Murder Plus: True Crime Stories From The Masters Of Detective Fiction

... And then there are those who only occasionally made crime their business like Dashiell Hammett’s old drinking buddy, Nunnally Johnson. Johnson is remembered today for writing, producing, and directing powerful westerns such as The Gunfighter (starring Gregory Peck), gripping tales of suspense like The Dark Mirror (starring Olivia de Havilland), social commentaries like The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (Gregory Peck, Jennifer Jones, Lee J. Cobb, Frederic March), and lighthearted comedies like Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (starring William Powell and Ann Blyth) and How to Marry a Millionaire (starring Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable). In the mid-1920s, before Hollywood beckoned, Johnson was a fledgling newspaperman for the Brooklyn Daily Journal and a short story writer for The Saturday Evening Post and H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s The Smart Set. That’s when this never-before-collected, true crime story appeared. Written in the as-told-to format (the teller is one Maxwell Livingston), it purports to offer “the inside facts about jewel thefts in exclusive society.” It has a quirky and amusing style all its own.

A Scream in the Dark

Nan shuddered. “I’m nervous,” she explained, drawing her scarf tighter under her chin. I nodded sympathetically. The situation was disturbing.

“I feel as if something were going to happen again,” she went on, then paused before adding: “And yet, I’m glad I came. It really is thrilling, don’t you think, Max?”

My nod this time was not so sympathetic. I suspected that whatever thrill was on the way, would probably be a bit more extravagant than my taste liked.

“Just think” — eagerly — “there’s a thief in our crowd, a real Raffles, working right at his trade! Twice now he’s got away with stuff, valuable stuff, from under our very noses.”

“You’ve been reading the papers too much,” I objected. “It’s nonsense to think that any of the people who came to the Brandons’ a month ago, or those who came to the Merritts’, would be capable of that. It was a chance, pure chance both times, that a robbery took place. A professional yegg did it, or two professional yeggs. Remember, there’ve been more than two house parties this year on Long Island.”

“Perhaps” — unconvinced; “but I have a feeling you’re wrong. That sheriff, Ruel, says—”

“Ruel is a fathead,” I broke in, “a caricature of a sleuth. Who, pray, could it have been? Your own brother? Ted Harrison? Polly Gleason? Mrs. Fothergill? Harry Fothergill?”

“None of those, silly. But there has always been one or two others, people we didn’t know very well.”

“Who then?” I insisted. “Count them off. First there was Tim Crosby.” I stopped to see what effect this name would have on her.

She leaped at the bait.

“You are silly!” she said, flaring up. “You’ve known Tim as long as you’ve known me.”

“But,” I reminded her, “Tim has been away — been away very very mysteriously. Even you hadn’t seen him for two years until he walked into the Brandons’. What has he been doing? How is he making his living? He certainly doesn’t toil, and yet he doesn’t borrow. The Crosby fortune has evaporated. Where, please tell me, does the money come from?”

There was anger in her eyes as she returned snappily: “You should be ashamed of yourself, Max, claiming to be a friend of Tim’s, and talking of him like that! I won’t listen to it. Unless you stop I’ll go in.”

“Please understand,” I insisted, “this is purely an academic discussion. I no more think Tim would steal from the Brandons or the Merritts than you do. I was simply going over the situation. And as for my having betrayed a friendship, you’ve, in exactly the same manner, betrayed all of your friendships here, by suspecting a thief among them.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean— Go ahead then.” She cooled off. “This is all impersonal, of course.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “Next, then, we may mention two men, both complete strangers to all of us, and both introduced and sponsored by Tim.”

Again she rose. “Why Tim all the time?” She demanded. “You are directly intimating something, Max, and it is not impersonal, either. You know very well that the first man — I forget his name — was an old army friend of Tim’s; and the second man—”

“The second,” I assisted her, “was an old college friend. Did you ever see anybody look less like a college man — old or young? Or act less like a college man?”

“It’s outrageous!”

