The Accomplice: A Novel of Suspense

By Matthew Head

The Accomplice, first published in 1947 as part of the Inner Sanctum Suspense Specials, is a psychological crime thriller in the mode of Ruth Rendell or Patricia Highsmith. The plot centers on Hank Bewley, studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, who meets an attractive young woman, Corrie Waters, and her breathtakingly handsome boyfriend, Lex Abbott. The events that transpire follow a sordid and depraved path to a shocking climax. Matthew Head is a pen-name for John E. Canaday (1907-1985), a long-time art critic for the New York Times and author of seven crime novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phocion Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789129304

Matthew Head

Matthew Head (real name: John Edwin Canaday, 1907-1985) was an art critic, author and gourmet. He was awarded a BA in French and English Literature at the University of Texas, and subsequently studied painting and art history at Yale. He had travelled to the Belgian Congo in 1943 and acted as a French interpreter for the Bureau of Economic Welfare, subsequently joining the United States Marine Corps. He served as a lieutenant in the South Pacific until the end of World War II, then went on to head the art school at Newcomb College in New Orleans before becoming chief of the educational division at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1953-1959. While there, he wrote the text for Metropolitan Seminars in Art. He then became a critic for the New York Times for 17 years. He wrote books on art and other subjects, including seven crime novels, four of them including Dr Mary Finney.

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE ACCOMPLICE

A Novel of Suspense

By

MATTHEW HEAD

The Accomplice was originally published in 1947 by Simon and Schuster, Inc., New York. Matthew Head is a pen-name of John E. Canaday.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

PART ONE 6

Chapter One 6

Chapter Two 13

Chapter Three 21

Chapter Four 28

Chapter Five 35

Chapter Six 46

Chapter Seven 52

Chapter Eight 58

Chapter Nine 67

PART TWO 69

Chapter Ten 69

Chapter Eleven 80

Chapter Twelve 86

Chapter Thirteen 95

Chapter Fourteen 99

Chapter Fifteen 105

Chapter Sixteen 112

Chapter Seventeen 116

Chapter Eighteen 123

Chapter Nineteen 132

PART THREE 138

Chapter Twenty 138

CONTENTS 144

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 145

DEDICATION

To Lee and Jack

• • •

An honest Love is Deathes Despaire

But a lying Love is Deathes Accomplice.

PART ONE

Chapter One

I was at a bar, in Paris.

Not a fancy bar, and not a student bar, just a nice commonplace comfortable little bar, and we were drinking chocolate. This was in the middle nineteen-thirties, 1934 to be exact, and I was with a very nice girl from Kansas City, named Corrie Walters.

Corrie requires a word of explanation. I didn’t really know her at the time. In fact it was the first time I had ever spoken to her, but I had spent a lot of time looking at her. She didn’t have the kind of ravishing good looks that take you off your feet at first glance, or even the impertinent prettiness that can hit just as hard, but the longer you looked at her, the more nice things you began to discover. I’ve tried to figure out why I looked twice in the first place, beyond the fact that there wasn’t much else to look at in the Sorbonne library, and the best I can figure is that it was something to do with the hair and the eyes, which isn’t a very good explanation because the hair was only a light brown, and the eyes were only a pleasant bluish gray. But the hair was very soft looking and very curly at the same time. She wore it in a little fluff of curls that was neither short nor long, but you could tell it was the kind of hair that only took a couple of quick licks with the comb and she would be ready to go. And as for the eyes, there was no trick stuff about them. Not slant and not oversize and not mysteriously shadowed or any of that kind of thing—just very pretty gray-blue eyes that minded their own business.

But I never looked at Corrie without finding something more that was just right. The dangerous places like wrists and fingers and length of neck, the places where a lot of girls go wrong, girls that you notice first for something spectacular in the way of bazoom or something like that—those places were always just right about Corrie, until finally you discovered there wasn’t anything about her that wasn’t fresh and delightful. Any girl as nicely put together as Corrie was could have exaggerated the make-up and maybe used just a bit of hair rinse and pulled a lot of trick stuff with the clothes and so forth and so on, and then she would have been something you would describe as a classy little job, the kind you can see twitching along the streets everywhere from Hollywood to New York inclusive, but the point is that Corrie didn’t do it like that. She just happened to be perfect, and perfection imposes a certain lack of spectacular individuality, I suppose. But Corrie made spectacular individuality a lot less desirable than it used to be before she came along, so that the girl with the extra-long legs, from New York, and the girl with the extra-short upper lip, from New Orleans, and the girl with the extra-yellow hair, from Los Angeles, all began to look like a bunch of girls who were courageously making the best of a bunch of unfortunate disfigurements, alongside Corrie, who happened to come from Missouri.

