A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  You mightn’t think Orville set store by anything, but he did by his Paw. “I will,” he vowed. Then he noticed me and he hollered, “Where is Paw? You was supposed to be caring for him, Bluebell.”

  “I couldn’t hold him,” I said. “He took old Betsey and he—”

  They didn’t wait for me to finish. Orville and Toll both set out running down the hill, hollering, “Paw” and “Old Cephus.”

  Deputy Jim said, “Come on.”

  I hung back until the Perfessor took me by the hand. “You needn’t be afraid, Bluebell. Jim and I will take care of you.”

  By my path we got to the cabin almost as soon as Orville and Toll. Old Cephus was already back inside. He was tearing up the almanac and scattering the writing around on the floor. He already had the feathers spread around in the fireplace and under the windows and on the doorsill. When he saw us all standing there, he thundered, “She’s riz up! There ain’t no time to make a fire ring, we got to git her shet out of here afore she comes trying to sneak in. Help me, Orvy.” He pushed the book into Orville’s hands. “Git the dishrag, Tolliver, and stick them pins in it for the burning. They’s up on Bluebell’s shelf in the matchbox.”

  “Them pins been burnt onct, Cephus,” Toll said. “The time the dog run off.”

  “They’s all we have, we’ll have to make use of them again.”

  Toll was about to do like Cephus said when Deputy Jim spoke up. “By the time that old witch picks up all these feathers and reads all that writing, it’ll be cockcrow and she can’t do you no harm tonight, Cephus.” He dipped his hand in his pockets like he had afore and brought out the silver bullet on his palm.

  Cephus picked it out of his hand, looked at the markings and he shook his head like he couldn’t believe it. “No wonder she riz up,” he whispered. “The silver bullet come out of her heart.” He set down heavy in the rocking chair. “I’m too old. I’ve lost my powers to kill witches.”

  Deputy Jim said, “You feather it back into the tree tomorrow, Old Cephus. Maybe it’ll go deep enough this time.” He turned round to me. “Get your things together, Bluebell.”

  “What for?” Toll spoke up though it wasn’t his business.

  “She’s coming down to Little Piney with us,” Deputy Jim told him. “I’ll find a place for her to board and maybe fix it up for her to go back to school. It’s better she stays off of Tall Piney for a time.”

  Orville asked, “And who’s going to cook for me and Paw while she’s gone away?”

  “If you weren’t so mean, Orvy,” Deputy Jim answered him, “you could find a wife to cook for you.”

  That was how it come about I went down to Little Piney for my education, not that it took on me much. I didn’t go back to Tall Piney until after Toll and me was married. Onct Toll got away from Orville’s influence, he stopped being so mean. Fact is, Orville wasn’t so dirty and mean hisself after the Widder Claggett married up with him. She wouldn’t put up with a pig in her cabin.

  Old Cephus was dead by then, peaceful. He fell asleep in his rocking chair one afternoon and never woke up. The Perfessor bought his Old Betsey off’n Orville and give it to the Historical Society. You can see it up at their museum.

  The Granny Woman was buried again, this time on the hill nearby her cabin, where Toll and me live. The Perfessor put up a headstone for her: Mary Virginia Piper, born in Roanoke, Virginia, 1823; died on Tall Piney, Missouri, 1924.

  The silver bullet is still in the tree by Piney Run where Old Cephus feathered it twict. Nobody in the Pineys would dast prize it out.

  STEPHEN MARLOWE

  Stephen Marlowe (1928– ) wrote some of the best paperback originals of the fifties and sixties. His most popular novels dealt with Chet Drum, former FBI agent turned independent gumshoe who managed, in the span of nineteen novels and a number of short stories, to deal with most of the important concerns and issues of the time.

  Marlowe was always the real thing. Even his earliest material—done primarily for the science fiction pulps of the early fifties—has a deftness not often found in beginners. Not that the Nobel Committee pestered him for any copies of this stuff, but by 1955 when he began selling to Gold Medal, Ace, and Avon, he was writing books with real style and pith. The opening chapter of Violence Is My Business, Chet Drum number six, should be force-fed to anybody who is even thinking of writing suspense fiction. It’s a masterpiece of atmosphere, plot, and genuine anxiety as a man tries to decide whether to jump off the foggy ledge of a college administration building.

