El Pendiente (1951) (story The Death Stone)
Si muero antes de despertar (1952) (story If I Should Die Before I Wake)
No abras nunca esa puerta (1952)
(stories: Somebody on the Phone/Humming Bird Comes Home)
Rear Window (1954) (story It Had to Be Murder)
Rear Window (1998) (story It Had to Be Murder)
Obsession (1954) (story Silent as the Grave)
Nightmare (1956) (story)
The Bride Wore Black (1968) (novel)
Mississippi Mermaid (1969) (novel Waltz Into Darkness)
Kati Patang (1970) (novel I Married a Dead Man)
Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972) (novel Rendezvous in Black)
Union City (1980) (story The Corpse Next Door)
I Married a Shadow (1983) (novel I Married a Dead Man)
Cloak & Dagger (1984) (story The Boy Who Cried Murder)
Mrs. Winterbourne (1996) (story I Married a Dead Man)
Original Sin (2001) (novel Waltz Into Darkness)
Four O’Clock (2006) (story Three O’Clock)
Dance It Off!
Wally Walters had been told more than once that he was a cake eater. Now a cake eater is one who having arrived at years of discretion toils not neither does he spin. In other words he lets the bread and butter of life go by him and concentrates on the cake — sugar icing and all. How he gets away with it is nobody’s business. But Wally Walters, in particular, wore a three-cornered, low-crowned hat down over his eyes and nose with a little green feather stuck in the band. Being unable to fasten a bow-tie himself, he wore his on a rubber band under the collar of his shirt. It looked just as good anyway. His trousers hung about his legs in folds; they extended to the tips of his shoes, and when he walked he looked elephant-footed. The funniest thing about him, though, was his raincoat. When it rained, and sometimes even when it didn’t rain, Wally came out in a soapy looking yellow slicker with a little strap around his throat like a dog-collar. On his back he had a drawing of a bobbed-haired flapper in a pink chemise and black silk stockings, and underneath was the legend “Ain’t we got fun” for all the townspeople to marvel at. The blonde cashier at the candy store had done it for him. She had also done some six or eight others. All the boys told her she had a great deal of talent going to waste. She agreed with them.
It is only fair to mention in passing that although Wally Walters was undeniably a cake eater, he never touched cake, or pie either for that matter. He dined in cafeterias whenever he did dine, which wasn’t as often as it sounds, and he ate things like ham sandwiches and custards because they cost less and were far more substantial. Several evenings a week he devoted to billiards, but on Saturday nights he was always to be found at the Rainbow, the local dance center, where they took the precaution of searching you for liquor as you went in. Some of the brighter ones got around this by carrying it internally. On Saturday nights Myrtle and Rose and Lily were always to be found there, outdoing one another in the grotesqueries of the Charleston. All that was needed was plenty of room, a pair of strong ankles, and lots of terpsichorean ambition; and these were the very things that Wally Walters seemed to have most of. Consequently he was a howling success and always in demand — as Rose and Myrtle and Lily thought that the cleverest Charleston contortionist was bound to make an ideal husband, in which case they wouldn’t have to go out any more but could do their practicing right at home.
But not for Wally. He knew too much about girls. Girls were a necessary evil, nice under Japanese lanterns at twelve o’clock with all their bagatelles and war-paint on, but not so nice at nine the next morning over the cereal and the coffee pot. Wally was an idealist. He had dreams and he hated to see them spoilt. He got a little older and he got a little older and finally he put his trust in one girl and one girl only, a girl in a castle of dreams.
There was Carfare Connie. They called her that because she would ride in anything from a limousine to a mail truck, but she always took along about a dollar and a half for spending money. She called it her emergency fund. She’d had the same dollar and a half for three years now and still her luck kept up. She used to read the motto engraved on the silver half dollar, “In God We Trust,” and smile knowingly to herself, and perhaps rub it on her sleeves to brighten it up a bit. Carfare Connie hadn’t had any trouble on automobile rides — much — but she believed in being prepared. Every Saturday night she put on a big floppy white picture hat which was nothing but wire and gauze and wended her merry way to the Rainbow, greeting all passers-by en route. She was very fond of Wally Walters. He and she would invent dance steps together.
“Look, cake, how about this one? I thought it up on my way to work this morning.”
“Show us it.”
“Tum tum, te ta ta,” said Carfare Connie with great gusto.
“Yeah,” he said, “I see what you’re driving at. Only look — tum tum, te ta ta — doesn’t that work out better?” Giving his version of it.
“Yeah, you’ve got it ezactly; that’s ezactly what I meant.” And a girl has to care a good deal for someone before she’ll let him change her pet ideas to suit himself.
Now there were six Lucilles all in a row until one was sent out on the road and there were only five. Lucille was one of those musical comedy heroines who have to wear gingham and tickle dust-mops and scrub floors in the first act, but then in the second act they bob up all covered with sequins and grab the nearest millionaire’s son and sing a song all about a platinum lining. And everybody goes home happy.
In this case everyone went home happy except poor Lucille herself. Lucille hated being sent on the road. It put her in bad humor for weeks and weeks at a time. She missed her gorgeous roof bungalow with its mirrored bath, she missed her Hispano-Fiat with its little green baize card table. She missed her borzoi with its concave stomach. Lucille in this instance was Mimi Travers of New York and Philadelphia, but decidedly not of points west. The whole trouble was the producers seemed to think otherwise. All day long on the train she said things about them not meant for little children to hear; and when night came she sat in her dressing-room with shoes scattered all about her and delayed getting dressed for the performance until the curtain of that particular theater was three quarters of an hour late and the stage manager threatened to wire New York. Then she slapped on a make-up helter skelter at the last possible moment and made them omit the “Primrose Path” number from the second act, saying she was fed up on it and didn’t give a damn.
And it was this same evening that Wally Walters came north along River Street looking like a million dollars going somewhere to get itself squandered. A brand new electric sign caught his eye and he paused to reflect upon it, giving the dimes, quarters, and halves in his pocket a vigorous shaking up.
The lights went on and off, on and off. There was something fascinating in the arrangement of the letters. Lucille, the Hit of Hits. Lucille. What a pretty name. He stood in line to buy a ticket, the six brass buttons on his powder-blue Norfolk gleaming in the light of the lobby — that powder-blue Norfolk that was the pride of his silly, disordered life, that he always wore to the Rainbow on Saturday nights and to the chop suey palaces. And though he wasn’t exactly thinking about her just then, there was always this girl in a castle of dreams and bubbles in his heart — which was a good heart as hearts go but all smothered with confetti.