Black is the Night: Stories inspired by Cornell Woolrich

INTRODUCTION

MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI

As an inveterate film aficionado, I had seen and thoroughly enjoyed a number of movies based on novels and short stories by the noir American writer Cornell Woolrich (1903–1968) long before I actually read any of them. But already they ‘spoke’ to me, full of Everyman characters racing against time, caught in the webs of fate and injustice, populated with seductive femmes fatales worth losing your heart to, peppered with nail-biting suspense, set against the background of nameless cities and hotel room windows shrouded in night and illuminated by the shimmering light of countless shady bars and dives.

Woolrich, who also wrote as George Hopley and William Irish, had a talent for turning melancholy tales of deceit and murder into something more, which is why the movies took him to heart – from the Golden Age of noir all the way to the French New Wave and later exponents.

He inspired Hitchcock’s Rear Window, François Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid (later remade in the USA as Original Sin), The Leopard Man, Deadline at Dawn, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, If I Should Die Before I Wake, Phantom Lady, I Married a Shadow, I’m Dangerous Tonight, Fassbinder’s Martha and well over fifty further adaptations.

It was with this in mind that, in the mid 1980s when I launched my Black Box Thriller line of hardboiled classic reprints, that I inevitably turned to his books. It felt like being struck by lightning how much more powerful Woolrich’s work was on the page than the way it had been diluted, however well produced, on the silver screen. He was not just a pulp writer but a poet whose sensibility still chimed strongly with the modern world (and my own literary obsessions) and a storyteller with no equal even when he was churning out stories for magazines like a one-man writing factory. To this day, whenever I need reminding how powerful a mere short story can be, I always go back to reading Woolrich, whom I would place on a literary pedestal with mainstream masters of the short form like Katherine Mansfield, Chekhov, Isaac Bashevis Singer or Joseph Conrad; that is how much I rate him.

I was able to reissue four of his novels, a collection of stories and some individual tales in anthologies I edited during the course of my publishing career, and would have done more had the rights situation proven easier. Woolrich died a miserable death, almost straight out of one of his own tales, with no living relative, having during his writing life assigned rights in perpetuity to his work to an assortment of defunct magazines, Hollywood producers and publishers, complicated by the fact that, at a low point and fighting deadlines, he rejigged many of his stories under different titles and sold them illegally again to any taker! Right now much of his work is still controlled by a major bank that runs the estate without much knowledge of the literary sensibilities involved. His fascinating life has been the object of a serious biography by Francis M. Nevins Jr, First You Dream, Then You Die, which at times reads like a story Woolrich might have written.

But his shadow still looms mightily across much of today’s varied territories of noir fiction. When I had the idea of putting together this tribute anthology of brand new stories either inspired by or in homage to Woolrich, I was amazed by the groundswell of interest from writers across not just the spectrum of mystery fiction but also in other genres and the mainstream, with authors, beyond the usual suspects, I would have never guessed at confessing to his influence and importance in their life. I was saddened to be unable to take up all the offers of those authors who wished to contribute to this volume but gladdened by their sincere interest.

As it is, we have a cornucopia of fantastic stories by award-winning authors old and new. Edgar, Anthony, Dagger winners and more; contributors from the USA, the UK, Canada, Israel, Ireland and Portugal, who have all managed to summon the phantom of Cornell Woolrich back to life in such varied ways, which I am confident the reader and that hidden mass of Woolrich fans out there throughout the world will greatly appreciate.

I would finally like to thank George Sandison, Nick Landau and Vivian Cheung at Titan Books who enthusiastically backed the project and a special nod to contributor Ana Teresa Pereira, not just one of Portugal’s most award-laden writers, but also in all probability the world’s number one Cornell Woolrich (and classic Hollywood movies) fan who, from her lair in Madeira, inspired me to assemble this volume.

MJ

WHY CORNELL WOOLRICH MATTERS

NEIL GAIMAN

Ididn’t know who Cornell Woolrich was. I picked up the book, a battered fifth-hand American paperback of Night Has A Thousand Eyes because I had liked the song of that name when I heard it on a Carpenters’ album when I was a boy. I was in my early twenties, and I was about to fall in love. I opened the book, and I read:

Every night he walked along the river, going home. Every night, about one. You do that when you’re young; walk along beside the river, looking at the water, looking at the stars. Sometimes you do that even when you’re a detective, and strictly speaking, have nothing to do with stars.

