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It and Other Stories

Collected Case Files of the Continental Op

The Early Years, Vol. 2

Dashiell Hammett

Edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

Contents

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

Introduction: The Early Years, 1923–1924

“It”

“Bodies Piled Up”

“The Tenth Clew”

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 Early Years: 1923–1924

Dashiell Hammett may have been born with the urge to write, we can’t know, but it was happenstance that set the course for his literary fame. His first choice of careers was private investigation. When he turned twenty-one, he joined Pinkerton’s National Detective Service as an operative, a job he enjoyed for three years, from 1915 to 1918, before joining the army. He served in a medical unit at Fort Bragg, Maryland, an intake center for soldiers infected with Spanish Influenza returning from the war in Europe. Hammett contracted the flu himself, and that activated a latent strain of tuberculosis probably spread from his mother. He left the army after just less than a year with a sergeant’s rating, an honorable discharge, and a disability rating that fluctuated over the next ten years between 20% and 100%, usually hovering midway in between.

After a period of convalescence, Hammett returned to detective work sporadically, until he was hospitalized with tuberculosis for some six months from November 1920 to the following May. Upon his release from the hospital, he moved to San Francisco and married his nurse, Josephine Dolan, in July 1921. Their daughter Mary was born in October. Hammett tried to support his new family as a detective, but he was unable. He retired permanently from the agency in either December 1921 or February 1922, depending on which evidence you choose to accept, due to disability. He was twenty-six, often a virtual invalid, and he needed money.

In February 1922 he commenced a year and a half of study at Munson’s School for Private Secretaries, with a “newspaper reporting objective,” as he wrote in his disability log for the Veterans Bureau. The training shows. His early fiction has a journalistic quality about it—in the best sense. It is clearly written, detail oriented, and plainly narrated, without the strained and sensationalistic flourishes that mark the fiction of other early pulp writers. In October 1922 he began submitting humorous and ironic sketches to The Smart Set, the high-brow magazine edited and partially owned by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. At their suggestion, after publishing three of his sketches, he lowered his sights to pulp magazines, which offered him steady, if not hefty, paychecks but required that he alter his subject matter. He made his living during most of the twenties on the back of what soon became his series character, the Continental Op, a professional detective.

Hammett’s Continental Op is inseparable from the pulp magazine Black Mask, which was barely three years old and under new ownership when the Continental Op was introduced. Twenty-six of the twenty-eight published Op stories first appeared there between October 1923 and November 1930, as well as two four-part serial novels featuring the Op. Founded in 1920 by Mencken and Nathan to publish what Mencken called in My Life as Author and Editor “hacks of experience,” writing for “murder fans.” Black Mask had no literary pretensions in the beginning. Its sole purpose was to make money. Mencken claimed in a 1933 letter to his friend Philip Goodman that he and Nathan could “get out a 128-page magazine at a cash outlay of no more than $500” and did so in the case of Black Mask. With “no desire to go on with the Black Mask.” Mencken and Nathan sold it in summer 1921 to Eugene Crowe and Eltinge Warner (just before Crowe’s death), having earned about $25,000 each for their efforts. From the beginning the magazine was aimed at a blue-collar audience who wanted entertaining stories. Though it is known now as the publication that pioneered hard-boiled detective fiction, in the 10 October 1923 issue, the editor bragged that Black Mask published “Rugged adventure and real man and woman romance; rare Western yarns, swift-acting logical detective stories, weird, creepy mystery tales, and the only thrilling, convincing ghost stories to be found anywhere.” In that mix, Hammett found no models, and his sure-footed stories stood out—initially because of their confident, plausible prose and notable absence of gratuitous violence.

Hammett used pseudonyms for his earliest Black Mask stories, usually Peter Collinson (from theatre slang for a phantom person). One might guess, and it is only a guess, that he was embarrassed to appear in the cheap pulps—certainly he spoke disparagingly of them later in his life. But he dropped his guard when he was asked for a comment about “the Vicious Circle,” a story about a politician reacting to blackmail published in the15 June 1923 Black Mask as by Collinson. Hammett replied that the story, which does not feature the Op, was based on cases he experienced as a private detective. He signed the response “S. D. Hammett” and soon afterward abandoned the Collinson pseudonym altogether. Sutton missed the reference. Even though Hammett took particular care in those early stories to describe accurately how a private detective went about his job and in “Zigzags of Treachery” (1 March 1924) provided specific how-to advice, it wasn’t until later that Sutton’s successor recognized the real-life experience that shaped the Op’s workman-like approaches to his cases.

Writers rarely develop in a vacuum. In Hammett’s case, the course of his literary development seems clearly enough to have been molded by his editors. He came to write detective fiction because Mencken saw no future for him among the smart set, and at Black Mask he clearly was guided in the beginning by his editors’ ideas about what would sell in their market, ideas that changed with the man in charge. George W. Sutton, the Black Mask editor who agreed after three months on the job to publish “Arson Plus,” had no literary qualifications. He, described himself this way in a farewell message to readers in the 15 March 1924 issue, the last for which he had responsibility:

The Editor is primarily a writer of automobile and motorboat articles, and all during the wonderful period that he has been at the helm of BLACK MASK, he has continued his automobile departments in various publications; using the afternoons and most of every night, every Sunday and holiday, to read the thousands of stories which come in to BLACK MASK—editing them, consulting with authors and artists, writing to readers, and attending to the thousands of details that make up the work necessary to getting out a “peppy” fiction magazine.

Sutton’s “various publications” included Vanity Fair, Collier’s, Town & Country, Popular Mechanics, and newspaper syndication.

In 1923 Sutton wrote a memo to prospective writers called “The Present needs of Black Mask,” in which he lamented that “BLACK MASK finds it very difficult to get exactly the kind of stories it wants. We can print stories of horror, supernatural but explainable phenomena and gruesome tales which no other magazine in the country would print, but they must be about human beings, convincing, entertaining, and interest impelling.” Sutton warned in his memo: “We do not care for purely scientific detective stories which lack action; and we are prejudiced by experience against the psychological story which is not very rugged and intense.”

Though Black Mask is regarded, appropriately, as the birthplace of hard-boiled fiction, the hard-boiled story was still in gestation under Sutton. While crime was a staple of his Black Mask, it was but one ingredient of the editorial mix, and only the earliest stories of Carroll John Daly, featuring cartoonishly violent protagonists acting out what seem to be the author’s homicidal, tough-guy fantasies, could properly be called hard boiled. Hammett set out to fulfill Black Mask’s needs with stories about a short, portly, tough, nameless detective for the Continental Detective Agency, based obviously on Pinkerton’s, who described his cases in procedural detail.

Hammett was known to Sutton and his associate editor Harry North only through correspondence and his fiction. Hammett lived in San Francisco; the editorial offices were in New York. Sutton made an effort to stay in touch with his writers and his readers, though. He solicited letters from his writers about the genesis of their stories, and he encouraged readers to write in with their reactions, which he published, criticisms and all. Hammett responded to Sutton’s requests regularly, and his letters are included here after the stories on which they comment.

By the time his fourth Op story was published, Hammett was advertised by Sutton as having “suddenly become one of the most popular of Black Mask writers, because his stories are always entertaining, full of action and very unusual situations.” They were also notably restrained by Black Mask standards. In those first four stories the Op does not carry a gun. In the first two there are no deaths; in the third there is one offstage murder and one murder before the story begins; and in the fourth there is one off- stage murder and one shooting. In the next five stories, Hammett’s last under Sutton’s editorship, there are a total of five murders during the action. Though the Op had an occasional fistfight, under Sutton he never killed a person; the crooks are the murderous ones. But Sutton went back to motorsports at the end of March 1924—his Camping by the Highway: Autocamper’s Handbook and Directory of Camp Sites was published by Field and Stream Publishing Company in 1925—and though Hammett was among the core writers on whose talents Sutton’s successors planned to build, the new editor had different ideas about what makes an entertaining story.

The reputations of Hammett and the magazine that nurtured his talent rose together, and by 1930 each had altered the course of English-language literature. Black Mask had grown in circulation to 100,000 copies a month, and it was grudgingly respected as the unquestioned king of the pulps, beginning to show its influence in the mainstream development of tough-guy literature. Hammett, already regarded as the master of the hard-boiled detective story, was being recognized as a major force in what arguably can be called America’s most talented literary generation, the generation of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and John Dos Passos. Hammett did not regard the Op stories, early or late, as his best work—he reserved that distinction for The Maltese Falcon (serialized in Black Mask from September 1928–January 1929) and The Glass Key (serialized in Black Mask from March to June 1930)—but there is no question that he used these stories to test characters, plots, and dialogue he used in his novels, and his genius shines through in every one.

R.L.

IT

Black Mask, 1 November 1923

Calling a detective to solve a crime that turns out to be something quite different from the first diagnosis makes a very unusual story of this. You’ll be surprised!

“Now listen, Mr. Zumwalt, you’re holding out on me; and it won’t do! If I’m going to work on this for you I’ve got to have the whole story.”

He looked thoughtfully at me for a moment through screwed-up blue eyes. Then he got up and went to the door of the outer office, opening it. Past him I could see the bookkeeper and the stenographer sitting at their desks. Zumwalt closed the door and returned to his desk, leaning across it to speak in a husky undertone.

“You are right, I suppose. But what I am going to tell you must be held in the strictest confidence.”

