A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  “You recall?” Korites said with sarcasm, shaking his head. “You dreamed it up. You’re still back in the damn nineteenth century. Your movies were old-fashioned when you made them. You don’t work anymore because you’re an anachronism.”

  “Old-fashioned?” said Griffith with a smile. “Yes, old-fashioned, a romantic, one who respects the past. I would rather die with my Charles Dickens than live with your Hemingway.”

  Dollard finished whatever he had in his mouth and said, “You think it would be sacrilegious to have the main course? Life goes on.”

  “Have a celery stick,” I suggested.

  “I don’t want to eat a celery stick,” he whined.

  “I wasn’t suggesting that you put it in your mouth,” I said.

  This was too much for Dollard. He stood up, pushing the chair back.

  “I’m the comic here,” he said. “Tell him.”

  He looked around for someone to tell me. The most sympathetic person was Sikes, and he was dead.

  “So that’s the way it is,” Dollard said, looking around the room. “You want me to play second banana.”

  “This is a murder scene,” shouted Korites, taking his glasses off, “not a night club, Lew. Try to remember that.” His jowls rumbled as he spoke. He was the boss, but not mine.

  “Someone in this room murdered the guy in the salad,” I reminded them.

  “My father,” said Griffith.

  “Your father killed Sikes?” I asked, turning to the great director. Griffith’s huge nose was at the rim of his almost empty glass. His dark eyes were looking into the remaining amber liquid for an answer.

  “My father,” he said without looking up, “would have known how to cope with this puzzle. He was a resourceful man, a gentleman, a soldier.”

  “Mine was a grocer,” I said.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Denise Giles, throwing down her napkin.

  “Not to Sikes,” I said. Just then the door behind me swung open. I turned to see a rail of a woman dressed in black.

  “Are you ready for the roast?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Dollard.

  “No,” said Korites, “we’re not having any more food.”

  “I have rights here,” Dollard insisted.

  Now I had it. This was an Alice in Wonderland nightmare and I was Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. We’d all change places in a few seconds and the Dormouse, Sikes, would have to be carried.

  “What,” demanded Mrs. Windless, “am I to do with the roast?”

  “You want the punch line or can I have it?” Dollard said to me.

  “Sikes already got the punch line,” I reminded him.

  Mrs. Windless looked over at Sikes for the first time.

  “Oh my God,” she screamed. “That man is dead.”

  “Really?” shouted Dollard leaping up. “Which one?”

  “Goddamn it,” shouted Korites. “This is serious.” His glasses were back on now. He didn’t seem to know what to do with them.

  Griffith got up and poured himself another drink.

  “We know he’s dead, Mrs. Windless,” Korites said. “The police are on the way. You’ll just have to stick all the food in the refrigerator and wait.”

  “What happened?” Mrs. Windless asked, her voice high, her eyes riveted on Sikes. “Who did this? I don’t want anything to do with murder.”

  “You don’t?” said Dollard. “Why didn’t you tell us that before we killed him? We did it for you.” He crossed his eyes but didn’t close them in time to block out the wine thrown in his face by the slinky Denise.

  Dollard stood up sputtering and groped for a napkin to wipe his face. Purple tears rolled down his cheeks.

  “Damn it,” he screamed. “What the hell? What the hell?”

  His hand found a napkin. He wiped his eyes. The stains were gone, but there was now a piece of apple from the Waldorf salad on his face.

  “Mrs. Windless,” said D. W., standing and pointing at the door. “You will depart and tell my driver, Mr. Reynolds, that Mr. Peters and I will be delayed. Mr. Dollard. You will sit down and clean your face. Miss Giles, you will refrain from outbursts, and Mr. Vann, you will attempt to show some animation. It is difficult to tell you from Mr. Sikes. Mr. Peters will continue the inquiry.”

  Vann stood up now, kicking back his chair. Griffith rose to meet him. They were standing face to face, toe to toe. Vann was about thirty years younger, but Griffith didn’t back away.