Openings are hard, but that one was perfect. It reached out and took you by the hand, and told you that you were going on a journey, and that the person leading you knew what they were doing.

It was the prose as much as the plot, and the atmosphere Woolrich created, that caught me as I read: a haunting inevitability, in which fate and the fragility of life were held up for examination before ending up in the darkness. The feeling that the people in the story were trapped in it, the hope that the author cared for them as much as we did and would see them, perhaps, safely all the way to the end. The end of the book was in equal measure doomed and elegiac, and delivered on all of its promises.

I was hooked, and fascinated. It was hard to find more Woolrich to read, then. He was out of print, and I wasn’t sure where to look. Soon enough I found a volume of Woolrich short stories and watched him conjure magic in tiny spaces. I understood immediately why Hitchcock would have appreciated his work, just as I loved that Hitchcock had taken the twist ending of the story he turned into Rear Window (our narrator was in a wheelchair!) and let it become the foundation that the story was built upon. And just like that, as my twenties came to an end, Woolrich came back into print. There was even a biography.

In my imagination Cornell Woolrich had been a huge bear of a man, probably bearded and brooding. It was only when I read the biography that I learned that he was slight and pale, and that life had not treated him kindly, neither in love nor in health, that he had ended his days in (appropriately enough) a wheelchair in a New York hotel lobby, glowering at the world.

The world Cornell Woolrich painted for us with his words is a world in which we will always be disappointed, always left alone, always let down; in which we can expect the worst of people, but just sometimes someone will come through; in which love leads only to betrayal and all we can expect, once our dreams are dead, is for the release of death; in which our hopes and our dreams burn brightly, but in their burning they only make the shadows darker.

Neil Gaiman

THE BLACK WINDOW

JOEL LANE

When the last film had ended,

sometimes, he’d sit in the dark

with a glass in his hand, and watch.

Himself, a thin red-haired boy

on the playing field. A shadow

that slammed him from behind,

a boot sliding down his instep

to freeze the muscle, bring numbness

and hollow pain. Breath in his ear:

How’s that for a dead leg? Then tears

as he stood, unable to run away

or follow. A screen of daylight.

Fifty years later, this hotel room.

Empty bottles on the shelves

where his books had once been.

The TV, never switched off.

And sometimes, there were people:

admirers of a writer he’d forgotten,

drinking companions. He gave them

books and whiskey. They gave him

their faces to mask his ghosts.

And in the night, his dead leg

spoke to him as it blackened.

Its breath smelt of old leaves,

a lost garden, roses and briars.

On a table by the dark window,

the typewriter slept in its hood.

His leg whispered its stories.

Eventually, they cut it off.

He was dead a year later.

MISSING SISTER

JOE R. LANSDALE

When Ralph came in his mother was crying and her face had gained ten years. His father looked three inches shorter and ten pounds heavier. He appeared to have melted into his chair.

No word? Ralph said.

No, said his father. Of course not. No word or I’d tell you… Sorry, Ralph. I’m upset.

We all are.

Ralph had never gotten along with his sister, Mae. She was always looking for attention. Now she really had it. She had been gone for three days, and things didn’t look good. Today he had helped put up fliers with a photo of her on them. That’s where he had been until now.

The cops had finally gotten interested in the whole thing. The first two days they said she’d come home, and now they were thinking she had run off. They weren’t thinking about what else might have happened and how she might not come home ever. Or maybe they were, and just weren’t saying, not wanting to upset the family.

They’ve looked all over, his mother said. They think she ran off with some man.

She didn’t, Ralph said.

Certainly not, his father said. She’s a good girl.

This wasn’t entirely true. She had taken enough drugs that if she could puke them all up from the last few years, she could fill a pharmacy. And the alcohol she’d drank. She barfed that up, she could fill the ocean, make it overflow. Add to that the fact that when he lived at home she was always prowling in his room, looking for something to steal so she could pawn or sell it to buy the pills and drink she wanted.

Do you have any idea where she might be, Ralph? his mother asked.

I’ve thought on it, and no. Can’t come up with a thing.

