to. Anyhow, I felt that he understood it already, probably much more deeply than I ever could.

  DOROTHY B. HUGHES

  Dorothy B. Hughes (1904–1993) had a number of films made from her novels, the best of which, the Humphrey Bogart–Gloria Grahame picture In a Lonely Place, is a genuine suspense classic.

  Hughes was an incisive book critic without ever being mean-spirited and wrote ticking-bomb crime stories without ever giving up the clean, controlled style that made her, as an undergraduate, a Yale Young Poet.

  Hughes fused elements of the thriller with elements of the traditional mystery in most of her novels. Odd that Hitchcock never bought one for the screen. They were exactly the sort of material he favored.

  The Collected Stories of Dorothy B. Hughes (a book that needs to be published) would span four decades and show how artists both use and transcend their time. The Grand Master award she received from the Mystery Writers of America in 1978 was deserved indeed.

  The Granny Woman

  They was waiting for him, the three of them, setting there on the stoop of Aunt Miney’s cabin. I remember like it was yesterday. Old Cephus wasn’t rightly on the stoop, he was on the gallery in Uncle Dauncy’s rocking chair. He wa’nt rocking. He was setting tall and upright as the silver-mounted Old Betsey he was holding aside him. Ol Cephus must of been eighty year then, gaunt and
gray as an old goose, but strong not weak in his age.

  Orville was setting on the top of the stoop. He wasn’t doing anything, just setting there chawing, looking mean and sloppy and dirty like always. You’d find it hard to believe Orville was Old Cephus’ son. There wa’nt nothing like in them.

  Down on the low step was Toll, Cousin Tolliver Sorkin, another mean one, though he wa’nt no more than twenty year to Orville’s fifty. Toll was whittling nothing like he’d do when he was waiting. Some men whittle something, a dog or a bird, or maybe a doll poppet, but Toll never whittled nothing.

  I knowed the man wasn’t coming friendly because none of them was fixed for company. They was wearing their working pants and shirts, dusty boots, and their old sweaty-stained hats. None of them appeared to be looking down the road, but they was seeing without looking. They didn’t know I was there, hiding up in the old crabapple tree aslant of the house. I’d sneaked up in the tree afore they come out on the stoop. If’n they’d knowed, they’d of sent me packing. They wa’nt meaning no good to the man.

  You could see him coming over the hill afore he was in sight. You could see him when he wa’nt no more than a twig of a man, down there below. It could of been that Toll, when he took his maw and paw down to Middle Piney that morning, heerd about him coming. But I think they’d knowed it afore then, the way a body does know things in these hills. Knowing don’t come from smoke signals like the Indians made when they lived here afore the war, leastways the Granny Woman used to claim she’d seed smoke signals when first she come to the Ozarks. Knowing is just knowing something afore you been told. It whispers out of the town and up into the hills some way or tuther.

  I could hear everything the menfolks was saying, not that it was much. The man was big enough to reckanize as a man when Cephus asked for about the hundredth time, “Is he still a-coming?”

  “He’s a-coming all right,” Orville grunted.

  “Purty nigh here.” Toll had that sly mouth on him, like he was itching for trouble.

  “What-all’s he coming up here for anyway?” Cephus complained.

  “You know what for,” Toll said.

  “You best keep your mouth shet, Toll.” When Orville had that real ugly look, it’d fair give you the shivers.