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Fly Paper and Other Stories

Collected Case Files of the Continental Op

The Later Years, Vol. 3

Dashiell Hammett

Edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

Contents

Foreword: “Through Mud and Blood and Death and Deceit”

Introduction: The Later Years, 1926–1930

“Fly Paper”

“The Farewell Murder”

“Death and Company”

About the Author

FOREWORD

“Through Mud and Blood and Death and Deceit”

The Continental Op: The Complete Case Files is the first electronic publication of Dashiell Hammett’s collected Continental Op stories to be licensed by either Hammett or his estate—and the first English-language volume of any kind to include all twenty-eight of the Op’s standalone stories. But, as with most of Hammett’s publishing history, the saga of the case-hardened, inelegant, unnamed operative from the Continental Detective Agency is anything but straightforward. The players in the Op’s publishing-life drama are several—including Hammett; his paramour and executrix, Lillian Hellman; Hellman’s allies; Hammett’s family; and various publishing advocates and political adversaries. Add to that the relative novelty of electronic books. Hammett’s 1920s publishing contracts did not anticipate his “little fat detective” on the luminous, ephemeral pages so lately familiar to modern readers. And yet, the Op was the product of an era of tumult, who survived gunshots, grifters, criminal conspiracies, class struggles, temptations, and neglect. He’s learned to adapt.

The Op stories were published individually during the early years of Hammett’s writing career, between 1923 and 1930. All but two were featured in Black Mask, the leading light of pulp magazines—a favorite among working-class readers, crime-fiction aficionados, and anyone who longed for a coin’s worth of well-crafted thrills. In June of 1929, near the end of the run, Hammett sent a note to Harry Block, his editor at Alfred A. Knopf. He had just sent Block a draft of his third novel, The Maltese Falcon, which he described as “by far the best thing” he’d done so far.

Also I’ve about two hundred and fifty thousand words of short stories in which the Continental Op appears. I know you’re not likely to be wildly enthusiastic about the short-story idea; but don’t you think that something quite profitable for both of us could be done with them by making a quite bulky collection of them—selling them by the pound, as it were? I don’t know anything about the manufacturing costs—how far bulkiness could be carried at a fairly low cost without eating up the profits. I’d want to rewrite the stories we included, of course, and there are possibly fifty or sixty of the quarter-million that I’d throw out as not worth bothering about. In the remainder there are some good stories, and altogether I think they’d give a more complete and true picture of a detective at work than has been given anywhere else.

Almost immediately Hammett had second thoughts about republishing the Op tales. “I’d rather forget them,” he told Block. The hardboiled pioneer was ready, in contemporary lexis, to retool his brand—to abandon the constraints and expectations of the crime-fiction genre and to shift his focus from the Continental Detective Agency’s anonymous foot soldier to more sophisticated conflicts starring independent detectives, non-detectives, and ex-detectives. It wasn’t long before the Continental Op’s work-a-day exploits were overshadowed by the deeper, darker, and splashier successes of Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon, 1930), Ned Beaumont (The Glass Key, 1931), and Nick Charles (The Thin Man, 1934). Hammett’s hardworking, hardboiled protagonist was relegated to the sidelines.

During the thirteen-year hiatus that followed, the Continental Op was available to readers primarily in Hammett’s first two novels, Red Harvest and The Dain Curse (each reworked from four linked Black Mask stories released 1927–1929, both published by Knopf in 1929). Red Harvest was ahead of its time—a vivid and exquisitely informed exploration of corruption, pragmatism, and ambiguity, set in Montana mining country. While it was optioned for film, Hammett’s fans could easily have overlooked the Op’s dubious debut as Willie Bindbugel in Ben Hecht’s wildly divergent film adaptation of the novel, released by Paramount as Roadhouse Nights in 1930. Willie played an investigative reporter, rather than a hardboiled detective, in a story that was more action-comedy than crime. Today, the film is most notable as a vehicle for Jimmy Durante in his first big-screen appearance.

The Dain Curse, Hammett’s second novel, featured the Op negotiating San Franciscan family drama, religious fervor, insanity, and drug-induced confusion in a tangled contest between the supernatural and sober reality. Hammett titled the expository final chapter “The Circus” and later described the book as a “silly story.” It is generally considered the least of his five novels. Still, The Dain Curse was a solid performance that garnered largely favorable reviews, earned a spot on the New York Times recommended holiday books list, and won the Op (and Hammett) his first printing in England. The Op was less fortunate in Hollywood, where, despite the fledgling film industry’s thirst for talking-picture storylines, Hammett’s ornate detective thriller came to naught.

The Continental Op’s fortunes rebounded in 1943, when Lawrence Spivak (with Frederick Dannay and his cousin Manfred B. Lee, jointly known as Ellery Queen) made arrangements to publish a string of digest-size paperback collections featuring Hammett’s short fiction. Hammett, serving in Alaska with the US Army Signal Corps, agreed unenthusiastically to a deal with Spivak’s Mercury Publications. “I signed the contract,” he told Lillian Hellman, “but don’t take that as a hint that I want it especially.” All but one of the twenty-eight Continental Op standalone tales were reprinted (in sometimes liberally re-edited form) between 1943 and 1951, under Best Seller Mysteries, Jonathan Press Mystery, Mercury Mystery, and Ellery Queen Selects imprints. Once again, the Op was widely available in the working-class world he represented.

Between 1951 and 1961—the last decade of Hammett’s life—virtually no one published the Op, Sam Spade, Ned Beaumont, Nick Charles, or any of Hammett’s fiction. It was the era of the Red scare, with its blacklists and committee hearings, and the beginnings of the Cold War, rife with anti-Soviet fear mongering and jingoistic conservatism. Hammett had made no secret of his leftwing affiliations, and with the taint of the Red brush he became unmarketable. His income was devastated, his publishers wary, the radio shows based on his work cancelled.

“Financially,” Hammett told his wife, Jose, in March of 1951, “this year’s going to be a holy terror and so—from the looks of things right now—are the next few years to come.” Hammett’s estimation was dead-on. He spent five of the last six months of 1951 imprisoned on a contempt of court charge after claiming his Fifth Amendment rights in US District Court. He would neither name the contributors to the Civil Rights Congress of New York bail fund he chaired nor provide information on the whereabouts of four Communist Party leaders who had skipped out on bail the CRC fund had provided. Hammett served his time without regret, but when he was released on December 9, both his health and his finances had crumbled beyond repair. His final bids at political engagement, teaching, and innovative fiction withered away over the course of the next two years. He lived in increasing seclusion and frugality in upstate New York, dependent on the kindness of friends and his monthly veteran’s pension of $131.10.

Hammett died on January 10, 1961. His only significant asset—$7,914.23 held in escrow by his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf—was dwarfed by Federal and New York State tax liens totaling nearly $175,000. While a portion of the shortfall might be attributed to slipshod tax reporting on Hammett’s part—he had failed to file returns while he was serving in the Army—the bulk is plainly a bitter byproduct of the US government’s retaliatory anti-communist campaigns. Lillian Hellman attached another $40,000 in claims for repayment of personal loans, in addition to his final medical, funeral, and administrative expenses. She was executrix for the Dashiell Hammett estate and with the approval of the IRS she put the rights to Hammett’s entire body of work up for auction, with the understanding that the sale price (a minimum of $5,000) would settle his outstanding debt.

Lillian Hellman wrote to Hammett’s daughters Mary and Jo to ask if they would be willing to go in with her to make an offer. There is no record of Mary’s reply. But Jo wrote back in June of 1963: “We will be able to send the thousand but it will be a month or six weeks before the cash is available. Is this satisfactory? Please let us know what has developed with the proposed tax settlement.” Hellman ignored Jo’s letter, disregarded her request for updates, and chose instead to pool resources with her friend Arthur Cowan. At the sale in November, she and Cowan won all rights to Hammett’s works with the minimum bid of $5,000. One year later Cowan was killed in a car accident, leaving his share of the Hammett library under Hellman’s complete control. “I am now the sole owner of the estate,” she told Jo.

Having captured Hammett’s literary rights at a bargain-basement rate, Hellman set herself to an ambitious campaign to restore his stifled reputation. She arranged for Random House to publish The Novels of Dashiell Hammett in 1965, followed by Dell paperback editions of The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man in 1966. With that, Hammett’s five major works were back in the marketplace.

The Continental Op made his comeback in The Big Knock-Over collection in 1966, edited and introduced by Hellman. All but one of the nine Op tales she selected had been published originally between 1925 and 1929—which is to say, Hellman’s choices comprised the bulk of the second half of Hammett’s Op oeuvre. Her introduction offers tribute and reminiscence, her glowing portrait of Hammett and the Hammett-Hellman relationship pointedly sentimental rather than squarely factual. “I don’t want modesty for either of us,” she explains. She glosses over Hammett’s early life (his wife and daughters dispatched in just twelve words) with petty inaccuracies, then fleshes out Hammett’s later years with a deft synthesis of personal history and private moments. Some of Hellman’s stories are almost certainly true. But truth, Hellman explained years later, is “slippery, tricky, unreliable.” Hammett’s fiction remained authentic, however, and The Big Knock-Over, published five years after his death, was received enthusiastically. And with it, Hellman’s inaugural foray into the reconstruction of her lover’s life slipped quietly into public consciousness.

The Continental Op collection followed in 1974, edited and introduced by Steven Marcus. He was a friend of Hellman and a respected literary and cultural scholar, but even so Hellman maintained tight control over the editorial process. Early on Marcus suggested twenty-four pieces of Hammett fiction, broken into three sections: Op stories, non-Op stories, and the first, unfinished draft of The Thin Man. Hellman objected, again and again; the book got shorter and shorter. “I do agree with you that Dash grew as a writer … but I don’t think we can base an anthology on the growth since most readers would properly be more interested in the results of the growth,” she argued. In the end, the collection included just seven Op selections, hopscotching between 1924 and 1930. Marcus divided his introduction into two parts—biographical and critical. There are golden echoes of Hellman’s reminisces in the first—especially where they touch on the Hammett-Hellman relationship—and threads of Marxist, Hobbesian, and nihilistic rationale weaving backwards and forwards through the second. Marcus, too, leaves his fingerprints on the Hammett legacy.

Through all of this, barring his ersatz appearance in Roadhouse Nights, the Op was noticeably absent from Hollywood. Hellman did what she could to capitalize on the character’s film and television potential, but it was tough going. Film rights to Red Harvest had been sold to Knopf along with print rights in 1929, as was then the standard. Knopf assigned rights to Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation, who, probably in 1972, assigned rights to PEA Films—whose claims continue to constrain Red Harvest’s film and television prospects. Hellman sold film and television rights to several other Op stories to Fast Film and PEA Films in 1974 and 1975—deals that brought her income, but left Hammett’s meaty, middle-aged detective in the wings, future opportunities further entangled. The Dain Curse, perhaps improbably, broke the Op’s dry streak in 1978 with a three-part mini-series on CBS, starring James Coburn as detective Hamilton Nash. The Op had a name and, at last, a legitimate film credit. In the decades before and after, filmic roles for Hammett’s seminal gumshoe have been more inspirational (read uncredited or unrecognizable), than sanctioned or celebrated.

When Lillian Hellman died in 1984 control of the Hammett literary estate passed into a literary trust administered by three of her friends. While the trustees’ oversight was uneven and unenthusiastic, under their tenure two important story collections came to fruition. The first was Nightmare Town, comprising twenty pieces of short fiction, spanning eleven years. The book was slow to come together, as the editors waded through a labyrinth of Hammett-Hellman-Random House permissions and decisions. Nightmare Town was published in 1999, with an introduction by William F. Nolan, who rightly described the anthology as “the largest collection of [Hammett’s] shorter works and by far the most comprehensive.” Seven stories featuring the Continental Op were included.

Just two years later, the prestigious Library of America published Hammett’s Crime Stories and Other Writings, succeeding Nightmare Town as the most comprehensive compilation of Hammett’s short fiction. Steven Marcus, then free from Hellman’s micro-managing oversight, selected twenty-seven pieces, including all but eight of the twenty-eight Op stories. Contractual limitations dealing with reprints in competing publications made full inclusion problematic. Nevertheless, the volume is handsome and enlightening. Margaret Atwood, a Hammett fan of longstanding, said it took readers “back to the beginning of the line” and showed why Hammett’s popularity had risen so rapidly. The mere presence of Crime Stories and Other Writings among Library of America’s illustrious volumes is proof of esteem for Hammett’s work that survived his pulp fiction origins nearly eight decades earlier.

Lillian Hellman’s appointees to the Dashiell Hammett literary trust ceded control to the Hammett family in 2003. Because rights to the five novels had already been transferred to Jo Hammett, in 1995 in a negotiated agreement based on copyright extension law, the change in administration applied mainly to Hammett’s short stories—and to the Op in particular. The new trustees (including Hammett’s grandson, Evan Marshall, and the editors of this volume) took seriously their responsibility to Hammett’s legacy. What followed was a new season of engagement and publication, in the United States and abroad. Hammett never ventured overseas, but his Op is a veteran traveler, with recent excursions that include Brazil, Italy, Romania, Poland, Germany, England, and, most notably, France, where a Hammett renaissance has resulted in a flock of new translations and paperback compilations, as well as, in 2011, an omnibus volume that collected virtually all of Hammett’s available fiction.

This electronic publication of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories comes 93 years after his “little man going forward day after day through mud and blood and death and deceit” narrated his first investigation in Black Mask magazine in 1923. It is the first opportunity for readers across the globe to enjoy both what Hammett called “a more complete and true picture of a detective at work” and to witness the growth of his creator, who changed the face of not just American crime fiction, but realistic, literary, and entertaining fiction worldwide. The stories are presented chronologically, with section introductions providing context and insights into Hammett’s evolution under his three Black Mask editors—George W. Sutton, Philip C. Cody, and Joseph Thompson Shaw. Headnotes original to each story’s publication are included, along with Hammett’s remarks in letters to the editors. “Three Dimes”—an incomplete Continental Op adventure preserved in Hammett’s archive—is included as a bonus to the complete volume.

We offer no pulp paper. No cloth-covered boards or dust jacket. No lurid cover art. No sewn binding or ribbon. Just Hammett’s words, as originally published in Black Mask, True Detective Stories, and Mystery Stories. Our only modifications are silent corrections to spelling and typographical errors preserved on the rare, fragile pages of Hammett’s original magazine offerings. Modern publishing provides distinct advantages to those of us who edit—who collect and prepare materials for publication—leaving us grateful for today’s more durable manuscripts, nimble word-processing technologies, and the easy mutability of e-files.

Hammett, however, was a man of an earlier era—writing with typewriters or pen, pencil, and paper, computers unconceived. He read bound books, hardcopy magazines, and newspapers in those decades when “papers” was not a metaphor. His image lingers in vintage shades of black and white, bound up with the Op, Sam Spade, and Nick Charles, washed in afterlife with Lillian Hellman’s painterly recollections. It’s tempting, then, to imagine our crime-fiction champion rejecting e-reading in favor of bookbinding’s tactile pleasures and traditions. “I tell you, it wasn’t like this when I was young,” Hammett wrote in 1950. “The world’s going to hell: some people claim radio and movies are responsible, but I think it started with the invention of the wheel. If man had been meant to revolve he wouldn’t have been born with flat feet.”

He was kidding, of course.

Dashiell Hammett was progressive. He was fascinated by technology (the “newest toy,” in his words), whether newfangled electric typewriters and razors or high-tech crossbows. He went to moving pictures when the art was new and bought televisions in the days when both equipment and programming were notoriously fickle. He dabbled in color photography when it was so slow as to require the semi-freezing of his insect subjects. He bought a hearing aid to test its power to eavesdrop on woodland animals. While he clearly loved books, he routinely abandoned book-husks when their subject matter had been digested. Hammett was far more interested in content than collectables—a sentiment that will resonate with today’s e-book shoppers. It was the words, the characters, and the fictional world they created that mattered. Medium was a convenience, not a creed. It’s a good bet that if Hammett were writing and reading in our electronic age he would own and enjoy an array of computers, tablets, and smart phones. And, at least sometimes, he would use them to enjoy ebooks. We hope you enjoy this one.

J.M.R.

INTRODUCTION

The Later Years: 1926–1930

Dashiell Hammett served his apprenticeship under editors Sutton and Cody, but by the end of 1925 he had outgrown them. When Cody refused his demand for more money, Hammett quit the magazine, and in March 1926 he took a job as advertising manager at Albert S. Samuels Jewelry Store in San Francisco, “the House of Lucky Wedding Rings.” The pay was $350 per month (about $55,000 per year in 2015 dollars), double his monthly income from writing for the pulps. It was his first full-time job in at least three years and, more likely, since he left the army. At Samuels he impressed his boss with his energy and ingenuity, working from 8 to 6, six days a week—but it was too much. Five months later, on 20 July, he was found collapsed in his office, lying in a pool of blood. His younger daughter Josephine was not quite two months old. Eight weeks later, Samuels wrote a notarized letter to the Veterans Bureau certifying that Hammett had resigned his position due to ill health. His earnings, now reduced to disability payments, dropped to $80 per month plus payment for some part-time work he did for Samuels. Moreover, the Veterans Bureau nurses insisted that Hammett live apart from his wife and children, which meant two rent payments. Within three months, he moved to 891 Post St. (the address of Sam Spade’s apartment in The Maltese Falcon) and Jose and the girls stayed first in an apartment in San Francisco, then across San Francisco Bay in Fairfax in Marin County. Hammett, meanwhile, tried to revive his advertising career from his apartment, publishing how-to articles in Western Advertising.

Meanwhile, a shakeup was materializing at Black Mask. Circulation was decreasing sharply, and Cody, whose attentions were divided among other Pro-Distributors projects, needed a new editor to revitalize the magazine. The successful applicant was a fifty-one-year old aspiring mystery writer who had submitted his first story to Black Mask in summer 1926. Joseph Thompson Shaw was a most unlikely candidate to edit a pulp detective-fiction magazine. He was a graduate of Bowdoin College, where he was a member of the editorial board for the school literary magazine. He was a four-time national sabers champion. He had worked as a journalist at The New York World, as a clerk at G. P. Putnam’s publishing company, and as editor of American Textile Journal, before embarking on a successful career in the textile business. Then he opened his own office to sell securities on the stock exchange. He wrote a history of the textile industry, From Wool to Cloth (American Woolen Co., 1904), and a travel book, Spain of To-Day (NY: Grafton, 1909). During WWI he served as a captain in the army and after the war as an officer in the American Relief Administration in France, and as director of the Bureau for Children’s Relief in Czechoslovakia. And he was socially connected. In February 1925, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that he was a member of the Pinehurst Country Club in Brooklyn, where he was frequently seen taking tea and dancing with his wife after polo and golf matches. Shaw’s first mystery story, “Makings,” was published in the December 1926 issue of Black Mask, the month after he took over from Cody as editor.