When you saw her last, did she say anything? his father said. Was she unhappy?

No.

Truth was, since he had come home from university for the holidays, before she went missing, they hadn’t talked much. Just something in passing. They never talked much. And then she became upset with his hobbies. She was always meddling in his business and, considering who she was and what she did, she was extremely judgmental.

Three nights back she had taken his car keys off the nightstand in the hallway. He had decided to go for a drive, as he had some things he needed to do, and then he saw his keys were missing, and immediately knew she had them. It was just like her.

When he came into his parents’ garage, he found her with his car trunk open, looking through the bags he kept back there. His hobbies.

She had opened one of the bags and was looking inside. He knew what she was looking at. It wasn’t something she could sell. It was what he was planning to drive out to the swamp and dispose of.

By the time Mae realized he was there, it was too late. He grabbed a hammer off the tool rack on the wall, and when she turned and started to scream, he ended it with one quick blow to her head.

He put on the gloves that were in the trunk, got a plastic bag out of there, and pulled it over her head quickly to stop the blood from leaking out. If he hadn’t done that, there would have been a lot of it.

Ralph put her in the trunk with the cut-up remains of the other three. She barely fit. It was already crowded back there.

With rags from the rag box his father kept for when he worked on his car, he mopped up the blood and wiped the hammer clean and hung it back on the tool rack. He put the bloody rags in another plastic bag and placed them in the trunk, and closed it.

He pushed the garage door up and drove the car out. The Prius was nearly silent. That was one of his favorite things about that car. Its silence.

Closing the garage door quietly, he drove out to the swamp, drove off a narrow road he knew had a turnaround at the end of it, up close to the river. There was a long pier there that went twenty feet out and over a bit of the water.

When he was parked at the turnaround, he got the bags out of the back. He had already put bricks in the bags in anticipation. His sister had been unexpected. He hadn’t cut her up and he didn’t have weights.

Ralph walked the bags with the body parts and the rags out to the end of the pier. He brought them there one at a time and dropped them in the water. They sank. It was pretty deep there. He remembered that from fishing and swimming there, back when he was young. Back then he had hung out here and thought about his hobbies, which at that time he was yet to pursue. As a kid, at home, he had practiced by cutting up pictures of pretty models in magazines. Scissors cut paper more easily than a hacksaw cut up flesh and bone, and sinew was certainly a bitch.

He had done things with the other girls that he didn’t do with his sister, and he wasn’t feeling the urge to do that with her now. Mae had been killed out of necessity, not out of lust. He wasn’t weird or anything. After all, she was his sister.

Thinking about what to do with Mae for a while, he finally decided to drag her down the little walking trail that was off to the side of the turnaround. He tumbled her out of the trunk and pulled her down the trail, then rolled her body into a ditch that slanted toward the river. She went down swiftly and out of sight, into the ditch, hidden by undergrowth and trees, tucked up in shadow.

He went back to the car and drove home. He opened the garage and carefully glided the car inside. He pulled the door down and looked around in there. It was all right.

He removed his gloves, knowing he’d get rid of them the next day, some place where they wouldn’t be found, in case he should be suspected and looked at for DNA and such.

Inside the kitchen he drank a glass of milk and ate a sandwich. Tomorrow his parents would wonder where Mae was, and a day or so later they would panic. Even then he envisioned the fliers he would help make with her information and a photo of her on them.

But that was then, and this was now, because he had already made those fliers, and they were stapled to light poles and bulletin boards in stores, and now he was standing in the living room comforting his parents. He was not only the oldest of their children, he had become, with one swift swing of the hammer, an only child. His parents just didn’t know it yet. Maybe they’d never know it for sure. If the body wasn’t found, then they could think she ran off to South America somewhere and was doing fine with a mess of kids, or some such.

He decided not to think about it, not while he was with his parents. He might start smiling, and he didn’t believe that was the way you were supposed to act. Yet, it was all he could do not to jump up and click his heels while his parents cried and wondered where she was.

Perhaps he would put up more fliers tomorrow, but he had to somehow find time to study. The biology test coming up at university was going to be a bitch.