  Though Marlowe never got the recognition he deserves for his crime novels, he wrote a fine literary novel in 1995, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, which at the time was being touted as a National Book Award nominee.

  Wanted—Dead and Alive

  (Chester Drum)

  I was drinking an ouzo-and-water on the aft deck of the car ferry Hellas and watching the lights of Brindisi fade into the Mediterranean darkness when a stocky figure came toward me, lurching slightly with the ship’s roll.

  “What the hell are you doing aboard?” I said.

  “Did I ever say I wouldn’t be?”

  “Wife see you yet?” I asked.

  “In the lounge. A real touching scene. She was looped. As usual.”

  That made two of them, I thought. Sebastian Spinner’s lurch hadn’t been all ship’s roll. He was gripping the rail hard with both hands to keep the deck from tilting.

  “What about the hired gun?”

  “Christ, no. If he’s aboard, I haven’t made him.” Spinner sighed ruefully. “Provided I remember what the sonofabitch looks like.” A foghorn tooted in the bay, sounding derisive.

  Sebastian Spinner was producer-director of Lucrezia Borgia, which was being filmed on location all over Italy. Twenty-five million bucks, not Spinner’s money, had been pumped into it so far. The studio was near bankruptcy, the picture still wasn’t finished and never would be if Spinner’s wife kept wandering all over the map, with or without whatever stud struck her fancy at the moment.

  It seemed even less likely that the picture would be finished if Spinner’s wife, Carole Frazer, who was playing La Lucrezia, wound up dead on the twenty-six-hour steamer trip between Brindisi, Italy, and Patras, Greece. Neither Spinner nor I would make book that she wouldn’t. Spinner had hired a Neapolitan killer to hit her in the head.

  I’d first bumped into Sebastian Spinner in Rome a couple of weeks ago, when I’d blown myself to a vacation after the Axel Spade case. It was a party, the kind they throw in Cinecittà or Hollywood, where somebody dressed to the earlobes always gets tossed into the pool, where an unknown starlet named Simonetta or something like that peels to the waist to prove her astonishing abundancy and where guys like me, if their luck is running bad, get hired by guys like Sebastian Spinner.

  “Drum?” he’d said, scooping a couple of martinis off a tray and handing me one. “That wouldn’t be Chester Drum?”

  I admitted my guilt.

  “The private dick?”

  “Not very private if you keep shouting it like that.”

  Spinner laughed phlegmily and clamped my arm with a small, soft hand. He was a stocky bald man, and his face and pate were shiny with sweat.

  “They say you’re the best in the business,” he said, and added modestly: “I’m the best in my business. Sweetheart, if we get together it could be you’re gonna save my life. Though sometimes I ain’t too sure it’s worth the trouble.” Spinner was alternately egotistic and self-deprecating, a typical Hollywood type who made me glad I usually worked out of Washington, D.C.

  He steered me outside and we drove off into the hot Roman night in his low-slung Facel Vega. He said nothing until we’d parked on the Via Veneto and took a curb-side table at Doney’s.

  “Somebody’s gonna hit my wife in the head,” he said then. “Christ, they kill her and there goes Lucrezia Borgia, not to mention twenty-five million bucks of Worldwide Studio money. If that happens, they wouldn’t give me a job sweeping out the l
atrine of the second unit of one of those goddam grade Z epics made with the Yugoslav army.”

  I asked: “How do you know somebody’s going to kill your wife, Mr. Spinner?” I asked it politely, the way you do with a loquacious drunk.

  Spinner recognized my point of view and didn’t like it. “On account of I hired the guy,” he said indignantly, and then I was all ears.

  A few days before, while they were shooting on location outside of Naples, Spinner had gone up to Vomero on a bat. You couldn’t blame him. His wife was sleeping with Philip Stanley, her leading man, and everybody knew it.

  “I was sitting in this trattoria in Vomero,” Spinner said. “I was gassed to the eyeballs, and all of a sudden it was like that Hitchcock gimmick where two guys meet on a train and . . . You remember the film, don’t you?