Shaw was the first full-time editor of Black Mask, and he took his job seriously. Though he had no experience in pulp magazine publishing, he was an excellent businessman and a superb promoter. His primary goal was to separate Black Mask from the rest of the pulp-fiction field by virtue of the quality of its fiction, detective fiction. Upon assuming the editor’s chair, he read through back issues of the magazine to identify the authors he wished to cultivate. He chose four, whom he called his “backfield,” employing a football metaphor: Erle Stanley Gardner, J. Paul Suter, Carroll John Daly, and Hammett, his favorite among them; for the line he named “a splendid nucleus” in Tom Curry, Raoul Whitfield, and Frederick Nebel. In the introduction to a 1946 anthology of stories from Black Mask, Shaw recalled his first days as editor:

We meditated on the possibility of creating a new type of detective story differing from that accredited to the Chaldeans and employed more recently by Gaborieau, Poe, Conan Doyle—in fact universally by detective story writers; that is, the deductive type, the cross-word puzzle sort, lacking—deliberately—all other human emotional values. …

So we wrote to Dashiell Hammett. His response was immediate and most enthusiastic: That is exactly what I’ve been thinking about and working toward. As I see it, the approach I have in mind has never been attempted. The field is unscratched and wide open. …

We felt obligated to stipulate our boundaries. We wanted simplicity for the sake of clarity, plausibility, and belief. We wanted action, but we held that action is meaningless unless it involves recognizable human character in three-dimensional form.

Hammett’s enthusiasm was amplified by Shaw’s check for $300, the money Hammett felt Cody had owed him earlier in the year. Shaw also passed along what he represented as lavish praise from Cody and Gardner. By February 1927 Hammett was back in the fold. He responded with his most accomplished short fiction to date, the “The Big Knock-Over,” the linked story “$106,000 Blood Money,” and “The Main Death,” all Op stories and his only submissions to Black Mask for the next year, totaling just under 45,000 words. They are also his most violent.

With “The Big Knock-Over” Hammett’s writing took on a new energy. The language was sharper than before; the plotting was more interesting; the dialogue was surer; and the dramatic scenes were more vivid. There was more action than in Hammett’s earlier stories, and the action was linked to real-life crime, as Shaw reminded readers in his introductory blurb, which mentioned the Illinois gang wars and a recent mail-truck robbery in Elizabeth, New Jersey that netted more than $800,000 and eventually left six people dead: “Mr. Hammett pictures a daring action that is almost stunning in its scope and effectiveness–yet can anyone be sure that it isn’t likely to occur?” The Op’s comment in “The Gutting of Couffignal” about M. P. Shiel’s The Lord of the Sea well describes Hammett’s stories for Shaw: “There were plots and counterplots, kidnappings, murders, prison-breakings, forgeries and burglaries, diamonds large as hats … It sounds dizzy here, but in the book it was as real as a dime.” Readers agreed.

The star of Shaw’s backfield produced, and the new editorial formula worked. In May 1927 Shaw announced that the circulation of Black Mask had increased 60%: “BECAUSE IT’S GOT THE STUFF! The stories in it are the best of their kind that can possibly be gotten, written by men who not only know how to write, but know what they are writing about.”

Unlike his predecessors, Shaw nurtured his authors’ careers and he took a special interest in Hammett’s. In January 1927 Hammett became the mystery-fiction reviewer for The Saturday Review of Literature. Co-founded in 1924 and edited by Yale English professor Henry Seidel Canby, who also chaired the editorial board of the newly formed Book-of-the-Month Club, The Saturday Review was regarded as the most influential literary magazine in the United States. Hammett did not then have the cachet to land that job, but Shaw did. A fledgling literary agent as well as an editor, he had the social and business connections to recommend his star writer. Book reviewing was significant to Hammett’s literary development. In his tough criticism of current mystery publications, he was forced to articulate his editorial standards, and that effort showed in the increased care he took with his own stories and his growing confidence that he could make detective fiction, which he regarded as subliterary in the hands of its most popular practitioners, respectable.

At Shaw’s urging, Hammett began planning his foray into novel writing and book publication. The first installment of his four-part serialized novel, “The Cleansing of Poisonville,” appeared in Black Mask monthly from November 1927, one year after Shaw became editor. In February 1928, when the last monthly installment was published, Hammett sent what he called his “action-detective novel” to the editors at Alfred A. Knopf, who published Conrad Aiken, Willa Cather, H. L Mencken, T. S. Eliot, and an array of classical literature. Since at least 1918, Knopf had maintained an imprint called The Borzoi Mysteries under the direction of Blanche Knopf, Alfred’s wife, but little attention had been paid to that line until Hammett arrived and Shaw began feeding Black Mask authors to the firm. Mrs. Knopf offered Hammett a three-book contract if he would change the title of his first novel, and in February 1929 she published Red Harvest—dedicated to Joseph Thompson Shaw—which received glowing reviews, followed in July by Hammett’s second Continental Op novel, The Dain Curse, also first serialized in Black Mask. Encouraged by Hammett’s success, Knopf published Shaw’s novel Derelict, in 1930, along with two books by Raoul Whitfield, Green Ice, a crime novel, and Silver Wings, a collection of juvenile “Flying Ace” stories.

After publication of Red Harvest, Hammett began to attract international attention as an important new novelist whose modernist literary sensibility set him apart from the genre writers associated with the pulps. He was compared favorably to Ernest Hemingway by Herbert Asbury in the Bookman, and the New Statesman in London called him an author of “obvious intelligence.” Meanwhile, he attracted the attention of Hollywood studio heads in need of talented writers who could handle dialogue to prepare scripts for the new talking movies, introduced commercially the year Red Harvest was published. Hammett accommodated them, confiding to Blanche Knopf that he would concentrate on writing more fiction that could be adapted to the screen.

By 1931, Hammett had written two more novels, both serialized in Black Mask before book publication by Knopf—The Maltese Falcon, introducing Sam Spade, and The Glass Key, about the political fixer Ned Beaumont. The last Op story, “Death and Company,” was published in November 1930. That story marked the end of Hammett’s interest in his fat, laconic detective and the end of his tenure at Black Mask. He had learned how to write fiction in his Op stories, and now his fiction had made him rich. He moved to New York, where he was the toast of the town.

R.L.

Fly Paper

Black Mask, August 1929

The “Continental” detective tackles a killer.

I

It was a wandering daughter job.

The Hambletons had been for several generations a wealthy and decently prominent New York family. There was nothing in the Hambleton history to account for Sue, the youngest member of the clan. She grew out of childhood with a kink that made her dislike the polished side of life, like the rough. By the time she was twenty-one, in 1926, she definitely preferred Tenth Avenue to Fifth, grifters to bankers, and Hymie the Riveter to the Honorable Cecil Windown, who had asked her to marry him.

The Hambletons tried to make Sue behave, but it was too late for that. She was legally of age. When she finally told them to go to hell and walked out on them there wasn’t much they could do about it. Her father, Major Waldo Hambleton, had given up all the hopes he ever had of salvaging her, but he didn’t want her to run into any grief that could be avoided. So he came into the Continental Detective Agency’s New York office and asked to have an eye kept on her.

Hymie the Riveter was a Philadelphia racketeer who had moved north to the big city, carrying a Thompson submachine-gun wrapped in blue-checkered oil cloth, after a disagreement with his partners. New York wasn’t so good a field as Philadelphia for machine-gun work. The Thompson lay idle for a year or so while Hymie made expenses with an automatic, preying on small-time crap games in Harlem.

Three or four months after Sue went to live with Hymie he made what looked like a promising connection with the first of the crew that came into New York from Chicago to organize the city on the western scale. But the boys from Chi didn’t want Hymie; they wanted the Thompson. When he showed it to them, as the big item in his application for employment, they shot holes in the top of Hymie’s head and went away with the gun.

Sue Hambleton buried Hymie, had a couple of lonely weeks in which she hocked a ring to eat, and then got a job as hostess in a speakeasy run by a Greek named Vassos.

One of Vassos’ customers was Babe McCloor, two hundred and fifty pounds of hard Scotch-Irish-Indian bone and muscle, a black-haired, blue-eyed, swarthy giant who was resting up after doing a fifteen-year hitch in Leavenworth for ruining most of the smaller post offices between New Orleans and Omaha. Babe was keeping himself in drinking money while he rested by playing with pedestrians in dark streets.

Babe liked Sue. Vassos liked Sue. Sue liked Babe. Vassos didn’t like that. Jealousy spoiled the Greek’s judgment. He kept the speakeasy door locked one night when Babe wanted to come in. Babe came in, bringing pieces of the door with him. Vassos got his gun out, but couldn’t shake Sue off his arm. He stopped trying when Babe hit him with the part of the door that had the brass knob on it. Babe and Sue went away from Vassos’ together.

Up to that time the New York office had managed to keep in touch with Sue. She hadn’t been kept under constant surveillance. Her father hadn’t wanted that. It was simply a matter of sending a man around every week or so to see that she was still alive, to pick up whatever information he could from her friends and neighbors, without, of course, letting her know she was being tabbed. All that had been easy enough, but when she and Babe went away after wrecking the gin mill, they dropped completely out of sight.

After turning the city upside-down, the New York office sent a journal on the job to the other Continental branches throughout the country, giving the information above and enclosing photographs and descriptions of Sue and her new playmate. That was late in 1927.

We had enough copies of the photographs to go around, and for the next month or so whoever had a little idle time on his hands spent it looking through San Francisco and Oakland for the missing pair. We didn’t find them. Operatives in other cities, doing the same thing, had the same luck.

Then, nearly a year later, a telegram came to us from the New York office. Decoded, it read:

Major Hambleton today received telegram from daughter in San Francisco quote Please wire me thousand dollars care apartment two hundred six number six hundred one Eddis Street stop I will come home if you will let me stop Please tell me if I can come but please please wire money anyway unquote Hambleton authorizes payment of money to her immediately stop Detail competent operative to call on her with money and to arrange for her return home stop If possible have man and woman operative accompany her here stop Hambleton wiring her stop Report immediately by wire.

II

The Old Man gave me the telegram and a check, saying:

“You know the situation. You’ll know how to handle it.”

I pretended I agreed with him, went down to the bank, swapped the check for a bundle of bills of several sizes, caught a street car, and went up to 601 Eddis Street, a fairly large apartment building on the corner of Larkin.

The name on Apartment 206’s vestibule mail box was J. M. Wales.

I pushed 206’s button. When the locked door buzzed off I went into the building, past the elevator to the stairs, and up a flight. 206 was just around the corner from the stairs.

The apartment door was opened by a tall, slim man of thirty-something in neat dark clothes. He had narrow dark eyes set in a long pale face. There was some gray in the dark hair brushed flat to his scalp.

“Miss Hambleton,” I said.

“Uh—what about her?” His voice was smooth, but not too smooth to be agreeable.

“I’d like to see her.”

His upper eyelids came down a little and the brows over them came a little closer together. He asked, “Is it—?” and stopped, watching me steadily.

I didn’t say anything. Presently he finished his question:

“Something to do with a telegram?”

“Yeah.”

His long face brightened immediately. He asked:

“You’re from her father?”

“Yeah.”

He stepped back and swung the door wide open, saying:

“Come in. Major Hambleton’s wire came to her only a few minutes ago. He said someone would call.”

We went through a small passageway into a sunny living-room that was cheaply furnished, but neat and clean enough.

“Sit down,” the man said, pointing at a brown rocking chair.

I sat down. He sat on the burlap-covered sofa facing me. I looked around the room. I didn’t see anything to show that a woman was living there.

He rubbed the long bridge of his nose with a longer forefinger and asked slowly:

“You brought the money?”

I said I’d feel more like talking with her there.

He looked at the finger with which he had been rubbing his nose, and then up at me, saying softly:

“But I’m her friend.”

I said, “Yeah?” to that.

“Yes,” he repeated. He frowned slightly, drawing back the corners of his thin-lipped mouth. “I’ve only asked whether you’ve brought the money.”

I didn’t say anything.

“The point is,” he said quite reasonably, “that if you brought the money she doesn’t expect you to hand it over to anybody except her. If you didn’t bring it she doesn’t want to see you. I don’t think her mind can be changed about that. That’s why I asked if you had brought it.”

“I brought it.”

He looked doubtfully at me. I showed him the money I had got from the bank. He jumped up briskly from the sofa.

“I’ll have her here in a minute or two,” he said over his shoulder as his long legs moved him toward the door. At the door he stopped to ask: “Do you know her? Or shall I have her bring means of identifying herself?”

“That would be best,” I told him.

He went out, leaving the corridor door open.

III

In five minutes he was back with a slender blonde girl of twenty-three in pale green silk. The looseness of her small mouth and the puffiness around her blue eyes weren’t yet pronounced enough to spoil her prettiness.

I stood up.

“This is Miss Hambleton,” he said.

She gave me a swift glance and then lowered her eyes again, nervously playing with the strap of a handbag she held.

“You can identify yourself?” I asked.

“Sure,” the man said. “Show them to him, Sue.”

She opened the bag, brought out some papers and things, and held them up for me to take.

“Sit down, sit down,” the man said as I took them.

They sat on the sofa. I sat in the rocking chair again and examined the things she had given me. There were two letters addressed to Sue Hambleton here, her father’s telegram welcoming her home, a couple of receipted department store bills, an automobile driver’s license, and a savings account pass book that showed a balance of less than ten dollars.

By the time I had finished my examination the girl’s embarrassment was gone. She looked levelly at me, as did the man beside her. I felt in my pocket, found my copy of the photograph New York had sent us at the beginning of the hunt, and looked from it to her.

“Your mouth could have shrunk, maybe,” I said, “but how could your nose have got that much longer?”

“If you don’t like my nose,” she said, “how’d you like to go to hell?” Her face had turned red.

“That’s not the point. It’s a swell nose, but it’s not Sue’s.” I held the photograph out to her. “See for yourself.”

She glared at the photograph and then at the man.

“What a smart guy you are,” she told him.

He was watching me with dark eyes that had a brittle shine to them between narrow-drawn eyelids. He kept on watching me while he spoke to her out the side of his mouth, crisply:

“Pipe down.”

She piped down. He sat and watched me. I sat and watched him. A clock ticked seconds away behind me. His eyes began shifting their focus from one of my eyes to the other. The girl sighed.

He said in a low voice: “Well?”

I said: “You’re in a hole.”

“What can you make out of it?” he asked casually.

“Conspiracy to defraud.”

The girl jumped up and hit one of his shoulders angrily with the back of a hand, crying:

“What a smart guy you are, to get me in a jam like this. It was going to be duck soup—yeh! Eggs in the coffee—yeh! Now look at you. You haven’t even got guts enough to tell this guy to go chase himself.” She spun around to face me, pushing her red face down at me—I was still sitting in the rocker—snarling: “Well, what are you waiting for? Waiting to be kissed good-by? We don’t owe you anything, do we? We didn’t get any of your lousy money, did we? Outside, then. Take the air. Dangle.”

“Stop it, sister,” I growled. “You’ll bust something.”

The man said:

“For God’s sake stop that bawling, Peggy, and give somebody else a chance.” He addressed me: “Well, what do you want?”

“How’d you get into this?” I asked.

He spoke quickly, eagerly:

“A fellow named Kenny gave me that stuff and told me about this Sue Hambleton, and her old man having plenty. I thought I’d give it a whirl. I figured the old man would either wire the dough right off the reel or wouldn’t send it at all. I didn’t figure on this send-a-man stuff. Then when his wire came, saying he was sending a man to see her, I ought to have dropped it.

“But hell! Here was a man coming with a grand in cash. That was too good to let go of without a try. It looked like there still might be a chance of copping, so I got Peggy to do Sue for me. If the man was coming today, it was a cinch he belonged out here on the Coast, and it was an even bet he wouldn’t know Sue, would only have a description of her. From what Kenny had told me about her, I knew Peggy would come pretty close to fitting her description. I still don’t see how you got that photograph. Television? I only wired the old man yesterday. I mailed a couple of letters to Sue, here, yesterday, so we’d have them with the other identification stuff to get the money from the telegraph company on.”

“Kenny gave you the old man’s address?”

“Sure he did.”

“Did he give you Sue’s?”

“No.”

“How’d Kenny get hold of the stuff?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Where’s Kenny now?”

“I don’t know. He was on his way east, with something else on the fire, and couldn’t fool with this. That’s why he passed it on to me.”

“Big-hearted Kenny,” I said. “You know Sue Hambleton?”

“No,” emphatically. “I’d never even heard of her till Kenny told me.”

“I don’t like this Kenny,” I said, “though without him your story’s got some good points. Could you tell it leaving him out?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side, saying:

“It wouldn’t be the way it happened.”

“That’s too bad. Conspiracies to defraud don’t mean as much to me as finding Sue. I might have made a deal with you.”

He shook his head again, but his eyes were thoughtful, and his lower lip moved up to overlap the upper a little.

The girl had stepped back so she could see both of us as we talked, turning her face, which showed she didn’t like us, from one to the other as we spoke our pieces. Now she fastened her gaze on the man, and her eyes were growing angry again.

I got up on my feet, telling him:

“Suit yourself. But if you want to play it that way I’ll have to take you both in.”

He smiled with indrawn lips and stood up.

The girl thrust herself in between us, facing him.

“This is a swell time to be dummying up,” she spit at him. “Pop off, you lightweight, or I will. You’re crazy if you think I’m going to take the fall with you.”

“Shut up,” he said in his throat.

“Shut me up,” she cried.

He tried to, with both hands. I reached over her shoulders and caught one of his wrists, knocked the other hand up.

She slid out from between us and ran around behind me, screaming:

“Joe does know her. He got the things from her. She’s at the St. Martin on O’Farrell Street—her and Babe McCloor.”

While I listened to this I had to pull my head aside to let Joe’s right hook miss me, had got his left arm twisted behind him, had turned my hip to catch his knee, and had got the palm of my left hand under his chin. I was ready to give his chin the Japanese tilt when he stopped wrestling and grunted:

“Let me tell it.”

“Hop to it,” I consented, taking my hands away from him and stepping back.

He rubbed the wrist I had wrenched, scowling past me at the girl. He called her four unlovely names, the mildest of which was “a dumb twist,” and told her:

“He was bluffing about throwing us in the can. You don’t think old man Hambleton’s hunting for newspaper space, do you?” That wasn’t a bad guess.

He sat on the sofa again, still rubbing his wrist. The girl stayed on the other side of the room, laughing at him through her teeth.

I said: “All right, roll it out, one of you.”

“You’ve got it all,” he muttered. “I glaumed that stuff last week when I was visiting Babe, knowing the story and hating to see a promising layout like that go to waste.”

“What’s Babe doing now?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Is he still puffing them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Like hell you don’t.”

“I don’t,” he insisted. “If you know Babe you know you can’t get anything out of him about what he’s doing.”

“How long have he and Sue been here?”

“About six months that I know of.”

“Who’s he mobbed up with?”

“I don’t know. Any time Babe works with a mob he picks them up on the road and leaves them on the road.”

“How’s he fixed?”

“I don’t know. There’s always enough grub and liquor in the joint.”

Half an hour of this convinced me that I wasn’t going to get much information about my people here.

I went to the phone in the passageway and called the Agency. The boy on the switchboard told me MacMan was in the operatives’ room. I asked to have him sent up to me, and went back to the living-room. Joe and Peggy took their heads apart when I came in.

MacMan arrived in less than ten minutes. I let him in and told him:

“This fellow says his name’s Joe Wales, and the girl’s supposed to be Peggy Carroll who lives upstairs in 421. We’ve got them cold for conspiracy to defraud, but I’ve made a deal with them. I’m going out to look at it now. Stay here with them, in this room. Nobody goes in or out, and nobody but you gets to the phone. There’s a fire-escape in front of the window. The window’s locked now. I’d keep it that way. If the deal turns out O.K. we’ll let them go, but if they cut up on you while I’m gone there’s no reason why you can’t knock them around as much as you want.”

MacMan nodded his hard round head and pulled a chair out between them and the door. I picked up my hat.

Joe Wales called:

“Hey, you’re not going to uncover me to Babe, are you? That’s got to be part of the deal.”