A THIN SLICE OF HEAVEN

VASEEM KHAN

1

It’s not that I have anything against strangers turning up at my office in the dead of night; it’s just that usually they’re wearing uniforms and a smirk that says one of us is about to have a good time and the chances are it isn’t me.

Travis von Spee was tall, matinée idol handsome, and charged with murder.

The von told you a little something about him. I’d heard it said that it was a sign of a noble patrilineality. There’s a word for you. The fact that he’d held on to those three little letters – and the Spee – suggested he couldn’t quite bring himself to relinquish a last hold on the Old Country, even with a golden ticket to the promised land burning a hole in his pocket.

I wagered that Travis wasn’t the name on his birth certificate.

Then again, with Hitler starting a bar-room brawl over in Europe, I didn’t blame him. It wasn’t a good time to be a German in L.A.

For a big man, his knock was diffident. I was used to heavy boots kicking back the door, mostly for effect. My door was never locked.

Herr Spee waited for me to usher him into a seat. Manners maketh the man, I suppose, even if you are an accused murderer.

Not that he looked like one. He looked like a tennis player, long-boned, with blue eyes, a firm chin, and the sort of slicked-back blond hair that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a wooden doll.

May I smoke?

Be my guest.

I watched him dig out a pack of Luckies from the pocket of his beautifully cut jacket, light one with a nickel-plated lighter held in shaky hands.

I suppose my hands would shake too, if I was facing a date with the gas chamber.

How can I help you, Mr von Spee?

Travis, please.

Sure. And you can call me Leo. And now that we’re such pals, how about you explain to me what you’re doing here, Travis.

I need your help.

I waited.

You’re familiar with my case, yes?

Sure. I hear you brutally murdered a nineteen-year-old co-ed.

His eyes flashed. I didn’t do it. I’m being framed.

I resisted the urge to pick him up by the collar and throw him out. Not that I could. He had a good seventy pounds on me. If that’s the case, you’ll have your day in court.

I doubt it. The forces ranged against me are… Wagnerian.

Poetic. I hope he remembered to quote Nietzsche when they had him strapped to the chair with cyanide wafting around his nostrils.

Alright. I’ll play along. Who framed you?

James Crawford.

I tapped out a little scale on the scarred surface of my desk. Crawford. There was no need to say ‘the financier’. I doubted there was a soul in the city who didn’t know what Crawford did, how much he was worth, or who he’d had knee-capped for crossing him. Why?

Because I’m having an affair with his wife.

I leaned back. A cry spiralled up from the street below. The lament of a drunk. You got a lot of them in this neck of the woods, especially around the witching hour. What with the depressed rents attracting a recent flood of flatfoots, the neighbourhood had really gone to the dogs.

I listened as he explained.

Three months ago, he’d met Nancy Crawford at an art gallery – he worked there as a part-time gallery assistant – while he pursued an unlikely career on the silver screen. They’d hit it off. She’d invited him back to a house in the hills, a secluded pied-à-terre her husband had bought a while back then forgotten about, the way some rich men do when they have too many toys.

Or wives.

In the normal course of things, the affair would have petered out, and young Travis would have found himself booted back out of Eden.

But Cupid had thrown a spanner in the works.

They’d fallen in love.

I suppose the good lady Crawford bankrolled your bail?

He gave me a sharp glance.

I took a bottle of bourbon from my desk, poured a glass. I tipped the bottle at him, but he shook his head.

"This kid you killed—sorry – allegedly killed – did you know her?"

He nodded. We stepped out together before I met Nancy. She worked at the art gallery.

And she was killed at the house where you… consorted with Mrs Crawford, correct?

He didn’t like the word ‘consorted’. I’d known he wouldn’t. Yes.

So, aside from the fact that you knew her, why does the D.A. think you did it?

He seemed to disconnect for a moment, then, They say they have physical evidence.

Such as?

I’ll find out soon.

And your motive?

He hesitated, and at that point the door opened and another late-night caller joined the party.

2

She was a small woman, maybe a decade older than young von Spee, but elegant in a way only the very rich can afford to be. She was nicely put together, with tawny-coloured hair in a romantic wave cut, parted down the middle. She wore expensive-looking wireframe spectacles and the clothes on her back would probably have paid a year’s rent on my office, with change for dinner and a show.