I nodded, and he went on:

“About two months ago one of our clients, Stanley Gorham, turned $100,000 worth of Liberty bonds over to us. He had to go to the Orient on business, and he had an idea that the bonds might go to par during his absence; so he left them with us to be sold if they did. Yesterday I had occasion to go to the safe deposit box where the bonds had been put—in the Golden Gate Trust Company’s vault—and they were gone!”

“Anybody except you and your partner have access to the box?”

“No.”

“When did you see the bonds last?”

“They were in the box the Saturday before Dan left. And one of the men on duty in the vault told me that Dan was there the following Monday.”

“All right! Now let me see if I’ve got it all straight. Your partner, Daniel Rathbone, was supposed to leave for New York on the twenty-seventh of last month, Monday, to meet an R. W. DePuy. But Rathbone came into the office that day with his baggage and said that important personal affairs made it necessary for him to postpone his departure, that he had to be in San Francisco the following morning. But he didn’t tell you what that personal business was.

“You and he had some words over the delay, as you thought it important that he keep the New York engagement on time. You weren’t on the best of terms at the time, having quarreled a couple of days before that over a shady deal Rathbone had put over. And so you—”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Zumwalt interrupted. “Dan had done nothing dishonest. It was simply that he had engineered several transactions that—well, I thought he had sacrificed ethics to profits.”

“I see. Anyhow, starting with your argument over his not leaving for New York that day, you and he wound up by dragging in all of your differences, and practically decided to dissolve partnership as soon as it could be done. The argument was concluded in your house out on Fourteenth Avenue; and, as it was rather late by then and he had checked out of his hotel before he had changed his mind about going to New York, he stayed there with you that night.”

“That’s right,” Zumwalt explained. “I have been living at a hotel since Mrs. Zumwalt has been away, but Dan and I went out to the house because it gave us the utmost privacy for our talk; and when we finished it was so late that we remained there.”

“Then the next morning you and Rathbone came down to the office and—”

“No,” he corrected me. “That is, we didn’t come down here together. I came here while Dan went to transact whatever it was that had held him in town. He came into the office a little after noon, and said he was going East on the evening train. He sent Quimby, the bookkeeper, down to get his reservations and to check his baggage, which he had left in the office here overnight. Then Dan and I went to lunch together, came back to the office for a few minutes—he had some mail to sign—and then he left.”

“I see. After that, you didn’t hear from or of him until about ten days later, when DePuy wired to find out why Rathbone hadn’t been to see him?”

“That’s right! As soon as I got DePuy’s wire I sent one to Dan’s brother in Chicago, thinking perhaps Dan had stopped over with him, but Tom wired back that he hadn’t seen his brother. Since then I’ve had two more wires from DePuy. I was sore with Dan for keeping DePuy waiting, but still I didn’t worry a lot.

“Dan isn’t a very reliable person, and if he suddenly took a notion to stop off somewhere between here and New York for a few days he’d do it. But yesterday, when I found that the bonds were gone from the safe deposit box and learned that Dan had been to the box the day before he left, I decided that I’d have to do something. But I don’t want the police brought into it if it can be avoided.

“I feel sure that if I can find Dan and talk to him we can straighten the mess out somehow without scandal. We had our differences, but Dan’s too decent a man, and I like him too well, for all his occasional wildness, to want to see him in jail. So I want him found with as much speed and as little noise as possible.”

“Has he got a car?”

“Not now. He had one but he sold it five or six months ago.”

“Where’d he bank? I mean his personal account?”

“At the Golden Gate Trust Company.”

“Got any photos of him?”

“Yes.”

He brought out two from a desk drawer—one full-face, and the other a three-quarter view. They showed a man in the middle of his life, with shrewd eyes set close together in a hatchet face, under dark, thin hair. But the face was rather pleasant for all its craftiness.

“How about his relatives, friends, and so on—particularly his feminine friends?”

“His only relative is the brother in Chicago. As to his friends: he probably has as many as any man in San Francisco. He was a wonderful mixer.

“Recently he has been on very good terms with a Mrs. Earnshaw, the wife of a real estate agent. She lives on Pacific Street, I think. I don’t know just how intimate they were, but he used to call her up on the phone frequently, and she called him here nearly every day. Then there is a girl named Eva Duthie, a cabaret entertainer, who lives in the 1100 block of Bush Street. There were probably others, too, but I know of only those two.”

“Have you looked through his stuff, here?”

“Yes, but perhaps you’d like to look for yourself.”

He led me into Rathbone’s private office: a small box of a room, just large enough for a desk, a filing cabinet, and two chairs, with doors leading into the corridor, the outer office, and Zumwalt’s.

“While I’m looking around you might get me a list of the serial numbers of the missing bonds,” I said. “They probably won’t help us right away, but we can get the Treasury Department to let us know when the coupons come in, and from where.”

I didn’t expect to find anything in Rathbone’s office and I didn’t.

Before I left I questioned the stenographer and the bookkeeper. They already knew that Rathbone was missing, but they didn’t know that the bonds were gone too.

The girl, Mildred Narbett was her name, said that Rathbone had dictated a couple of letters to her on the twenty-eighth—the day he left for New York—both of which had to do with the partner’s business—and told her to send Quimby to check his baggage and make his reservations. When she returned from lunch she had typed the two letters and taken them in for him to sign, catching him just as he was about to leave.

John Quimby, the bookkeeper, described the baggage he had checked: two large pigskin bags and a cordovan Gladstone bag. Having a bookkeeper’s mind, he had remembered the number of the berth he had secured for Rathbone on the evening train—lower 4, car 8. Quimby had returned with the checks and tickets while the partners were out at luncheon, and had put them on Rathbone’s desk.

At Rathbone’s hotel I was told that he had left on the morning of the twenty-seventh, giving up his room, but leaving his two trunks there, as he intended living there after his return from New York, in three or four weeks. The hotel people could tell me little worth listening to, except that he had left in a taxicab.

At the taxi stand outside I found the chauffeur who had carried Rathbone.

“Rathbone? Sure, I know him!” he told me around a limp cigarette. “Yeah, I guess it was about that date that I took him down to the Golden Gate Trust Company. He had a coupla big yellow bags and a little brown one. He busted into the bank, carrying the little one, and right out again, looking like somebody had kicked him on his corns. Had me take him to the Phelps Building”—the offices of Rathbone & Zumwalt were in that building—“and didn’t give me a jit over my fare!”

At the Golden Gate Trust Company I had to plead and talk a lot, but they finally gave me what I wanted—Rathbone had drawn out his account, a little less than $5,000, on the twenty-fifth of the month, the Saturday before he left town.

From the trust company I went down to the Ferry Building baggage-rooms and cigared myself into a look at the records for the twenty-eighth. Only one lot of three bags had been checked to New York that day.

I telegraphed the numbers and Rathbone’s description to the Agency’s New York office, instructing them to find the bags and, through them, find him.

Up in the Pullman Company’s offices I was told that car “8” was a through car, and that they could let me know within a couple hours whether Rathbone had occupied his berth all the way to New York.

On my way up to the 1100 block of Bush Street I left one of Rathbone’s photographs with a photographer, with a rush order for a dozen copies.

I found Eva Duthie’s apartment after about five minutes of searching vestibule directories, and got her out of bed. She was an undersized blonde girl of somewhere between nineteen and twenty-nine, depending upon whether you judged by her eyes or by the rest of her face.

“I haven’t seen or heard from Mr. Rathbone for nearly a month,” she said. “I called him up at his hotel the other night—had a party I wanted to ring him in on—but they told me that he was out of town and wouldn’t be back for a week or two.”

Then, in answer to another question:

“Yes, we were pretty good friends, but not especially thick. You know what I mean: we had a lot of fun together but neither of us meant anything to the other outside of that. Dan is a good sport—and so am I.”

Mrs. Earnshaw wasn’t so frank. But she had a husband, and that makes a difference. She was a tall, slender woman, as dark as a gypsy, with a haughty air and a nervous trick of chewing her lower lip.

We sat in a stiffly furnished room and she stalled me for about fifteen minutes, until I came out flat-footed with her.

“It’s like this, Mrs. Earnshaw,” I told her. “Mr. Rathbone has disappeared, and we are going to find him. You’re not helping me and you’re not helping yourself. I came here to get what you know about him.

“I could have gone around asking a lot of questions among your friends; and if you don’t tell me what I want to know that’s what I’ll have to do. And, while I’ll be as careful as possible, still there’s bound to be some curiosity aroused, some wild guesses, and some talk. I’m giving you a chance to avoid all that. It’s up to you.”

“You are assuming,” she said coldly, “that I have something to hide.”

“I’m not assuming anything. I’m hunting for information about Daniel Rathbone.”

She bit her lip on that for a while, and then the story came out bit by bit, with a lot in it that wasn’t any too true, but straight enough in the long run. Stripped of the stuff that wouldn’t hold water, it went like this:

She and Rathbone had planned to run away together. She had left San Francisco on the twenty-sixth, going directly to New Orleans. He was to leave the next day, apparently for New York, but he was to change trains somewhere in the Middle West and meet her in New Orleans. From there they were to go by boat to Central America.

She pretended ignorance of his designs upon the bonds. Maybe she hadn’t known. Anyhow, she had carried out her part of the plan, but Rathbone had failed to show up in New Orleans. She hadn’t shown much care in covering her trail and private detectives employed by her husband had soon found her. Her husband had arrived in New Orleans and, apparently not knowing that there was another man in the deal, had persuaded her to return home.