“Not unless I have to.”

“I’d just as leave stand the rap,” he said. “I’d be safer in jail.”

“I’ll give you the best break I can,” I promised, “but you’ll have to take what’s dealt you.”

IV

Walking over to the St. Martin—only half a dozen blocks from Wales’s place—I decided to go up against McCloor and the girl as a Continental op who suspected Babe of being in on a branch bank stick-up in Alameda the previous week. He hadn’t been in on it—if the bank people had described half-correctly the men who had robbed them—so it wasn’t likely my supposed suspicions would frighten him much. Clearing himself, he might give me some information I could use. The chief thing I wanted, of course, was a look at the girl, so I could report to her father that I had seen her. There was no reason for supposing that she and Babe knew her father was trying to keep an eye on her. Babe had a record. It was natural enough for sleuths to drop in now and then and try to hang something on him.

The St. Martin was a small three-story apartment house of red brick between two taller hotels. The vestibule register showed, R. K. McCloor, 313, as Wales and Peggy had told me.

I pushed the bell button. Nothing happened. Nothing happened any of the four times I pushed it. I pushed the button labeled Manager.

The door clicked open. I went indoors. A beefy woman in a pink-striped cotton dress that needed pressing stood in an apartment doorway just inside the street door.

“Some people named McCloor live here?” I asked.

“Three-thirteen,” she said.

“Been living here long?”

She pursed her fat mouth, looked intently at me, hesitated, but finally said: “Since last June.”

“What do you know about them?”

She balked at that, raising her chin and her eyebrows.

I gave her my card. That was safe enough; it fit in with the pretext I intended using upstairs.

Her face, when she raised it from reading the card, was oily with curiosity.

“Come in here,” she said in a husky whisper, backing through the doorway.

I followed her into her apartment. We sat on a Chesterfield and she whispered:

“What is it?”

“Maybe nothing.” I kept my voice low, playing up to her theatricals. “He’s done time for safe-burglary. I’m trying to get a line on him now, on the off chance that he might have been tied up in a recent job. I don’t know that he was. He may be going straight for all I know.” I took his photograph—front and profile, taken at Leavenworth—out of my pocket. “This him?”

She seized it eagerly, nodded, said, “Yes, that’s him, all right,” turned it over to read the description on the back, and repeated, “Yes, that’s him, all right.”

“His wife is here with him?” I asked.

She nodded vigorously.

“I don’t know her,” I said. “What sort of looking girl is she?”

She described a girl who could have been Sue Hambleton. I couldn’t show Sue’s picture, that would have uncovered me if she and Babe heard about it.

I asked the woman what she knew about the McCloors. What she knew wasn’t a great deal: paid their rent on time, kept irregular hours, had occasional drinking parties, quarreled a lot.

“Think they’re in now?” I asked. “I got no answer on the bell.”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen either of them since night before last, when they had a fight.”

“Much of a fight?”

“Not much worse than usual.”

“Could you find out if they’re in?” I asked.

She looked at me out of the ends of her eyes.

“I’m not going to make any trouble for you,” I assured her. “But if they’ve blown I’d like to know it, and I reckon you would too.”

“All right, I’ll find out.” She got up, patting a pocket in which keys jingled. “You wait here.”

“I’ll go as far as the third floor with you,” I said, “and wait out of sight there.”

“All right,” she said reluctantly.

On the third floor, I remained by the elevator. She disappeared around a corner of the dim corridor, and presently a muffled electric bell rang. It rang three times. I heard her keys jingle and one of them grate in a lock. The lock clicked. I heard the doorknob rattle as she turned it.

Then a long moment of silence was ended by a scream that filled the corridor from wall to wall.

I jumped for the corner, swung around it, saw an open door ahead, went through it, and slammed the door shut behind me.

The scream had stopped.

I was in a small dark vestibule with three doors besides the one I had come through. One door was shut. One opened into a bathroom. I went to the other.

The fat manager stood just inside it, her round back to me. I pushed past her and saw what she was looking at.

Sue Hambleton, in pale yellow pajamas trimmed with black lace, was lying across a bed. She lay on her back. Her arms were stretched out over her head. One leg was bent under her, one stretched out so that its bare foot rested on the floor. That bare foot was whiter than a live foot could be. Her face was white as her foot, except for a mottled swollen area from the right eyebrow to the right cheek-bone and dark bruises on her throat.

“Phone the police,” I told the woman, and began poking into corners, closets and drawers.

It was late afternoon when I returned to the Agency. I asked the file clerk to see if we had anything on Joe Wales and Peggy Carroll, and then went into the Old Man’s office.

He put down some reports he had been reading, gave me a nodded invitation to sit down, and asked:

“You’ve seen her?”

“Yeah. She’s dead.”

The Old Man said, “Indeed,” as if I had said it was raining, and smiled with polite attentiveness while I told him about it—from the time I had rung Wales’s bell until I had joined the fat manager in the dead girl’s apartment.

“She had been knocked around some, was bruised on the face and neck,” I wound up. “But that didn’t kill her.”

“You think she was murdered?” he asked, still smiling gently.

“I don’t know. Doc Jordan says he thinks it could have been arsenic. He’s hunting for it in her now. We found a funny thing in the joint. Some thick sheets of dark gray paper were stuck in a book—The Count of Monte Cristo—wrapped in a month-old newspaper and wedged into a dark corner between the stove and the kitchen wall.”

“Ah, arsenical fly paper,” the Old Man murmured. “The Maybrick-Seddons trick. Mashed in water, four to six grains of arsenic can be soaked out of a sheet—enough to kill two people.”

I nodded, saying:

“I worked on one in Louisville in 1916. The mulatto janitor saw McCloor leaving at half-past nine yesterday morning. She was probably dead before that. Nobody’s seen him since. Earlier in the morning the people in the next apartment had heard them talking, her groaning. But they had too many fights for the neighbors to pay much attention to that. The landlady told me they had a fight the night before that. The police are hunting for him.”

“Did you tell the police who she was?”

“No. What do we do on that angle? We can’t tell them about Wales without telling them all.”

“I dare say the whole thing will have to come out,” he said thoughtfully. “I’ll wire New York.”

I went out of his office. The file clerk gave me a couple of newspaper clippings. The first told me that, fifteen months ago, Joseph Wales, alias Holy Joe, had been arrested on the complaint of a farmer named Toomey that he had been taken for twenty-five hundred dollars on a phoney “Business Opportunity” by Wales and three other men. The second clipping said the case had been dropped when Toomey failed to appear against Wales in court—bought off in the customary manner by the return of part or all of his money. That was all our files held on Wales, and they had nothing on Peggy Carroll.

V

MacMan opened the door for me when I returned to Wales’s apartment.

“Anything doing?” I asked him.

“Nothing—except they’ve been belly-aching a lot.”

Wales came forward, asking eagerly:

“Satisfied now?”

The girl stood by the window, looking at me with anxious eyes.

I didn’t say anything.

“Did you find her?” Wales asked, frowning. “She was where I told you?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, then.” Part of his frown went away. “That lets Peggy and me out, doesn’t—” He broke off, ran his tongue over his lower lip, put a hand to his chin, asked sharply: “You didn’t give them the tip-off on me, did you?”

I shook my head, no.

He took his hand from his chin and asked irritably:

“What’s the matter with you, then? What are you looking like that for?”

Behind him the girl spoke bitterly.

“I knew damned well it would be like this,” she said. “I knew damned well we weren’t going to get out of it. Oh, what a smart guy you are!”

“Take Peggy into the kitchen, and shut both doors,” I told MacMan. “Holy Joe and I are going to have a real heart-to-heart talk.”

The girl went out willingly, but when MacMan was closing the door she put her head in again to tell Wales:

“I hope he busts you in the nose if you try to hold out on him.”

MacMan shut the door.

“Your playmate seems to think you know something,” I said.

Wales scowled at the door and grumbled: “She’s more help to me than a broken leg.” He turned his face to me, trying to make it look frank and friendly. “What do you want? I came clean with you before. What’s the matter now?”

“What do you guess?”

He pulled his lips in between his teeth.

“What do you want to make me guess for?” he demanded. “I’m willing to play ball with you. But what can I do if you won’t tell me what you want? I can’t see inside your head.”

“You’d get a kick out of it if you could.”

He shook his head wearily and walked back to the sofa, sitting down bent forward, his hands together between his knees.

“All right,” he sighed. “Take your time about asking me. I’ll wait for you.”

I went over and stood in front of him. I took his chin between my left thumb and fingers, raising his head and bending my own down until our noses were almost touching. I said:

“Where you stumbled, Joe, was in sending the telegram right after the murder.”

“He’s dead?” It popped out before his eyes had even had time to grow round and wide.

The question threw me off balance. I had to wrestle with my forehead to keep it from wrinkling, and I put too much calmness in my voice when I asked:

“Is who dead?”

“Who? How do I know? Who do you mean?”

“Who did you think I meant?” I insisted.

“How do I know? Oh, all right! Old man Hambleton, Sue’s father.”

“That’s right,” I said, and took my hand away from his chin.

“And he was murdered, you say?” He hadn’t moved his face an inch from the position into which I had lifted it. “How?”

“Arsenic—fly paper.”

“Arsenic fly paper.” He looked thoughtful. “That’s a funny one.”

“Yeah, very funny. Where’d you go about buying some if you wanted it?”

“Buying it? I don’t know. I haven’t seen any since I was a kid. Nobody uses fly paper here in San Francisco anyway. There aren’t enough flies.”

“Somebody used some here,” I said, “on Sue.”

“Sue?” He jumped so that the sofa squeaked under him.

“Yeah. Murdered yesterday morning—arsenical fly paper.”

“Both of them?” he asked incredulously.

“Both of who?”

“Her and her father.”

“Yeah.”

He put his chin far down on his chest and rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other.

“Then I am in a hole,” he said slowly.

“That’s what,” I cheerfully agreed. “Want to try talking yourself out of it?”

“Let me think.”

I let him think, listening to the tick of the clock while he thought. Thinking brought drops of sweat out on his gray-white face. Presently he sat up straight, wiping his face with a fancily colored handkerchief.

“I’ll talk,” he said. “I’ve got to talk now. Sue was getting ready to ditch Babe. She and I were going away. She— Here, I’ll show you.”

He put his hand in his pocket and held out a folded sheet of thick notepaper to me. I took it and read:

Dear Joe—

I can’t stand this much longer—we’ve simply got to go soon. Babe beat me again tonight. Please, if you really love me, let’s make it soon.

Sue

The handwriting was a nervous woman’s, tall, angular, and piled up.

“That’s why I made the play for Hambleton’s grand,” he said. “I’ve been shatting on my uppers for a couple of months, and when that letter came yesterday I just had to raise dough somehow to get her away. She wouldn’t have stood for tapping her father though, so I tried to swing it without her knowing.”

“When did you see her last?”

“Day before yesterday, the day she mailed that letter. Only I saw her in the afternoon—she was here—and she wrote it that night.”

“Babe suspect what you were up to?”

“We didn’t think he did. I don’t know. He was jealous as hell all the time, whether he had any reason to be or not.”

“How much reason did he have?”

Wales looked me straight in the eye and said:

“Sue was a good kid.”

I said: “Well, she’s been murdered.”

He didn’t say anything.

Day was darkening into evening. I went to the door and pressed the light button. I didn’t lose sight of Holy Joe Wales while I was doing it.

As I took my finger away from the button, something clicked at the window. The click was loud and sharp.

I looked at the window.

A man crouched there on the fire-escape, looking in through glass and lace curtain. He was a thick-featured dark man whose size identified him as Babe McCloor. The muzzle of a big black automatic was touching the glass in front of him. He had tapped the glass with it to catch our attention.

He had our attention.

There wasn’t anything for me to do just then. I stood there and looked at him. I couldn’t tell whether he was looking at me or at Wales. I could see him clearly enough, but the lace curtain spoiled my view of details like that. I imagined he wasn’t neglecting either of us, and I didn’t imagine the lace curtain hid much from him. He was closer to the curtain than we, and I had turned on the room’s lights.

Wales, sitting dead still on the sofa, was looking at McCloor. Wales’s face wore a peculiar, stiffly sullen expression. His eyes were sullen. He wasn’t breathing.

McCloor flicked the nose of his pistol against the pane, and a triangular piece of glass fell out, tinkling apart on the floor. It didn’t, I was afraid, make enough noise to alarm MacMan in the kitchen. There were two closed doors between here and there.

Wales looked at the broken pane and closed his eyes. He closed them slowly, little by little, exactly as if he were falling asleep. He kept his stiffly sullen blank face turned straight to the window.

McCloor shot him three times.

The bullets knocked Wales down on the sofa, back against the wall. Wales’s eyes popped open, bulging. His lips crawled back over his teeth, leaving them naked to the gums. His tongue came out. Then his head fell down and he didn’t move any more.

When McCloor jumped away from the window I jumped to it. While I was pushing the curtain aside, unlocking the window and raising it, I heard his feet land on the cement paving below.

MacMan flung the door open and came in, the girl at his heels.

“Take care of this,” I ordered as I scrambled over the sill. “McCloor shot him.”

VI

Wales’s apartment was on the second floor. The fire-escape ended there with a counter-weighted iron ladder that a man’s weight would swing down into a cement-paved court.

I went down as Babe McCloor had gone, swinging down on the ladder till within dropping distance of the court, and then letting go.

There was only one street exit to the court. I took it.

A startled looking, smallish man was standing in the middle of the sidewalk close to the court, gaping at me as I dashed out.

I caught his arm, shook it.

“A big guy running.” Maybe I yelled. “Where?”

He tried to say something, couldn’t, and waved his arm at billboards standing across the front of a vacant lot on the other side of the street.

I forgot to say, “Thank you,” in my hurry to get over there.

I got behind the billboards by crawling under them instead of going to either end, where there were openings. The lot was large enough and weedy enough to give cover to anybody who wanted to lie down and bushwhack a pursuer—even anybody as large as Babe McCloor.

While I considered that, I heard a dog barking at one corner of the lot. He could have been barking at a man who had run by. I ran to that corner of the lot. The dog was in a board-fenced backyard, at the corner of a narrow alley that ran from the lot to a street.

I chinned myself on the board fence, saw a wire-haired terrier alone in the yard, and ran down the alley while he was charging my part of the fence.

I put my gun back into my pocket before I left the alley for the street.

A small touring car was parked at the curb in front of a cigar store some fifteen feet from the alley. A policeman was talking to a slim dark-faced man in the cigar store doorway.

“The big fellow that come out of the alley a minute ago,” I said. “Which way did he go?”

The policeman looked dumb. The slim man nodded his head down the street, said, “Down that way,” and went on with his conversation.

I said, “Thanks,” and went on down to the corner. There was a taxi phone there and two idle taxis. A block and a half below, a street car was going away.

“Did the big fellow who came down here a minute ago take a taxi or the street car?” I asked the two taxi chauffeurs who were leaning against one of the taxis.

The rattier looking one said:

“He didn’t take a taxi.”

I said:

“I’ll take one. Catch that street car for me.”

The street car was three blocks away before we got going. The street wasn’t clear enough for me to see who got on and off it. We caught it when it stopped at Market Street.

“Follow along,” I told the driver as I jumped out.

On the rear platform of the street car I looked through the glass. There were only eight or ten people aboard.

“There was a great big fellow got on at Hyde Street,” I said to the conductor. “Where’d he get off?”

The conductor looked at the silver dollar I was turning over in my fingers and remembered that the big man got off at Taylor Street. That won the silver dollar.

I dropped off as the street car turned into Market Street. The taxi, close behind, slowed down, and its door swung open.

“Sixth and Mission,” I said as I hopped in.

McCloor could have gone in any direction from Taylor Street. I had to guess. The best guess seemed to be that he would make for the other side of Market Street.

It was fairly dark by now. We had to go down to Fifth Street to get off Market, then over to Mission, and back up to Sixth. We got to Sixth Street without seeing McCloor. I couldn’t see him on Sixth Street—either way from the crossing.

“On up to Ninth,” I ordered, and while we rode told the driver what kind of man I was looking for.

We arrived at Ninth Street. No McCloor. I cursed and pushed my brains around.

The big man was a yegg. San Francisco was on fire for him. The yegg instinct would be to use a rattler to get away from trouble. The freight yards were in this end of town. Maybe he would be shifty enough to lie low instead of trying to powder. In that case, he probably hadn’t crossed Market Street at all. If he stuck, there would still be a chance of picking him up tomorrow. If he was high-tailing, it was catch him now or not at all.

“Down to Harrison,” I told the driver.

We went down to Harrison Street, and down Harrison to Third, up Bryant to Eighth, down Brannan to Third again, and over to Townsend—and we didn’t see Babe McCloor.

“That’s tough, that is,” the driver sympathized as we stopped across the street from the Southern Pacific passenger station.

“I’m going over and look around in the station,” I said. “Keep your eyes open while I’m gone.”

When I told the copper in the station my trouble he introduced me to a couple of plain-clothes men who had been planted there to watch for McCloor. That had been done after Sue Hambleton’s body was found. The shooting of Holy Joe Wales was news to them.

I went outside again and found my taxi in front of the door, its horn working over-time, but too asthmatically to be heard indoors. The ratty driver was excited.

“A guy like you said come up out of King Street just now and swung on a No. 16 car as it pulled away,” he said.

“Going which way?”

“That-away,” pointing southeast.

“Catch him,” I said, jumping in.

The street car was out of sight around a bend in Third Street two blocks below. When we rounded the bend, the street car was slowing up, four blocks ahead. It hadn’t slowed up very much when a man leaned far out and stepped off. He was a tall man, but didn’t look tall on account of his shoulder spread. He didn’t check his momentum, but used it to carry him across the sidewalk and out of sight.

We stopped where the man had left the car.

I gave the driver too much money and told him:

“Go back to Townsend Street and tell the copper in the station that I’ve chased Babe McCloor into the S. P. yards.”

VII

I thought I was moving silently down between two strings of box cars, but I had gone less than twenty feet when a light flashed in my face and a sharp voice ordered:

“Stand still, you.”

I stood still. Men came from between cars. One of them spoke my name, adding: “What are you doing here? Lost?” It was Harry Pebble, a police detective.

I stopped holding my breath and said:

“Hello, Harry. Looking for Babe?”

“Yes. We’ve been going over the rattlers.”

“He’s here. I just tailed him in from the street.”

Pebble swore and snapped the light off.

“Watch, Harry,” I advised. “Don’t play with him. He’s packing plenty of gun and he’s cut down one boy tonight.”

“I’ll play with him,” Pebble promised, and told one of the men with him to go over and warn those on the other side of the yard that McCloor was in, and then to ring for reinforcements.

“We’ll just sit on the edge and hold him in till they come,” he said.

That seemed a sensible way to play it. We spread out and waited. Once Pebble and I turned back a lanky bum who tried to slip into the yard between us, and one of the men below us picked up a shivering kid who was trying to slip out. Otherwise nothing happened until Lieutenant Duff arrived with a couple of carloads of coppers.

Most of our force went into a cordon around the yard. The rest of us went through the yard in small groups, working it over car by car. We picked up a few hoboes that Pebble and his men had missed earlier, but we didn’t find McCloor.

We didn’t find any trace of him until somebody stumbled over a railroad bull huddled in the shadow of a gondola. It took a couple of minutes to bring him to, and he couldn’t talk then. His jaw was broken. But when we asked if McCloor had slugged him, he nodded, and when we asked in which direction McCloor had been headed, he moved a feeble hand to the east.