Travis got to his feet and greeted her with soulful eyes. He lowered his great head and she pecked him chastely on the cheek, then the pair of them sat down, arms entwined like teenage lovers.

Mrs Crawford, I presume?

I knew who she was, of course, but in a town like L.A. it always paid to make the well-known think they weren’t as famous as they supposed.

Please call me Nancy, Mr Rubin.

And you can call me Leo. Or Leonidas. My father had a sense of humour, God rest his soul.

She gave a wan smile. I apologise for my tardiness, but Travis and I can’t afford to be seen together.

I understand.

Her eyes were the sort of blue you saw at the bottom of swimming pools. Has Travis explained the situation?

He was about to tell me what motive the D.A. has ascribed to him for the murder.

She winced. The word ‘murder’ generated the same reaction in some rich folks as the word ‘bankruptcy’.

He didn’t do it.

That wasn’t my question.

Travis stirred back to life. They say she found out about our relationship and attempted to blackmail me. A woman scorned. I lured her to Nancy’s hillside house and killed her.

How did you get in?

Nancy gave me a key. The police found it in my apartment.

Presumably you have no alibi for the time of the murder?

He shook his head. I was by myself. I’d been sent out of the city to pick up an item for the gallery.

But no one can verify your whereabouts?

Not for the time Annie was killed.

Motive, means, and opportunity, I muttered. The D.A.’s holy trinity.

He said nothing.

Her hand tightened around his. I sensed her desperation. Here was a woman who hadn’t expected to fall for a man like Travis von Spee. She prided herself on making sensible life choices.

Then again, she’d married James Crawford.

I sipped at my bourbon. "So… why are you here?"

Nancy spoke. We want you to investigate, Mr Rubin.

I gave a faint smile. Why me? With your dough you can afford any private dick in the city.

Because you once helped a man called Arnold Tremaine. You helped him when no one else would. You helped him when my husband tried to destroy him.

Arnie Tremaine. A long time ago. I was a different man, then. Ten years schlepping around in shoes like mine and you learn that idealism is strictly for the birds.

Travis couldn’t have done this, she continued.

What makes you so sure?

He’s not a violent man. Her conviction was almost touching. I shot a glance at von Spee. How well did she really know him? What would a man do to hold on to a life of ease, bankrolled by a besotted older woman?

I thought about the last time I’d taken on James Crawford. It had cost me my job, my friends, and the life I thought I was building.

Fifty dollars an hour plus expenses, I said. That’s double my usual rate, but I figure your husband owes me.

That’s quite acceptable… Leo.

I raised my glass. I’ll drink to that.

3

If you want to meet a dirty cop, don’t go to a bar, go to church.

I’d known John Roscoe for years. Once upon a time we’d been friends, rookies on the force. The day I decided to take on James Crawford, Roscoe tried to warn me.

Needless to say, I’d had my ears on backwards.

I parked my clapped-out Packard convertible behind a black sedan that resembled a hearse, then made my way into the Church of All Saints on the corner of Highland and Fifth.

The air was a furnace. I felt like a turkey walking into an oven.

Roscoe was hunched in a pew at the rear, cigarette in hand. He’d put on weight since I’d last seen him, and hadn’t shaved in what looked like a week. He reeked of sweat and a cologne so stiff it was like a crack to the jaw. Put a hotdog in his hand and he’d resemble any other bum on Wilshire Boulevard.

I slipped onto the pew and looked up at the altar, where Christ avoided my gaze, peering up at the heavens like a black man in a dark alley during a roust. An old priest shuffled around the nave, throwing disapproving glances our way.

I think he wants you to put out that cigarette.

Roscoe grunted, then took a long deliberate draw, and launched a cloud of smoke at me.

I coughed, just to be polite, then said, How’s Arlene?

She left me.

Finally saw the light, huh?

My attempt at humour fell to the floor and scuttled off to a corner to die.

For what it’s worth: thanks for coming.

I didn’t come here to help you. I came here to warn you. Don’t cross the D.A. on this one. He’ll drop a building on you.

Remind me, who’s paying the D.A.’s salary these days? The city or James Crawford?

He gave me a filthy look, then sucked on his cigarette again.

You’re here now. You might as well tell me what you know.

He killed her. Von Spee.

"How do you know?"

