Murder Anyway You Cut It- With The French Film Tell No One In Mind

Murder Anyway You Cut It- With The French Film Tell No One In Mind

By Zack James

Phil Larkin, the locally well-known private investigator from Gloversville about sixty miles west of Boston, loved to go to the National Private Investigators Association (NPIA) annual conventions. Phil liked to go not so much to inspect the inevitable new technological gizmos like your own personal legal surveillance drone and hand-held DNA tester (which does not work except in extremely comfortable circumstances which at forty nine hundred bucks is a little expensive for a solo P.I . to put in the bottom desk drawer next to the well-used bottle of Johnny Walker Red whiskey) which were touted as the P.I.s next best friend by their producers but to gather up old acquaintances. Gather up and over a few whiskies to find out about some new interesting case one of them was working on (they are not all interesting by any means whatever the individual P.I. might be hyping about by virtue of his or her prowess in solving the riddle of the age –usually some missing husband who was ready to go home after a couple of months with some floozy who took all his dough and blew for places unknown). Or about a case they might have heard about.

That is how Phil heard from his old friend Artie Shaw about the Beck case, the case that had half the public coppers, gendarmes they call them there, in France baffled and Artie too until things fell into place by virtue of that over-rated prowess that every P.I. hung out like single in front of his or her shabby sixth floor office in some seen its day office building filled with failed dentists, cheapjack insurance agents, seedy repo men and discount wholesale jewelers.

(By the way for those who are confused, or only know of the more famous American Forensic Investigators Organization (AFIO), the one the famous detectives Jack Dolan, Robert Parker, and Shane Chandler, the latter a distant relative of the crime writer Raymond who practically invented the hard-boiled detective genre with guys like Phillip Marlow and Sack Simmons that has misled several generations of readers and average citizens about the real lives of P.I.s, belong to, the NPIA and AFIO work two very different tracks. The AFIO had split, an acrimoniously split, from the NPIA over the issue of working with the public coppers.

The NPIA historically had deferred, meaning “butted out on,” once a case went onto the police blotter. The AFIO made up of a bunch of “hot-doggers” who spit on the public coppers and their half-ass work went on the premise that all cases were better done through private hands. Phil an old time public cop himself would have been railroaded out of business, maybe tarred and feathered like they did in the early days of the town according to the town records, in Gloversville if he had made step one to mess with the open police cases in that town. Every NPIA member in attendance could hardly wait for the banquet that closed each convention to hear the words, to hear the deep dark secret of the profession that the difference in results, the actual numbers of cases solved by the two organizations was minuscule or NPIA’s track records were better. The reality was that despite the few headline cases like the Galton kidnaping and the ransom case which some guy named Ross MacDonald solved there was as much co-operation between AFIO and public coppers as by NPIA.)            

Artie, originally from Boston, had worked with Phil when he had started out on a couple of cases, key-hole peeping cases which in the 1950s was bread and butter work for most private detectives in the days when getting a divorce was heavy lifting without an army of reasons adultery being the primo reason a court would accept as grounds for breaking up the “sacred” household. Phil eventually moved on from that work saying to anybody who would listen that he would rather try to solve mass murder cases, solve serial murder stuff than have to swallow the lies associated with guys and gals shacking up, you know just working late or the car broke down bullshit, when some husband or wife was looking to get out from under and had the goods on the miscreant to make a big moola score. Less strain on the nerves.

Artie, knowing his limitations, always stuck with key-hole peeping which is how in a roundabout way he got the Beck case. The wife of big Boston international banker had hired him to get the goods on her husband and his French mistress whom said banker had established in a Paris apartment for when he travelled there on business. Artie, really a pro then at getting the dope, getting the photos necessary to close a divorce case in court, rapped that one up tight, no problem. What Artie had found out in Paris as the 1950s turned into the 1960s was that there was still much key-hole peeping work to found there through the still pretty much intact cumbersome French Napoleonic civil code and so he stayed around there to pick up the pieces, especially when that Boston banker’s divorcee set up herself in Montmatre and shown him her appreciation in other ways, other ways that counted.      

That banker’s ex-wife connection got him the Beck case, got it to him at least indirectly through her lawyer in Paris who was also the lawyer that this Doctor Beck had retained once he got into serious trouble, or rather his sister, Anne, a devotee of the horsey set, but loaded with dough from her husband’s fortune had retained. The case would have seemed to be on the face of it way over Artie’s head as it involved a “cold case,” a case that the French gendarmes had closed up tight. But the ex-banker’s wife and Beck’s lawyer both agreed that a non-French P.I. would have less hurdles to cross than some Parisian private dick who was bound by law to turn everything over to the coppers under penalty of losing his or her license. (Artie was working off his U.S. permit courtesy of influence with the public coppers by a friend of that banker’s ex-wife).

Artie had moreover gotten on the case after the thing had been dead for about seven, eight years. Years after this Doctor Beck was cleared by the cops as far as could be of his wife’s murder out in the country while they were out for a swim on the lake. The doctor’s story then had been that he had been knocked unconscious by a party unknown and dumped in the lake when he heard his wife’s screams. Except he was found on the dock. As such things went the public coppers had to let it go when they couldn’t shake his story and his wife’s father, a public copper himself, identified his daughter’s body and vouched for his son-in-law.           

Then a couple of bodies surfaced in that same area and a couple of cops from the old case started to put two and two together and come up with the doctor. Get the bugger in court for a shot at the big step-off. The frame was on but the point was how was Artie to get enough evidence to get the doctor off the hook. As it turned out a couple of pieces of evidence surfaced that got the ball rolling. The doctor’s wife, who along with his sister were seriously into steeplechase horse shows, had been beaten badly by someone a few weeks prior to her death. The coppers figured that Doc Deck did the deed, a wife-beater not uncommon among certain high profile Type A’s. As it turned out the wife, Margot was her name, had had his sister take photographs of the wounds but had also swore her to secrecy that this horse set guy, this Phillip Neuville, the son of Baron Neuville, a guy with a pile of money as well had done the beating when she confronted him with evidence of child sexual abuse of a bunch of peasant kids who worked the stables as a part of program she was involved with.     

That confrontation as it turned out resulted in the death of young Phillipe. The photographs were taken after the Doc’s wife had killed the bastard.  Nice work, nice touch.