We went over and searched the Santa Fe yards.

We didn’t find McCloor.

VIII

I Rode up to the Hall of Justice with Duff. MacMan was in the captain of detectives’ office with three or four police sleuths.

“Wales die?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“Say anything before he went?”

“He was gone before you were through the window.”

“You held on to the girl?”

“She’s here.”

“She say anything?”

“We were waiting for you before we tapped her,” detective-sergeant O’Gar said, “not knowing the angle on her.”

“Let’s have her in. I haven’t had any dinner yet. How about the autopsy on Sue Hambleton?”

“Chronic arsenic poisoning.”

“Chronic? That means it was fed to her little by little, and not in a lump?”

“Uh-huh. From what he found in her kidney, intestines, liver, stomach and blood, Jordan figures there was less than a grain of it in her. That wouldn’t be enough to knock her off. But he says he found arsenic in the tips of her hair, and she’d have to be given some at least a month ago for it to have worked out that far.”

“Any chance that it wasn’t arsenic that killed her?”

“Not unless Jordan’s a bum doctor.”

A policewoman came in with Peggy Carroll.

The blonde girl was tired. Her eyelids, mouth corners and body drooped, and when I pushed a chair out toward her she sagged down in it.

O’Gar ducked his grizzled bullet head at me.

“Now, Peggy,” I said, “tell us where you fit into this mess.”

“I don’t fit into it.” She didn’t look up. Her voice was tired. “Joe dragged me into it. He told you.”

“You his girl?”

“If you want to call it that,” she admitted.

“You jealous?”

“What,” she asked, looking up at me, her face puzzled, “has that got to do with it?”

“Sue Hambleton was getting ready to go away with him when she was murdered.”

The girl sat up straight in the chair and said deliberately:

“I swear to God I didn’t know she was murdered.”

“But you did know she was dead,” I said positively.

“I didn’t,” she replied just as positively.

I nudged O’Gar with my elbow. He pushed his undershot jaw at her and barked:

“What are you trying to give us? You knew she was dead. How could you kill her without knowing it?”

While she looked at him I waved the others in. They crowded close around her and took up the chorus of the sergeant’s song. She was barked, roared, and snarled at plenty in the next few minutes.

The instant she stopped trying to talk back to them I cut in again.

“Wait,” I said, very earnestly. “Maybe she didn’t kill her.”

“The hell she didn’t,” O’Gar stormed, holding the center of the stage so the others could move away from the girl without their retreat seeming too artificial. “Do you mean to tell me this baby—”

“I didn’t say she didn’t,” I remonstrated. “I said maybe she didn’t.”

“Then who did?”

I passed the question to the girl: “Who did?”

“Babe,” she said immediately.

O’Gar snorted to make her think he didn’t believe her.

I asked, as if I were honestly perplexed:

“How do you know that if you didn’t know she was dead?”

“It stands to reason he did,” she said. “Anybody can see that. He found out she was going away with Joe, so he killed her and then came to Joe’s and killed him. That’s just exactly what Babe would do when he found it out.”

“Yeah? How long have you known they were going away together?”

“Since they decided to. Joe told me a month or two ago.”

“And you didn’t mind?”

“You’ve got this all wrong,” she said. “Of course I didn’t mind. I was being cut in on it. You know her father had the bees. That’s what Joe was after. She didn’t mean anything to him but an in to the old man’s pockets. And I was to get my dib. And you needn’t think I was crazy enough about Joe or anybody else to step off in the air for them. Babe got next and fixed the pair of them. That’s a cinch.”

“Yeah? How do you figure Babe would kill her?”

“That guy? You don’t think he’d—”

“I mean, how would he go about killing her?”

“Oh!” She shrugged. “With his hands, likely as not.”

“Once he’d made up his mind to do it, he’d do it quick and violent?” I suggested.

“That would be Babe,” she agreed.

“But you can’t see him slow-poisoning her—spreading it out over a month?”

Worry came into the girl’s blue eyes. She put her lower lip between her teeth, then said slowly:

“No, I can’t see him doing it that way. Not Babe.”

“Who can you see doing it that way?”

She opened her eyes wide, asking:

“You mean Joe?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Joe might have,” she said persuasively. “God only knows what he’d want to do it for, why he’d want to get rid of the kind of meal ticket she was going to be. But you couldn’t always guess what he was getting at. He pulled plenty of dumb ones. He was too slick without being smart. If he was going to kill her, though, that would be about the way he’d go about it.”

“Were he and Babe friendly?”

“No.”

“Did he go to Babe’s much?”

“Not at all that I know about. He was too leary of Babe to take a chance on being caught there. That’s why I moved upstairs, so Sue could come over to our place to see him.”

“Then how could Joe have hidden the fly paper he poisoned her with in her apartment?”

“Fly paper!” Her bewilderment seemed honest enough.

“Show it to her,” I told O’Gar.

He got a sheet from the desk and held it close to the girl’s face.

She stared at it for a moment and then jumped up and grabbed my arm with both hands.

“I didn’t know what it was,” she said excitedly. “Joe had some a couple of months ago. He was looking at it when I came in. I asked him what it was for, and he smiled that wisenheimer smile of his and said, ‘You make angels out of it,’ and wrapped it up again and put it in his pocket. I didn’t pay much attention to him: he was always fooling with some kind of tricks that were supposed to make him wealthy, but never did.”

“Ever see it again?”

“No.”

“Did you know Sue very well?”

“I didn’t know her at all. I never even saw her. I used to keep out of the way so I wouldn’t gum Joe’s play with her.”

“But you know Babe?”

“Yes, I’ve been on a couple of parties where he was. That’s all I know him.”

“Who killed Sue?”

“Joe,” she said. “Didn’t he have that paper you say she was killed with?”

“Why did he kill her?”

“I don’t know. He pulled some awful dumb tricks sometimes.”

“You didn’t kill her?”

“No, no, no!”

I jerked the corner of my mouth at O’Gar.

“You’re a liar,” he bawled, shaking the fly paper in her face. “You killed her.” The rest of the team closed in, throwing accusations at her. They kept it up until she was groggy and the policewoman beginning to look worried.

Then I said angrily:

“All right. Throw her in a cell and let her think it over.” To her: “You know what you told Joe this afternoon: this is no time to dummy up. Do a lot of thinking tonight.”

“Honest to God I didn’t kill her,” she said.

I turned my back to her. The policewoman took her away.

“Ho-hum,” O’Gar yawned. “We gave her a pretty good ride at that, for a short one.”

“Not bad,” I agreed. “If anybody else looked likely, I’d say she didn’t kill Sue. But if she’s telling the truth, then Holy Joe did it. And why should he poison the goose that was going to lay nice yellow eggs for him? And how and why did he cache the poison in their apartment? Babe had the motive, but damned if he looks like a slow-poisoner to me. You can’t tell, though; he and Holy Joe could even have been working together on it.”

“Could,” Duff said. “But it takes a lot of imagination to get that one down. Anyway you twist it, Peggy’s our best bet so far. Go up against her again, hard, in the morning?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And we’ve got to find Babe.”

The others had had dinner. MacMan and I went out and got ours. When we returned to the detective bureau an hour later it was practically deserted of the regular operatives.

“All gone to Pier 42 on a tip that McCloor’s there,” Steve Ward told us.

“How long ago?”

“Ten minutes.”

MacMan and I got a taxi and set out for Pier 42. We didn’t get to Pier 42.

On First Street, half a block from the Embarcadero, the taxi suddenly shrieked and slid to a halt.

“What—?” I began, and saw a man standing in front of the machine. He was a big man with a big gun. “Babe,” I grunted, and put my hand on MacMan’s arm to keep him from getting his gun out.

“Take me to—” McCloor was saying to the frightened driver when he saw us. He came around to my side and pulled the door open, holding the gun on us.

He had no hat. His hair was wet, plastered to his head. Little streams of water trickled down from it. His clothes were dripping wet.

He looked surprised at us and ordered:

“Get out.”

As we got out he growled at the driver:

“What the hell you got your flag up for if you had fares?”

The driver wasn’t there. He had hopped out the other side and was scooting away down the street. McCloor cursed him and poked his gun at me, growling:

“Go on, beat it.”

Apparently he hadn’t recognized me. The light here wasn’t good, and I had a hat on now. He had seen me for only a few seconds in Wales’s room.

I stepped aside. MacMan moved to the other side.

McCloor took a backward step to keep us from getting him between us and started an angry word.

MacMan threw himself on McCloor’s gun arm.

I socked McCloor’s jaw with my fist. I might just as well have hit somebody else for all it seemed to bother him.

He swept me out of his way and pasted MacMan in the mouth. MacMan fell back till the taxi stopped him, spit out a tooth, and came back for more.

I was trying to climb up McCloor’s left side.

MacMan came in on his right, failed to dodge a chop of the gun, caught it square on the top of the noodle, and went down hard. He stayed down.

I kicked McCloor’s ankle, but couldn’t get his foot from under him. I rammed my right fist into the small of his back and got a left-handful of his wet hair, swinging on it. He shook his head, dragging me off my feet.

He punched me in the side and I could feel my ribs and guts flattening together like leaves in a book.

I swung my fist against the back of his neck. That bothered him. He made a rumbling noise down in his chest, crunched my shoulder in his left hand, and chopped at me with the gun in his right.

I kicked him somewhere and punched his neck again.

Down the street, at the Embarcadero, a police whistle was blowing. Men were running up First Street toward us.

McCloor snorted like a locomotive and threw me away from him. I didn’t want to go. I tried to hang on. He threw me away from him and ran up the street.

I scrambled up and ran after him, dragging my gun out.

At the first corner he stopped to squirt metal at me—three shots. I squirted one at him. None of the four connected.

He disappeared around the corner. I swung wide around it, to make him miss if he were flattened to the wall waiting for me. He wasn’t. He was a hundred feet ahead, going into a space between two warehouses. I went in after him, and out after him at the other end, making better time with my hundred and ninety pounds than he was making with his two-fifty.

He crossed a street, turning up, away from the waterfront. There was a light on the corner. When I came into its glare he wheeled and leveled his gun at me. I didn’t hear it click, but I knew it had when he threw it at me. The gun went past with a couple of feet to spare and raised hell against a door behind me.

McCloor turned and ran up the street. I ran up the street after him.

I put a bullet past him to let the others know where we were. At the next corner he started to turn to the left, changed his mind, and went straight on.

I sprinted, cutting the distance between us to forty or fifty feet, and yelped:

“Stop or I’ll drop you.”

He jumped sidewise into a narrow alley.

I passed it on the jump, saw he wasn’t waiting for me, and went in. Enough light came in from the street to let us see each other and our surroundings. The alley was blind—walled on each side and at the other end by tall concrete buildings with steel-shuttered windows and doors.

McCloor faced me, less than twenty feet away. His jaw stuck out. His arms curved down free of his sides. His shoulders were bunched.

“Put them up,” I ordered, holding my gun level.

“Get out of my way, little man,” he grumbled, taking a stiff-legged step toward me. “I’ll eat you up.”

“Keep coming,” I said, “and I’ll put you down.”

“Try it.” He took another step, crouching a little. “I can still get to you with slugs in me.”

“Not where I’ll put them.” I was wordy, trying to talk him into waiting till the others came up. I didn’t want to have to kill him. We could have done that from the taxi. “I’m no Annie Oakley, but if I can’t pop your kneecaps with two shots at this distance, you’re welcome to me. And if you think smashed kneecaps are a lot of fun, give it a whirl.”

“Hell with that,” he said and charged.

I shot his right knee.

He lurched toward me.

I shot his left knee.

He tumbled down.

“You would have it,” I complained.

He twisted around, and with his arms pushed himself into a sitting position facing me.

“I didn’t think you had sense enough to do it,” he said through his teeth.

IX

I talked to McCloor in the hospital. He lay on his back in bed with a couple of pillows slanting his head up. The skin was pale and tight around his mouth and eyes, but there was nothing else to show he was in pain.

“You sure devastated me, bo,” he said when I came in.

“Sorry,” I said, “but—”

“I ain’t beefing. I asked for it.”

“Why’d you kill Holy Joe?” I asked, off-hand, as I pulled a chair up beside the bed.

“Uh-uh—you’re tooting the wrong ringer.”

I laughed and told him I was the man in the room with Joe when it happened.

McCloor grinned and said:

“I thought I’d seen you somewheres before. So that’s where it was. I didn’t pay no attention to your mug, just so your hands didn’t move.”

“Why’d you kill him?”

He pursed his lips, screwed up his eyes at me, thought something over, and said:

“He killed a broad I knew.”

“He killed Sue Hambleton?” I asked.

He studied my face a while before he replied: “Yep.”

“How do you figure that out?”

“Hell,” he said, “I don’t have to. Sue told me. Give me a butt.”

I gave him a cigarette, held a lighter under it, and objected:

“That doesn’t exactly fit in with other things I know. Just what happened and what did she say? You might start back with the night you gave her the goog.”

He looked thoughtful, letting smoke sneak slowly out of his nose, then said:

“I hadn’t ought to hit her in the eye, that’s a fact. But, see, she had been out all afternoon and wouldn’t tell me where she’d been, and we had a row over it. What’s this—Thursday morning? That was Monday, then. After the row I went out and spent the night in a dump over on Army Street. I got home about seven the next morning. Sue was sick as hell, but she wouldn’t let me get a croaker for her. That was kind of funny, because she was scared stiff.”

McCloor scratched his head meditatively and suddenly drew in a great lungful of smoke, practically eating up the rest of the cigarette. He let the smoke leak out of mouth and nose together, looking dully through the cloud at me. Then he said bruskly:

“Well, she went under. But before she went she told me she’d been poisoned by Holy Joe.”

“She say how he’d given it to her?”

McCloor shook his head.

“I’d been asking her what was the matter, and not getting anything out of her. Then she starts whining that she’s poisoned. ‘I’m poisoned, Babe,’ she whines. ‘Arsenic. That damned Holy Joe,’ she says. Then she won’t say anything else, and it’s not a hell of a while after that that she kicks off.”

“Yeah? Then what’d you do?”

“I went gunning for Holy Joe. I knew him but didn’t know where he jungled up, and didn’t find out till yesterday. You was there when I came. You know about that. I had picked up a boiler and parked it over on Turk Street, for the getaway. When I got back to it, there was a copper standing close to it. I figured he might have spotted it as a hot one and was waiting to see who came for it, so I let it alone, and caught a street car instead, and cut for the yards. Down there I ran into a whole flock of hammer and saws and had to go overboard in China Basin, swimming up to a pier, being ranked again by a watchman there, swimming off to another, and finally getting through the line only to run into another bad break. I wouldn’t of flagged that taxi if the For Hire flag hadn’t been up.”

“You knew Sue was planning to take a run-out on you with Joe?”

“I don’t know it yet,” he said. “I knew damned well she was cheating on me, but I didn’t know who with.”

“What would you have done if you had known that?” I asked.

“Me?” He grinned wolfishly. “Just what I did.”

“Killed the pair of them,” I said.

He rubbed his lower lip with a thumb and asked calmly:

“You think I killed Sue?”

“You did.”

“Serves me right,” he said. “I must be getting simple in my old age. What the hell am I doing barbering with a lousy dick? That never got nobody nothing but grief. Well, you might just as well take it on the heel and toe now, my lad. I’m through spitting.”

And he was. I couldn’t get another word out of him.

X

The Old Man sat listening to me, tapping his desk lightly with the point of a long yellow pencil, staring past me with mild blue, rimless-spectacled, eyes. When I had brought my story up to date, he asked pleasantly:

“How is MacMan?”

“He lost two teeth, but his skull wasn’t cracked. He’ll be out in a couple of days.”

The Old Man nodded and asked:

“What remains to be done?”

“Nothing. We can put Peggy Carroll on the mat again, but it’s not likely we’ll squeeze much more out of her. Outside of that, the returns are pretty well all in.”

“And what do you make of it?”

I squirmed in my chair and said: “Suicide.”

The Old Man smiled at me, politely but skeptically.

“I don’t like it either,” I grumbled. “And I’m not ready to write it in a report yet. But that’s the only total that what we’ve got will add up to. That fly paper was hidden behind the kitchen stove. Nobody would be crazy enough to try to hide something from a woman in her own kitchen like that. But the woman might hide it there.

“According to Peggy, Holy Joe had the fly paper. If Sue hid it, she got it from him. For what? They were planning to go away together, and were only waiting till Joe, who was on the nut, raised enough dough. Maybe they were afraid of Babe, and had the poison there to slip him if he tumbled to their plan before they went. Maybe they meant to slip it to him before they went anyway.

“When I started talking to Holy Joe about murder, he thought Babe was the one who had been bumped off. He was surprised, maybe, but as if he was surprised that it had happened so soon. He was more surprised when he heard that Sue had died too, but even then he wasn’t so surprised as when he saw McCloor alive at the window.

“She died cursing Holy Joe, and she knew she was poisoned, and she wouldn’t let McCloor get a doctor. Can’t that mean that she had turned against Joe, and had taken the poison herself instead of feeding it to Babe? The poison was hidden from Babe. But even if he found it, I can’t figure him as a poisoner. He’s too rough. Unless he caught her trying to poison him and made her swallow the stuff. But that doesn’t account for the month-old arsenic in her hair.”

“Does your suicide hypothesis take care of that?” the Old Man asked.

“It could,” I said. “Don’t be kicking holes in my theory. It’s got enough as it stands. But, if she committed suicide this time, there’s no reason why she couldn’t have tried it once before—say after a quarrel with Joe a month ago—and failed to bring it off. That would have put the arsenic in her. There’s no real proof that she took any between a month ago and day before yesterday.”

“No real proof,” the Old Man protested mildly, “except the autopsy’s finding—chronic poisoning.”

I was never one to let experts’ guesses stand in my way. I said:

“They base that on the small amount of arsenic they found in her remains—less than a fatal dose. And the amount they find in your stomach after you’re dead depends on how much you vomit before you die.”

The Old Man smiled benevolently at me and asked:

“But you’re not, you say, ready to write this theory into a report? Meanwhile what do you purpose doing?”

“If there’s nothing else on tap, I’m going home, fumigate my brains with Fatimas, and try to get this thing straightened out in my head. I think I’ll get a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo and run through it. I haven’t read it since I was a kid. It looks like the book was wrapped up with the fly paper to make a bundle large enough to wedge tightly between the wall and stove, so it wouldn’t fall down. But there might be something in the book. I’ll see anyway.”

“I did that last night,” the Old Man murmured.

I asked: “And?”

He took a book from his desk drawer, opened it where a slip of paper marked a place, and held it out to me, one pink finger marking a paragraph.

“Suppose you were to take a millegramme of this poison the first day, two millegrammes the second day, and so on. Well, at the end of ten days you would have taken a centigramme: at the end of twenty days, increasing another millegramme, you would have taken three hundred centigrammes; that is to say, a dose you would support without inconvenience, and which would be very dangerous for any other person who had not taken the same precautions as yourself. Well, then, at the end of the month, when drinking water from the same carafe, you would kill the person who had drunk this water, without your perceiving otherwise than from slight inconvenience that there was any poisonous substance mingled with the water.”

“That does it,” I said. “That does it. They were afraid to go away without killing Babe, too certain he’d come after them. She tried to make herself immune from arsenic poisoning by getting her body accustomed to it, taking steadily increasing doses, so when she slipped the big shot in Babe’s food she could eat it with him without danger. She’d be taken sick, but wouldn’t die, and the police couldn’t hang his death on her because she too had eaten the poisoned food.