A little thing called evidence.

He says Crawford framed him.

Sure. And my old man’s the King of Siam.

I took out a handkerchief and mopped my brow, then the back of my neck. If it’s as open and shut as you say, you fellas have nothing to fear from little old me.

The corners of his mouth winched up, the sort of smile you saw on a corpse with rigor mortis and a story to tell. "We have a witness at the art gallery says they’ve been going toe to toe for a while now. They were lovers, were being the operative word. But I’m guessing you knew that. Same witness swears blind he called her just an hour before she died. Moments later, she goes racing out of there like her tail was on fire."

There’s got to be more. McGregor wouldn’t stick his neck out on a bunch of circumstantial hooey.

Rhett McGregor was the D.A., the sort of man who’d pick the Pope up by the ankles and shake him around a bit, just to see what fell out. He’d been a sharp prosecutor, once upon a time, before he decided he liked the high life more than he liked justice, and put up a For Rent sign outside his office.

We found a shirt button in her hand. She tore it from her attacker when he strangled her. That was after he cracked her on the back of the head with a poker to soften her up.

Let me guess: the button came from Travis’ shirt?

He smiled without humour. We found the shirt in his apartment. Get this: the buttons are monogrammed. TVS. How do you like that?

I watched the priest fiddle with the altar, wiping down Christ’s feet. How difficult would it have been for Crawford’s thugs to break in to his apartment?

He squinted at me. Is that your angle? That Crawford did this?

Or paid someone to set our boy up.

Why would he do that?

You know why.

He gave me a sideways look that told me he knew exactly what I meant. If the story about the two lovebirds wasn’t public knowledge yet, it soon would be.

Then again, James Crawford had a great deal of clout in this city, maybe even enough to impose a sense of discretion on the free press.

For a time, at least.

4

The La Brea Art Gallery was stuck between a famous drugstore and a museum of Egyptian antiquities. The storefront was glitzy, with gold and silver trim around the windows, and all sorts of bizarre junk on display, laid out on swards of purple velvet. Art, I supposed, though you’d have to be rich, mad, or from Mars to recognise it as such.

Inside, the space was vast, with plain white walls, like a mental institution. Canvasses hung at discreet intervals, big ones, small ones, ones that made no sense. Sculptures were dotted about, on marble pedestals, interspersed with bronze statues of figures wearing less clothing than would usually be considered polite for a weekday afternoon in downtown L.A.

This wasn’t the sort of place where price tags were displayed, but I could guess, judging from the pair of armed security guards lounging by the counter and hitting on the receptionist, that harried husbands didn’t just walk in off the street and pick up a gewgaw for the wife’s forgotten birthday.

I introduced myself and asked for a Janine Hanson.

The two guards looked me up and down as if they’d stepped in something unsavoury and it had come alive and then walked in the door behind them.

So, fellas, I don’t suppose you have anything in here by Kandinsky, specifically from his Blue Rider period? I love the way he and Franz Marc improvise colour the way musicians use tone in a piece of music.

They exchanged glances as if I’d asked them to work out the meaning of life. In Mandarin.

Hanson arrived. A tall, platinum blonde in a wide-shouldered olive dress. She could have made a killing on the impersonator circuit as a double for Jean Harlow, if Harlow hadn’t died a couple of years ago.

Five minutes later, we were sitting in a spick and span office bigger than my apartment, Harlow with a cigarette jittering around in her fingers.

He killed her alright, that Kraut son of a bitch.

For a vision of elegance, she sure knew how to cuss.

How long were Travis and Annie together?

A year. He strung her along.

He says they broke it off months ago.

That’s a filthy lie. He proposed to her back in June. She’d still be wearing his engagement ring if she hadn’t thrown it in his face when she found out about Nancy Crawford.

A little detail Travis von Spee had neglected to mention.

She sucked on her cigarette. There’s something else. She made me promise not to tell anyone, but I guess it doesn’t matter now. Her lower lip quivered. She was pregnant. With Travis’ child.

Did he know about it?

He knew about it. She made sure he did.

Was she blackmailing him?

I hate that word, don’t you?

How about you answer the question?

She looked at me as if I’d socked her in the kisser. She just wanted what was owed to her. Travis made promises. And then that stuck-up bitch walks in the door and he drops Annie like it was nothing.