“Well” — I was willing to pass over the matter, for it really was chance that had led me to mention Tim again — “there was this Englishman, Darcy, who claims to be a journalist and novelist and what-not. And he” — the idea occurred to me suddenly — “has been present at the Brandons’, at the Merritts’, and is coming here to-night. Otherwise, he’s been nowhere else so far as we know.”

Nan was stumped. “I don’t know,” she said after a pause, very slowly. “Polly Gleason vouches for him. Polly surely wouldn’t bring a crook in. And besides—”

“Yes, I know — and besides, he hasn’t any of the earmarks of a crook, of the kind of crook you’ve read about,” I finished the sentence for her. “He’s charming, isn’t he?”

“I think so.”

The list, so far as I could remember, went no further. And it was Nan who broke the silence.

“Why,” she demanded, “do you think Tim keeps bringing strangers in?”

“They are old army and college friends,” I reminded her slyly. “Why? Does it worry you?”

Her only answer was to jump down from the balustrade where we had been sitting, and start toward the door.

“Let’s go in,” she said. “I think somebody’s just arrived.”

I took one more puff on my cigarette and, throwing it away, followed her in. Nan was almost at the reception-room door. She had stopped and was listening. Beyond the door the usual introductions for a newcomer, a stranger, were going on. A voice, Tim Crosby’s:

“And I was sure you wouldn’t mind, so I brought him along. Mrs. Gleason, Mr. Durling, another of my old army pals.”

An odd light came into Nan’s eyes, a queer, troubled light, as she turned to me.

“Another stranger is here!”

Then, laughing, as though at her own suspicion, she parted the curtains which separated us from the reception room. The next minute she was acknowledging an introduction to Mr. Durling.

As I say, I was nervous too. So much had been said in the newspapers about the two robberies, and so lurid and persuasive — to me — had been the intimations of a Raffles, that I half believed it to be true. Only, who among these people, among this coterie of ours, could it be?

I had catalogued the names as much for myself as for Nan. All of the others were friends for whose honesty I would have bonded my life. But of Tim Crosby I knew nothing beyond the fact that he was a companionable lad who had been God knows where for the two years since his father’s death. He had inherited nothing, so people said, and yet — and this is the kind of thing that always puzzles me — he lived well, upheld his end financially in whatever the crowd did, and never worked. Men who can live without work invariably hold a fascination for me.

As for his apparently endless number of old college and army friends, I was willing to suspect any and all of them, particularly the latest, Mr. Durling. They all, the three, were of a stripe — gaudily dressed, inclined to be overly familiar on short acquaintance, and altogether too willing to be taken for granted.

I acknowledge, though, that in mentioning Leo Darcy as I had, I had done him an injustice. I had no reason on earth for suspecting him any ill intentions at all. He was Polly’s own guest, and without doubt he had brought the best of references, even assuming that she had not known him abroad. Well bred, well read, well mannered, he had quite won the liking of all of us — except me.

But I don’t count in such a respect. It was only that in him I seemed to see a little too much eagerness to be affable, to be accepted; indeed, just such another quality as I had found in Tim Crosby’s friends, with more polish. But then, I’m a bit diffident socially, and so no fit judge of such things.

The subject of the thefts came up, of course, at dinner. It was Leo Darcy who started it.

“I know,” he said in his pert little way, “that we’ve all been thinking at one time or another this evening about these little unpleasantnesses. It’s quite a revelation to me, I assure you. Never before did I fancy that some evening I might be sitting in er — er — in terror, you might say, lest a robber spring in the window.”

“Stuff!” Polly declared. “There’s little here in this house to tempt a robber.”

It was Durling who denied this. “Look at those pearls around your neck. Look at Mrs. Fothergill’s wrist watch, worth every bit of five hundred dollars. Look at—”

By chance my eyes strayed to Tim Crosby. He was glaring at his old army pal. But Durling failed to notice.

“Yes,” Nan chimed in, “and look at Polly’s rings.”