“That clicks. After the row Monday night, when she wrote Joe the note urging him to make the getaway soon, she tried to hurry up her immunity, and increased her preparatory doses too quickly, took too large a shot. That’s why she cursed Joe at the end: it was his plan.”

“Possibly she overdosed herself in an attempt to speed it along,” the Old Man agreed, “but not necessarily. There are people who can cultivate an ability to take large doses of arsenic without trouble, but it seems to be a sort of natural gift with them, a matter of some constitutional peculiarity. Ordinarily, any one who tried it would do what Sue Hambleton did—slowly poison themselves until the cumulative effect was strong enough to cause death.”

Babe McCloor was hanged, for killing Holy Joe Wales, six months later.

The Farewell Murder

Black Mask, February 1930

The Continental Op is called in to protect a man and runs into plenty grief.

I

I was the only one who left the train at Farewell.

A man came through the rain from the passenger shed. He was a small man. His face was dark and flat. He wore a gray waterproof cap and a gray coat cut in military style.

He didn’t look at me. He looked at the valise and gladstone bag in my hands. He came forward quickly, walking with short, choppy steps.

He didn’t say anything when he took the bags from me. I asked:

“Kavalov’s?”

He had already turned his back to me and was carrying my bags towards a tan Stutz coach that stood in the roadway beside the gravel station platform. In answer to my question he bowed twice at the Stutz without looking around or checking his jerky half-trot.

I followed him to the car.

Three minutes of riding carried us through the village. We took a road that climbed westward into the hills. The road looked like a seal’s back in the rain.

The flat-faced man was in a hurry. We purred over the road at a speed that soon carried us past the last of the cottages sprinkled up the hillside.

Presently we left the shiny black road for a paler one curving south to run along a hill’s wooded crest. Now and then this road, for a hundred feet or more at a stretch, was turned into a tunnel by tall trees’ heavily leafed boughs interlocking overhead.

Rain accumulated in fat drops on the boughs and came down to thump the Stutz’s roof. The dulness of rainy early evening became almost the blackness of night inside these tunnels.

The flat-faced man switched on the lights, and increased our speed.

He sat rigidly erect at the wheel. I sat behind him. Above his military collar, among the hairs that were clipped short on the nape of his neck, globules of moisture made tiny shining points. The moisture could have been rain. It could have been sweat.

We were in the middle of one of the tunnels.

The flat-faced man’s head jerked to the left, and he screamed:

“A-a-a-a-a-a!”

It was a long, quivering, high-pitched bleat, thin with terror.

I jumped up, bending forward to see what was the matter with him.

The car swerved and plunged ahead, throwing me back on the seat again.

Through the side window I caught a one-eyed glimpse of something dark lying in the road.

I twisted around to try the back window, less rain-bleared.

I saw a black man lying on his back in the road, near the left edge. His body was arched, as if its weight rested on his heels and the back of his head. A knife handle that couldn’t have been less than six inches long stood straight up in the air from the left side of his chest.

By the time I had seen this much we had taken a curve and were out of the tunnel.

“Stop,” I called to the flat-faced man.

He pretended he didn’t hear me. The Stutz was a tan streak under us. I put a hand on the driver’s shoulder.

His shoulder squirmed under my hand, and he screamed “A-a-a-a-a!” again as if the dead black man had him.

I reached past him and shut off the engine.

He took his hands from the wheel and clawed up at me. Noises came from his mouth, but they didn’t make any words that I knew.

I got a hand on the wheel. I got my other forearm under his chin. I leaned over the back of his seat so that the weight of my upper body was on his head, mashing it down against the wheel.

Between this and that and the help of God, the Stutz hadn’t left the road when it stopped moving.

I got up off the flat-faced man’s head and asked:

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”

He looked at me with white eyes, shivered, and didn’t say anything.

“Turn it around,” I said. “We’ll go back there.”

He shook his head from side to side, desperately, and made some more of the mouth-noises that might have been words if I could have understood them.

“You know who that was?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“You do,” I growled.

He shook his head.

By then I was beginning to suspect that no matter what I said to this fellow I’d get only head-shakes out of him.

I said:

“Get away from the wheel, then. I’m going to drive back there.”

He opened the door and scrambled out.

“Come back here,” I called.

He backed away, shaking his head.

I cursed him, slid in behind the wheel, said, “All right, wait here for me,” and slammed the door.

He retreated backwards slowly, watching me with scared, whitish eyes while I backed and turned the coach.

I had to drive back farther than I had expected, something like a mile.

I didn’t find the black man.

The tunnel was empty.

If I had known the exact spot in which he had been lying, I might have been able to find something to show how he had been removed. But I hadn’t had time to pick out a landmark, and now any one of four or five places looked like the spot.

With the help of the coach’s lamps I went over the left side of the road from one end of the tunnel to the other.

I didn’t find any blood. I didn’t find any footprints. I didn’t find anything to show that anybody had been lying in the road. I didn’t find anything.

It was too dark by now for me to try searching the woods.

I returned to where I had left the flat-faced man.

He was gone.

It looked, I thought, as if Mr. Kavalov might be right in thinking he needed a detective.

II

Half a mile beyond the place where the flat-faced man had deserted me, I stopped the Stutz in front of a grilled steel gate that blocked the road. The gate was padlocked on the inside. From either side of it tall hedging ran off into the woods. The upper part of a brown-roofed small house was visible over the hedge-top to the left.

I worked the Stutz’s horn.

The racket brought a gawky boy of fifteen or sixteen to the other side of the gate. He had on bleached whipcord pants and a wildly striped sweater. He didn’t come out to the middle of the road, but stood at one side, with one arm out of sight as if holding something that was hidden from me by the hedge.

“This Kavalov’s?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” he said uneasily.

I waited for him to unlock the gate. He didn’t unlock it. He stood there looking uneasily at the car and at me.

“Please, mister,” I said, “can I come in?”

“What—who are you?”

“I’m the guy that Kavalov sent for. If I’m not going to be let in, tell me, so I can catch the six-fifty back to San Francisco.”

The boy chewed his lip, said, “Wait till I see if I can find the key,” and went out of sight behind the hedge.

He was gone long enough to have had a talk with somebody.

When he came back he unlocked the gate, swung it open, and said:

“It’s all right, sir. They’re expecting you.”

When I had driven through the gate I could see lights on a hilltop a mile or so ahead and to the left.

“Is that the house?” I asked.

“Yes, sir. They’re expecting you.”

Close to where the boy had stood while talking to me through the gate, a double-barrel shotgun was propped up against the hedge.

I thanked the boy and drove on. The road wound gently uphill through farm land. Tall, slim trees had been planted at regular intervals on both sides of the road.

The road brought me at last to the front of a building that looked like a cross between a fort and a factory in the dusk. It was built of concrete. Take a flock of squat cones of various sizes, round off the points bluntly, mash them together with the largest one somewhere near the center, the others grouped around it in not too strict accordance with their sizes, adjust the whole collection to agree with the slopes of a hilltop, and you would have a model of the Kavalov house. The windows were steel-sashed. There weren’t very many of them. No two were in line either vertically or horizontally. Some were lighted.

As I got out of the car, the narrow front door of this house opened.

A short, red-faced woman of fifty or so, with faded blonde hair wound around and around her head, came out. She wore a high-necked, tight-sleeved, gray woolen dress. When she smiled her mouth seemed wide as her hips.

She said:

“You’re the gentleman from the city?”

“Yeah. I lost your chauffeur somewhere back on the road.”

“Lord bless you,” she said amiably, “that’s all right.”

A thin man with thin dark hair plastered down above a thin, worried face came past her to take my bags when I had lifted them out of the car. He carried them indoors.

The woman stood aside for me to enter, saying:

“Now I suppose you’ll want to wash up a little bit before you go in to dinner, and they won’t mind waiting for you the few minutes you’ll take if you hurry.”

I said, “Yeah, thanks,” waited for her to get ahead of me again, and followed her up a curving flight of stairs that climbed along the inside of one of the cones that made up the building.

She took me to a second-story bedroom where the thin man was unpacking my bags.

“Martin will get you anything you need,” she assured me from the doorway, “and when you’re ready, just come on downstairs.”

I said I would, and she went away. The thin man had finished unpacking by the time I had got out of coat, vest, collar and shirt. I told him there wasn’t anything else I needed, washed up in the adjoining bathroom, put on a fresh shirt and collar, my vest and coat, and went downstairs.

The wide hall was empty. Voices came through an open doorway to the left.

One voice was a nasal whine. It complained:

“I will not have it. I will not put up with it. I am not a child, and I will not have it.”

This voice’s t’s were a little too thick for t’s, but not thick enough to be d’s.

Another voice was a lively, but slightly harsh, barytone. It said cheerfully:

“What’s the good of saying we won’t put up with it, when we are putting up with it?”

The third voice was feminine, a soft voice, but flat and spiritless. It said:

“But perhaps he did kill him.”

The whining voice said: “I do not care. I will not have it.”

The barytone voice said, cheerfully as before: “Oh, won’t you?”

A doorknob turned farther down the hall. I didn’t want to be caught standing there listening. I advanced to the open doorway.

III

I was in the doorway of a low-ceilinged oval room furnished and decorated in gray, white and silver. Two men and a woman were there.

The older man—he was somewhere in his fifties—got up from a deep gray chair and bowed ceremoniously at me. He was a plump man of medium height, completely bald, dark-skinned and pale-eyed. He wore a wax-pointed gray mustache and a straggly gray imperial.

“Mr. Kavalov?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.” His was the whining voice.

I told him who I was. He shook my hand and then introduced me to the others.

The woman was his daughter. She was probably thirty. She had her father’s narrow, full-lipped mouth, but her eyes were dark, her nose was short and straight, and her skin was almost colorless. Her face had Asia in it. It was pretty, passive, unintelligent.

The man with the barytone voice was her husband. His name was Ringgo. He was six or seven years older than his wife, neither tall nor heavy, but well setup. His left arm was in splints and a sling. The knuckles of his right hand were darkly bruised. He had a lean, bony, quick-witted face, bright dark eyes with plenty of lines around them, and a good-natured hard mouth.

He gave me his bruised hand, wriggled his bandaged arm at me, grinned, and said:

“I’m sorry you missed this, but the future injuries are yours.”

“How did it happen?” I asked.

Kavalov raised a plump hand.

“Time enough it is to go into that when we have eaten,” he said. “Let us have our dinner first.”

We went into a small green and brown dining-room where a small square table was set. I sat facing Ringgo across a silver basket of orchids that stood between tall silver candlesticks in the center of the table. Mrs. Ringgo sat to my right, Kavalov to my left. When Kavalov sat down I saw the shape of an automatic pistol in his hip pocket.

Two men servants waited on us. There was a lot of food and all of it was well turned out. We ate caviar, some sort of consommé, sand dabs, potatoes and cucumber jelly, roast lamb, corn and string beans, asparagus, wild duck and hominy cakes, artichoke-and-tomato salad, and orange ice. We drank white wine, claret, Burgundy, coffee and crème de menthe.

Kavalov ate and drank enormously. None of us skimped.

Kavalov was the first to disregard his own order that nothing be said about his troubles until after we had eaten. When he had finished his soup he put down his spoon and said:

“I am not a child. I will not be frightened.”

He blinked pale, worried eyes defiantly at me, his lips pouting between mustache and imperial.

Ringgo grinned pleasantly at him. Mrs. Ringgo’s face was as serene and inattentive as if nothing had been said.

“What is there to be frightened of?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Kavalov said. “Nothing excepting a lot of idiotic and very pointless trickery and play-acting.”

“You can call it anything you want to call it,” a voice grumbled over my shoulder, “but I seen what I seen.”

The voice belonged to one of the men who was waiting on the table, a sallow, youngish man with a narrow, slack-lipped face. He spoke with a subdued sort of stubbornness, and without looking up from the dish he was putting before me.

Since nobody else paid any attention to the servant’s clearly audible remark, I turned my face to Kavalov again. He was trimming the edge of a sand dab with the side of his fork.

“What kind of trickery and play-acting?” I asked.

Kavalov put down his fork and rested his wrists on the edge of the table. He rubbed his lips together and leaned over his plate towards me.

“Supposing”—he wrinkled his forehead so that his bald scalp twitched forward—“you have done injury to a man ten years ago.” He turned his wrists quickly, laying his hands palms-up on the white cloth. “You have done this injury in the ordinary business manner—you understand?—for profit. There is not anything personal concerned. You do not hardly know him. And then supposing he came to you after all those ten years and said to you: ‘I have come to watch you die.’” He turned his hands over, palms down. “Well, what would you think?”

“I wouldn’t,” I replied, “think I ought to hurry up my dying on his account.”

The earnestness went out of his face, leaving it blank. He blinked at me for a moment and then began eating his fish. When he had chewed and swallowed the last piece of sand dab he looked up at me again. He shook his head slowly, drawing down the corners of his mouth.

“That was not a good answer,” he said. He shrugged, and spread his fingers. “However, you will have to deal with this Captain Cat-and-mouse. It is for that I engaged you.”

I nodded.

Ringgo smiled and patted his bandaged arm, saying:

“I wish you more luck with him than I had.”

Mrs. Ringgo put out a hand and let the pointed fingertips touch her husband’s wrist for a moment.

I asked Kavalov:

“This injury I was to suppose I had done: how serious was it?”

He pursed his lips, made little wavy motions with the fingers of his right hand, and said:

“Oh—ah—ruin.”

“We can take it for granted, then, that your captain’s really up to something?”

“Good God!” said Ringgo, dropping his fork. “I wouldn’t like to think he’d broken my arm just in fun.”

Behind me the sallow servant spoke to his mate:

“He wants to know if we think the captain’s really up to something.”

“I heard him,” the other said gloomily. “A lot of help he’s going to be to us.”

Kavalov tapped his plate with a fork and made angry faces at the servants.

“Shut up,” he said. “Where is the roast?” He pointed the fork at Mrs. Ringgo. “Her glass is empty.” He looked at the fork. “See what care they take of my silver,” he complained, holding it out to me. “It has not been cleaned decently in a month.”

He put the fork down. He pushed back his plate to make room for his forearms on the table. He leaned over them, hunching his shoulders. He sighed. He frowned. He stared at me with pleading pale eyes.

“Listen,” he whined. “Am I a fool? Would I send to San Francisco for a detective if I did not need a detective? Would I pay you what you are charging me, when I could get plenty good enough detectives for half of that, if I did not require the best detective I could secure? Would I require so expensive a one if I did not know this captain for a completely dangerous fellow?”

I didn’t say anything. I sat still and looked attentive.

“Listen,” he whined. “This is not April-foolery. This captain means to murder me. He came here to murder me. He will certainly murder me if somebody does not stop him from it.”

“Just what has he done so far?” I asked.

“That is not it.” Kavalov shook his bald head impatiently. “I do not ask you to undo anything that he has done. I ask you to keep him from killing me. What has he done so far? Well, he has terrorized my people most completely. He has broken Dolph’s arm. He has done these things so far, if you must know.”

“How long has this been going on? How long has he been here?”

“A week and two days.”

“Did your chauffeur tell you about the black man we saw in the road?”

Kavalov pushed his lips together and nodded slowly.

“He wasn’t there when I went back,” I said.

He blew out his lips with a little puff and cried excitedly:

“I do not care anything about your black men and your roads. I care about not being murdered.”

“Have you said anything to the sheriff’s office?” I asked, trying to pretend I wasn’t getting peevish.

“That I have done. But to what good? Has he threatened me? Well, he has told me he has come to watch me die. From him, the way he said it, that is a threat. But to your sheriff it is not a threat. He has terrorized my people. Have I proof that he has done that? The sheriff says I have not. What absurdity! Do I need proof? Don’t I know? Must he leave fingerprints on the fright he causes? So it comes to this: the sheriff will keep an eye on him. ‘An eye,’ he said, mind you. Here I have twenty people, servants and farm hands, with forty eyes. And he comes and goes as he likes. An eye!”

“How about Ringgo’s arm?” I asked.

Kavalov shook his head impatiently and began to cut up his lamb.

Ringgo said:

“There’s nothing we can do about that. I hit him first.” He looked at his bruised knuckles. “I didn’t think he was that tough. Maybe I’m not as good as I used to be. Anyway, a dozen people saw me punch his jaw before he touched me. We performed at high noon in front of the post office.”

“Who is this captain?”

“It’s not him,” the sallow servant said. “It’s that black devil.”

Ringgo said:

“Sherry’s his name, Hugh Sherry. He was a captain in the British army when we knew him before—quartermasters department in Cairo. That was in 1917, all of twelve years ago. The commodore”—he nodded his head at his father-in-law—“was speculating in military supplies. Sherry should have been a line officer. He had no head for desk work. He wasn’t timid enough. Somebody decided the commodore wouldn’t have made so much money if Sherry hadn’t been so careless. They knew Sherry hadn’t made any money for himself. They cashiered Sherry at the same time they asked the commodore please to go away.”

Kavalov looked up from his plate to explain:

“Business is like that in wartime. They wouldn’t let me go away if I had done anything they could keep me there for.”

“And now, twelve years after you had him kicked out of the army in disgrace,” I said, “he comes here, threatens to kill you, so you believe, and sets out to spread panic among your people. Is that it?”

“That is not it,” Kavalov whined. “That is not it at all. I did not have him kicked out of any armies. I am a man of business. I take my profits where I find them. If somebody lets me take a profit that angers his employers, what is their anger to me? Second, I do not believe he means to kill me. I know that.”

“I’m trying to get it straight in my mind.”

“There is nothing to get straight. A man is going to murder me. I ask you not to let him do it. Is not that simple enough?”

“Simple enough,” I agreed, and stopped trying to talk to him.

Kavalov and Ringgo were smoking cigars, Mrs. Ringgo and I cigarettes over crème de menthe when the red-faced blonde woman in gray wool came in.

She came in hurriedly. Her eyes were wide open and dark. She said:

“Anthony says there’s a fire in the upper field.”

Kavalov crunched his cigar between his teeth and looked pointedly at me.

I stood up, asking:

“How do I get there?”

“I’ll show you the way,” Ringgo said, leaving his chair.

“Dolph,” his wife protested, “your arm.”

He smiled gently at her and said:

“I’m not going to interfere. I’m only going along to see how an expert handles these things.”

IV

I ran up to my room for hat, coat, flashlight and gun.

The Ringgos were standing at the front door when I started downstairs again.

He had put on a dark raincoat, buttoned tight over his injured arm, its left sleeve hanging empty. His right arm was around his wife. Both of her bare arms were around his neck. She was bent far back, he far forward over her. Their mouths were together.

Retreating a little, I made more noise with my feet when I came into sight again. They were standing apart at the door, waiting for me. Ringgo was breathing heavily, as if he had been running. He opened the door.

Mrs. Ringgo addressed me:

“Please don’t let my foolish husband be too reckless.”

I said I wouldn’t, and asked him:

“Worth while taking any of the servants or farm hands along?”

He shook his head.

“Those that aren’t hiding would be as useless as those that are,” he said. “They’ve all had it taken out of them.”

He and I went out, leaving Mrs. Ringgo looking after us from the doorway. The rain had stopped for the time, but a black muddle overhead promised more presently.

Ringgo led me around the side of the house, along a narrow path that went downhill through shrubbery, past a group of small buildings in a shallow valley, and diagonally up another, lower, hill.