She wasn’t a woman to take kindly to the jilting Rathbone had handed her, so she hadn’t tried to get in touch with him, or to learn what had kept him from joining her.

Her story rang true enough, but just to play safe, I put out a few feelers in the neighborhood, and what I learned seemed to verify what she had told me. I gathered that a few of the neighbors had made guesses that weren’t a million miles away from the facts.

I got the Pullman Company on the telephone and was told that lower 4, car 8, leaving for New York on the twenty-eighth, hadn’t been occupied at all.

Zumwalt was dressing for dinner when I went up to his room at the hotel where he was staying.

I told him all that I had learned that day, and what I thought of it.

“Everything makes sense up until Rathbone left the Golden Gate Trust Company vault on the twenty-seventh, and after that nothing does! He had planned to grab the bonds and elope with this Mrs. Earnshaw, and he had already drawn out of the bank all his own money. That’s all orderly. But why should he have gone back to the office? Why should he have stayed in town that night? What was the important business that held him? Why should he have ditched Mrs. Earnshaw? Why didn’t he use his reservations at least part of the way across the country, as he had planned? False trail, maybe, but a rotten one! There’s nothing to do, Mr. Zumwalt, but to call in the police and the newspapers, and see what publicity and a nation-wide search will do for us.”

“But that means jail for Dan, with no chance to quietly straighten the matter up!” he protested.

“It does! But it can’t be helped. And remember, you’ve got to protect yourself. You’re his partner, and, while not criminally responsible, you are financially responsible for his actions. You’ve got to put yourself in the clear!”

He nodded reluctant agreement and I grabbed the telephone.

For two hours I was busy giving all the dope we had to the police, and as much as we wanted published to the newspapers, who luckily had photographs of Rathbone, taken a year before when he had been named as co-respondent in a divorce suit.

I sent off three telegrams. One to New York, asking that Rathbone’s baggage be opened as soon as the necessary authority could be secured. (If he hadn’t gone to New York the baggage should be waiting at the station.) One to Chicago, asking that Rathbone’s brother be interviewed and then shadowed for a few days. And one to New Orleans, to have the city searched for him. Then I headed for home and bed.

News was scarce, and the papers the next day had Rathbone spread out all over the front pages, with photographs and descriptions and wild guesses and wilder clews that had materialized somehow within the short space between the time the newspapers got the story and the time they went to press.

I spent the morning preparing circulars and plans for having the country covered; and arranging to have steamship records searched.

Just before noon a telegram came from New York, itemizing the things found in Rathbone’s baggage. The contents of the two large bags didn’t mean anything. They might have been packed for use or for a stall. But the things in the Gladstone bag, which had been found unlocked, were puzzling.

Here’s the list:

Two suits silk pajamas, 4 silk shirts, 8 linen collars, 4 suits underwear, 6 neckties, 6 pairs sox, 18 handkerchiefs, 1 pair military brushes, 1 comb, 1 safety razor, 1 tube shaving cream, 1 shaving brush, 1 tooth brush, 1 tube tooth paste, 1 can talcum powder, 1 bottle hair tonic, 1 cigar case holding 12 cigars, 1 .32 Colt’s revolver, 1 map of Honduras, 1 Spanish English dictionary, 2 books postage stamps, 1 pint Scotch whiskey, and 1 manicure set.

Zumwalt, his bookkeeper, and his stenographer were watching two men from headquarters search Rathbone’s office when I arrived there. After I showed them the telegram the detectives went back to their examination.

“What’s the significance of that list?” Zumwalt asked.

“It shows that there’s no sense to this thing the way it now stands,” I said. “That Gladstone bag was packed to be carried. Checking it was all wrong—it wasn’t even locked. And nobody ever checks Gladstone bags filled with toilet articles—so checking it for a stall would have been the bunk! Maybe he checked it as an afterthought—to get rid of it when he found he wasn’t going to need it. But what could have made it unnecessary to him? Don’t forget that it’s apparently the same bag that he carried into the Golden Gate Trust Company vault when he went for the bonds. Damned if I can dope it!”

“Here’s something else for you to dope,” one of the city detectives said, getting up from his examination of the desk and holding out a sheet of paper. “I found it behind one of the drawers, where it had slipped down.”

It was a letter, written with blue ink in a firm, angular and unmistakably feminine hand on heavy white note paper.

Dear Dannyboy:

If it isn’t too late I’ve changed my mind about going. If you can wait another day, until Tuesday, I’ll go. Call me up as soon as you get this, and if you still want me I’ll pick you up in the roadster at the Shattuck Avenue station Tuesday afternoon.

More than ever yours,

“Boots.”

It was dated the twenty-sixth—the Sunday before Rathbone had disappeared.

“That’s the thing that made him lay over another day, and made him change his plans,” one of the police detectives said. “I guess we better run over to Berkeley and see what we can find at the Shattuck Avenue station.”

“Mr. Zumwalt,” I said, when he and I were alone in his office, “how about this stenog of yours?”

He bounced up from his chair and his face turned red.

“What about her?”

“Is she— How friendly was she with Rathbone?”

“Miss Narbett,” he said heavily, deliberately, as if to be sure that I caught every syllable, “is to be married to me as soon as my wife gets her divorce. That is why I canceled the order to sell my house. Now would you mind telling me just why you asked?”

“Just a random guess!” I lied, trying to soothe him. “I don’t want to overlook any bets. But now that’s out of the way.”

“It is,” he was still talking deliberately, “and it seems to me that most of your guesses have been random ones. If you will have your office send me a bill for your services to date, I think I can dispense with your help.”

“Just as you say. But you’ll have to pay for a full day today; so, if you don’t mind, I’ll keep on working at it until night.”

“Very well! But I am busy, and you needn’t bother about coming in with any reports.”

“All right,” I said, and bowed myself out of the office, but not out of the job.

That letter from “Boots” had not been in the desk when I searched it. I had taken every drawer out and even tilted the desk to look under it. The letter was a plant!

And then again: maybe Zumwalt had given me the air because he was dissatisfied with the work I had done and peeved at my question about the girl—and maybe not.

Suppose (I thought, walking up Market Street, bumping shoulders and stepping on people’s feet) the two partners were in this thing together. One of them would have to be the goat, and that part had fallen to Rathbone. Zumwalt’s manner and actions since his partner’s disappearance fit that theory well enough.

Employing a private detective before calling in the police was a good play. In the first place it gave him the appearance of innocence. Then the private sleuth would tell him everything he learned, every step he took, giving Zumwalt an opportunity to correct any mistakes or oversights in the partners’ plans before the police came into it; and if the private detective got on dangerous ground he could be called off.

And suppose Rathbone was found in some city where he was unknown—and that would be where he’d go. Zumwalt would volunteer to go forward to identify him. He would look at him and say, “No, that’s not him,” Rathbone would be turned loose, and that would be the end of that trail.

This theory left the sudden change in Rathbone’s plans unaccounted for; but it made his return to the office on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh more plausible. He had come back to confer with his partner over that unknown necessity for the change, and they had decided to leave Mrs. Earnshaw out of it. Then they had gone out to Zumwalt’s house. For what? And why had Zumwalt decided not to sell the house? And why had he taken the trouble to give me an explanation? Could they have cached the bonds there?

A look at the house wouldn’t be a bad idea!

I telephoned Bennett, at the Oakland Police Department.

“Do me a favor, Frank? Call Zumwalt on the phone. Tell him you’ve picked up a man who answers Rathbone’s description to a T; and ask him to come over and take a look at him. When he gets there stall him as long as you can—pretending that the man is being fingerprinted and measured, or something like that—and then tell him that you’ve found that the man isn’t Rathbone, and that you are sorry to have brought him over there, and so on. If you only hold him for half or three-quarters of an hour it’ll be enough—it’ll take him more than half an hour traveling each way. Thanks!”

I stopped in at the office, stuck a flashlight in my pocket, and headed for Fourteenth Avenue.

Zumwalt’s house was a two-story, semi-detached one; and the lock on the front door held me up about four minutes. A burglar would have gone through it without checking his stride. This breaking into the house wasn’t exactly according to the rules, but on the other hand, I was legally Zumwalt’s agent until I discontinued work that night—so this crashing in couldn’t be considered illegal.

I started at the top floor and worked down. Bureaus, dressers, tables, desks, chairs, walls, woodwork, pictures, carpets, plumbing—I looked at everything that was thick enough to hold paper. I didn’t take things apart, but it’s surprising how speedily and how thoroughly you can go through a house when you’re in training.

I found nothing in the house itself, so I went down into the cellar.

It was a large cellar and divided in two. The front part was paved with cement, and held a full coal-bin, some furniture, some canned goods, and a lot of odds and ends of housekeeping accessories. The rear division, behind a plaster partition where the steps ran down from the kitchen, was without windows, and illuminated only by one swinging electric light, which I turned on.

A pile of lumber filled half the space; on the other side barrels and boxes were piled up to the ceiling; two sacks of cement lay beside them, and in another corner was a tangle of broken furniture. The floor was of hard dirt.

I turned to the lumber pile first. I wasn’t in love with the job ahead of me—moving the pile away and then back again. But I needn’t have worried.

A board rattled behind me, and I wheeled to see Zumwalt rising from behind a barrel and scowling at me over a black automatic pistol.

“Put your hands up,” he said.