  “You can’t tell us what to do. You can’t tell anyone what to do. You’re washed up,” Vann hissed.

  “As Bluebeard is rumored to have said,” whispered Griffith, “I’m merely between engagements.”

  “See, see,” grouched Dollard, pointing with his fork at the two antagonists. “Everyone’s a comic. I ask you.”

  I sighed and stood up again.

  “Sit down,” I shouted at Vann and Griffith. The room went silent. The mood was ruined by my stomach growling. But they sat and Mrs. Windless left the room. “Who called the police?”

  “I did,” said Korites.

  “I thought no one left the room but Griffith?” I said.

  “Phone is just outside the door, everyone could see me call. I left the door open,” Korites said. He pushed his dirty plate away from him and then pulled it back. “What’s the difference?”

  “Why didn’t you all start yelling, panic, accuse each other?” I asked.

  “We thought it was one of Jason’s practical jokes,” said Denise Giles. “He was fond of practical jokes.”

  “Rubber teeth, joy buzzers, ink in the soup,” sighed Dollard. “A real amateur, a putz. Once pretended he was poisoned at a lunch in . . .”

  “Lew,” shouted Korites. “Just shut up.”

  “All right you people,” I said. “None of you like Sikes, is that right?”

  “Right,” Korites said, “but that’s a far cry from one of us . . .”

  “How about hate?” I tried. “Would hate be a good word to apply to your feelings about the late dinner guest?”

  “Maybe,” said Korites, “there was no secret about that among our friends. I doubt if anyone who knew Jason did anything less than hate him. But none of us murdered him. We couldn’t have.”

  “And yet,” Griffith said, “one of you had to have done the deed. In The Birth of a Nation—”

  “This is death, not birth,” hissed Vann. “This isn’t a damn movie.”

  Griffith drew his head back and examined Vann over his beak of a nose.

  “Better,” said Griffith. “Given time I could possibly motivate you into a passable performance. Even Richard Barthelmess had something to learn from my humble direction.”

  There was a radio in the corner. Dollard had stood up and turned it on. I didn’t stop him. We listened to the radio and watched Sikes and each other while I tried to think. Griffith was drawing something on the white tablecloth with his fork.

  Dollard found the news, and we learned that Hirohito had a cold but was getting better, King Farouk of Egypt had just gotten married, Leopold Stokowski was on his way to Italy under an assumed name, probably to visit Greta Garbo, and a guy named Albert Burroughs had been found semi-conscious in a hotel room in Bloomington, Illinois. The room was littered with open cans of peas. Burroughs managed to whisper to the ambulance driver that he had lived on peas for nine days even though he had $77,000 in cash in the room.

  I got up and turned off the radio.

  “You tell a story like that in a movie,” said Korites, “and they say it isn’t real.”

  “If you tell it well, they will believe anything,” said Griffith, again doodling on the cloth.

  The dinner mess, not to mention Sikes’ corpse, was beginning to ruin the party.

  “Things are different,” Griffith said, looking down at what he had drawn. He lifted a long-fingered hand to wipe out the identations in the tablecloth.

  “Things?” I asked, wondering if he was going to tell us tales about his care
er, his father, or the state of the universe.

  “I am an artist of images,” he explained, looking up, his eyes moving from me to each of the people around the table. “I kept the entire script of my films, sometimes 1,500 shots, all within my head.” He pointed to his head in case we had forgotten where it was located.

  “This scene,” he went on, “has changed. When I left this room to find Mr. Peters, Mr. Sikes had a knife in his neck, not his back, and it was a somewhat different knife.”

  “You’ve had three too many, D. W.,” Dollard said with a smile.

  I got up and examined Sikes. There was no hole in his neck or anywhere else on his body that I could find.

  “No cuts, bruises, marks . . .” I began, and then it hit me. My eyes met Griffith’s. I think it hit him at the same moment.