The path was soggy. At the top of the hill we left the path, going through a wire gate and across a stubbly field that was both gummy and slimy under our feet. We moved along swiftly. The gumminess of the ground, the sultriness of the night air, and our coats, made the going warm work.

When we had crossed this field we could see the fire, a spot of flickering orange beyond intervening trees. We climbed a low wire fence and wound through the trees.

A violent rustling broke out among the leaves overhead, starting at the left, ending with a solid thud against a tree trunk just to our right. Then something plopped on the soft ground under the tree.

Off to the left a voice laughed, a savage, hooting laugh.

The laughing voice couldn’t have been far away. I went after it.

The fire was too small and too far away to be of much use to me: blackness was nearly perfect among the trees.

I stumbled over roots, bumped into trees, and found nothing. The flashlight would have helped the laugher more than me, so I kept it idle in my hand.

When I got tired of playing peekaboo with myself, I cut through the woods to the field on the other side, and went down to the fire.

The fire had been built in one end of the field, a dozen feet or less from the nearest tree. It had been built of dead twigs and broken branches that the rain had missed, and had nearly burnt itself out by the time I reached it.

Two small forked branches were stuck in the ground on opposite sides of the fire. Their forks held the ends of a length of green sapling. Spitted on the sapling, hanging over the fire, was an eighteen-inch-long carcass, headless, tailless, footless, skinless, and split down the front.

On the ground a few feet away lay an airedale puppy’s head, pelt, feet, tail, insides, and a lot of blood.

There were some dry sticks, broken in convenient lengths, beside the fire. I put them on as Ringgo came out of the woods to join me. He carried a stone the size of a grapefruit in his hand.

“Get a look at him?” he asked.

“No. He laughed and went.”

He held out the stone to me, saying:

“This is what was chucked at us.”

Drawn on the smooth gray stone, in red, were round blank eyes, a triangular nose, and a grinning, toothy mouth—a crude skull.

I scratched one of the red eyes with a fingernail, and said:

“Crayon.”

Ringgo was staring at the carcass sizzling over the fire and at the trimmings on the ground.

“What do you make of that?” I asked.

He swallowed and said:

“Mickey was a damned good little dog.”

“Yours?”

He nodded.

I went around with my flashlight on the ground. I found some footprints, such as they were.

“Anything?” Ringgo asked.

“Yeah.” I showed him one of the prints. “Made with rags tied around his shoes. They’re no good.”

We turned to the fire again.

“This is another show,” I said. “Whoever killed and cleaned the pup knew his stuff; knew it too well to think he could cook him decently like that. The outside will be burnt before the inside’s even warm, and the way he’s put on the spit he’d fall off if you tried to turn him.”

Ringgo’s scowl lightened a bit.

“That’s a little better,” he said, “Having him killed is rotten enough, but I’d hate to think of anybody eating Mickey, or even meaning to.”

“They didn’t,” I assured him. “They were putting on a show. This the sort of thing that’s been happening?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the sense of it?”

He glumly quoted Kavalov:

“Captain Cat-and-mouse.”

I gave him a cigarette, took one myself, and lighted them with a stick from the fire.

He raised his face to the sky, said, “Raining again; let’s go back to the house,” but remained by the fire, staring at the cooking carcass. The stink of scorched meat hung thick around us.

“You don’t take this very seriously yet, do you?” he asked presently, in a low, matter-of-fact voice.

“It’s a funny layout.”

“He’s cracked,” he said in the same low voice. “Try to see this. Honor meant something to him. That’s why we had to trick him instead of bribing him, back in Cairo. Less than ten years of dishonor can crack a man like that. He’d go off and hide and brood. It would be either shoot himself when the blow fell—or that. I was like you at first.” He kicked at the fire. “This is silly. But I can’t laugh at it now, except when I’m around Miriam and the commodore. When he first showed up I didn’t have the slightest idea that I couldn’t handle him. I had handled him all right in Cairo. When I discovered I couldn’t handle him I lost my head a little. I went down and picked a row with him. Well, that was no good either. It’s the silliness of this that makes it bad. In Cairo he was the kind of man who combs his hair before he shaves, so his mirror will show an orderly picture. Can you understand some of this?”

“I’ll have to talk to him first,” I said. “He’s staying in the village?”

“He has a cottage on the hill above. It’s the first one on the left after you turn into the main road.” Ringgo dropped his cigarette into the fire and looked thoughtfully at me, biting his lower lip. “I don’t know how you and the commodore are going to get along. You can’t make jokes with him. He doesn’t understand them, and he’ll distrust you on that account.”

“I’ll try to be careful,” I promised. “No good offering this Sherry money?”

“Hell, no,” he said softly. “He’s too cracked for that.”

We took down the dog’s carcass, kicked the fire apart, and trod it out in the mud before we returned to the house.

V

The country was fresh and bright under clear sunlight the next morning. A warm breeze was drying the ground and chasing raw-cotton clouds across the sky.

At ten o’clock I set out afoot for Captain Sherry’s. I didn’t have any trouble finding his house, a pinkish stuccoed bungalow with a terra cotta roof, reached from the road by a cobbled walk.

A white-clothed table with two places set stood on the tiled veranda that stretched across the front of the bungalow.

Before I could knock, the door was opened by a slim black man, not much more than a boy, in a white jacket. His features were thinner than most American negroes’, aquiline, pleasantly intelligent.

“You’re going to catch colds lying around in wet roads,” I said, “if you don’t get run over.”

His mouth-ends ran towards his ears in a grin that showed me a lot of strong yellow teeth.

“Yes, sir,” he said, buzzing his s’s, rolling the r, bowing. “The capitaine have waited breakfast that you be with him. You do sit down, sir. I will call him.”

“Not dog meat?”

His mouth-ends ran back and up again and he shook his head vigorously.

“No, sir.” He held up his black hands and counted the fingers. “There is orange and kippers and kidneys grilled and eggs and marmalade and toast and tea or coffee. There is not dog meat.”

“Fine,” I said, and sat down in one of the wicker armchairs on the veranda.

I had time to light a cigarette before Captain Sherry came out.

He was a gaunt tall man of forty. Sandy hair, parted in the middle, was brushed flat to his small head, above a sunburned face. His eyes were gray, with lower lids as straight as ruler-edges. His mouth was another hard straight line under a close-clipped sandy mustache. Grooves like gashes ran from his nostrils past his mouth-corners. Other grooves, just as deep, ran down his cheeks to the sharp ridge of his jaw. He wore a gaily striped flannel bathrobe over sand-colored pajamas.

“Good morning,” he said pleasantly, and gave me a semi-salute. He didn’t offer to shake hands. “Don’t get up. It will be some minutes before Marcus has breakfast ready. I slept late. I had a most abominable dream.” His voice was a deliberately languid drawl. “I dreamed that Theodore Kavalov’s throat had been cut from here to here.” He put bony fingers under his ears. “It was an atrociously gory business. He bled and screamed horribly, the swine.”

I grinned up at him, asking:

“And you didn’t like that?”

“Oh, getting his throat cut was all to the good, but he bled and screamed so filthily.” He raised his nose and sniffed. “That’s honeysuckle somewhere, isn’t it?”

“Smells like it. Was it throat-cutting that you had in mind when you threatened him?”

“When I threatened him,” he drawled. “My dear fellow, I did nothing of the sort. I was in Udja, a stinking Moroccan town close to the Algerian frontier, and one morning a voice spoke to me from an orange tree. It said: ‘Go to Farewell, in California, in the States, and there you will see Theodore Kavalov die.’ I thought that a capital idea. I thanked the voice, told Marcus to pack, and came here. As soon as I arrived I told Kavalov about it, thinking perhaps he would die then and I wouldn’t be hung up here waiting. He didn’t, though, and too late I regretted not having asked the voice for a definite date. I should hate having to waste months here.”

“That’s why you’ve been trying to hurry it up?” I asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Schrecklichkeit,” I said, “rocky skulls, dog barbecues, vanishing corpses.”

“I’ve been fifteen years in Africa,” he said. “I’ve too much faith in voices that come from orange trees where no one is to try to give them a hand. You needn’t fancy I’ve had anything to do with whatever has happened.”

“Marcus?”

Sherry stroked his freshly shaven cheeks and replied:

“That’s possible. He has an incorrigible bent for the ruder sort of African horse-play. I’ll gladly cane him for any misbehavior of which you’ve reasonably definite proof.”

“Let me catch him at it,” I said, “and I’ll do my own caning.”

Sherry leaned forward and spoke in a cautious undertone:

“Be sure he suspects nothing till you’ve a firm grip on him. He’s remarkably effective with either of his knives.”

“I’ll try to remember that. The voice didn’t say anything about Ringgo?”

“There was no need. When the body dies, the hand is dead.”

Black Marcus came out carrying food. We moved to the table and I started on my second breakfast.

Sherry wondered whether the voice that had spoken to him from the orange tree had also spoken to Kavalov. He had asked Kavalov, he said, but hadn’t received a very satisfactory answer. He believed that voices which announced deaths to people’s enemies usually also warned the one who was to die. “That is,” he said, “the conventional way of doing it, I believe.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll try to find out for you. Maybe I ought to ask him what he dreamed last night, too.”

“Did he look nightmarish this morning?”

“I don’t know. I left before he was up.”

Sherry’s eyes became hot gray points.

“Do you mean,” he asked, “that you’ve no idea what shape he’s in this morning, whether he’s alive or not, whether my dream was a true one or not?”

“Yeah.”

The hard line of his mouth loosened into a slow delighted smile.

“By Jove,” he said, “That’s capital! I thought—you gave me the impression of knowing positively that there was nothing to my dream, that it was only a meaningless dream.”

He clapped his hands sharply.

Black Marcus popped out of the door.

“Pack,” Sherry ordered. “The bald one is finished. We’re off.”

Marcus bowed and backed grinning into the house.

“Hadn’t you better wait to make sure?” I asked.

“But I am sure,” he drawled, “as sure as when the voice spoke from the orange tree. There is nothing to wait for now: I have seen him die.”

“In a dream.”

“Was it a dream?” he asked carelessly.

When I left, ten or fifteen minutes later, Marcus was making noises indoors that sounded as if he actually was packing.

Sherry shook hands with me, saying:

“Awfully glad to have had you for breakfast. Perhaps we’ll meet again if your work ever brings you to northern Africa. Remember me to Miriam and Dolph. I can’t sincerely send condolences.”

Out of sight of the bungalow, I left the road for a path along the hillside above, and explored the country for a higher spot from which Sherry’s place could be spied on. I found a pip, a vacant ramshackle house on a jutting ridge off to the northeast. The whole of the bungalow’s front, part of one side, and a good stretch of the cobbled walk, including its juncture with the road, could be seen from the vacant house’s front porch. It was a rather long shot for naked eyes, but with field glasses it would be just about perfect, even to a screen of over-grown bushes in front.

When I got back to the Kavalov house Ringgo was propped up on gay cushions in a reed chair under a tree, with a book in his hand.

“What do you think of him?” he asked. “Is he cracked?”

“Not very. He wanted to be remembered to you and Mrs. Ringgo. How’s the arm this morning?”

“Rotten. I must have let it get too damp last night. It gave me hell all night.”

“Did you see Captain Cat-and-mouse?” Kavalov’s whining voice came from behind me. “And did you find any satisfaction in that?”

I turned around. He was coming down the walk from the house. His face was more gray than brown this morning, but what I could see of his throat, above the v of a wing collar, was uncut enough.

“He was packing when I left,” I said. “Going back to Africa.”

VI

That day was Thursday. Nothing else happened that day.

Friday morning I was awakened by the noise of my bedroom door being opened violently.

Martin, the thin-faced valet, came dashing into my room and began shaking me by the shoulder, though I was sitting up by the time he reached my bedside.

His thin face was lemon-yellow and ugly with fear.

“It’s happened,” he babbled. “Oh, my God, it’s happened!”

“What’s happened?”

“It’s happened. It’s happened.”

I pushed him aside and got out of bed. He turned suddenly and ran into my bathroom. I could hear him vomiting as I pushed my feet into slippers.

Kavalov’s bedroom was three doors below mine, on the same side of the building.

The house was full of noises, excited voices, doors opening and shutting, though I couldn’t see anybody.

I ran down to Kavalov’s door. It was open.

Kavalov was in there, lying on a low Spanish bed. The bedclothes were thrown down across the foot.

Kavalov was lying on his back. His throat had been cut, a curving cut that paralleled the line of his jaw between points an inch under his ear lobes.

Where his blood had soaked into the blue pillow case and blue sheet it was purple as grape-juice. It was thick and sticky, already clotting.

Ringgo came in wearing a bathrobe like a cape.

“It’s happened,” I growled, using the valet’s words.

Ringgo looked dully, miserably, at the bed and began cursing in a choked, muffled, voice.

The red-faced blonde woman—Louella Qually, the housekeeper—came in, screamed, pushed past us, and ran to the bed, still screaming. I caught her arm when she reached for the covers.

“Let things alone,” I said.

“Cover him up. Cover him up, the poor man!” she cried.

I took her away from the bed. Four or five servants were in the room by now. I gave the housekeeper to a couple of them, telling them to take her out and quiet her down. She went away laughing and crying.

Ringgo was still staring at the bed.

“Where’s Mrs. Ringgo?” I asked.

He didn’t hear me. I tapped his good arm and repeated the question.

“She’s in her room. She—she didn’t have to see it to know what had happened.”

“Hadn’t you better look after her?”

He nodded, turned slowly, and went out.

The valet, still lemon-yellow, came in.

“I want everybody on the place, servants, farm hands, everybody downstairs in the front room,” I told him. “Get them all there right away, and they’re to stay there till the sheriff comes.”

“Yes, sir,” he said and went downstairs, the others following him.

I closed Kavalov’s door and went across to the library, where I phoned the sheriff’s office in the county seat. I talked to a deputy named Hilden. When I had told him my story he said the sheriff would be at the house within half an hour.

I went to my room and dressed. By the time I had finished, the valet came up to tell me that everybody was assembled in the front room—everybody except the Ringgos and Mrs. Ringgo’s maid.

I was examining Kavalov’s bedroom when the sheriff arrived. He was a white-haired man with mild blue eyes and a mild voice that came out indistinctly under a white mustache. He had brought three deputies, a doctor and a coroner with him.

“Ringgo and the valet can tell you more than I can,” I said when we had shaken hands all around. “I’ll be back as soon as I can make it. I’m going to Sherry’s. Ringgo will tell you where he fits in.”

In the garage I selected a muddy Chevrolet and drove to the bungalow. Its doors and windows were tight, and my knocking brought no answer.

I went back along the cobbled walk to the car, and rode down into Farewell. There I had no trouble learning that Sherry and Marcus had taken the two-ten train for Los Angeles the afternoon before, with three trunks and half a dozen bags that the village expressman had checked for them.

After sending a telegram to the Agency’s Los Angeles branch, I hunted up the man from whom Sherry had rented the bungalow.

He could tell me nothing about his tenants except that he was disappointed in their not staying even a full two weeks. Sherry had returned the keys with a brief note saying he had been called away unexpectedly.

I pocketed the note. Handwriting specimens are always convenient to have. Then I borrowed the keys to the bungalow and went back to it.

I didn’t find anything of value there, except a lot of fingerprints that might possibly come in handy later. There was nothing there to tell me where my men had gone.

I returned to Kavalov’s.

The sheriff had finished running the staff through the mill.

“Can’t get a thing out of them,” he said. “Nobody heard anything and nobody saw anything, from bedtime last night, till the valet opened the door to call him at eight o’clock this morning, and saw him dead like that. You know any more than that?”

“No. They tell you about Sherry?”

“Oh, yes. That’s our meat, I guess, huh?”

“Yeah. He’s supposed to have cleared out yesterday afternoon, with his black man, for Los Angeles. We ought to be able to find the work in that. What does the doctor say?”

“Says he was killed between three and four this morning, with a heavyish knife—one clean slash from left to right, like a left-handed man would do it.”

“Maybe one clean cut,” I agreed, “but not exactly a slash. Slower than that. A slash, if it curved, ought to curve up, away from the slasher, in the middle, and down towards him at the ends—just the opposite of what this does.”

“Oh, all right. Is this Sherry a southpaw?”

“I don’t know,” I wondered if Marcus was. “Find the knife?”

“Nary hide nor hair of it. And what’s more, we didn’t find anything else, inside or out. Funny a fellow as scared as Kavalov was, from all accounts, didn’t keep himself locked up tighter. His windows were open. Anybody could of got in them with a ladder. His door wasn’t locked.”

“There could be half a dozen reasons for that. He—”

One of the deputies, a big-shouldered blond man, came to the door and said:

“We found the knife.”

The sheriff and I followed the deputy out of the house, around to the side on which Kavalov’s room was situated. The knife’s blade was buried in the ground, among some shrubs that bordered a path leading down to the farm hands’ quarters.

The knife’s wooden handle—painted red—slanted a little toward the house. A little blood was smeared on the blade, but the soft earth had cleaned off most. There was no blood on the painted handle, and nothing like a fingerprint.

There were no footprints in the soft ground near the knife. Apparently it had been tossed into the shrubbery.

“I guess that’s all there is here for us,” the sheriff said. “There’s nothing much to show that anybody here had anything to do with it, or didn’t. Now we’ll look after this here Captain Sherry.

I went down to the village with him. At the post office we learned that Sherry had left a forwarding address: General Delivery, St. Louis, Mo. The postmaster said Sherry had received no mail during his stay in Farewell.

We went to the telegraph office, and were told that Sherry had neither received nor sent any telegrams. I sent one to the Agency’s St. Louis branch.

The rest of our poking around in the village brought us nothing—except we learned that most of the idlers in Farewell had seen Sherry and Marcus board the southbound two-ten train.

Before we returned to the Kavalov house a telegram came from the Los Angeles branch for me:

Sherry’s trunks and bags in baggage room here not yet called for are keeping them under surveillance.

When we got back to the house I met Ringgo in the hall, and asked him:

“Is Sherry left-handed?”

He thought, and then shook his head. “I can’t remember,” he said. “He might be. I’ll ask Miriam. Perhaps she’ll know—women remember things like that.”

When he came downstairs again he was nodding:

“He’s very nearly ambidextrous, but uses his left hand more than his right. Why?”

“The doctor thinks it was done with a left hand. How is Mrs. Ringgo now?”

“I think the worst of the shock is over, thanks.”

VII

Sherry’s baggage remained uncalled for in the Los Angeles passenger station all day Saturday. Late that afternoon the sheriff made public the news that Sherry and the black were wanted for murder, and that night the sheriff and I took a train south.

Sunday morning, with a couple of men from the Los Angeles police department, we opened the baggage. We didn’t find anything except legitimate clothing and personal belongings that told us nothing.

That trip paid no dividends.

I returned to San Francisco and had bales of circulars printed and distributed.

Two weeks went by, two weeks in which the circulars brought us nothing but the usual lot of false alarms.

Then the Spokane police picked up Sherry and Marcus in a Stevens Street rooming house.

Some unknown person had phoned the police that one Fred Williams living there had a mysterious black visitor nearly every day, and that their actions were very suspicious. The Spokane police had copies of our circular. They hardly needed the H. S. monograms on Fred Williams’ cuff links and handkerchiefs to assure them that he was our man.

After a couple of hours of being grilled, Sherry admitted his identity, but denied having murdered Kavalov.

Two of the sheriff’s men went north and brought the prisoners down to the county seat.

Sherry had shaved off his mustache. There was nothing in his face or voice to show that he was the least bit worried.

