Харлан Эллисон - Murder Plus - True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

Cassidy watched them go, then sat silently looking at the gun on the desk, frowning a bit. He leaned forward, picked the gun up and studied the fingerprint in a satisfied manner.

Then, suddenly, Mrs. Warner stood up and the noise her chair made as it scraped along the floor when she pushed it back was loud in the stillness. “You don’t need Harold’s prints,” she said in a tight, tense voice. “Someone else might have touched that gun. The fingerprint is probably his, but even if it isn’t — Harold killed Clyde. I know he did. And I know why!”

Cassidy said, “Yes?”

“Clyde threatened to tell the police about Harold’s black-market racket. He thought Harold had something to do with our separation. He thought Harold and I—” Her voice stopped and she looked at the floor.

“Did you?” Cassidy asked.

“No. But Clyde thought so. And—”

“And,” the detective broke in, “when you and Clyde separated, he moved in to live with the man he suspected of having come between him and his wife. That sounds a little bit odd, doesn’t it, Mrs. Warner? You aren’t a very good liar.

“And trying to pin it on Harold is another mistake. I wondered if you might try that when you thought his alibi wouldn’t hold up. You see, there’s really nothing much wrong with Harold’s alibi. I just tried to make it sound that way. When I said Poletti had taken it on the lam, I neglected to mention one little thing. Poletti skipped, all right, but he didn’t get far. My men and the OPA agents were on his tail. They picked him up when he tried to shove off by plane from LaGuardia Field. He’ll be in court, all right.”

Bertha Warner sat down again. She stared at Cassidy and her hands gripped her chair until her knuckles were white.

Cassidy didn’t give her any time to think. “Never try to pin a murder on a man who couldn’t have done it,” he went on. “Besides, even if he didn’t have an alibi, I wouldn’t suspect him too much. The real clue to the murderer is not that fingerprint on the gun, at all. You’re wearing the same clothes you wore last night as I asked you to, aren’t you?”

She nodded wordlessly.

“And that’s the same purse you carried?” He pointed to the small cotton bag.

She looked at it in bewilderment, but she nodded.

“That,” Cassidy said, “is the clue. That and this file box. If Harold Warner had killed his brother and had wanted to remove the gun from the scene, he wouldn’t have needed to conceal it in that file box. He’d have simply stuck it in his pocket. But you haven’t any pockets big enough to hold a .45 and your purse is much too small. That’s why you used the file box.”

Some of Bertha Warner’s fear dropped away. She almost smiled. “That’s pretty thin,” she said. “That might apply to any woman. You can’t prove that I—”

Cassidy raised his voice. “Let’s have Redfern,” he called.

The door opened and a uniformed patrolman came in with Redfern. Cassidy asked, “Is that the woman you saw come out of 252 yesterday morning, some time after two o’clock?”

Redfern studied her. “Yes,” he said.

“Was she carrying a file box like that one?”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Warner shrank away from Redfern, shaking her head. “No!” she exclaimed half hysterically. “No, no!”

Cassidy merely said, “I’ll have your prints now, Mrs. Warner.”

The calm, completely confident way he said it apparently told Bertha Warner that she was licked. She broke. Hysterically, disconnectedly, prodded by Cassidy’s swift, unrelenting questions, she told her story.

She left her mother’s around ten. Passing a movie, she had an impulse to go in. She left the theater around eleven-thirty and was on her way to the subway when she met Clyde.

He told her he had to speak to her. He said it was important, something about Harold, and that he was on his way to Sector R headquarters and that she should come with him. He said they’d be alone, that all he had to do was phone Schirmer and tell him not to report.

Bertha Warner, believing that Clyde had some family problem concerning Harold, consented. Clyde went upstairs first and told her to follow in about five minutes and not let the elevator boy see her. Only wardens, he said, were supposed to be in the apartment.

She obeyed his instructions and he was alone when she arrived. He had a flask of liquor with him and he set two glasses on the table. They had a couple of drinks and he kept postponing the matter she’d come to discuss. Presently he began to plead with her to come back, and tried to make love. She said all she wanted from him was a divorce. He refused to let her leave the apartment. She ran to the back room, intending to lock herself in. Then she saw his gun, partly concealed under the pillow of the cot.

He followed her and she raised the gun. Suddenly it occurred to her that if he were dead, she wouldn’t have to worry about the divorce. He shouted at her, and in a blind fury she fired.

She knew at once that she’d killed him. She thought of putting the gun in his hand to make it look like suicide, but she was afraid of a slip-up. She decided to remove all traces of her presence. She hadn’t been seen coming in, and it was a simple matter to wait until the elevator had gone upstairs and then to run out.

She threw the file box containing the gun and glass into the nearest rubbish basket. Then she went back to her hotel, sneaking in and walking all the way up.

In December, 1942, Bertha Warner was tried in Special Sessions for the murder of Clyde Warner, her husband. She admitted she had shot him but she pleaded self-defense. The prosecution pointed out that there was absolutely no evidence of a struggle and that the position of the body indicated Clyde had been shot suddenly without warning.

After six hours, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty of murder in the second degree. Several of the jurymen intimated later that the coldblooded way in which she had sought to make Harold Warner pay for her crime weighed heavily against her.

She was sentenced to a term of from twenty years to life.

Today’s reader, more accustomed to flawed heroes (or antiheroes) might find S. S. Van Dine’sPhilo Vance insufferable. Indeed, even during Vance’s heyday, some, including Dashiell Hammett, loathed him: “There is a theory that any one who talks enough on any subject must, if only by chance, finally say something not altogether incorrect. Vance disproves this theory; he manages always, and usually, ridiculously, to be wrong... His conversational manner is that of a high school girl who has been studying the foreign words and phrases in the back of her dictionary.” But Vance’s aristocratic, rugged good looks, sophistication, and encyclopedic knowledge of the arts, painting, religion, and music won him great favor with readers. And in 1926, while Hammett, Caroll John Daly, and Erie Stanley Gardner were breaking new ground in the pages of Black Mask, Van Dine was, according to Howard Haycraft, “breaking all modern publishing records for detective fiction” with the publication of The Canary Murder Case. Vance was so fashionable that literally dozens of movies were adapted from books in which he appeared, and eight different leading men played the role of Vance on the screen. And as you are about to find out, true crime editors, too, seeking to capitalize on this fictional hero, thought up strange new ways of incorporating him into seemingly unrelated yarns.

“I see that Madeleine Smith, the tarnished heroine of the famous old Glasgow poison drama, died yesterday in New York.”

John F. X. Markham, New York’s district attorney, was enjoying his post-prandial cigar in the lounge room of the Stuyvesant Club. With him were Philo Vance and I. It had long been our custom to forgather at the club for dinner and chat on Sunday nights; and it was here that Vance had related to us many of the more famous criminal cases of Europe, with which he had familiarized himself during his criminological studies.