He first met Nancy Crawford here, is that right?

She nodded. Mr Crawford is a regular here. He collects art. Spends a fortune. He was one of Annie’s clients. She could charm him into buying anything. His wife never bothered to grace us with her presence. But then, one day, she just walks in out of the blue. Alone. Travis happens to be out front and offers to show her around. And that was that.

Let’s talk about the day of the murder. You told the cops Annie received a call here, from Travis. She left immediately after. That was the last time anyone saw her alive.

Yes.

How do you know the call was from Travis?

Because I heard her say his name.

What did she say exactly?

I don’t know. I just heard her say the name. Travis.

So you can’t be sure it was him on the other end of the line?

Who else would it be? Besides, they’d had a spat the day before.

What about?

Nothing important. But she’d had a bellyful of him. I think she’d been threatening to go public with what she knew about him and Nancy.

Did you tell the cops that?

You bet I did.

I changed tack.

Did Annie have family in L.A.? Close friends?

We were her friends. As for family… She blew in from an Okie town and never looked back. The only family she ever mentioned was an aunt. A Fran Rice. She’s in a nursing home in Glendale.

5

The Macon Carter Nursing Home was a stone’s throw from the eastern boundary of Griffith Park, on the corner of Pacific and Vine, one of the dozens of private enterprises that had sprung up in recent years in the wake of the Old Age Assistance grants programme. By handing the cash direct to the elderly, the federal government had inadvertently provided the incentive for privately-run outfits to muscle out the public operators that had long treated their patients like cans of meat on a conveyor belt.

I flashed my PI badge at the receptionist along with a full set of gums, and was duly escorted through whitewashed corridors and out over a flag-stoned path to a walled garden where a troop of wizened shamans were sunning themselves like lizards.

Fran Rice was eighty-two years old, with thinning hair as white as snow, liver-spotted hands, and the sort of face that suggested she’d lived a life of excess. She was sat in a wheelchair staring into space.

The nurse warned me the old gal was not entirely compos mentis.

I dragged a wicker garden seat across the lawn and parked myself directly opposite her, obstructing her line of sight into whatever dimension she happened to be currently peering into.

Her face folded into a petulant frown.

Introducing myself, I explained that I was here to talk about her niece Annie Williams.

She said nothing for a while and I thought she might have drifted into sleep, with her eyes open, like they say tired horses sometimes do.

Annie’s dead.

I know, Mrs Rice.

Miss. Not Mrs. I never married. God never made the man who could tame me.

My apologies, Miss—

Call me Franny. You’re handsome.

That’s nice of you to say. Now, about Annie—

You’re supposed to return the compliment.

Her eyes glimmered like hot stones.

I smiled. Appearances can be deceptive, and it seemed to me Franny Rice’s doolally act was just that. An act.

We started talking. She told me about Annie, her only connection to the rest of her family. Annie had visited regularly, and spent hours chatting about her life.

It was that hood from the gallery, said Franny. He killed her. I know he did.

The police think so, I said. They arrested him. He’s out on bail.

"Hah. The police. They sent an officer out here. He was all of seven years old. A runny nose and pants that didn’t fit. Didn’t ask me a goddamned thing. Just wanted to let me know that Annie was dead." Tears welled in her eyes.

Well, I guess I’d like to ask you a few questions, if I may. Just to build up a picture of Annie’s life in these past months. Did she mention to you that she was pregnant?

Her head creaked up and down like a rusty derrick. She told me. I told her to get rid of it. Nothing good could come of keeping it. But she wouldn’t listen. She thought the kid was her meal ticket. Thought the father would pay through the nose.

She blackmailed him?

She unleashed a cackle that turned a couple of other heads. Blackmail? Only a man would use that word. She didn’t put that baby in there all by herself, Mr Handsome. Her expression became sorrowful. I guess she underestimated him.

Travis?

Travis? No, not Travis. The father.

I sat upright. "Travis is the father, Miss Rice."

You’re dumber than you look, she said. Travis wasn’t the father of Annie’s baby.

I frowned. But you said it was the man from the gallery.

Yes. The other one. The older guy.