“I knew there was nothing more to wait for after my dream,” he drawled, “so I went away. Then, when I heard the dream had come true, I knew you johnnies would be hot after me—as if one can help his dreams—and I—ah—sought seclusion.”

He solemnly repeated his orange-tree-voice story to the sheriff and district attorney. The newspapers liked it.

He refused to map his route for us, to tell us how he had spent his time.

“No, no,” he said. “Sorry, but I shouldn’t do it. It may be I shall have to do it again some time, and it wouldn’t do to reveal my methods.”

He wouldn’t tell us where he had spent the night of the murder. We were fairly certain that he had left the train before it reached Los Angeles, though the train crew had been able to tell us nothing.

“Sorry,” he drawled. “But if you chaps don’t know where I was, how do you know that I was where the murder was?”

We had even less luck with Marcus. His formula was:

“Not understand the English very good. Ask the capitaine. I don’t know.”

The district attorney spent a lot of time walking his office floor, biting his finger nails, and telling us fiercely that the case was going to fall apart if we couldn’t prove that either Sherry or Marcus was within reach of the Kavalov house at, or shortly before or after, the time of the murder.

The sheriff was the only one of us who hadn’t a sneaky feeling that Sherry’s sleeves were loaded with assorted aces. The sheriff saw him already hanged.

Sherry got a lawyer, a slick looking pale man with hornrim glasses and a thin twitching mouth. His name was Schaeffer. He went around smiling to himself and at us.

When the district attorney had only thumb nails left and was starting to work on them, I borrowed a car from Ringgo and started following the railroad south, trying to learn where Sherry had left the train. We had mugged the pair, of course, so I carried their photographs with me.

I displayed those damned photographs at every railroad stop between Farewell and Los Angeles, at every village within twenty miles of the tracks on either side, and at most of the houses in between. And it got me nothing.

There was no evidence that Sherry and Marcus hadn’t gone through to Los Angeles.

Their train would have put them there at ten-thirty that night. There was no train out of Los Angeles that would have carried them back to Farewell in time to kill Kavalov. There were two possibilities: an airplane could have carried them back in plenty of time; and an automobile might have been able to do it, though that didn’t look reasonable.

I tried the airplane angle first, and couldn’t find a flyer who had had a passenger that night. With the help of the Los Angeles police and some operatives from the Continental’s Los Angeles branch, I had everybody who owned a plane—public or private—interviewed. All the answers were no.

We tried the less promising automobile angle. The larger taxicab and hire-car companies said, “No.” Four privately owned cars had been reported stolen between ten and twelve o’clock that night. Two of them had been found in the city the next morning: they couldn’t have made the trip to Farewell and back. One of the others had been picked up in San Diego the next day. That let that one out. The other was still loose, a Packard sedan. We got a printer working on post card descriptions of it.

To reach all the small-fry taxi and hire-car owners was quite a job, and then there were the private car owners who might have hired out for one night. We went into the newspapers to cover these fields.

We didn’t get any automobile information, but this new line of inquiry—trying to find traces of our men here a few hours before the murder—brought results of another kind.

At San Pedro (Los Angeles’s seaport, twenty-five miles away) a negro had been arrested at one o’clock on the morning of the murder. The negro spoke English poorly, but had papers to prove that he was Pierre Tisano, a French sailor. He had been arrested on a drunk and disorderly charge.

The San Pedro police said that the photograph and description of the man we knew as Marcus fit the drunken sailor exactly.

That wasn’t all the San Pedro police said.

Tisano had been arrested at one o’clock. At a little after two o’clock, a white man who gave his name as Henry Somerton had appeared and had tried to bail the negro out. The desk sergeant had told Somerton that nothing could be done till morning, and that, anyway, it would be better to let Tisano sleep off his jag before removing him. Somerton had readily agreed to that, had remained talking to the desk sergeant for more than half an hour, and had left at about three. At ten o’clock that morning he had reappeared to pay the black man’s fine. They had gone away together.

The San Pedro police said that Sherry’s photograph—without the mustache—and description were Henry Somerton’s.

Henry Somerton’s signature on the register of the hotel to which he had gone between his two visits to the police matched the handwriting in Sherry’s note to the bungalow’s owner.

It was pretty clear that Sherry and Marcus had been in San Pedro—a nine-hour train ride from Farewell—at the time that Kavalov was murdered.

Pretty clear isn’t quite clear enough in a murder job: I carried the San Pedro desk sergeant north with me for a look at the two men.

“Them’s them, all righty,” he said.

VIII

The district attorney ate up the rest of his thumb nails.

The sheriff had the bewildered look of a child who had held a balloon in his hand, had heard a pop, and couldn’t understand where the balloon had gone.

I pretended I was perfectly satisfied.

“Now we’re back where we started,” the district attorney wailed disagreeably, as if it was everybody’s fault but his, “and with all those weeks wasted.”

The sheriff didn’t look at the district attorney, and didn’t say anything.

I said:

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. We’ve made some progress.”

“What?”

“We know that Sherry and the dinge have alibis.”

The district attorney seemed to think I was trying to kid him. I didn’t pay any attention to the faces he made at me, and asked:

“What are you going to do with them?”

“What can I do with them but turn them loose? This shoots the case to hell.”

“It doesn’t cost the county much to feed them,” I suggested. “Why not hang on to them as long as you can, while we think it over? Something new may turn up, and you can always drop the case if nothing does. You don’t think they’re innocent, do you?”

He gave me a look that was heavy and sour with pity for my stupidity.

“They’re guilty as hell, but what good’s that to me if I can’t get a conviction? And what’s the good of saying I’ll hold them? Damn it, man, you know as well as I do that all they’ve got to do now is ask for their release and any judge will hand it to them.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ll bet you the best hat in San Francisco that they don’t ask for it.”

“What do you mean?”

“They want to stand trial,” I said, “or they’d have sprung that alibi before we dug it up. I’ve an idea that they tipped off the Spokane police themselves. And I’ll bet you that hat that you get no habeas corpus motions out of Schaeffer.”

The district attorney peered suspiciously into my eyes.

“Do you know something that you’re holding back?” he demanded.

“No, but you’ll see I’m right.”

I was right. Schaeffer went around smiling to himself and making no attempt to get his clients out of the county prison.

Three days later something new turned up.

A man named Archibald Weeks, who had a small chicken farm some ten miles south of the Kavalov place, came to see the district attorney. Weeks said he had seen Sherry on his—Weeks’s—place early on the morning of the murder.

Weeks had been leaving for Iowa that morning to visit his parents. He had got up early to see that everything was in order before driving twenty miles to catch an early morning train.

At somewhere between half-past five and six o’clock he had gone to the shed where he kept his car, to see if it held enough gasoline for the trip.

A man ran out of the shed, vaulted the fence, and dashed away down the road. Weeks chased him for a short distance, but the other was too speedy for him. The man was too well-dressed for a hobo: Weeks supposed he had been trying to steal the car.

Since Weeks’s trip east was a necessary one, and during his absence his wife would have only their two sons—one seventeen, one fifteen—there with her, he had thought it wisest not to frighten her by saying anything about the man he had surprised in the shed.

He had returned from Iowa the day before his appearance in the district attorney’s office, and after hearing the details of the Kavalov murder, and seeing Sherry’s picture in the papers, had recognized him as the man he had chased.

We showed him Sherry in person. He said Sherry was the man. Sherry said nothing.

With Weeks’s evidence to refute the San Pedro police’s, the district attorney let the case against Sherry come to trial. Marcus was held as a material witness, but there was nothing to weaken his San Pedro alibi, so he was not tried.

Weeks told his story straight and simply on the witness stand, and then, under cross-examination, blew up with a loud bang. He went to pieces completely.

He wasn’t, he admitted in answer to Schaeffer’s questions, quite as sure that Sherry was the man as he had been before. The man had certainly, the little he had seen of him, looked something like Sherry, but perhaps he had been a little hasty in saying positively that it was Sherry. He wasn’t, now that he had had time to think it over, really sure that he had actually got a good look at the man’s face in the dim morning light. Finally, all that Weeks would swear to was that he had seen a man who had seemed to look a little bit like Sherry.

It was funny as hell.

The district attorney, having no nails left, nibbled his finger-bones.

The jury said, “Not guilty.”

Sherry was freed, forever in the clear so far as the Kavalov murder was concerned, no matter what might come to light later.

Marcus was released.

The district attorney wouldn’t say good-bye to me when I left for San Francisco.

IX

Four days after Sherry’s acquittal, Mrs. Ringgo was shown into my office.

She was in black. Her pretty, unintelligent, Oriental face was not placid. Worry was in it.

“Please, you won’t tell Dolph I have come here?” were the first words she spoke.

“Of course not, if you say not,” I promised and pulled a chair over for her.

She sat down and looked big-eyed at me, fidgeting with her gloves in her lap.

“He’s so reckless,” she said.

I nodded sympathetically, wondering what she was up to.

“And I’m so afraid,” she added, twisting her gloves. Her chin trembled. Her lips formed words jerkily: “They’ve come back to the bungalow.”

“Yeah?” I sat up straight. I knew who they were.

“They can’t,” she cried, “have come back for any reason except that they mean to murder Dolph as they did father. And he won’t listen to me. He’s so sure of himself. He laughs and calls me a foolish child, and tells me he can take care of himself. But he can’t. Not, at least, with a broken arm. And they’ll kill him as they killed father. I know it. I know it.”

“Sherry hates your husband as much as he hated your father?”

“Yes. That’s it. He does. Dolph was working for father, but Dolph’s part in the—the business that led up to Hugh’s trouble was more—more active than father’s. Will you—will you keep them from killing Dolph? Will you?”

“Surely.”

“And you mustn’t let Dolph know,” she insisted, “and if he does find out you’re watching them, you mustn’t tell him I got you to. He’d be angry with me. I asked him to send for you, but he—” She broke off, looking embarrassed: I supposed her husband had mentioned my lack of success in keeping Kavalov alive. “But he wouldn’t.”

“How long have they been back?”

“Since the day before yesterday.”

“Any demonstrations?”

“You mean things like happened before? I don’t know. Dolph would hide them from me.”

“I’ll be down tomorrow,” I promised. “If you’ll take my advice you’ll tell your husband that you’ve employed me, but I won’t tell him if you don’t.”

“And you won’t let them harm Dolph?”

I promised to do my best, took some money away from her, gave her a receipt, and bowed her out.

Shortly after dark that evening I reached Farewell.

X

The bungalow’s windows were lighted when I passed it on my way uphill. I was tempted to get out of my coupé and do some snooping, but was afraid that I couldn’t out-Indian Marcus on his own grounds, and so went on.

When I turned into the dirt road leading to the vacant house I had spotted on my first trip to Farewell, I switched off the coupé’s lights and crept along by the light of a very white moon overhead.

Close to the vacant house I got the coupé off the path and at least partly hidden by bushes.

Then I went up on the rickety porch, located the bungalow, and began to adjust my field glasses to it.

I had them partly adjusted when the bungalow’s front door opened, letting out a slice of yellow light and two people.

One of the people was a woman.

Another least turn of the set-screw and her face came clear in my eyes—Mrs. Ringgo.

She raised her coat collar around her face and hurried away down the cobbled walk. Sherry stood on the veranda looking after her.

When she reached the road she began running uphill, towards her house.

Sherry went indoors and shut the door.

I took the glasses away from my eyes and looked around for a place where I could sit. The only spot I could find where sitting wouldn’t interfere with my view of the bungalow was the porch-rail. I made myself as comfortable as possible there, with a shoulder against the corner post, and prepared for an evening of watchful waiting.

Two hours and a half later a man turned into the cobbled walk from the road. He walked swiftly to the bungalow, with a cautious sort of swiftness, and he looked from side to side as he walked.

I suppose he knocked on the door.

The door opened, throwing a yellow glow on his face, Dolph Ringgo’s face.

He went indoors. The door shut.

My watch-tower’s fault was that the bungalow could only be reached from it roundabout by the path and road. There was no way of cutting cross-country.

I put away the field glasses, left the porch, and set out for the bungalow. I wasn’t sure that I could find another good spot for the coupé, so I left it where it was and walked.

I was afraid to take a chance on the cobbled walk.

Twenty feet above it, I left the road and moved as silently as I could over sod and among trees, bushes and flowers. I knew the sort of folks I was playing with: I carried my gun in my hand.

All of the bungalow’s windows on my side showed lights, but all the windows were closed and their blinds drawn. I didn’t like the way the light that came through the blinds helped the moon illuminate the surrounding ground. That had been swell when I was up on the ridge getting cock-eyed squinting through glasses. It was sour now that I was trying to get close enough to do some profitable listening.

I stopped in the closest dark spot I could find—fifteen feet from the building—to think the situation over.

Crouching there, I heard something.

It wasn’t in the right place. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. It was the sound of somebody coming down the walk towards the house.

I wasn’t sure that I couldn’t be seen from the path. I turned my head to make sure. And by turning my head I gave myself away.

Mrs. Ringgo jumped, stopped dead still in the path, and then cried:

“Is Dolph in there? Is he? Is he?”

I was trying to tell her that he was by nodding, but she made so much noise with her Is he’s that I had to say “Yeah” out loud to make her hear.

I don’t know whether the noise we made hurried things up indoors or not, but guns had started going off inside the bungalow.

You don’t stop to count shots in circumstances like those, and anyway these were too blurred together for accurate score-keeping, but my impression was that at least fifty of them had been fired by the time I was bruising my shoulder on the front door.

Luckily, it was a California door. It went in the second time I hit it.

Inside was a reception hall opening through a wide arched doorway into a living-room. The air was hazy and the stink of burnt powder was sharp.

Sherry was on the polished floor by the arch, wriggling sidewise on one elbow and one knee, trying to reach a Luger that lay on an amber rug some four feet away. His upper teeth were sunk deep into his lower lip, and he was coughing little stomach coughs as he wriggled.

At the other end of the room, Ringgo was upright on his knees, steadily working the trigger of a black revolver in his good hand. The pistol was empty. It went snap, snap, snap, snap foolishly, but he kept on working the trigger. His broken arm was still in the splints, but had fallen out of the sling and was hanging down. His face was puffy and florid with blood. His eyes were wide and dull. The white bone handle of a knife stuck out of his back, just over one hip, its blade all the way in. He was clicking the empty pistol at Marcus.

The black boy was on his feet, feet far apart under bent knees. His left hand was spread wide over his chest, and the black fingers were shiny with blood. In his right hand he held a white bone-handled knife—its blade a foot long—held it, knife-fighter fashion, as you’d hold a sword. He was moving toward Ringgo, not directly, but from side to side, obliquely, closing in with shuffling steps, crouching, his hand turning the knife restlessly, but holding the point always towards Ringgo. Marcus’s eyes were bulging and red-veined. His mouth was a wide grinning crescent. His tongue, far out, ran slowly around and around the outside of his lips. Saliva trickled down his chin.

He didn’t see us. He didn’t hear us. All of his world just then was the man on his knees, the man in whose back a knife—brother of the one in the black hand—was wedged.

Ringgo didn’t see us. I don’t suppose he even saw the black. He knelt there and persistently worked the trigger of his empty gun.

I jumped over Sherry and swung the barrel of my gun at the base of Marcus’s skull. It hit. Marcus dropped.

Ringgo stopped working the gun and looked surprised at me.

“That’s the idea; you’ve got to put bullets in them or they’re no good,” I told him, pulled the knife out of Marcus’s hand, and went back to pick up the Luger that Sherry had stopped trying to get.

Mrs. Ringgo ran past me to her husband.

Sherry was lying on his back now. His eyes were closed.

He looked dead, and he had enough bullet holes in him to make death a good guess.

Hoping he wasn’t dead, I knelt beside him—going around him so I could kneel facing Ringgo—and lifted his head up a little from the floor.

Sherry stirred then, but I couldn’t tell whether he stirred because he was still alive or because he had just died.

“Sherry,” I said sharply. “Sherry.”

He didn’t move. His eyelids didn’t even twitch.

I raised the fingers of the hand that was holding up his head, making his head move just a trifle.

“Did Ringgo kill Kavalov?” I asked the dead or dying man.

Even if I hadn’t known Ringgo was looking at me I could have felt his eyes on me.

“Did he, Sherry?” I barked into the still face.

The dead or dying man didn’t move.

I cautiously moved my fingers again so that his dead or dying head nodded, twice.

Then I made his head jerk back, and let it gently down on the floor again.

“Well,” I said, standing up and facing Ringgo, “I’ve got you at last.”

XI

I’ve never been able to decide whether I would actually have gone on the witness stand and sworn that Sherry was alive when he nodded, and nodded voluntarily, if it had been necessary for me to do so to convict Ringgo.

I don’t like perjury, but I knew Ringgo was guilty, and there I had him.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to decide.

Ringgo believed Sherry had nodded, and then, when Marcus gave the show away, there was nothing much for Ringgo to do but try his luck with a plea of guilty.

We didn’t have much trouble getting the story out of Marcus. Ringgo had killed his beloved capitaine. The black boy was easily persuaded that the law would give him his best revenge.

After Marcus had talked, Ringgo was willing to talk.

He stayed in the hospital until the day before his trial opened. The knife Marcus had planted in his back had permanently paralyzed one of his legs, though aside from that he recovered from the stabbing.

Marcus had three of Ringgo’s bullets in him. The doctors fished two of them out, but were afraid to touch the third. It didn’t seem to worry him. By the time he was shipped north to begin an indeterminate sentence in San Quentin for his part in the Kavalov murder he was apparently as sound as ever.

Ringgo was never completely convinced that I had ever suspected him before the last minute when I had come charging into the bungalow.

“Of course I had, right along,” I defended my skill as a sleuth. That was while he was still in the hospital. “I didn’t believe Sherry was cracked. He was one hard, sane-looking scoundrel. And I didn’t believe he was the sort of man who’d be worried much over any disgrace that came his way. I was willing enough to believe that he was out for Kavalov’s scalp, but only if there was some profit in it. That’s why I went to sleep and let the old man’s throat get cut. I figured Sherry was scaring him up—nothing more—to get him in shape for a big-money shake-down. Well, when I found out I had been wrong there I began to look around.

“So far as I knew, your wife was Kavalov’s heir. From what I had seen, I imagined your wife was enough in love with you to be completely in your hands. All right, you, as the husband of his heir, seemed the one to profit most directly by Kavalov’s death. You were the one who’d have control of his fortune when he died. Sherry could only profit by the murder if he was working with you.”

“But didn’t his breaking my arm puzzle you?”

“Sure. I could understand a phoney injury, but that seemed carrying it a little too far. But you made a mistake there that helped me. You were too careful to imitate a left-hand cut on Kavalov’s throat; did it by standing by his head, facing his body when you cut him, instead of by his body, facing his head, and the curve of the slash gave you away. Throwing the knife out the window wasn’t so good, either. How’d he happen to break your arm? An accident?”

“You can call it that. We had that supposed fight arranged to fit in with the rest of the play, and I thought it would be fun to really sock him. So I did. And he was tougher than I thought, tough enough to even up by snapping my arm. I suppose that’s why he killed Mickey too. That wasn’t on the schedule. On the level, did you suspect us of being in cahoots?”

I nodded.

“Sherry had worked the game up for you, had done everything possible to draw suspicion on himself, and then, the day before the murder, had run off to build himself an alibi. There couldn’t be any other answer to it: he had to be working with you. There it was, but I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t prove it till you were trapped by the thing that made the whole game possible—your wife’s love for you sent her to hire me to protect you. Isn’t that one of the things they call ironies of life?”

