“I imagine, Mr. Groves—” Trant was still glancing at the pad, but now he looked up quickly at Gordon — “that life with Mrs. Weiderbacker was none too easy. She was bossy, difficult, close-fisted, maybe? How much nicer it would have been to have a million dollars of your own. And what a temptation to kill her when there was a perfect fall guy in the house.”
Gordon Groves’s face was thunderous. “You suggest that I—?”
“Oh, not you. But your wife has the identical motive.” Trant twisted around to Daisy. “Very ingenious, Mrs. Groves.”
“Timothy!” It was Freda who leaped up. “How dare you accuse Daisy? All that time she was on the phone taking my dictation.”
“She was?” Trant read aloud from the middle of the pad. “One could almost compare contact spraying with democracy.” He turned to the butler. “Who picked up the mail today?”
“Er — I think, sir, it was Mrs. Groves.”
“Exactly.” Trant shook his head at his sister. “Your speech did arrive after all and it gave a clever murderess an ideal murder set-up. She took the speech from the mailman, copied it out in shorthand, pretended it hadn’t come, and then offered to take it down over the phone.
“A perfect alibi with the shorthand pad as fool-proof evidence. What a cinch to pretend to take dictation, to drop the receiver, to slip into the music room, shoot Mrs. Weiderbacker, and then to run back and pick up the dictation again.
“Too bad for her I made you cut out the contact-spraying paragraph. It was in the copy you mailed but not in the copy you dictated. That, I’m afraid, is going to be her noose.”
Daisy had jumped up now, white-faced and eagle-eyed.
“It’s a lie. I never went near the music room.”
“You’re sure, Mrs. Groves? When we arrived, your face was red and swollen; your eyes were running. It might, of course, have been due to natural grief, but then again...” Trant picked the full-blown yellow rose from his buttonhole and held it under Daisy’s nose. Almost immediately, she sneezed; her eyes started to run, her face to pinken.
“As I thought,” murmured Trant. “Not natural grief, but a violent case of rose-fever.”
He turned rather sadly to his sister. “I’m sorry to do this, Freda,” he said. “But next time you pick a best friend, I recommend someone a little less — cold-blooded.”
His glance at Chloe Carmichael was frankly appreciative. “A burlesque queen, for example.”
Murder on the Waterfront
by Budd Schulberg[6]
Budd Schulberg decided to become a writer when, as a boy, he listened to his father, then in charge of Paramount Studios in Hollywood, read from the worlds of Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad, and Charles Dickens — great teachers all. At the age of fifteen, while traveling to Europe with his family, young Budd began seriously to put words one after the other. The first result was five chapters of a projected novel about a murderer who left no fingerprints because he had only a hook on his wooden arm. “That little number,” says Budd Schulberg, “has fortunately been lost to posterity.”
This was Budd’s “poetry period” too. Later, as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, he wrote short stories, and one of them won a prize in a national intercollegiate contest. But it was during the time he was wording in Hollywood, after graduation from Dartmouth, that Budd Schulberg began to come into his own. His father liked the short stories Budd was writing, showed them to a famous literary agent — and Budd Schulberg, the writer, was launched; for his first half dozen short stories sold to “Collier’s,” “Saturday Evening Post,” and “Liberty.”
One of those first short stories was a little number called “What Makes Sammy Run?” Budd Schulberg conceived the idea of expanding this short into a novel — and the rest is literary history. The novel — also titled WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? — raised a critical storm, added a new phrase to our language, created an unforgettable picture of an all-American heel, became a sensational success, and today has a permanent place in the Modern Library.
But Mr. Schulberg was only on his way. His second novel, THE HARDER THEY FALL, added to his stature by dealing realistically with the tough, ruthless world of prizefighting. And his third novel, THE DISENCHANTED, reached the top of the best-seller lists, achieving both popular and critical acclaim, THE DISENCHANTED, a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, created another great American portrait — that “golden figure of the glittering Twenties” (based on the life and times of F. Scott Fitzgerald).
And then Mr. Schulberg went back — seriously — to his father’s business. He wrote the original story and screenplay of “On the Waterfront” — one of the finest motion pictures in the whole history of that difficult art form. “On the Waterfront” won no less than nine Oscars for 1954 — and all richly deserved. It was voted the best picture of the year; Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint took top honors as best actor and best supporting actress; Elia Kazan was judged the best director of the year; and Budd Schulberg’s story and screenplay, suggested by Malcolm Johnson s Pulitzer Prize newspaper articles, won the most coveted writing award in the motion picture industry. Then in 1955 Mr. Schulberg followed up the prize-winning movie with a novel based substantially on the same material; WATERFRONT was hailed by “The New York Times” as “the best of Schulberg, a full-fledged performance by a gifted American writer.”
And now we bring you Budd Schulberg’s “Murder on the Waterfront.” This tale of Matt Gillis, an Irish-thick; rebel of a longshoreman, has the same background — “the violent, vivid, restless, corrupted” waterfront. Undoubtedly, the story is a by-product of Mr. Schulberg’s research and work on the motion picture and the noveclass="underline" it has the same power, the same honesty, the same impact.
The alarm was about to ring when Matt Gillis reached out his bearlike, heavy-muscled arm and shut it off. Habit. Half-past 6. Summer with the light streaming in around the patched window shades, and winter when half-past 6 was black as midnight. Matt stretched his heavyweight, muscular body and groaned. Habit woke you up at half-past 6 every morning, but habit didn’t make you like it — not on these raw winter mornings when the wind blew in from the sea, whipping along the waterfront with an intensity it seemed to reserve for longshoremen. He shivered in anticipation.
Matt listened to the wind howling through the narrow canyon of Eleventh Street and thought to himself: Another day, another icy-fingered, stinking day. He pushed one foot from under the covers to test the temperature, and then quickly withdrew it into the warmth of the double bed again. Cold. Damn that janitor, Lacey — the one they all called Rudolph because of his perpetually red nose. Never enough heat in the place. Well, the landlord was probably saying, what do they expect for twenty-five a month?
Matt rolled over heavily, ready for the move into his work clothes. “Matt?” his wife, Franny, murmured, feeling for him drowsily in the dark. “I’ll get up; fix you some coffee.”
“It’s all right.” His buxom Fran. Matt patted her. Her plump-pretty Irish face was still swollen with sleep. For a moment he remembered her as she had been fifteen years ago: the prettiest kid in the neighborhood — bright, flirty, sky-blue eyes and a pug nose, a little bit of a girl smothered in Matt’s big arms, a child in the arms of a grizzly. Now she was plump all over, something like him on a smaller, softer scale, as if she had had to grow along his lines to keep him company.