I put them up. I didn’t have a pistol with me, not being in the habit of carrying one except when I thought I was going to need it; but it would have been all the same if I had had a pocket full of them. I don’t mind taking chances, but there’s no chance when you’re looking into the muzzle of a gun that a determined man is holding on you.

So I put my hands up. And one of them brushed against the swinging light globe. I drove my knuckles into it. As the cellar went black I threw myself backward and to one side. Zumwalt’s gun streaked fire.

Nothing happened for a while. I found that I had fallen across the doorway that gave to the stairs and the front cellar. I figured that I couldn’t move without making a noise that would draw lead, so I lay still.

Then began a game that made up in tenseness what it lacked in action.

The part of the cellar where we were was about twenty by twenty feet and blacker than a new shoe. There were two doors. One, on the opposite side, opened into the yard and was, I supposed, locked. I was lying on my back across the other, waiting for a pair of legs to grab. Zumwalt, with a gun out of which only one bullet had been spent, was somewhere in the blackness, and aware, from his silence, that I was still alive.

I figured I had the edge on him. I was closest to the only practicable exit; he didn’t know that I was unarmed; he didn’t know whether I had help close by or not; time was valuable to him, but not necessarily so to me. So I waited.

Time passed. How much I don’t know. Maybe half an hour.

The floor was damp and hard and thoroughly uncomfortable. The electric light had cut my hand when I broke it, and I couldn’t determine how badly I was bleeding. I thought of Tad’s “blind man in a dark room hunting for a black hat that wasn’t there,” and knew how he felt.

A box or barrel fell over with a crash—knocked over by Zumwalt, no doubt, moving out from the hiding-place wherein he had awaited my arrival.

Silence for a while. And then I could hear him moving cautiously off to one side.

Without warning two streaks from his pistol sent bullets into the partition somewhere above my feet. I wasn’t the only one who was feeling the strain.

Silence again, and I found that I was wet and dripping with perspiration.

Then I could hear his breathing, but couldn’t determine whether he was nearer or was breathing more heavily.

A soft, sliding, dragging across the dirt floor! I pictured him crawling awkwardly on his knees and one hand, the other hand holding the pistol out ahead of him—the pistol that would spit fire as soon as its muzzle touched something soft. And I became uneasily aware of my bulk. I am thick through the waist; and there in the dark it seemed to me that my paunch must extend almost to the ceiling—a target that no bullet could miss.

I stretched my hands out toward him and held them there. If they touched him first I’d have a chance.

He was panting harshly now; and I was breathing through a mouth that was stretched as wide as it would go, so that there would be no rasping of the large quantities of air I was taking in and letting out.

Abruptly he came.

Hair brushed the fingers of my left hand. I closed them about it, pulling the head I couldn’t see viciously toward me, driving my right fist beneath it. You may know that I put everything I had in that smack when I tell you that not until later, when I found that one of my cheeks was scorched, did I know that his gun had gone off.

He wiggled, and I hit him again.

Then I was sitting astride him, my flashlight hunting for his pistol. I found it, and yanked him to his feet.

As soon as his head cleared I herded him into the front cellar and got a globe to replace the one I had smashed.

“Now dig it up,” I ordered.

That was a safe way of putting it. I wasn’t sure what I wanted or where it would be, except that his selecting this part of the cellar to wait for me in made it look as if this was the right place.

“You’ll do your own digging!” he growled.

“Maybe,” I said, “but I’m going to do it now, and I haven’t time to tie you up. So if I’ve got to do the digging, I’m going to crown you first, so you’ll sleep peacefully until it’s all over.”

All smeared with blood and dirt and sweat, I must have looked capable of anything, for when I took a step toward him he gave in.

From behind the lumber pile he brought a spade, moved some of the barrels to one side, and started turning up the dirt.

When a hand—a man’s hand—dead-yellow where the damp dirt didn’t stick to it—came into sight I stopped him.

I had found “it,” and I had no stomach for looking at “it” after three weeks of lying in the wet ground.

NOTE: In court, Lester Zumwalt’s plea was that he had killed his partner in self-defense. Zumwalt testified that he had taken the Gorham bonds in a futile attempt to recover losses in the stock market; and that when Rathbone—who had intended taking them and going to Central America with Mrs. Earnshaw—had visited the safe deposit box and found them gone, he had returned to the office and charged Zumwalt with the theft.

Zumwalt at that time had not suspected his partner’s own dishonest plans, and had promised to restore the bonds. They had gone to Zumwalt’s house to discuss the matter; and, Rathbone, dissatisfied with his partner’s plan of restitution, had attacked Zumwalt, and had been killed in the ensuing struggle.

Then Zumwalt had told Mildred Narbett, his stenographer, the whole story and had persuaded her to help him. Between them they had made it appear that Rathbone had been in the office for a while the next day—the twenty-eighth—and had left for New York.

However, the jury seemed to think that Zumwalt had lured his partner out to the Fourteenth Avenue house for the purpose of killing him; so Zumwalt was found guilty of murder in the first degree.

The first jury before which Mildred Narbett was tried disagreed. The second jury acquitted her, holding that there was nothing to show that she had taken part in either the theft of the bonds or the murder, or that she had any knowledge of either crime until afterward; and that her later complicity was, in view of her love for Zumwalt, not altogether blameworthy.

BODIES PILED UP

Black Mask, 1 December 1923

One of our best detectives is this nameless sleuth of Mr. Hammett’s. He’s deductive, practical, and maybe a little unromantic. Probably that’s why he runs into such wild adventures and takes such horrible chances. In this story he walks into a whirlwind of death. Go to it.

The Montgomery Hotel’s regular detective had taken his last week’s rake-off from the hotel bootlegger in merchandise instead of cash, had drunk it down, had fallen asleep in the lobby, and had been fired. I happened to be the only idle operative in the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco branch at the time, and thus it came about that I had three days of hotel-coppering while a man was being found to take the job permanently.

The Montgomery is a quiet hotel of the better sort, and so I had a very restful time of it—until the third and last day.

Then things changed.

I came down into the lobby that afternoon to find Stacey, the assistant manager on duty at the time, hunting for me.

“One of the maids just phoned that there’s something wrong up in 906,” he said.

We went up to that room together. The door was open. In the center of the floor stood a maid, staring goggle-eyed at the closed door of the clothespress. From under it, extending perhaps a foot across the floor toward us, was a snake-shaped ribbon of blood.

I stepped past the maid and tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it. Slowly, rigidly, a man pitched out into my arms—pitched out backward—and there was a six-inch slit down the back of his coat, and the coat was wet and sticky.

That wasn’t altogether a surprise: the blood on the floor had prepared me for something of the sort. But when another followed him—facing me, this one, with a dark, distorted face—I dropped the one I had caught and jumped back.

And as I jumped a third man came tumbling out after the others.

From behind me came a scream and a thud as the maid fainted. I wasn’t feeling any too steady myself. I’m no sensitive plant, and I’ve looked at a lot of unlovely sights in my time, but for weeks afterward I could see those three dead men coming out of that clothespress to pile up at my feet: coming out slowly—almost deliberately—in a ghastly game of “follow your leader.”

Seeing them, you couldn’t doubt that they were really dead. Every detail of their falling, every detail of the heap in which they now lay, had a horrible certainty of lifelessness in it.

I turned to Stacey, who, deathly white himself, was keeping on his feet only by clinging to the foot of the brass bed.

“Get the woman out! Get doctors—police!”

I pulled the three dead bodies apart, laying them out in a grim row, faces up. Then I made a hasty examination of the room.

A soft hat, which fitted one of the dead men, lay in the center of the unruffled bed. The room key was in the door, on the inside. There was no blood in the room except what had leaked out of the clothespress, and the room showed no signs of having been the scene of a struggle.

The door to the bathroom was open. In the bottom of the bath tub was a shattered gin bottle, which, from the strength of the odor and the dampness of the tub, had been nearly full when broken. In one corner of the bathroom I found a small whisky glass, and another under the tub. Both were dry, clean, and odorless.

The inside of the clothespress door was stained with blood from the height of my shoulder to the floor, and two hats lay in the puddle of blood on the closet floor. Each of the hats fitted one of the dead men.

That was all. Three dead men, a broken gin bottle, blood.

Stacey returned presently with a doctor, and while the doctor was examining the dead men, the police detectives arrived.

The doctor’s work was soon done.

“This man,” he said, pointing to one of them, “was struck on the back of the head with a small blunt instrument, and then strangled. This one,” pointing to another, “was simply strangled. And the third was stabbed in the back with a blade perhaps five inches long. They have been dead for about two hours—since noon or a little after.”

The assistant manager identified two of the bodies. The man who had been stabbed—the first to fall out of the clothespress—had arrived at the hotel three days before, registering as Tudor Ingraham of Washington, D. C., and had occupied room 915, three doors away.

The last man to fall out—the one who had been simply choked—was the occupant of this room. His name was Vincent Develyn. He was an insurance broker and had made the hotel his home since his wife’s death, some four years before.

The third man had been seen in Develyn’s company frequently, and one of the clerks remembered that they had come into the hotel together at about five minutes after twelve this day. Cards and letters in his pockets told us that he was Homer Ansley, a member of the law firm of Lankershim and Ansley, whose offices were in the Miles Building—next door to Develyn’s office, in fact.

Develyn’s pockets held between $150 and $200; Ansley’s wallet contained more than $100; Ingraham’s pockets yielded nearly $300, and in a money belt around his waist we found $2200 and two medium-sized unset diamonds. All three had watches—Develyn’s was a valuable one—in their pockets, and Ingraham wore two rings, both of which were expensive ones. Ingraham’s room key was in his pocket.