I was at the Sorbonne that year on an exchange fellowship that had sent some lucky Frenchman to Yale, on the theory that international relations were going to be favorably affected by this arrangement. It was a fellowship in architecture and it still had a year to go. I was supposed to be working at the Beaux-Arts, but the stuff they were putting out there was so grim that I spent most of my time auditing lectures at the Sorbonne instead. The fellowship was mostly just a way of marking time profitably until I could get a decent job, anyway. I’ve already said that this was in 1934, and if you remember what architects were doing about that time, then you remember that it was nothing at all. So the fellowship had been a godsend to me, and I had grabbed it, even though it was a narrow squeak to get by financially on it, even when you were used to not having much money, the way I was.

The first time I saw Corrie, it was at the Sorbonne in the library, and after that I began looking for her there every time I went in. After a few days I was going in especially to look for her, and I found she would usually come in sometime between ten and eleven in the morning. She didn’t look like the Sorbonne and she certainly didn’t look as if she felt at home there. I would get to looking at her as she kept on reading, and the longer I looked, the prettier she would get. It was the early part of the summer and the tourists were just beginning to show up around town. When Corrie came into the library she would always go to the reserve case and take a book off the shelf for the Introduction to French Culture course, which was a summer course that the Sorbonne had whipped up for Americans who thought they had to have something besides the usual reasons for coming to Paris.

Corrie would sit there reading, or at least looking at the open book, and I would sit a couple of tables away watching her, and discovering nicer things all the time, until one day, after this had been going on for two weeks, I decided to follow her out of the library and let things begin to happen. She never stuck very long at her reading anyhow, and as usual this day she began to fidget after fifteen minutes or so of trying to be a scholar, and in another few minutes she got up and turned the book in and left the room.

I followed her down the hall, but she went into the women’s room so I went out of the building and stood there on the steps waiting for her. Pretty soon she came stepping along on those pretty legs of hers and she marched past me without looking left or right or batting an eyelash. Her mouth was a brighter red now, and she had put on a kind of little leather skullcap job, the kind that were popular later on under the name of beanies, and the fluff of curls came out all around it like a kind of wreath or crown.

I fell in behind her and she walked down to the boulevard without stopping to look into any of the shop windows or anything, and after a couple of blocks she dropped into a chair at one of the cafés. It was the usual kind, with tables on the sidewalk, and a small inside room for the bar, with a wall that was mostly doors and could be more or less folded up so that in good weather the whole thing was open to the street. There weren’t many people there at that hour, and Corrie sat at a table not far from the bar, with nobody near. The waiter came up and I was close enough behind to hear her order a cup of chocolate.

The waiter went off and Corrie began scrabbling around in her purse the way women do, and brought out a pack of Jaunes—French cigarettes, and cheap ones, that could mean that the American who carried them was acclimated to Paris, or might mean she wanted to appear to be. I sat down at the next table, a matter of inches away. Corrie snapped her bag shut, and then unsnapped it again and began scrabbling around some more, with the unlit cigarette in her mouth. I had just got my matches out when she found her own, so I lost that chance. I watched her while she lit up, and she was one of the women who have learned to light a cigarette without screwing their faces all up. After a couple of puffs she pulled off the little leather skullcap and sighed and fluffed up the curls at the back of her neck with her hand. The skullcap slid off the table onto the pavement, but before I could get out of my chair she bent over and picked it up for herself.

This could have gone on forever so I said to myself what the hell, and I got up and went over and asked her if she would mind if I sat at her table.

She glanced up without jumping or anything, as if she had known I was there all the time, and gave me a long cool look all the way up and down.

Yes, I would, she said. Very much.

Well... I said.

Yes, I know, she said. Go ahead and say it if you want to. ‘You can’t blame a fellow for trying.’ She gave me that cool straight stare for another moment and then said, Good-by now.

She turned her head away from me and began to work at watching the people passing on the sidewalk. I started to sit down.

If you sit there I’ll call a cop, she said quickly. You know —a gendarme.

I straightened up again and said, This isn’t what you think it is. We’re both at the Sorbonne. I followed you out of the library just now. The waiter came up and left her chocolate. He looked at me in an undecided way for a minute, and then at Corrie, but she didn’t say anything about me, and when I told him to bring another chocolate he decided it was all right for the time being, and went back to the bar.

Corrie said, I know you followed me. You’ve been boring holes in my back ever since I came here. I don’t like it and you’ve been giving me the fidgets, if you must know. And you still give me the fidgets. Now please go away. I want my cup of chocolate and I want it all by myself. She had a nice voice, maybe a little twangy on the short as, Missouri fashion, but a nice voice all the same.

She looked away from me again and took a puff or two off her cigarette. The people kept passing up and down along the sidewalk and going in and out of the patches of sun. It was one of those days when Paris looks like all the pictures the Impressionists painted of it. The air was full of that particular cool sparkle that Monet knew how to put there, and the crowd on the sidewalk was giving an animated demonstration of the theory of broken color. Corrie sat there looking out at everything as absently as she could manage, stirring her chocolate while it cooled, and letting her cigarette smoke away by itself on the edge of the table. I almost began to believe I wasn’t standing there at all.