We looked, all of us, for some reason, though we knew them, had seen them a hundred times. Three platinum and diamond affairs that glistened wickedly as Polly held them up. She was proud of them, reveled in having them on her fingers. But fascinating as they were, they stirred some sense of danger in all of us, I believe.

Anyway, nobody spoke for a while. Again I glanced at Tim Crosby. His face was white as he busied himself with his food, and he kept his eyes on his plate. Durling, who sat at Polly’s left, stared blandly at the stones, and Darcy smiled affably across the table at Nan, as though they shared a secret between them.

“When we dance,” he presently said to her, “I’d like to have the first with you. May I?”

It was this ease, this ability to say things I couldn’t in a way that I couldn’t that set me a little against Darcy. I should have waited to ask that question until afterward, when so many attentions were not alert to be centered on anything that came to hand.

Nan nodded.

“I danced with Lady Diana once,” he went on. “She is tall, you know, and I am not so tall. It must have been torture to her, and certainly I was most fearful that she would say: T can’t go on with this; you are not tall enough for me.’ But she is as tolerant as she is beautiful, and so we finished it.”

A maid came in and stopped beside Polly.

“Excuse me,” she nodded to Darcy, “but shall I serve coffee now?”

Polly nodded, and the maid withdrew. The girl returned in another minute, and presently, in spite of the suppressed tension, we all felt pleasantly stimulated.

Darcy took up his story where he left off, a rambling but lightly narrated account of another week-end, in England, when there came a second interruption. Tim Crosby had risen from the table.

“Excuse me,” he said hurriedly, “but I think it’s started to rain and my car’s in the drive.”

He went around the table toward the door. Polly called to him: “Go through the pantry, Tim. It’s quicker.”

“I was going to,” he replied. He pushed the swinging door and disappeared. We heard him stumble.

Polly laughed. “Golf sticks,” she explained.

The words were scarcely out of her mouth when, astonishingly, the lights went out. For a second we sat struck silent, startled, our nerves suddenly taut. I, for one, hadn’t realized the tension. Then Polly giggled.

“He fell against the switch button,” she said. “Will somebody—”

I pushed my chair back hastily. Another chair scraped on the floor. I put out my hands to grope my way.

“It’s on the left side—”

The voice broke, raised into an ear-splitting scream, a scream of fright, of panic. A chair turned over. There were sudden noises, as somebody sprang up, and I heard Nan crying: “Polly! Polly! What is it, Polly?” I dashed through the dark for where I took the door to be, bumping against the table. Then I found it, flung it open, and collided with — Tim Crosby.

“What the devil!”

“Turn on those lights.”

“What lights?”

I knocked him aside, slid my hand down the left wall, and found the button. I returned in time to hear Polly sob:

“My rings! My rings! Somebody snatched them!”

I looked around, dumbfounded. Nan was holding Polly in her arms, begging her to tell what had happened. Tim Crosby stood at my shoulder, apparently trying to make out the scene. Harry Fothergill and Fletcher Gleason stared at each other, dazed. Durling seemed to be trying to catch Tim’s eye, and Darcy stood by Polly’s chair.

“What do you mean?” he demanded. “Somebody snatched your rings off then?”

Polly bobbed her head against Nan’s shoulder and held out her hand. The third finger was red and scratched — and bare.

“Good God!”

Fletcher Gleason shook himself, as if to see that he was wholly awake. “But there was nobody else—” He stopped.

“No,” Durling continued for him, “nobody but us.”

The silence that followed this must have lasted a year. Tim Crosby broke it.

“I don’t know,” he began. “That is, I didn’t know — oh, I didn’t know I’d turned off the lights.”

The lights! Almost with one accord we faced him, and his face blanched. Somebody struck a match — Durling. He lighted his cigar slowly, deliberately. It must have been what came to our eyes, automatically, against our wills, that prompted him to shoot an answer at our unuttered thoughts.

“Suppose you search me, then!”

At that Gleason waved his hand. “This is nonsense!” he said. “Don’t fly off the handle, Tim. Nobody has been accused.” He paused. “It isn’t the rings,” he said, “but — is one of us a thief?”