Ringgo smiled ruefully and said:

“They should call it that. You know what Sherry was trying on me, don’t you?”

“I can guess. That’s why he insisted on standing trial.”

“Exactly. The scheme was for him to dig out and keep going, with his alibi ready in case he was picked up, but staying uncaught as long as possible. The more time they wasted hunting him, the less likely they were to look elsewhere, and the colder the trail would be when they found he wasn’t their man. He tricked me there. He had himself picked up, and his lawyer hired that Weeks fellow to egg the district attorney into not dropping the case. Sherry wanted to be tried and acquitted, so he’d be in the clear. Then he had me by the neck. He was legally cleared forever. I wasn’t. He had me. He was supposed to get a hundred thousand dollars for his part. Kavalov had left Miriam something more than three million dollars. Sherry demanded one-half of it. Otherwise, he said, he’d go to the district attorney and make a complete confession. They couldn’t do anything to him. He’d been acquitted. They’d hang me. That was sweet.”

“You’d have been wise at that to have given it to him,” I said.

“Maybe. Anyway I suppose I would have given it to him if Miriam hadn’t upset things. There’d have been nothing else to do. But after she came back from hiring you she went to see Sherry, thinking she could talk him into going away. And he lets something drop that made her suspect I had a hand in her father’s death, though she doesn’t even now actually believe that I cut his throat.

“She said you were coming down the next day. There was nothing for me to do but go down to Sherry’s for a showdown that night, and have the whole thing settled before you came poking around. Well, that’s what I did, though I didn’t tell Miriam I was going. The showdown wasn’t going along very well, too much tension, and when Sherry heard you outside he thought I had brought friends, and—fireworks.”

“What ever got you into a game like that in the first place?” I asked. “You were sitting pretty enough as Kavalov’s son-in-law, weren’t you?”

“Yes, but it was tiresome being cooped up in that hole with him. He was young enough to live a long time. And he wasn’t always easy to get along with. I’d no guarantee that he wouldn’t get up on his ear and kick me out, or change his will, or anything of the sort.

“Then I ran across Sherry in San Francisco, and we got to talking it over, and this plan came out of it. Sherry had brains. On the deal back in Cairo that you know about, both he and I made plenty that Kavalov didn’t know about. Well, I was a chump. But don’t think I’m sorry that I killed Kavalov. I’m sorry I got caught. I’d done his dirty work since he picked me up as a kid of twenty, and all I’d got out of it was damned little except the hopes that since I’d married his daughter I’d probably get his money when he died—if he didn’t do something else with it.”

They hanged him.

Death and Company

Black Mask, November 1930

The Continental Op turns in a Case.

The Old Man introduced me to the other man in his office—his name was Chappell—and said: “Sit down.”

I sat down.

Chappell was a man of forty-five or so, solidly built and dark-complexioned, but shaky and washed out by worry or grief or fear. His eyes were red-rimmed and their lower lids sagged, as did his lower lip. His hand, when I shook it, had been flabby and damp.

The Old Man picked up a piece of paper from his desk and held it out to me. I took it. It was a letter crudely printed in ink, all capital letters.

MARTIN CHAPPELL

DEAR SIR—

IF YOU EVER WANT TO SEE YOUR WIFE ALIVE AGAIN YOU WILL DO JUST WHAT YOU ARE TOLD AND THAT IS GO TO THE LOT ON THE CORNER OF TURK AND LARKIN ST. AT EXACTLY 12 TONIGHT AND PUT $5000 IN $100 BILLS UNDER THE PILE OF BRICKS BEHIND THE BILL BOARD. IF YOU DO NOT DO THIS OR IF YOU GO TO THE POLICE OR IF YOU TRY ANY TRICKS YOU WILL GET A LETTER TOMORROW TELLING YOU WHERE TO FIND HER CORPSE. WE MEAN BUSINESS.

DEATH & CO.

I put the letter back on the Old Man’s desk.

He said: “Mrs. Chappell went to a matinée yesterday afternoon. She never returned home. Mr. Chappell received this in the mail this morning.”

“She go alone?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Chappell said. His voice was very tired. “She told me she was going when I left for the office in the morning, but she didn’t say which show she was going to or if she was going with anybody.”

“Who’d she usually go with?”

He shook his head hopelessly. “I can give you the names and addresses of all her closest friends, but I’m afraid that won’t help. When she hadn’t come home late last night I telephoned all of them—everybody I could think of—and none of them had seen her.”

“Any idea who could have done this?” I asked.

Again he shook his head hopelessly.

“Any enemies? Anybody with a grudge against you, or against her? Think, even if it’s an old grudge or seems pretty slight. There’s something like that behind most kidnapings.”

“I know of none,” he said wearily. “I’ve tried to think of anybody I know or ever knew who might have done it, but I can’t.”

“What business are you in?”

He looked puzzled, but replied: “I’ve an advertising agency.”

“How about discharged employees?”

“No, the only one I’ve ever discharged was John Hacker and he has a better job now with one of my competitors and we’re on perfectly good terms.”

I looked at the Old Man. He was listening attentively, but in his usual aloof manner, as if he had no personal interest in the job. I cleared my throat and said to Chappell: “Look here. I want to ask some questions that you’ll probably think—well—brutal, but they’re necessary. Right?”

He winced as if he knew what was coming, but nodded and said: “Right.”

“Has Mrs. Chappell ever stayed away over night before?”

“No, not without my knowing where she was.” His lips jerked a little. “I think I know what you are going to ask. I’d like—I’d rather not hear. I mean I know it’s necessary, but, if I can, I think I’d rather try to tell you without your asking.”

“I’d like that better too,” I agreed. “I hope you don’t think I’m getting any fun out of this.”

“I know,” he said. He took a deep breath and spoke rapidly, hurrying to get it over: “I’ve never had any reason to believe that she went anywhere that she didn’t tell me about or had any friends she didn’t tell me about. Is that”—his voice was pleading—“what you wanted to know?”

“Yes, thanks.” I turned to the Old Man again. The only way to get anything out of him was to ask for it, so I said: “Well?”

He smiled courteously, like a well-satisfied blank wall, and murmured: “You have the essential facts now, I think. What do you advise?”

“Pay the money of course—first,” I replied, and then complained: “It’s a damned shame that’s the only way to handle a kidnaping. These Death and Co. birds are pretty dumb, picking that spot for the pay-off. It would be duck soup to nab them there.” I stopped complaining and asked Chappell: “You can manage the money all right?”

“Yes.”

I addressed the Old Man: “Now about the police?”

Chappell began: “No, not the police! Won’t they—?”

I interrupted him: “We’ve got to tell them, in case something goes wrong and to have them all set for action as soon as Mrs. Chappell is safely home again. We can persuade them to keep their hands off till then.” I asked the Old Man: “Don’t you think so?”

He nodded and reached for his telephone. “I think so. I’ll have Lieutenant Fielding and perhaps someone from the District Attorney’s office come up here and we’ll lay the whole thing before them.”

Fielding and an Assistant District Attorney named McPhee came up. At first they were all for making the Turk-and-Larkin-Street-brick-pile a midnight target for half the San Francisco police force, but we finally persuaded them to listen to reason. We dug up the history of kidnaping from Ross to Parker and waved it in their faces and showed them that the statistics were on our side: more success and less grief had come from paying what was asked and going hunting afterwards than from trying to nail the kidnapers before the kidnaped were released.

At half past eleven o’clock that night Chappell left his house, alone, with five thousand dollars wrapped in a sheet of brown paper in his pocket. At twenty minutes past twelve he returned.

His face was yellowish and wet with perspiration and he was trembling.

“I put it there,” he said difficultly. “I didn’t see anybody.”

I poured out a glass of his whiskey and gave it to him.

He walked the floor most of the night. I dozed in a sofa. Half a dozen times at least I heard him go to the street door to open it and look out. Detective-sergeants Muir and Callahan went to bed. They and I had planted ourselves there to get any information Mrs. Chappell could give us as soon as possible.

She did not come home.

At nine in the morning Callahan was called to the telephone. He came away from it scowling.

“Nobody’s come for the dough yet,” he told us.

Chappell’s drawn face became wide-eyed and open-mouthed with horror. “You had the place watched?” he cried.

“Sure,” Callahan said, “but in an all right way. We just had a couple of men stuck up in an apartment down the block with field-glasses. Nobody could tumble to that.”

Chappell turned to me, horror deepening in his face. “What—?”

The door-bell rang.

Chappell ran to the door and presently came back excitedly tearing a special-delivery-stamped envelope open. Inside was another of the crudely printed letters.

MARTIN CHAPPELL

DEAR SIR—

WE GOT THE MONEY ALL RIGHT BUT HAVE GOT TO HAVE MORE TONIGHT THE SAME AMOUNT AT THE SAME TIME AND EVERYTHING ELSE THE SAME. THIS TIME WE WILL HONESTLY SEND YOUR WIFE HOME ALIVE IF YOU DO AS YOU ARE TOLD. IF YOU DO NOT OR SAY A WORD TO THE POLICE YOU KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT AND YOU BET YOU WILL GET IT.

DEATH & CO.

Callahan said: “What the hell?”

Muir growled: “Them ¾ ¾ at the window must be blind.”

I looked at the postmark on the envelope. It was earlier that morning. I asked Chappell: “Well, what are you going to do?”

He swallowed and said: “I’ll give them every cent I’ve got if it will bring Louise home safe.”

At half past eleven o’clock that night Chappell left his house with another five thousand dollars. When he returned the first thing he said was: “The money I took last night is really gone.”

This night was much like the previous one except that he had less hopes of seeing Mrs. Chappell in the morning. Nobody said so, but all of us expected another letter in the morning asking for still another five thousand dollars.

Another special-delivery letter did come, but it read:

MARTIN CHAPPELL

DEAR SIR—

WE WARNED YOU TO KEEP THE POLICE OUT OF IT AND YOU DISOBEYED. TAKE YOUR POLICE TO APT. 313 AT 895 POST ST. AND YOU WILL FIND THE CORPSE WE PROMISED YOU IF YOU DISOBEYED.

DEATH & CO.

Callahan cursed and jumped for the telephone.

I put an arm around Chappell as he swayed, but he shook himself together and turned fiercely on me.

“You’ve killed her!” he cried.

“Hell with that,” Muir barked. “Let’s get going.”

Muir, Chappell, and I went out to Chappell’s car, which had stood two nights in front of the house. Callahan ran out to join us as we were moving away.

The Post Street address was only a ten-minute ride from Chappell’s house the way we did it. It took a couple of more minutes to find the manager of the apartment house and to take her keys away from her. Then we went up and entered apartment 313.

A tall slender woman with curly red hair lay dead on the living-room floor. There was no question of her being dead: she had been dead long enough for discoloration to have got well under way She was lying on her back. The tan flannel bathrobe—apparently a man’s—she had on had fallen open to show pinkish lingerie. She had on stockings and one slipper. The other slipper lay near her.

Her face and throat and what was visible of her body were covered with bruises. Her eyes were wide open and bulging, her tongue out: she had been beaten and then throttled.

More police detectives joined us and some policemen in uniform. We went into our routine.

The manager of the house told us the apartment had been occupied by a man named Harrison M. Rockfield. She described him: about thirty-five years old, six feet tall, blond hair, gray or blue eyes, slender, perhaps a hundred and sixty pounds, very agreeable personality, dressed well. She said he had been living there alone for three months. She knew nothing about his friends, she said, and had not seen Mrs. Chappell before. She had not seen Rockfield for two or three days but had thought nothing of it as she often went a week or so without seeing some tenants.

We found a plentiful supply of clothing in the apartment, some of which the manager positively identified as Rockfield’s. The police department experts found a lot of masculine fingerprints that we hoped were his.

We couldn’t find anybody in adjoining apartments who had heard the racket that must have been made by the murder.

We decided that Mrs. Chappell had probably been killed as soon as she was brought to the apartment—no later than the night of her disappearance, anyhow.

“But why?” Chappell demanded dumbfoundedly.

“Playing safe. You wouldn’t know till after you’d come across. She wasn’t feeble. It would be hard to keep her quiet in a place like this.”

A detective came in with the package of hundred-dollar bills Chappell had placed under the brick-pile the previous night.

I went down to headquarters with Callahan to question the men stationed at a nearby apartment-window to watch the vacant lot. They swore up and down that nobody—“not as much as a rat”—could have approached the brick-pile without being seen by them. Callahan’s answer to that was a bellowed “The Hell they couldn’t—they did!”

I was called to the telephone. Chappell was on the wire. His voice was hoarse.

“The telephone was ringing when I got home,” he said, “and it was him.”

“Who?”

“Death and Co., he said. That’s what he said, and he told me that it was my turn next. That’s all he said. ‘This is Death and Co., and it’s your turn next.’”

“I’ll be right out,” I said. “Wait for me.”

I told Callahan and the others what Chappell had told me.

Callahan scowled. “—,” he said, “I guess we’re up against another of those — damned nuts!”

Chappell was in a bad way when I arrived at his house. He was shivering as if with a chill and his eyes were almost idiotic in their fright.

“It’s—it’s not only that—that I’m afraid,” he tried to explain. “I am—but it’s—I’m not that afraid—but—but with Louise—and—it’s the shock and all. I—”

“I know,” I soothed him. “I know. And you haven’t slept for a couple of days. Who’s your doctor? I’m going to phone him.”

He protested feebly, but finally gave me his doctor’s name.

The telephone rang as I was going towards it. The call was for me, from Callahan.

“We’ve pegged the fingerprints,” he said triumphantly. “They’re Dick Moley’s. Know him?”

“Sure,” I said, “as well as you do.”

Moley was a gambler, gunman, and grifter-in-general with a police record as long as his arm.

Callahan was saying cheerfully: “That’s going to mean a fight when we find him, because you know how tough that — is. And he’ll laugh while he’s being tough.”

“I know,” I said.

I told Chappell what Callahan had told me. Rage came into his face and voice when he heard the name of the man accused of killing his wife.

“Ever hear of him?” I asked.

He shook his head and went on cursing Moley in a choked, husky voice.

I said: “Stop that. That’s no good. I know where to find Moley.”

His eyes opened wide. “Where?” he gasped.

“Want to go with me?”

“Do I?” he shouted. Weariness and sickness had dropped from him.

“Get your hat,” I said, “and we’ll go.”

He ran upstairs for his hat and down with it.

He had a lot of questions as we went out and got into his car. I answered most of them with: “Wait, you’ll see.”

But in the car he went suddenly limp and slid down in his seat.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I can’t,” he mumbled. “I’ve got to—help me into the house—the doctor.”

“Right,” I said, and practically carried him into the house.

I spread him on a sofa, had a maid bring him water, and called his doctor’s number. The doctor was not in.

When I asked him if there was any other particular doctor he wanted he said weakly: “No, I’m all right. Go after that—that man.”

“All right,” I said.

I went outside, got a taxicab, and sat in it.

Twenty minutes later a man went up Chappell’s front steps and rang the bell. The man was Dick Moley, alias Harrison M. Rockfield.

He took me by surprise. I had been expecting Chappell to come out, not anyone to go in. He had vanished indoors and the door was shut by the time I got there.

I rang the bell savagely.

A heavy pistol roared inside, twice.

I smashed the glass out of the door with my gun and put my left hand in, feeling for the latch.

The heavy pistol roared again and a bullet hurled splinters of glass into my cheek, but I found the latch and worked it.

I kicked the door back and fired once straight ahead at random. Something moved in the dark hallway then and without waiting to see what it was I fired again, and when something fell I fired at the sound.

A voice said: “Cut it out. That’s enough. I’ve lost my gun.”

It wasn’t Chappell’s voice. I was disappointed.

Near the foot of the stairs I found a light-switch and turned it on. Dick Moley was sitting on the floor at the other end of the hallway holding one leg.

“That damned fool maid got scared and locked this door,” he complained, “or I’d’ve made it out back.”

I went nearer and picked up his gun. “Get you anywhere but the leg?” I asked.

“No. I’d’ve been all right if I hadn’t dropped the gun when it upset me.”

“You’ve got a lot of ifs,” I said. “I’ll give you another one. You’ve got nothing to worry about but that bullet-hole if you didn’t kill Chappell.”

He laughed. “If he’s not dead he must feel funny with those two .44s in his head.”

“That was — damned dumb of you,” I growled.

He didn’t believe me. He said: “It was the best job I ever pulled.”

“Yeah? Well, suppose I told you that I was only waiting for another move of his to pinch him for killing his wife?”

He opened his eyes at that.

“Yeah,” I said, “and you have to walk in and mess things up. I hope to — they hang you for it.” I knelt down beside him and began to slit his pants-leg with my pocket-knife.

“What’d you do? Go in hiding after you found her dead in your rooms because you knew a guy with your record would be out of luck, and then lose your head when you saw in the extras this afternoon what kind of a job he’d put up on you?”

“Yes,” he said slowly, “though I’m not sure I lost my head. I’ve got a hunch I came pretty near giving the — — — —— what he deserved.”

“That’s a swell hunch,” I told him. “We were ready to grab him. The whole thing had looked phoney. Nobody had come for the money the first night, but it wasn’t there the next day, so he said. Well, we only had his word for it that he had actually put it there and hadn’t found it the next night. The next night, after he had been told the place was watched he left the money there, and then he wrote the note saying Death & Company knew he’d gone to the police. That wasn’t public news, either. And then her being killed before anybody knew she was kidnaped. And then tying it to you when it was too dizzy—no, you are dizzy, or you wouldn’t have pulled this one. Anyhow we had enough to figure he was wrong, and if you’d let him alone we’d have pulled him, put it in the papers, and waited for you to come forth and give us what we needed to clear you and swing him.” I was twisting my necktie around his leg above the bullet-hole. “But that’s too sensible for you. How long you been playing around with her?”

“A couple of months,” he said, “only I wasn’t playing. I meant it.”

“How’d he happen to catch her there alone?”

He shook his head. “He must’ve followed her there that afternoon when she was supposed to be going to the theater. Maybe he waited outside until he saw me go out. I had to go downtown, but I wasn’t gone an hour. She was already cold when I came back.” He frowned. “I don’t think she’d’ve answered the doorbell, though maybe—or maybe he’d had a duplicate made of the key she had.”

Some policemen came in: the frightened maid had had sense enough to use the telephone.

“Do you think he planned it that way from the beginning?” Moley asked.

I didn’t. I thought he had killed his wife in a jealous rage and later thought of the Death and Co. business.

About the Author

Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) charted a gritty new direction for American crime fiction, crafting true-to-life stories as brash as they are exacting. In 1922, he began writing fiction based on his experience as a private detective, and he pioneered the tough-minded, action-heavy, realistic style that became known as hardboiled. Among his best-known works are Red Harvest (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), The Thin Man (1934), and the Collected Case Files of the Continental Op, most of which were published in Black Mask magazine.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

“Foreword” Copyright © 2016 Julie M. Rivett; “Introduction” Copyright © 2016 by Richard Layman; “Fly Paper” Copyright © 1929, “The Farewell Murder” and “Death and Company” Copyright © 1930 by Pro-Distributors; renewed by Pro-Distributors as agent for Dashiell Hammett, whose interest was conveyed by will in 1984 to the Dashiell Hammett Literary Property Trust. All Rights Reserved.

Cover design by Jamie Keenan

978-1-5040-3603-0

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

Foreword: “Through Mud and Blood and Death and Deceit”

Introduction: The Later Years, 1926–1930

Fly Paper

The Farewell Murder

Death and Company

About the Author

Copyright