  “We’ll just wait for the police,” Korites said, removing his glasses again.

  “Go on, Mr. G.,” I said. “Let’s hear your script.”

  Griffith stood again, put down his glass, and smiled. He was doing either Abe Lincoln or Sherlock Holmes.

  “This scene was played for me,” he said. “I was not the director. I was the audience. My ego is not fragile, at least not too fragile to realize that I have witnessed an act. I can see each of you playing your roles, even the late Mr. Sikes. Each of you in an iris, laughing, silently enigmatic, attentive. And then the moment arrives. The audience is distracted by a pretty face in close-up. Then a cut to body, or supposed body, for Sikes was not dead when I left this room to find Mr. Peters.”

  “Come on . . .” laughed Dollard.

  “Of all . . .” sighed Denise Giles.

  “You’re mad . . .” counterpointed Vann.

  But Korites sat silent.

  “He wasn’t dead,” I said again, picking up for Griffith, who seemed to have ended his monologue. All he needed was applause. He looked good, but he had carried the scene as far as he could. It was mine now.

  “Let’s try this scenario,” I said. “Sikes was a practical joker, right?”

  “Right,” Dollard agreed, “but—”

  “What if you all agreed to play a little joke on D. W. ? Sikes pretends to be dead with a knife in his neck when Denise distracts Griffith. Sikes can’t stick the fake knife in his back. He can’t reach his own back. He attaches it to his neck. Then you all discover the body, Griffith comes for me, Sikes laughs. You all laugh, then one of you, probably Korites, moves behind him and uses a real knife to turn the joke into fact. You’re all covered. Someone did it. The police would have a hell of a time figuring out which one, and meanwhile, it would make a hell of a news story. Griffith a witness. All of you suspects. Probably wind up with a backer who’d cash in on your morbid celebrity.”

  “Ridiculous,” laughed Korites.

  “I was the audience,” Griffith repeated with a rueful laugh.

  “Even if this were true,” said Denise Giles, “you could never prove it.”

  “Props,” I said. “You didn’t have time to get rid of that fake knife, at least not to get it hidden too well. D. W. was with me for only a minute or two, and you didn’t want to get too far from this room in case we came running back here. No, if we’re right, that prop knife is nearby, where it can be found, somewhere in this room or not far from it.”

  “This is ridiculous,” said Vann, standing up. “I’m not staying here for any more of this charade.” He took a step toward the door behind Griffith, giving me a good idea of where to start looking for the prop knife, but the director was out of his chair and barring his way.

  “Move,” shouted Vann.

  “Never,” cried Griffith.

  Vann threw a punch, but Griffith caught it with his left and came back with a right. Vann went down. Korites started to rise, looked at my face, and sat down again.

  “We can work something out here,” he said, his face going white.

  A siren blasted somewhere outside.

  “Hell of a practical joke,” Dollard said, dropping the radish in his fingers. “Hell of a joke.”

  No one moved while we waited for the police. We just sat there, Vann on the floor, Griffith standing. I imagined a round iris closing in on the scene, and then a slow fade to black.

  WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT

  William Campbell Gault (1910–1995) supported himself for three decades by writing books for high school boys. They featured sports or cars and were second only to the juvenile novels of Robert A. Heinlein in popularity.

  He was the perfect man to write for teenagers. He’d developed a style in the pulps of the thirties and forties that was so simple and easygoing it was almost like direct address.

  It was this style that won him the Edgar for Don’t Cry for Me, one of the most remarkable private eye novels ever written. Take a Midwestern Republican, transplant him to the West Coast, make him start thinking in terms of gray rather than black and white—and you have a charmingly (and somewhat sadly) confused man who is no longer sure which set of values to apply to the world he encounters every day.

  Because Gault spent so much time and effort on his teenager books, his crime career never quite got the recognition it deserved, even though both Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald praised him and the Private Eye Writers made him a Grand Master.

