“Lily is motionless — a lifeless, crumpled heap upon the ground. He bends over her body, searching. He finds her handbag. He opens it — takes something from it with his gloved hands... What has he taken? I cannot see... Yes — it is the little roll of violet-colored paper, bound with the green-and-gold string.”
Doctor Alcazar stopped. And waited. He had heard another movement — a sharp rustle — from his left. And a hissing intake of breath.
He’s going. He’s back on his heels. What to use for the knockout?... Ah!
Doctor Alcazar shifted in his chair. Growing excitement appeared to have seized him. His hands gripped the desk-top as his eyes stared down at the globe.
“...He is stealing away... If only I could see his face!... He is limping a little. His leg is paining him, aching. He puts his hand down to it, seeming to adjust something beneath his trouser-leg...”
An odd little cry from the right, a strangled cry of panic-stricken astonishment.
No sound from the left.
“...Ah! He is turning! At last we are going to see his face! He—”
The click of a switch — and the room was flooded with light.
“All right, that’s enough!” The voice that came out of Clinton de Vries was harsh and high-pitched. “Stay where you are. Both of you. Don’t move.”
He was standing — and there was a gun in his hand, squat and black and ugly. His face was a dirty gray color, and his eyes were glazed and bright. He looked at Doctor Alcazar and said, “You heard me. Keep still.” He looked at the hunched, frozen immobility of his wife and said, “You. Get up. Open the safe and takeout the money you put there this morning.”
Doctor Alcazar looked at the French windows. The curtains over them billowed and Avvie stepped into the room. The coat of his non-commital gray suit was tightly buttoned, and his brown felt hat was pulled low on his forehead. His right hand was in his side pocket, grasping a gun.
As de Vries wheeled, Avvie moved forward. “Okay, de Vries,” he snapped. “That’ll do. You’d better drop the pistol.”
He moved steadily across the room, a courageous little man. He said, “I got a warrant for you here,” in the same dry, crackling voice, and then stopped abruptly.
An extraordinary sound had come from the throat of de Vries — an insane, animal sound. His lips rolled back from his teeth and his mouth opened, wide.
His hand flashed up and thrust the muzzle of his gun into his mouth, pointing upwards.
There was an oddly muffled report — and a mess — and no more Clinton de Vries...
Avvie sat in the dimmest corner of the little bar-room. His fingers drummed incessantly on the stained table top, and he kept glancing at the door...
It opened for the twentieth time — and admitted the tall and lean and imposing form of Doctor Alcazar, who paced slowly towards his friend, drew up a chair, sat down, put a hand inside his coat, and slowly pulled out his wallet.
From the wallet he drew an oblong, blue-tinted slip of paper, and turned it so that Avvie could see its face.
Avvie’s eyes opened, very wide. He swallowed. He said, “Ten G’s!” without knowing he’d spoken.
Doctor Alcazar folded the check, put it back in his wallet, and turned and called an order to the barman. An impressive order.
Avvie said, “What we gonna do?” His voice was still hoarse with shock. “Split an’ quit?”
Doctor Alcazar eyed him reprovingly. “My dear Avvie!” he said. “Our hard-gotten gains might, of course, be used to found The Alcazar College of Psychic Research...
“On the other hand,” said Doctor Alcazar, “they could be used to set us up in business...”
“Howzat?” Avvie said. “Whaddya mean — business?”
“The business,” said Doctor Alcazar, “of Private Investigation... You type a report and they give you a century — but you look in the crystal and they give you ten grand!”
Sugar and Spice
by Vera Caspary
Vera Caspary... in the mystery field the name of Vera Caspary evokes another name — LAURA, the title of Miss Caspary’s first detective novel and one of the major successes of this decade, LAURA began as a magazine serial, was then published in book form, later became a sensational motion picture, and finally toured as a play. Indeed, LAURA was so popular in all its processings that one is tempted to think of the author as Laura Caspary... In the course of her varied writing career — advertising copy-miter, editor, novelist, playwright, screen-play miter, even correspondence-school teacher — Vera Caspary has proved herself an explorer of the “aberrations of society.” Her early work was ambitiously serious. In her first book, THE WHITE GIRL (1929), she dealt vividly, harshly, and realistically with the problem of a Negress who left the South for Chicago and posed as white. At that period in her literary growth Vera Caspary mote “in the hard, materialistic style of Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber.” Subsequent novels showed her still probing social backgrounds, and in 1932 her novel, THICKER THAN WATER, depicted the family life of Portuguese Jews in Chicago, describing “the subtle alterations... and the slow fading of orthodox observances.”
After an interval of scripting for the films Miss Caspary created LAURA — “Something different from the run-of-the-mill detective story” and “done with a novel twist and much shill,” according to Will Cuppy’s review. BEDELIA followed — a “curious and clever” tale in which Miss Caspary “ably presented a pathological case history without so much as once finding it necessary to indulge in the special terminology of the psychiatric clinic.” Completing a trio of so-called “psycho-thrillers,” her next book, STRANGER THAN THE TRUTH, was compared by some critics with Kenneth Fearing’s THE BIG CLOCK.
But now, Vera Caspary is “through with it.” She will mite no more detective stories. Perhaps that is why Miss Caspary feels so strongly that she is “not properly a mystery story miter at all.” She has always maintained that murder is only “a dramatic device which heightens the emotion and action, and sharpens character drawing.” Does Miss Caspary really mean that? Merely a dramatic device? What else does Miss Caspary think of the writing craft? Well, she believes that “to be a miter you must have a point of view in what you experience. You need to keep an ear and an eye always at the keyhole, without malice. After you have observed, and listened at keyholes, all you need is a will of iron to ride the beam.”
Taking Miss Caspary at her own word, let us now watch her peeping through the keyhole, looking into the lives of two women and a man, hearing what they say, imagining what they think, observing what they do; let us pin down, throughout the story, Miss Caspary’s own point of view, using that as the catalyst (without malice, remember) which reveals the dissolution of a human soul — for surely that is precisely what the act of murder is...
I have never known a murderer, a murder victim, nor anyone involved in a murder case. I admit that I am a snob, but to my mind crime is sordid and inevitably associated with gangsters, frustrated choir singers in dusty suburban towns, and starving old ladies supposed to have hidden vast fortunes in the bedsprings. I once remarked to a friend that people of our sort were not in the homicide set, and three weeks later heard that her brother-in-law had been arrested as a suspect in the shooting of his rich uncle. It was proved, however, that this was a hunting accident and the brother-in-law exonerated. But it gave me quite a jolt.