Beyond this money—whose presence would seem to indicate that robbery hadn’t been the motive behind the three killings—we found nothing on any of their persons to throw the slightest light on the crime. Nor did the most thorough examination of both Ingraham’s and Develyn’s rooms teach us anything.

In Ingraham’s room we found a dozen or more packs of carefully marked cards, some crooked dice, and an immense amount of data on racehorses. Also we found that he had a wife who lived on East Delavan Avenue in Buffalo, and a brother on Crutcher Street in Dallas; as well as a list of names and addresses that we carried off to investigate later. But nothing in either room pointed, even indirectly, at murder.

Phels, the police department Bertillon man, found a number of fingerprints in Develyn’s room, but we couldn’t tell whether they would be of any value or not until he had worked them up. Though Develyn and Ansley had apparently been strangled by hands, Phels was unable to get prints from either their necks or their collars.

The maid who had discovered the blood said that she had straightened up Develyn’s room between ten and eleven that morning, but had not put fresh towels in the bathroom. It was for this purpose that she had gone to the room in the afternoon. She had found the door unlocked, with the key on the inside, and, as soon as she entered, had seen the blood and telephoned Stacey. She had seen no one in the corridor nearby as she entered the room.

She had straightened up Ingraham’s room, she said, at a few minutes after one. She had gone there earlier—between 10:20 and 10:45—for that purpose, but Ingraham had not then left it.

The elevator man who had carried Ansley and Develyn up from the lobby at a few minutes after twelve remembered that they had been laughingly discussing their golf scores of the previous day during the ride. No one had seen anything suspicious in the hotel around the time at which the doctor had placed the murders. But that was to be expected.

The murderer could have left the room, closing the door behind him, and walked away secure in the knowledge that at noon a man in the corridors of the Montgomery would attract little attention. If he was staying at the hotel he would simply have gone to his room; if not, he would have either walked all the way down to the street, or down a floor or two and then caught an elevator.

None of the hotel employees had ever seen Ingraham and Develyn together. There was nothing to show that they had even the slightest acquaintance. Ingraham habitually stayed in his room until noon, and did not return to it until very late at night. Nothing was known of his affairs.

At the Miles Building we—that is, Marty O’Hara and George Dean of the police department homicide detail, and I—questioned Ansley’s partner and Develyn’s employees. Both Develyn and Ansley, it seemed, were ordinary men who led ordinary lives: lives that held neither dark spots nor queer kinks. Ansley was married and had two children; he lived on Lake Street. Both men had a sprinkling of relatives and friends scattered here and there through the country; and, so far as we could learn, their affairs were in perfect order.

They had left their offices this day to go to luncheon together, intending to visit Develyn’s room first for a drink apiece from a bottle of gin someone coming from Australia had smuggled in to him.

“Well,” O’Hara said, when we were on the street again, “this much is clear. If they went up to Develyn’s room for a drink, it’s a cinch that they were killed almost as soon as they got in the room. Those whisky glasses you found were dry and clean. Whoever turned the trick must have been waiting for them. I wonder about this fellow Ingraham.”

“I’m wondering, too,” I said. “Figuring it out from the positions I found them in when I opened the closet door, Ingraham sizes up as the key to the whole thing. Develyn was back against the wall, with Ansley in front of him, both facing the door. Ingraham was facing them, with his back to the door. The clothespress was just large enough for them to be packed in it—too small for any of them to slip down while the door was closed.

“Then there was no blood in the room except what had come from the clothespress. Ingraham, with that gaping slit in his back, couldn’t have been stabbed until he was inside the closet, or he’d have bled elsewhere. He was standing close to the other men when he was knifed, and whoever knifed him closed the door quickly afterward.

“Now, why should he have been standing in such a position? Do you dope it out that he and another killed the two friends, and that while he was stowing their bodies in the closet his accomplice finished him off?”

“Maybe,” Dean said.

And that “maybe” was still as far as we had gone three days later.

We had sent and received bales of telegrams, having relatives and acquaintances of the dead men interviewed; and we had found nothing that seemed to have any bearing upon their deaths. Nor had we found the slightest connecting link between Ingraham and the other two. We had traced those other two back step by step almost to their cradles. We had accounted for every minute of their time since Ingraham had arrived in San Francisco—thoroughly enough to convince us that neither of them had met Ingraham.

Ingraham, we had learned, was a book-maker and all around crooked gambler. His wife and he had separated, but were on good terms. Some fifteen years before, he had been convicted of “assault with intent to kill” in Newark, N. J., and had served two years in the state prison. But the man he had assaulted—one John Pellow—had died of pneumonia in Omaha in 1914.

Ingraham had come to San Francisco for the purpose of opening a gambling club, and all our investigations had tended to show that his activities while in the city had been toward that end alone.

The fingerprints Phels had secured had all turned out to belong to Stacey, the maid, the police detectives, or myself. In short, we had found nothing!

So much for our attempts to learn the motive behind the three murders.

We now dropped that angle and settled down to the detail-studying, patience-taxing grind of picking up the murderer’s trail. From any crime to its author there is a trail. It may be—as in this case—obscure; but, since matter cannot move without disturbing other matter along its path, there always is—there must be—a trail of some sort. And finding and following such trails is what a detective is paid to do.

In the case of a murder it is possible sometimes to take a short-cut to the end of the trail, by first finding the motive. A knowledge of the motive often reduces the field of possibilities; sometimes points directly to the guilty one. It is on this account that murderers are, as a rule, more easily apprehended than any other class of criminals.

But a knowledge of the motive isn’t indispensable—quite a few murder mysteries are solved without its help. And in a fair proportion—say, ten to twenty per cent—of cases where men are convicted justly of murder, the motive isn’t clearly shown even at the last, and sometimes is hardly guessed at.

So far, all we knew about the motive in the particular case we were dealing with was that it hadn’t been robbery; unless something we didn’t know about had been stolen—something of sufficient value to make the murderer scorn the money in his victims’ pockets.

We hadn’t altogether neglected the search for the murderer’s trail, of course, but—being human—we had devoted most of our attention to trying to find a short-cut. Now we set out to find our man, or men, regardless of what had urged him or them to commit the crimes.

Of the people who had been registered at the hotel on the day of the killing there were nine men of whose innocence we hadn’t found a reasonable amount of proof. Four of these were still at the hotel, and only one of that four interested us very strongly. That one—a big rawboned man of forty-five or fifty, who had registered as J. J. Cooper of Anaconda, Montana—wasn’t, we had definitely established, really a mining man, as he pretended to be. And our telegraphic communications with Anaconda failed to show that he was known there. Therefore we were having him shadowed—with few results.

Five men of the nine had departed since the murders; three of them leaving forwarding addresses with the mail clerk. Gilbert Jacquemart had occupied room 946 and had ordered his mail forwarded to him at a Los Angeles hotel. W. F. Salway, who had occupied room 1022, had given instructions that his mail be readdressed to a number on Clark Street in Chicago. Ross Orrett, room 609, had asked to have his mail sent to him care of General Delivery at the local post office.

Jacquemart had arrived at the hotel two days before, and had left on the afternoon of the murders. Salway had arrived the day before the murders and had left the day after them. Orrett had arrived on the day of the murders and had left the following day.

Sending telegrams to have the first two found and investigated, I went after Orrett myself. A musical comedy named “What For?” as being widely advertised just then with gaily printed plum-colored hand-bills. I got one of them and, at a stationery store, an envelope to match, and mailed it to Orrett at the Montgomery Hotel. There are concerns that make a practice of securing the names of arrivals at the principal hotels and mailing them advertisements. I trusted that Orrett, knowing this, wouldn’t be suspicious when my gaudy envelope, forwarded from the hotel, reached him through the General Delivery window.

Dick Foley—the Agency’s shadow specialist—planted himself in the post office, to loiter around with an eye on the “O” window until he saw my plum-colored envelope passed out, and then to shadow the receiver.

I spent the next day trying to solve the mysterious J. J. Cooper’s game, but he was still a puzzle when I knocked off that night.

At a little before five the following morning Dick Foley dropped into my room on his way home to wake me up and tell me what he had done for himself.

“This Orrett baby is our meat!” he said. “Picked him up when he got his mail yesterday afternoon. Got another letter besides yours. Got an apartment on Van Ness Avenue. Took it the day after the killing, under the name of B. T. Quinn. Packing a gun under his left arm—there’s that sort of a bulge there. Just went home to bed. Been visiting all the dives in North Beach. Who do you think he’s hunting for?

“Who?”

“Guy Cudner.”

That was news! This Guy Cudner, alias “The Darkman,” was the most dangerous bird on the Coast, if not in the country. He had only been nailed once, but if he had been convicted of all the crimes that everybody knew he had committed he’d have needed half a dozen lives to crowd his sentences into, besides another half-dozen to carry to the gallows. However, he had decidedly the right sort of backing—enough to buy him everything he needed in the way of witnesses, alibis, even juries, and—so the talk went—an occasional judge.

I don’t know what went wrong with his support that one time he was convicted up North and sent over for a one-to-fourteen-year hitch; but it adjusted itself promptly, for the ink was hardly dry on the press notices of his conviction before he was loose again on parole.

“Is Cudner in town?”