Then all of a sudden she said in a low, urgent voice, but not shifting her glance and still stirring her chocolate, "Sit down. Sit down here quick," and she pushed out the chair across from her with her foot.

I sat down quick and now she looked straight at me.

Her voice was still low and tense, but she still kept her casual attitude, sitting there as if nothing out of the way was happening, and she said, Start smoking my cigarette. Anything. Talk to me. To look at her you’d have thought she was just talking along, not saying anything much, just chatting, if you hadn’t heard the tension in her voice.

Act natural, she said between her teeth. Don’t sit so stiff.

I managed to say, That was a sudden shift of wind.

Not so loud, she said.

She smiled suddenly, but it was a smile that had nothing to do with what I had said, and was too tight at the comers. I don’t care what you say, she said, talking through the smile, but keep talking to me. Count to a hundred or something. But not loud. She kept the phony smile.

Are we old friends or something like that? I asked her.

That’s right, she said. Yes, old friends. I couldn’t think of anything more, but the waiter helped out by coming up and putting down my chocolate. He hesitated for a minute to see if Corrie was going to tell him to get me the hell out of there, but when she didn’t say anything he went away again, and by that time I had caught my breath.

Your name is Corrie Walters, I said. It was in a book you left in the library. I turned it in at the desk.

Yes, I got it. Thanks. Go on.

I’m Hank Bewley, I said. Really Henry, but people call me Hank. It helps some. Would you like to?

She didn’t say anything and she held the smile so hard that it made the corners of my mouth ache, but something happened around her eyes and it was a long way from a smile.

Give it a try, I said. Go ahead, say it: Hank. It’s easy. She didn’t say anything. I threatened her. I might get up and leave, I said.

Her hand shot out across the table and rested on top of mine. Please! she said. She had lost a lot of her confident manner, and if I had had any idea of leaving, I abandoned it. Her hand was cool and dry and warm and moist all at the same time, and it felt good on mine.

It’s all right, I said. I’ll sit here if it helps you any.

She took her hand away and when I kept looking at her she finally relaxed what was left of the smile and lowered her eyes. A sigh with some tremble in it came out of her, and she picked up her spoon again and began stirring her chocolate.

By now I knew what it was all about.

Over at the bar there was an American-looking boy with his back to us, in a good-looking suit of gray flannels that had rich mans money written all over it. He was standing just inside the doors and he hadn’t been there when Corrie and I first sat down. I couldn’t see his face, but even through the flannels I could tell enough about his build to envy it. It was a heavy build and it wasn’t going to stand middle age very well, but that was beside the point at the moment.

I said to Corrie, I think maybe I’m being used.

She froze for a moment, then she laid the spoon down carefully on the edge of the saucer. It tinkled uncertainly as she took her hand away, and when she started to lift the cup, her fingers trembled so that she had to put it down again. She kept staring at the table top and her face began to turn a fine technicolor pink.

Don’t take it so hard, I said. It isn’t going to help any to cry. But if it’s Grayflannels we’re playing this one for, I guess you can go on and cry if you want to. He isn’t looking.

Her back was to the bar so she couldn’t see him. She looked up quickly at me now. Is he— she began, and then, What’s he doing?

Just now, I said, he’s standing with his weight on his left foot, leaning slightly forward on the bar. The good old Praxitelean curve. What with the attitude and the drape of the suit you can tell he’s a beautifully assembled set of muscles. He’s drinking beer. Is that your man?

Just to be doing something with herself she pushed her cup and saucer carefully toward the middle of the table, then she picked up the little leather skullcap and settled it slowly and carefully on the back of her head. She took as much time doing all this as she could, with her face getting pinker all the time, and there was too much water in her eyes to look comfortable, but after she had got the cap settled she looked at me with a perfectly level gaze and said painfully, I’ve made such a fool of myself. I could just die.

Forget it, I said. Sorry I made such a poor decoy.

I’ve got to go, she said, and put her hand on her purse. Better wait a minute, I said. You might even be weak on your pins. Nothing we do seems to make any difference anyhow. I looked at Grayflannels. He’s shifted his weight to the right side, I reported. Otherwise no change. A very rugged audience. Is there anything I can do?

She gave a fraction of a smile, very small, but really for me this time.

You can give me a cigarette, she said, and light it.

You’ve got Jaunes and matches in your purse, I said.

She jumped, and her eyes widened. You know everything! she said. I hate those old Jaunes, though. They’re a kind of disguise. I’ve only been here two weeks, and I thought—

Sorry, I said. Mine are Jaunes too. I’m going on two years. I offered the pack and she took one and I lit it for her. She took a big puff and made a face, and laid the cigarette aside.

I’ll get some Luckies or something for next time, I said. She tightened up to object to the next time, but I said, Don’t be silly, of course there’ll be a next time. And in case you missed it in the excitement, my name’s Hank, Hank Bewley.

I haven’t forgotten it, she said. I’ll never be able to forget it. I only wish I could. The tremble came back and she said again, "Such a fool, I’ve