  “Well, I met me a mafiosa type and we started in to talking. I ain’t usually the jealous type. Merde, I been married six times, what’s an extracurricular roll in the hay more or less matter, it’s a free country, I get yens too. But Carole’s been spreading it around and her middle name ain’t exactly discretion and this Stanley bastard practically rubs my face in it. No dame’s gonna make Sebastian Spinner wear neon horns.

  “That’s what I tell the mafiosa type, and he nods his head and listens, and pretty soon, like, I’m foaming at the mouth, and finally I shut up. That’s when he says, ‘For five thousand dollars American I will kill her,’ and that’s when I say, ‘For five thousand dollars American you got yourself a deal,’ and he swifty cons me into giving him half of it in advance, walks out of the trattoria after I tell him when the best time to hit Carole in the head would be.”

  “When would it be?”

  He told me about her up-coming trip to Greece. “On the boat,” he said. “They got a ferry that runs from Brindisi to Patras. Carole hates to fly.”

  I watched the traffic swarming along the Via Veneto and being swallowed by the Pinciana Gate. “I take it you sort of changed your mind.”

  “You bet your sweet life I did. What goes with Lucrezia Borgia if Carole gets hit in the head? You tell me that, pal.”

  “Okay, call your gun off. What do you need me for?”

  “I can’t call him off.”

  That got a raised eyebrow from me.

  “I don’t even know his goddam name, I’m not sure what trattoria in Vomero it was and he had a face like all the other little swifties who’ll sell their own sisters for a thousand lire in Naples. Kee-rist, I need a drink.”

  “Maybe he just let you talk yourself out of twenty-five hundred bucks,” I suggested. “What makes you so sure he intends to go through with it?”

  “Nothing, sweetheart,” Spinner admitted with a slightly sick smile. “Nothing at all. Maybe he is laughing up his sleeve down in Vomero. Don’t you think I know that?”

  “So?”

  “So maybe on the other hand he ain’t.”

  I went down to Naples for a few days and prowled all the dives in Vomero without any luck. I got to Brindisi half an hour before the Hellas sailed. Now, on the aft deck of the car ferry, I told Spinner: “Look. Sober up and stay that way. I’ll watch your wife, but if the guy’s aboard maybe you’ll recognize him.”

  A voice, not Spinner’s, said: “I say, old man, don’t you feel a bit of a horse’s ass following us?” and a man joined us at the rail. In the light streaming through the portholes of the lounge, I recognized Philip Stanley. He was a big guy, about my size, in a navy blue blazer with gold buttons and a pair of gray flannel slacks. He had a hard, handsome face going a little heavy in the jowls, and his eyes held that look of smug, inbred self-satisfaction they seem to give out along with the diplomas at Eton and Harrow and the other public schools that turn out the members of the British Establishment. Actually, he had grown up in a Birmingham slum, and it had taken him all his life to cultivate that look of supercilious disdain.

  “Sweetheart,” Spinner said, “I never dreamed Carole would pack her playmate for the trip. Maybe she’s slipping if she don’t think she can do better in Greece. A lot better. They’re pretty torrid in the sack, those Greeks, what I hear.”

  Stanley laughed. “Better than you she can always do, at any rate. But tell me, old boy,” he asked dryly, “would you be speaking about those Greeks from personal experience?”

  Spinner took a drunken, clumsy swing at him. Evading it easily, Stanley grabbed his wrist and levered the plump man a few staggering steps along the deck before letting go. Spinner fell down and leaped up again as if he had springs in his shoes.

  I got between them, and Spinner said gratefully, “Hold me back, Drum. Hold me back, sweetheart. Every mark I put on his face’ll cost Worldwide half a million bucks.”

  Stanley snickered, and neatly turned his broad back, and walked away along the rail. Spinner shuffled toward the door to the lounge. I lit a cigarette and followed the Englishman. A few more minutes away from Carole Frazer wouldn’t hurt. Spinner would have the sense to keep an eye on her until I showed up.

  “Got a few minutes?” I asked Stanley.

  “Twenty-five hours to Patras,” he said, leaning both elbows on the rail and staring down at the frothy white wake. “But just who are you?”

  “Drum,” I said crisply. “Worldwide front office.”

  “I never heard of you.”

  “You’re not supposed to—until I land on you with both feet.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning if I can’t get some assurance Lucrezia’ll be in the cutter’s room inside of six months, the front office is half-inclined to chuck the whole works.”