“Don’t know,” Dick said, “but this Orrett, or Quinn, or whatever his name is, is surely hunting for him. In Rick’s place, at ‘Wop’ Healey’s and at Pigatti’s. ‘Porky’ Grout tipped me off. Says Orrett doesn’t know Cudner by sight, but is trying to find him. Porky didn’t know what he wants with him.”

This Porky Grout was a dirty little rat who would sell out his family—if he ever had one—for the price of a flop. But with these lads who play both sides of the game it’s always a question of which side they’re playing when you think they’re playing yours.

“Think Porky was coming clean?” I asked.

“Chances are—but you can’t gamble on him.”

“Is Orrett acquainted here?”

“Doesn’t seem to be. Knows where he wants to go but has to ask how to get there. Hasn’t spoken to anybody that seemed to know him.”

“What’s he like?”

“Not the kind of egg you’d want to tangle with offhand, if you ask me. He and Cudner would make a good pair. They don’t look alike. This egg is tall and slim, but he’s built right—those fast, smooth muscles. Face is sharp without being thin, if you get me. I mean all the lines in it are straight. No curves. Chin, nose, mouth, eyes—all straight, sharp lines and angles. Looks like the kind of egg we know Cudner is. Make a good pair. Dresses well and doesn’t look like a rowdy—but harder than hell! A big game hunter! Our meat, I bet you!”

“It doesn’t look bad,” I agreed. “He came to the hotel the morning of the day the men were killed, and checked out the next morning. He packs a rod, and changed his name after he left. And now he’s paired off with The Darkman. It doesn’t look bad at all!”

“I’m telling you,” Dick said, “this fellow looks like three killings wouldn’t disturb his rest any. I wonder where Cudner fits in.”

“I can’t guess. But, if he and Orrett haven’t connected yet, then Cudner wasn’t in on the murders; but he may give us the answer.”

Then I jumped out of bed.

“I’m going to gamble on Porky’s dope being on the level! How would you describe Cudner?”

“You know him better than I do.”

“Yes, but how would you describe him to me if I didn’t know him?”

“A little fat guy with a red forked scar on his left cheek. What’s the idea?”

“It’s a good one,” I admitted. “That scar makes all the difference in the world. If he didn’t have it and you were to describe him you’d go into all the details of his appearance. But he has it, so you simply say, ‘A little fat guy with a red forked scar on his left cheek.’ It’s a ten to one that that’s just how he has been described to Orrett. I don’t look like Cudner, but I’m his size and build, and with a scar on my face Orrett will fall for me.”

“What then?”

“There’s no telling; but I ought to be able to learn a lot if I can get Orrett talking to me as Cudner. It’s worth a try anyway.”

“You can’t get away with it—not in San Francisco. Cudner is too well known.”

“What difference does that make, Dick? Orrett is the only one I want to fool. If he takes me for Cudner, well and good. If he doesn’t, still well and good. I won’t force myself on him.”

“How are you going to fake the scar?”

“Easy! We have pictures of Cudner, showing the scar, in the criminal gallery. I’ll get some collodion—it’s sold in drug stores under several trade names for putting on cuts and scratches—color it, and imitate Cudner’s scar on my cheek. It dries with a shiny surface and, put on thick, will stand out just enough to look like an old scar.”

It was a little after eleven the following night when Dick telephoned me that Orrett was in Pigatti’s place, on Pacific Street, and apparently settled there for some little while. My scar already painted on, I jumped into a taxi and within a few minutes was talking to Dick, around the corner from Pigatti’s.

“He’s sitting at the last table back on the left side. And he was alone when I came out. You can’t miss him. He’s the only egg in the joint with a clean collar.”

“You better stick outside—half a block or so away—with the taxi,” I told Dick. “Maybe brother Orrett and I will leave together and I’d just as leave have you standing by in case things break wrong.”

Pigatti’s place is a long, narrow, low-ceilinged cellar, always dim with smoke. Down the middle runs a narrow strip of bare floor for dancing. The rest of the floor is covered with closely packed tables, whose cloths are always soiled; and the management hasn’t yet verified the rumor that the country has gone dry.

Most of the tables were occupied when I came in, and half a dozen couples were dancing. Few of the faces to be seen were strangers to the morning “line up” at police headquarters.

Peering through the smoke, I saw Orrett at once, seated alone in a far corner, looking at the dancers with the set blank face of one who masks an all-seeing watchfulness. I walked down the other side of the room and crossed the strip of dance-floor directly under a light, so that the scar might be clearly visible to him. Then I selected a vacant table not far from his, and sat down facing him.

Ten minutes passed while he pretended an interest in the dancers and I affected a thoughtful stare at the dirty cloth on my table; but neither of us missed so much as a flicker of the other’s lids.

His eyes—grey eyes that were pale without being shallow, with black needle-point pupils—met mine after a while in a cold, steady, inscrutable stare; and, very slowly, he got to his feet. One hand—his right—in a side pocket of his dark coat, he walked straight across to my table and sat down opposite me.

“Cudner?”

“Looking for me, I hear,” I replied, trying to match the icy smoothness of his voice, as I was matching the steadiness of his gaze.

He had sat down with his left side turned slightly toward me, which put his right arm in not too cramped a position for straight shooting from the pocket that still held his hand.

“You were looking for me, too.”

I didn’t know what the correct answer to that would be, so I just grinned. But the grin didn’t come from my heart. I had, I realized, made a mistake—one that might cost me something before we were done. This bird wasn’t hunting for Cudner as a friend, as I had carelessly assumed, but was on the war path.

I saw those three dead men falling out of the closet in room 906!

My gun was inside the waist-band of my trousers, where I could get it quickly, but his was in his hand. So I was careful to keep my own hands motionless on the edge of the table, while I widened my grin.

His eyes were changing now, and the more I looked at them the less I liked them. The grey in them had darkened and grown duller, and the pupils were larger, and white crescents were showing beneath the gray. Twice before I had looked into eyes such as these—and I hadn’t forgotten what they meant—the eyes of the congenital killer!

“Suppose you speak your piece,” I suggested after a while.

But he wasn’t to be beguiled into conversation. He shook his head a mere fraction of an inch and the corners of his compressed mouth dropped down a trifle. The white crescents of eyeballs were growing broader, pushing the grey circles up under the upper lids.

It was coming! And there was no use waiting for it!

I drove a foot at his shins under the table, and at the same time pushed the table into his lap and threw myself across it. The bullet from his gun went off to one side. Another bullet—not from his gun—thudded into the table that was upended between us.

I had him by the shoulders when the second shot from behind took him in the left arm, just below my hand. I let go then and fell away, rolling over against the wall and twisting around to face the direction from which the bullets were coming.

I twisted around just in time to see—jerking out of sight behind a corner of the passage that gave to a small dining room—Guy Cudner’s scarred face. And as it disappeared a bullet from Orrett’s gun splattered the plaster from the wall where it had been.

I grinned at the thought of what must be going on in Orrett’s head as he lay sprawled out on the floor confronted by two Cudners. But he took a shot at me just then and I stopped grinning. Luckily, he had to twist around to fire at me, putting his weight on his wounded arm, and the pain made him wince, spoiling his aim.

Before he had adjusted himself more comfortably I had scrambled on hands and knees to Pigaitti’s kitchen door—only a few feet away—and had myself safely tucked out of range around an angle in the wall; all but my eyes and the top of my head, which I risked so that I might see what went on.

Orrett was now ten or twelve feet from me, lying flat on the floor, facing Cudner, with a gun in his hand and another on the floor beside him.

Across the room, perhaps thirty feet away, Cudner was showing himself around his protecting corner at brief intervals to exchange shots with the man on the floor, occasionally sending one my way. We had the place to ourselves. There were four exits, and the rest of Pigatti’s customers had used them all.

I had my gun out, but I was playing a waiting game. Cudner, I figured, had been tipped off to Orrett’s search for him and had arrived on the scene with no mistaken idea of the other’s attitude. Just what there was between them and what bearing it had on the Montgomery murders was a mystery to me, but I didn’t try to solve it now. I kept away from the bullets that were flying around as best I could and waited.

They were firing in unison. Cudner would show around his corner, both men’s weapons would spit, and he would duck out of sight again. Orrett was bleeding about the head now and one of his legs sprawled crookedly behind him. I couldn’t determine whether Cudner had been hit or not.

Each had fired eight, or perhaps nine, shots when Cudner suddenly jumped out into full view, pumping the gun in his left hand as fast as its mechanism would go, the gun in his right hand hanging at his side. Orrett had changed guns, and was on his knees now, his fresh weapon keeping pace with his enemy’s.

That couldn’t last!

Cudner dropped his left-hand gun, and, as he raised the other, he sagged forward and went down on one knee. Orrett stopped firing abruptly and fell over on his back—spread out full-length. Cudner fired once more—wildly, into the ceiling—and pitched down on his face.

I sprang to Orrett’s side and kicked both of his guns away. He was lying still but his eyes were open.

“Are you Cudner, or was he?”

“He.”

“Good!” he said, and closed his eyes.

I crossed to where Cudner lay and turned him over on his back. His chest was literally shot to pieces.

His thick lips worked, and I put my ear down to them.

“I get him?”

“Yes,” I lied, “he’s already cold.”

His dying face twisted into a triumphant grin.

“Sorry … three in hotel …” he gasped hoarsely. “Mistake … wrong room … got one … had to … other two … protect myself … I …”

He shuddered and died.

A week later the hospital people let me talk to Orrett. I told him what Cudner had said before he died.