“Well,” spoke up Durling, “I suppose I’m the only stranger here. This may not be exactly the proper thing to do, but I’m willing that I should be searched from head to foot before I leave this room.”

Again Gleason raised his hand, but this time he was unanimously voted down. Darcy assumed the spokesmanship for all of us. “Mr. Durling’s suggestion is perfectly proper, it seems to me,” he said. “I too am comparatively a stranger. But I think these other gentlemen will all join me in a belief that we all ought to be searched, and thoroughly, from top to bottom. We should find out here and now er — er — whatever is to be found out.” He glanced around and we all nodded.

“This is terrible!” Gleason objected, obviously distressed. “And yet—”

“And yet,” I interrupted, “one of us here is undoubtedly responsible.”

Polly was sitting up straight again. Her eyes were red, and she was rubbing her finger. Nan and Mrs. Fothergill rose. “Perhaps,” Nan said, “Polly could help us.”

Polly shook her head. “I know nothing,” she declared, “except that just as I started to speak, two hands grabbed mine, and before I could clinch my fist they had slipped the rings off. Strong hands.”

“If I may offer a suggestion,” I said, “suppose Tim — Tim was out of the room at the time — search every man here. I assume that—”

“Why the devil should I have to say it? Durling, though, helped me out.”

“Of course,” he finished the sentence, “the ladies are eliminated.”

“Then,” said Nan, rising briskly, “we might as well get out and let you get to it. Please, please, be quick.”

They rose, led by Polly, and started to leave the room. Nan last. As she passed me she pulled me aside. “Max! Max!” she whispered. “Do something — anything!”

I shook my head. “Go outside,” I said. “I’ll let you know in a minute.” She hurried after the others.

There were nine of us left when the door closed behind her. Gleason, Fothergill, Ted Harrison, Cully Mason, Nan’s brother, Durling, Darcy, Tim Crosby, and myself. Gleason was impatient.

“Go to it, Tim,” he said.

Tim glanced around uncertainly. I stepped forward. “Begin with me,” I suggested. With a half-apology he began the ordeal — and I’ll vouch for its thoroughness. My pockets, the lining of my coat and vest, the hollows of my bat tie, my waistband — he went through everything.

Next came Fothergill. And then Gleason. And then Darcy. The little Englishman chattered away, offering possible and impossible hiding places for inspection. Then Harrison, Cully, and finally Durling. Tim hastened, was stepping back from the man he’d brought to the house, when Darcy spoke.

“Just a minute, Mr. Crosby!” he said sharply. “Mr. Durling has not been searched as thoroughly as he might be. We’re all, you know, to be treated with equal disrespect.” This last was with a cold, humorless smile.

Durling growled something. “Don’t slight me, Tim,” he said then. “Look good.”

Without comment Tim extended his search — his futile search. Completed, he made his report — the report that we already realized.

“They’re not here.”

Automatically I glanced about the room. It was comparatively bare, not a possible place where the rings could have been placed in the fraction of a second that followed the theft. The windows were down. The floor was hardwood — and glistened with a clear expanse.

Gleason sat down. “Will somebody call the girls?” he asked. I went into the next room. The occupants sprang to their feet. “Gleason will make the report,” I said, and they filed past me.

We took our chairs. Darcy was speaking.

“It makes the situation beastly awkward,” he said as I sat down. “One of us has got away with it, as you say here. One of us so far is an uncaught thief. We all suspect one another. I don’t dare suggest that the police be called—”

“Not all,” Gleason interrupted. “This is a private robbery.” He smiled grimly.

“Personally,” Darcy resumed, “I should object to being held. But I would understand your point of view. The point is, shall we all remain here? Wouldn’t we be trying your nerves to remain any longer — what with so many other trinkets about, as Mr. Durling has pointed out” — he smiled the same cold, humorless smile at Tim’s friend — “and the lights likely to go out again at any moment” — and this time the smile was for Tim.