  Stanley straightened and turned suddenly in my direction. He looked worried. “Are you serious?”

  “Sure I am,” I said. Though with his rugged Anglo-Saxon good looks Philip Stanley was about as far from a hungry little Neapolitan killer as you could get, the more I knew about the principals in the case the better I’d be able to handle whatever developed. “The director’s been throwing a bat all the way from the Italian Alps to Calabria and between takes the stars go hop-scotching from bed to bed all over Europe. You think maybe Worldwide’s wild about that?”

  “I’ll admit I’ve slept with Carole,” Stanley said, “but—”

  “Admit it? Hell, everybody knows it.”

  “But I had hoped to keep her somewhat closer to the set by doing it.”

  “That’s what I like about you box-office big-shots. Your modesty.”

  “I am afraid you misunderstand,” Stanley said, and a tortoni wouldn’t have melted in his mouth. “Naturally I’ve gotten a certain amount of publicity as Carole’s leading man, but I am not, as you put it, a box-office big-shot. I will be, if we ever finish Lucrezia. Otherwise I’ll just be another not-quite-matinee-idol knocking at the back doors of Cinecittà for work.”

  Him and Sebastian Spinner both, I thought. The only one who didn’t seem to mind was Carole Frazer.

  “Damn it all,” he went on, “why d’you think we’re languishing a year behind schedule? Because I’ve slept with Carole? That’s nonsense, old boy. I don’t have to tell you the woman’s a nymphomaniac, if a lovely one. But if it isn’t me then it’s someone else, and that’s only the half of it. Carole was rushed to London three times for emergency medical treatment, and each time as I also don’t have to tell you it was some psychosomatic foolishness. Why, she’s only appeared in half a dozen crucial scenes so far, close-ups, and virtually every far shot’s been done by her stand-in. We have a great deal more footage of the stand-in than we do of Carole. If you doubt my word, ask Spinner. And Dawn Sibley’s no mere double, she’s a fine actress in her own right. Sometimes I think it would be simpler all around if we were to chuck Carole and let Dawn do Lucrezia. I don’t stand alone. Ask around, old boy, and then tell that to the front office. Most of us want to see this film completed as much as you do. But unfortunately it was conceived as a vehicle for Carole.”

  After that long tirade, he had nothing else to say. I watched him walk across the
deck and inside. For a little while I listened to the rush of water under the hull-plates. Brindisi was a faint and distant line of light. Overhead a gull, nailed in silhouette against the starlit sky, screamed and flapped its wings once. When I looked again, only a glow remained on the horizon in the direction of Brindisi. I carried my empty ouzo glass to the lounge.

  At a big table near the bar, Carole Frazer was holding court. She was wearing black tapered slacks and a paisley blouse that fondled her high breasts without hugging them lasciviously. A casual lock of her blond hair had fallen across her right eye and right cheek. A languid smile that did not quite part her moist red lips was the reward her suitors got.

  There were about a dozen of them, most of them dark and slender Italians and Greeks with intense eyes and gleaming teeth. Any one of them, I realized, could have been Sebastian Spinner’s little swifty from Vomero. He’d be as easy to single out as a fingerling in a fish hatchery.

  “Ouzo,” I told the barman, and he poured the anise-flavored liqueur and added enough water to turn it milky. His hand was not steady on the carafe, and he sloshed a little water on the bar. In the world that Hollywood made, Carole Frazer was an institution. He was staring at her bugeyed. I couldn’t blame him. Seen close, her blond beauty was really scorching.

  Spinner sat alone at a table nearby. He was drinking Scotch and darting small, anxious glances at the men clustered around his wife. Each time he’d shake his head slightly, and his eyes would flick on like a snake’s tongue. He had trouble keeping his head off the table. He was very drunk.

  I went over to him and sat down. “Any luck?”

  “Nope. Maybe he’s here. Maybe not. I can’t tell them apart, bunch a goddam Chinamen.”

  “Lay off the sauce,” I suggested, “and you won’t see double.”

  Carole Frazer called across to us in her throaty purr of a voice. “Mister, if you can make him do that, you’re a better man than his psychiatrist. Who are you?”