James Cain - The Baby in the Icebox and Other Short Fiction

He kept I up, while women creamed all over, then pulled a gun from his pocket, and let go at the ceiling, so it sounded like the field artillery, as shots always do when fired inside a room. Jack jumped for him and hit the deck, as his feet shot from under him on the slippery wood of the dance floor. Joe swung, missed, swung again, and landed, so Mr. Drunk went down. But when Joe scrambled for the gun, there came this voice through the smoke: “Hold it! As you were — and leave that gun alone.”

Then hulking in came this short-necked, thick-shouldered thing, in Homburg hat, double-breasted coat, and white muffler, one hand in his pocket, the other giving an imitation of a movie gangster. He said keep still and nobody would get hurt, but “I won’t stand for tricks.” He helped Jack up, asked how he’d been. Jack said: “Young man, let me tell you something—”

“How you been? I asked.”

“Fine, Mr. Rocco.”

“Any telling, Jack — I’ll do it.”

Then, to her: “Lydia, how’ve you been?”

“That doesn’t concern you.”

Then she burst out about what he had done to his mother, the gyp he’d handed his father, and his propositions to her, and I got it, at last, who this idiot was. He listened, but right in the middle of it, he waved his hand toward me and asked: “Who’s this guy?”

“Vanny, I think you know.”

“Guy, are you the boy friend?”

“If so I don’t tell you.”

I sounded tough, but my belly didn’t feel that way. They had it some more, and he connected me with the tune, and seemed to enjoy it a lot, that it had told him where to find her, on the broadcast as here now tonight. But he kept creeping closer, to where we were all lined up, with the drunk stretched on the floor, the gun under his hand, and I suddenly felt the prickle, that Vanny was really nuts, and in a minute meant to kill her. It also crossed my mind, that a guy who plays the guitar has a left hand made of steel, from squeezing down on the strings, and is a dead sure judge of distance, to the last eighth of an inch. I prayed I could forget it, told myself I owed her nothing at all, that she’d turned on me cold, with no good reason. I concentrated, to dismiss the thought entirely.

No soap.

I grabbed for my chord and got it.

I choked down on his hand, the one he held in his pocket, while hell broke loose in the place, with women screaming, men running, and fists trying to help, I had the gun hand all right, but when I reached for the other he twisted, butted, and bit, and for that long I thought he’d get loose, and that I was a gone pigeon. The gun barked, and a piledriver hit my leg. I went down. Another gun spoke and he went down beside me. Then here was Jack, the drunk’s gun in his hand, stepping in close, and firing again to make sure.

I blacked out.

I came to, and then she was there, a knife in her hand, ripping the cloth away from the outside of my leg, grabbing napkins, stanching blood, while somewhere ten miles off I could hear Jack’s voice, as he yelled into a phone. On the floor right beside me was something under a tablecloth.

That went on for some time, with Joe calming things down and some people sliding out. The band came in, and I heard a boy ask for his guitar. Somebody brought it to him. And then, at last, came the screech of sirens, and she whispered some thanks to God.

Then, while the cops were catching up, with me, with Jack, and what was under the cloth, we both went kind of haywire, me laughing, she crying, and both in each others’ arms. I said: “Lydia, Lydia, you’re not taking that plane. They legalize things in Maryland, one thing specially, except that instead of wheels, they generally use a ring.”

Still holding my leg with one hand she pulled me close with the other, kissed me and kept on kissing me, and couldn’t speak at all. All legalized now, is what I started to tell about — with Jack as best man, naturally.

James M. Cain wrote six magazine serials, all while he was in California, and he considered them “commercial stories” — written primarily for quick money from either a magazine, studio, or both. But Cain also considered “Old Man Posterity” the only judge of literary merit, and by the Old Man’s measure some of these stories have had a surprising life of their own. Double Indemnity, for example: It was Cain’s first serial, written strictly for a quick sale in the hope of capitalizing on his fame as the author of the controversial, best-selling Postman. The editor of Redbook, especially, had been pressing Ms. Haggard for a Cain mystery. But when Cain sent Double Indemnity to New York, Redbook declined it. This annoyed Cain, who told Alfred A. Knopf that he considered the story “a piece of tripe [that] will never go between hardcovers while I live. The penalty, I suppose, for doing something like this is that you don’t even sell it to magazines.”

Cain gave serious thought to rewriting Double Indemnity in the manner of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, exploring “what forces of destiny brought these particular people to this dreadful spot, at this particular time, on this particular day.” But before he could rework it, Edith Haggard sold Double Indemnity to Liberty, and when it came out over eight weeks in early 1936, it created a sensation. Liberty immediately wanted another, and Cain by then needed money to finance a trip to Mexico to research his still-evolving Serenade. So he wrote a serial about a female opera star whose businessman husband suddenly discovers his voice is better than his wife’s. Cain called this one Two Can Sing, but when he sent it to New York, Liberty turned it down. The editor wanted more murder. Then 20th Century-Fox bought Two Can Sing for $8,000. (It was made twice into movies, in 1939 as Wife, Husband and Friend starring Loretta Young, Warner Baxter, Binnie Barnes, and Cesar Romero, and in 1949 as Everybody Does It starring Linda Darnell, Paul Douglas, and Celeste Holm.) Later, after it sold to the American, it proved the most popular short novel the magazine ever published. The editor, Albert Benjamin, pleaded with Cain for another. By now, Serenade had been published, creating almost as much excitement as Postman, and Cain was hotter than ever.

His next serial grew out of a conversation he once had with a Collier’s editor (“How about a Cinderella story with a modern twist? What about a waitress marrying a Harvard man?”). He wrote it specifically with Collier’s in mind, but when his agent sent the magazine the story — called Modern Cinderella — Collier’s turned it down, primarily, Cain thought, because it was also concerned with organized labor. But Universal bought it for $17,500 late in 1937 and made it into a soppy little film called When Tomorrow Comes, starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer.

The following year, Cain wrote Money and the Woman, which Liberty bought immediately. It was also sold to Warner Brothers, and the studio assigned the script to Robert Presnell. When the film, starring Jeffrey Lynn and Brenda Marshall, was released in 1940, Variety said the script was all right and the story okay, “but somewhere along the line, the plot went askew. Result is a mild ‘B’ film.”

Cain did not attempt another serial until late 1941, when, recuperating from an operation and needing money, he wrote Love’s Lovely Counterfeit. It was, he said, the only story he ever wrote with the movies in mind. But it was also a story about the seamier side of city politics, and after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and America entered World War II, neither the magazines nor the studios were interested in fiction criticizing American institutions, and the story never sold.