“That’s the way I doped it out,” Orrett said from out of the depths of the bandages in which he was swathed. “That’s why I moved and changed my name the next day.”

“I suppose you’ve got it nearly figured out by now,” he said after a while.

“No,” I confessed, “I haven’t. I’ve an idea what it was all about but I could stand having a few details cleared up.”

“I’m sorry I can’t clear them up for you, but I’ve got to cover myself up. I’ll tell you a story, though, and it may help you. Once upon a time there was a high-class crook—what the newspapers call a Master Mind. Came a day when he found he had accumulated enough money to give up the game and settle down as an honest man.

“But he had two lieutenants—one in New York and one in San Francisco—and they were the only men in the world who knew he was a crook. And, besides that, he was afraid of both of them. So he thought he’d rest easier if they were out of the way. And it happened that neither of these lieutenants had ever seen the other.

“So this Master Mind convinced each of them that the other was double-crossing him and would have to be bumped off for the safety of all concerned. And both of them fell for it. The New Yorker went to San Francisco to get the other, and the San Franciscan was told that the New Yorker would arrive on such-and-such a day and would stay at such-and-such a hotel.

“The Master Mind figured that there was an even chance of both men passing out when they met—and he was nearly right at that. But he was sure that one would die, and then, even if the other missed hanging, there would only be one man left for him to dispose of later.”

There weren’t as many details in the story as I would have liked to have, but it explained a lot.

“How do you figure out Cudner’s getting into the wrong room?” I asked.

“That was funny! Maybe it happened like this: My room was 609 and the killing was done in 906. Suppose Cudner went to the hotel on the day he knew I was due and took a quick slant at the register. He wouldn’t want to be seen looking at it if he could avoid it, so he didn’t turn it around, but flashed a look at it as it lay—facing the desk.

“When you read numbers of three figures upside-down you have to transpose them in your head to get them straight. Like 123. You’d get that 3-2-1, and then turn them around in your head. That’s what Cudner did with mine. He was keyed up, of course, thinking of the job ahead of him, and he overlooked the fact that 609 upside-down still reads 609 just the same. So he turned it around and made it 906—Develyn’s room.”

“That’s how I doped it,” I said, “and I reckon it’s about right. And then he looked at the key-rack and saw that 906 wasn’t there. So he thought he might just as well get his job done right then, when he could roam the hotel corridors without attracting attention. Of course, he may have gone up to the room before Ansley and Develyn came in and waited for them, but I doubt it.

“I think it more likely that he simply happened to arrive at the hotel a few minutes after they had come in. Ansley was probably alone in the room when Cudner opened the unlocked door and came in—Develyn being in the bathroom getting the glasses.

“Ansley was about your size and age, and close enough in appearance to fit a rough description of you. Cudner went for him, and then Develyn, hearing the scuffle, dropped the bottle and glasses and rushed out, and got his.

“Cudner, being the sort he was, would figure that two murders were no worse than one, and he wouldn’t want to leave any witnesses around.

“And that is probably how Ingraham got into it. He was passing on his way from his room to the elevator and perhaps heard the racket and investigated. And Cudner put a gun in his face and made him stow the two bodies in the clothespress. And then he stuck his knife in Ingraham’s back and slammed the door on him. That’s about the—”

An indignant nurse descended on me from behind and ordered me out of the room, accusing me of getting her patient excited.

Orrett stopped me as I turned to go.

“Keep your eye on the New York dispatches,” he said, “and maybe you’ll get the rest of the story. It’s not over yet. Nobody has anything on me out here. That shooting in Pigatti’s was self-defense so far as I’m concerned. And as soon as I’m on my feet again and can get back East there’s going to be a Master Mind holding a lot of lead. That’s a promise!”

I believed him.

THE TENTH CLEW

A Complete Mystery-Detective Novelette

Black Mask, 1 January 1924

There were enough clews in this crime to give Mr. Hammett’s nameless detective a year or so of work. But solving a mystery in that length of time didn’t appeal to him. He wanted faster action—and he got it in good measure. So will you if you begin this entertaining novelette.

I

“Do you know … Emil Bonfils?”

“Mr. Leopold Gantvoort is not at home,” the servant who opened the door said, “but his son, Mr. Charles, is—if you wish to see him.”

“No. I had an appointment with Mr. Leopold Gantvoort for nine or a little after. It’s just nine now. No doubt he’ll be back soon. I’ll wait.”

“Very well, sir.”

He stepped aside for me to enter the house, took my overcoat and hat, guided me to a room on the second floor—Gantvoort’s library—and left me. I picked up a magazine from the stack on the table, pulled an ash tray over beside me, and made myself comfortable.

An hour passed. I stopped reading and began to grow impatient. Another hour passed—and I was fidgeting.

A clock somewhere below had begun to strike eleven when a young man of twenty-five or -six, tall and slender, with remarkably white skin and very dark hair and eyes, came into the room.

“My father hasn’t returned yet,” he said. “It’s too bad that you should have been kept waiting all this time. Isn’t there anything I could do for you? I am Charles Gantvoort.”

“No, thank you.” I got up from my chair, accepting the courteous dismissal. “I’ll get in touch with him tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, and we moved toward the door together.

As we reached the hall an extension telephone in one corner of the room we were leaving buzzed softly, and I halted in the doorway while Charles Gantvoort went over to answer it.

His back was toward me as he spoke into the instrument.

“Yes. Yes. Yes!”—sharply—“What? Yes”—very weakly—“Yes.”

He turned slowly around and faced me with a face that was gray and tortured, with wide shocked eyes and gaping mouth—the telephone still in his hand.

“Father,” he gasped, “is dead—killed!”

“Where? How?”

“I don’t know. That was the police. They want me to come down at once.”

He straightened his shoulders with an effort, pulling himself together, put down the telephone, and his face fell into less strained lines.

“You will pardon my—”

“Mr. Gantvoort,” I interrupted his apology, “I am connected with the Continental Detective Agency. Your father called up this afternoon and asked that a detective be sent to see him tonight. He said his life had been threatened. He hadn’t definitely engaged us, however, so unless you—”

“Certainly! You are employed! If the police haven’t already caught the murderer I want you to do everything possible to catch him.”

“All right! Let’s get down to headquarters.”

Neither of us spoke during the ride to the Hall of Justice. Gantvoort bent over the wheel of his car, sending it through the streets at a terrific speed. There were several questions that needed answers, but all his attention was required for his driving if he was to maintain the pace at which he was driving without piling us into something. So I didn’t disturb him, but hung on and kept quiet.

Half a dozen police detectives were waiting for us when we reached the detective bureau. O’Gar—a bullet-headed detective-sergeant who dresses like the village constable in a movie, wide-brimmed black hat and all, but who isn’t to be put out of the reckoning on that account—was in charge of the investigation. He and I had worked on two or three jobs together before, and hit it off excellently.

He led us into one of the small offices below the assembly room. Spread out on the flat top of a desk there were a dozen or more objects.

“I want you to look these things over carefully,” the detective-sergeant told Gantvoort, “and pick out the ones that belonged to your father.”

“But where is he?”

“Do this first,” O’Gar insisted, “and then you can see him.”

I looked at the things on the table while Charles Gantvoort made his selections. An empty jewel case; a memoranda book; three letters in slit envelopes that were addressed to the dead man; some other papers; a bunch of keys; a fountain pen; two white linen handkerchiefs; two pistol cartridges; a gold watch, with a gold knife and a gold pencil attached to it by a gold-and-platinum chain; two black leather wallets, one of them very new and the other worn; some money, both paper and silver; and a small portable typewriter, bent and twisted, and matted with hair and blood. Some of the other things were smeared with blood and some were clean.

Gantvoort picked out the watch and its attachments, the keys, the fountain pen, the memoranda book, the handkerchiefs, the letters and other papers, and the older wallet.

“These were father’s,” he told us. “I’ve never seen any of the others before. I don’t know, of course, how much money he had with him tonight, so I can’t say how much of this is his.”

“You’re sure none of the rest of this stuff was his?” O’Gar asked.

“I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. Whipple could tell you.” He turned to me. “He’s the man who let you in tonight. He looked after father, and he’d know positively whether any of these other things belonged to him or not.”

One of the police detectives went to the telephone to tell Whipple to come down immediately.

I resumed the questioning.

“Is anything that your father usually carried with him missing? Anything of value?”

“Not that I know of. All of the things that he might have been expected to have with him seem to be here.”

“At what time tonight did he leave the house?”

“Before seven-thirty. Possibly as early as seven.”

“Know where he was going?”

“He didn’t tell me, but I supposed he was going to call on Miss Dexter.”

The faces of the police detectives brightened, and their eyes grew sharp. I suppose mine did, too. There are many, many murders with never a woman in them anywhere; but seldom a very conspicuous killing.

“Who’s this Miss Dexter?” O’Gar took up the inquiry.

“She’s well—” Charles Gantvoort hesitated. “Well, father was on very friendly terms with her and her brother. He usually called on them—on her several evenings a week. In fact, I suspected that he intended marrying her.”

“Who and what is she?”

“Father became acquainted with them six or seven months ago. I’ve met them several times, but don’t know them very well. Miss Dexter—Creda is her given name—is about twenty-three years old, I should judge, and her brother Madden is four or five years older. He is in New York now, or on his way there, to transact some business for father.”

“Did your father tell you he was going to marry her?” O’Gar hammered away at the woman angle.