6

James Crawford’s main place of residence was a white frame mansion on Lafayette Park, heralded by a gate so far from the house you needed a pair of binoculars to catch sight of the porte cochère.

A gang of hoods masquerading as security guards lounged at the gate.

They exchanged belly laughs as I wheezed my Packard up to the gate, then invited me to step out so they could frisk me like I owed them money.

By the time I was bounced up to the mansion, I felt like I’d spent an hour in a Turkish hammam.

Frankly, I was surprised Crawford had let me in the house, but I guess he had little to fear from me and knew it.

I was let in by a black butler named Jackson, who bade me follow him across a hall wider than a pair of football fields laid end to end, through a pair of French doors, and up a wrought-iron staircase to a carpeted landing. Along the walls were large oil canvasses of men engaged in violence throughout history: a sword-wielding Crusader, Davy Crockett at the Alamo, a soldier heading out of a trench at the Somme. I guessed Crawford saw himself as a great man of action; in some ways he was, though there’d never been anything noble about his particular crusades.

Jackson knocked on a tall wooden door, and a booming voice bade us enter.

James Crawford’s study was vast, with a high ceiling painted like the Sistine Chapel, and a red carpet that stretched from edge to edge like a lake of blood. Enormous drapes had been pulled back from a window that looked out onto rolling acres in which horses gambolled and stable-hands chased them around with grooming brushes.

Antiques were dotted about, an eclectic mix that looked as if someone had raided a very expensive cupboard and then thrown the contents around the room and left them where they lay. Crawford had about as much of an eye for art as I did, but he went out of his way to convince you otherwise, and had the chequebook to buy himself a veneer of taste.

A storybook giant in a buttoned-up oriental jacket and a turban stood quietly to one side. His complexion was dark, his beard was neatly trimmed, and his demeanour suggested violence would only become an option if I made it absolutely necessary.

I resolved to not make it necessary.

James Crawford was sitting behind a mahogany desk the size of a landing field, dressed in a crisp white shirt and silk tie. His blond hair was slicked back, and his blue eyes were gazing at me with curiosity, the way a cat sizes up a mouse between its paws.

A fat cigar was held in one hand.

Crawford only smoked Partagas Habanas and made damn sure everyone knew it.

Leo Rubin, he said, a wide grin cracking open his features. The shine on his porcelain teeth could have dazzled a blind beggar. Abdul – he waved his cigar at the turbaned Indian – take a gander at our friend here. That there is righteousness personified, mister. Mark it well. It’s the sort of thing that gets a man killed.

My hands balled into fists by my sides and I had to stamp down on the urge to leap across the desk.

On the surface, James Crawford was a businessman, a financier, a man who made dreams come true in the city of angels. He’d clawed his way up from the dirt, a granite-chinned personification of the American dream. The trouble is that dirt clings to you, no matter how high you climb, and, for some, it’s a hard habit to break. Crawford had a hand in every dirty racket you could think of, including the dirtiest one of all: politics. Rumour had it, he’d bankrolled the crooked campaigns of more than one of the birds now sitting fat as Christmas turkeys up in City Hall.

Smoke drifted over to me, as fragrant as the perfume of a sheikh’s favourite catamite. The smile on his puss gave me the itch.

I want to talk to you about Annie Williams.

His eyes narrowed, and then he grinned. A tragedy, what happened to that girl. I hear the guy who did it is out on bail. If the cops let me have my way, it wouldn’t even get to trial.

He didn’t do it.

Way I hear it, it’s an open and shut case.

Who told you that? Your friend McGregor?

He smiled. As it happens, the D.A. and I enjoyed a round of golf just the other day.

"Travis didn’t do it. You did it."

He straightened in his chair. I’d choose my next words carefully. You wouldn’t want to say something you later regret. Not again.

I’m guessing you don’t have all of the facts. About your wife, for instance.

He frowned. Nancy? What’s she got to do with this?

It was my turn to smile.

Abdul. Go powder your nose.

The big man glanced between us.

Crawford reached into a drawer and laid a pearl-handled automatic onto the desk. It’s fine. Leo’s as docile as a kitty kat, ain’t that right?

Abdul left the room on silken feet, closing the door behind him.

Alright, pal. You have my attention.

"You were sleeping with Annie Williams. Nature followed its course. But when she asked