“I told you,” Tim sprang up, “that it was accidental. If you wish to question—”

“I meant nothing, Mr. Crosby,” the Englishman explained placidly. “You are too impetuous.”

Choking another angry word, Tim sat down again, his face as white as a sheet, for we could not help it; but the circumstances — the lights, Durling, Darcy’s notice that the search had not been regular at first — compelled in our faces, no doubt, something akin to skepticism. And when I turned to Nan, she was in tears.

“Then,” Darcy went on, “if there are no objections, and if Mr. and Mrs. Gleason will understand that we mean only to relieve them of an undesirable situation, I move that we make our adieus.”

“There is an objection.”

“From whom?” Darcy turned in surprise to face Tim Crosby.

“From me.”

“Tim,” spoke Durling, “Mr. Darcy’s right. Let’s go.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.”

Durling’s voice held a command. His words were short, snapped out, and we looked at him in surprise. Tim met his gaze for a minute and then, after a pause, submitted.

“All right,” he said.

Durling and I rose uncertainly. Gleason followed us. Darcy smiled around.

“I’m sure,” he said, picking up his demitasse, “that we all regret to the very bottom of our hearts what has taken place here. It is the most unfortunate thing I’ve ever known.”

He put the cup to his lips, and at that second Tim Crosby jumped to his feet.

“Grab him!” he cried.

Durling flung himself directly across the table, crashing the cups and glasses and dishes recklessly, while his hands shot out and seized Darcy’s.

It was pandemonium. Tim was around the table in a flash. Nan screamed. I shouted something — I don’t know what. All I could tell was that Durling was being dragged across the table, sweeping everything to the floor, that Tim was shouting unintelligibly, and that Darcy was fighting furiously, desperately, to break Durling’s hold. And then Tim struck the Englishman.

His fist caught Darcy on the point of the jaw, a blow that might easily have broken it, and the fight ended there. Darcy dropped to the floor, unconscious. In a flash Tim was astride the prostrate form, had turned it face up, and was running a finger around inside Darcy’s mouth. A smile came to his face. He withdrew the finger, held it up. There were Polly’s three rings!

A half-hour later Darcy, sullen and silent, was sitting awkwardly in a stuffed chair, his hands bound behind him.

“Now,” Nan spoke, “tell us.”

Tim sat down. “Well,” he began, “I want first to give you Mr. Durling’s correct identity. He is from Scotland Yard, in this country on important business. And Mr. Darcy — he is wanted certainly for one theft and homicide case in London, and suspected of several others. He has a few aliases that I can’t remember. I recognized him, I thought, when we met at the Brandons’, from the pictures published in the London papers while I was over there last summer. After what happened I was pretty certain of it.

“I cabled to Scotland Yard. It happens that I am interested in such matters. I’ll confess it — I am a detective. What my professional connections are doesn’t matter. But before Durling came, there was the Merritts’ party, so I brought along another detective — my old ‘college chum.’ ”

“And the first man — at the Brandons’ — who was he?”

“What he said he was — what I said he was — really and truly an old army pal. But the detective flunked me. We got nowhere, could do nothing. The Merritts’ coup — planned — turned out a failure. Then Durling came.

“Briefly, Durling recognized Darcy at once. We had planned to get him outside after dinner, make the arrest with as little fuss as possible and let the party go on. Then came that clumsy accident when I turned off the lights, which really was an accident. Evidently Darcy was waiting to take advantage of the first opportunity that came up. And then we couldn’t arrest him until we found out what had become of the rings.

“The search failing, we were up a tree until at last, when Durling had a hunch that something might turn up as Darcy prepared to go. Darcy started to drink his demitasse — and it was cold as ice! It flashed on me what he had done — he had dropped the rings in his black coffee. And to put me in a more humane light, I hit him on the jaw to prevent his swallowing Polly’s rings. Does that answer all the questions?”

We nodded, speechless.

“And now,” Tim said, “I have a question — for Nan.” He turned to her. “You thought I had taken them, didn’t you?”

She turned red. “Yes,” she replied truthfully, “only... only, I didn’t care if you had.”