  The Kerman Kill

  “Pierre?” my Uncle Vartan asked. “Why Pierre? You were Pistol Pete Apoyan when you fought.”

  Sixteen amateur fights I’d had and won them all. Two professional fights I’d had and painfully decided it would not be my trade. I had followed that career with three years as an employee of the Arden Guard and Investigative Service in Santa Monica before deciding to branch out on my own.

  We were in my uncle’s rug store in Beverly Hills, a small store and not in the highest rent district, but a fine store. No machine-made imitation orientals for him, and absolutely no carpeting.

  “You didn’t change your name,” I pointed out.

  “Why would I?” he asked. “It is an honorable name and suited to my trade.”

  “And Pierre is not an honorable name?”

  He signed. “Please do not misunderstand me. I adore your mother. But Pierre is a name for hairdressers and perfume manufacturers and those pirate merchants on Rodeo Drive. Don’t your friends call you Pete?”

  “My odar friends,” I admitted. “Odar” means (roughly) non-Armenian. My mother is French, my father Armenian.

  “Think!” he said. “Sam Spade. Mike Hammer. But Pierre?”

  “Hercule Poirot,” I said.

  “What does that mean? Who is this Hercule Poirot? A friend?” He was frowning.

  It was my turn to sigh. I said nothing. My Uncle Vartan is a stubborn man. He had four nephews, but I was his favorite. He had never married. He had come to this country as an infant with my father and their older brother. My father had sired one son and one daughter, my Uncle Sarkis three sons.

  “You’re so stubborn!” Uncle Vartan said.

  The pot had just described the kettle. I shrugged.

  He took a deep breath. “I suppose I am, too.”

  I nodded.

  “Whatever,” he said, “the decision is yours, no matter what name you decide to use.”

  The decision would be mine but the suggestion had been his. Tough private eye stories, fine rugs, and any attractive woman under sixty were what he cherished. His store had originally been a two-story duplex with a separate door and stairway to the second floor. That, he had suggested, would be a lucrative location for my office when I left Arden.

  His reasoning was sound enough. He got the carriage trade; why wouldn’t I? And he would finance the remodeling.

  Why was I so stubborn?

  “Don’t sulk,” he said.

  “It’s because of my mother,” I explained. “She didn’t like it when I was called Pistol Pete.”

  His smile was sad. “I know. But wouldn’t Pistol Pierre have sounded worse?” He shook his head. “Lucky Pierre, always in the middle. I talked with the c
ontractor last night. The remodeling should be finished by next Tuesday.”

  The second floor was large enough to include living quarters for me. Tonight I would tell my two roomies in our Pacific Palisades apartment that I would be deserting them at the end of the month. I drove out to Westwood, where my mother and sister had a French pastry shop.

  My sister, Adele, was behind the counter. My mother was in the back, smoking a cigarette. She is a chain smoker, my mother, the only nicotine addict in the family. She is a slim, trim, and testy forty-seven-year-old tiger.

  “Well—?” she asked.

  “We won,” I told her. “It will be the Pierre Apoyan Investigative Service.”

  “You won,” she corrected me. “You and Vartan. It wasn’t my idea.”

  “Are there any croissants left?” I asked.

  “On the shelf next to the oven.” She shook her head. “That horny old bastard! All the nice women I found for him—”

  “Who needs a cow when milk is cheap?” I asked.

  “Don’t be vulgar,” she said. “And if you do, get some new jokes.”

  I buttered two croissants, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat down across from her. I said, “The rumor I heard years ago is that Vartan came on to you before you met Dad.”

  “The rumor is true,” she admitted. “But if I wanted to marry an adulterer I would have stayed in France.”

  “And then you never would have met Dad. You did okay, Ma.”

  “I sure as hell did. He’s all man.”

  The thought came to me that if he were all man, the macho type, my first name would not be Pierre. I didn’t voice the thought; I preferred to drink my coffee, not wear it.