“No; but it was pretty obvious that he was very much—ah—infatuated. We had some words over it a few days ago—last week. Not a quarrel, you understand, but words. From the way he talked I feared that he meant to marry her.”

“What do you mean ‘feared’?” O’Gar snapped at that word.

Charles Gantvoort’s pale face flushed a little, and he cleared his throat embarrassedly.

“I don’t want to put the Dexters in a bad light to you. I don’t think—I’m sure they had nothing to do with father’s—with this. But I didn’t care especially for them—didn’t like them. I thought they were—well—fortune hunters, perhaps. Father wasn’t fabulously wealthy, but he had considerable means. And, while he wasn’t feeble, still he was past fifty-seven, old enough for me to feel that Creda Dexter was more interested in his money than in him.”

“How about your father’s will?”

“The last one of which I have any knowledge—drawn up two or three years ago—left everything to my wife and me jointly. Father’s attorney, Mr. Murray Abernathy, could tell you if there was a later will, but I hardly think there was.”

“Your father had retired from business, hadn’t he?”

“Yes; he turned his import and export business over to me about a year ago. He had quite a few investments scattered around, but he wasn’t actively engaged in the management of any concern.”

O’Gar tilted his village constable hat back and scratched his bullet head reflectively for a moment. Then he looked at me.

“Anything else you want to ask?”

“Yes. Mr. Gantvoort, do you know, or did you ever hear your father or anyone else speak of an Emil Bonfils?”

“No.”

“Did your father ever tell you that he had received a threatening letter? Or that he had been shot at on the street?”

“No.”

“Was your father in Paris in 1902?”

“Very likely. He used to go abroad every year up until the time of his retirement from business.”

II

“That’s Something!”

O’Gar and I took Gantvoort around to the morgue to see his father, then. The dead man wasn’t pleasant to look at, even to O’Gar and me, who hadn’t known him except by sight. I remembered him as a small wiry man, always smartly tailored, and with a brisk springiness that was far younger than his years.

He lay now with the top of his head beaten into a red and pulpy mess.

We left Gantvoort at the morgue and set out afoot for the Hall of Justice.

“What’s this deep stuff you’re pulling about Emil Bonfils and Paris in 1902?” the detective-sergeant asked as soon as we were out in the street.

“This: the dead man phoned the Agency this afternoon and said he had received a threatening letter from an Emil Bonfils with whom he had had trouble in Paris in 1902. He also said that Bonfils had shot at him the previous evening, in the street. He wanted somebody to come around and see him about it tonight. And he said that under no circumstances were the police to be let in on it—that he’d rather have Bonfils get him than have the trouble made public. That’s all he would say over the phone; and that’s how I happened to be on hand when Charles Gantvoort was notified of his father’s death.”

O’Gar stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and whistled softly.

“That’s something!” he exclaimed. “Wait till we get back to headquarters—I’ll show you something.”

Whipple was waiting in the assembly room when we arrived at headquarters. His face at first glance was as smooth and mask-like as when he had admitted me to the house on Russian Hill earlier in the evening. But beneath his perfect servant’s manner he was twitching and trembling.

We took him into the little office where we had questioned Charles Gantvoort.

Whipple verified all that the dead man’s son had told us. He was positive that neither the typewriter, the jewel case, the two cartridges, or the newer wallet had belonged to Gantvoort.

We couldn’t get him to put his opinion of the Dexters in words, but that he disapproved of them was easily seen. Miss Dexter, he said, had called up on the telephone three times this night at about eight o’clock, at nine, and at nine-thirty. She had asked for Mr. Leopold Gantvoort each time, but she had left no message. Whipple was of the opinion that she was expecting Gantvoort, and he had not arrived.

He knew nothing, he said, of Emil Bonfils or of any threatening letters. Gantvoort had been out the previous night from eight until midnight. Whipple had not seen him closely enough when he came home to say whether he seemed excited or not. Gantvoort usually carried about a hundred dollars in his pockets.

“Is there anything that you know of that Gantvoort had on his person tonight which isn’t among these things on the desk?” O’Gar asked.

“No, sir. Everything seems to be here—watch and chain, money, memorandum book, wallet, keys, handkerchiefs, fountain pen—everything that I know of.”

“Did Charles Gantvoort go out tonight?”

“No, sir. He and Mrs. Gantvoort were at home all evening.”

“Positive?”

Whipple thought a moment.

“Yes, sir, I’m fairly certain. But I know Mrs. Gantvoort wasn’t out. To tell the truth, I didn’t see Mr. Charles from about eight o’clock until he came downstairs with this gentleman”—pointing to me—“at eleven. But I’m fairly certain he was home all evening. I think Mrs. Gantvoort said he was.”

Then O’Gar put another question—one that puzzled me at the time.

“What kind of collar buttons did Mr. Gantvoort wear?”

“You mean Mr. Leopold?”

“Yes.”

“Plain gold ones, made all in one piece. They had a London jeweler’s mark on them.”

“Would you know them if you saw them?”

“Yes, sir.”

We let Whipple go home then.

“Don’t you think,” I suggested when O’Gar and I were alone with this desk-load of evidence that didn’t mean anything at all to me yet, “it’s time you were loosening up and telling me what’s what?”

“I guess so—listen! A man named Lagerquist, a grocer, was driving through Golden Gate Park tonight, and passed a machine standing on a dark road, with its lights out. He thought there was something funny about the way the man in it was sitting at the wheel, so he told the first patrolman he met about it.

“The patrolman investigated and found Gantvoort sitting at the wheel—dead—with his head smashed in and this dingus”—putting one hand on the bloody typewriter—“on the seat beside him. That was at a quarter of ten. The doc says Gantvoort was killed—his skull crushed—with this typewriter.

“The dead man’s pockets, we found, had all been turned inside out; and all this stuff on the desk, except this new wallet, was scattered about in the car—some of it on the floor and some on the seats. This money was there too—nearly a hundred dollars of it. Among the papers was this.”

He handed me a sheet of white paper upon which the following had been typewritten:

L. F. G.—

I want what is mine. 6,000 miles and 21 years are not enough to hide you from the victim of your treachery. I mean to have what you stole.

E. B.

“L. F. G. could be Leopold F. Gantvoort,” I said. “And E. B. could be Emil Bonfils. Twenty-one years is the time from 1902 to 1923, and 6,000 miles is, roughly, the distance between Paris and San Francisco.”

I laid the letter down and picked up the jewel case. It was a black imitation leather one, lined with white satin, and unmarked in any way.

Then I examined the cartridges. There were two of them, S. W. .45-caliber, and deep crosses had been cut in their soft noses—an old trick that makes the bullet spread out like a saucer when it hits.

“These in the car, too?”

“Yep—and this.”

From a vest pocket O’Gar produced a short tuft of blond hair—hairs between an inch and two inches in length. They had been cut off, not pulled out by the roots.

“Any more?”

There seemed to be an endless stream of things.

He picked up the new wallet from the desk—the one that both Whipple and Charles Gantvoort had said did not belong to the dead man—and slid it over to me.

“That was found in the road, three or four feet from the car.”

It was of a cheap quality, and had neither manufacturer’s name nor owner’s initials on it. In it were two ten-dollar bills, three small newspaper clippings, and a typewritten list of six names and addresses, headed by Gantvoort’s.

The three clippings were apparently from the Personal columns of three different newspapers—the type wasn’t the same—and they read:

GEORGE—

Everything is fixed. Don’t wait too long.

D. D. D.

R. H. T.—

They do not answer.

FLO.

CAPPY.—

Twelve on the dot and look sharp.

BINGO.

The names and addresses on the typewritten list, under Ganvoort’s, were:

Quincy Heathcote, 1223 S. Jason Street, Denver; B. D. Thornton, 96 Hughes Circle, Dallas; Luther G. Randall, 615 Columbia Street, Portsmouth; J. H. Boyd Willis, 4544 Harvard Street, Boston; Hannah Hindmarsh, 218 E. 79th Street, Cleveland.

“What else?” I asked when I had studied these.

The detective-sergeant’s supply hadn’t been exhausted yet.

“The dead man’s collar buttons—both front and back—had been taken out, though his collar and tie were still in place. And his left shoe was gone. We hunted high and low all around, but didn’t find either shoe or collar buttons.”

“Is that all?”

I was prepared for anything now.

“What the hell do you want?” he growled. “Ain’t that enough?”

“How about fingerprints?”

“Nothing stirring! All we found belonged to the dead man.”

“How about the machine he was found in?”

“A coupe belonging to a Doctor Wallace Girargo. He phoned in at six this evening that it had been stolen from near the corner of McAllister and Polk Streets. We’re checking up on him—but I think he’s all right.”

The things that Whipple and Charles Gantvoort had identified as belonging to the dead man told us nothing. We went over them carefully, but to no advantage. The memoranda book contained many entries, but they all seemed totally foreign to the murder. The letters were quite as irrelevant.

The serial number of the typewriter with which the murder had been committed had been removed, we found—apparently filed out of the frame.

“Well, what do you think?” O’Gar asked when we had given up our examination of our clews and sat back burning tobacco.

“I think we want to find Monsieur Emil Bonfils.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to do that,” he grunted. “I guess our best bet is to get in touch with these five people on the list with Gantvoort’s name. Suppose that’s a murder list? That this Bonfils is out to get all of them?”

“Maybe. We’ll get hold of them anyway. Maybe we’ll find that some of them have already been killed. But whether they have been killed or are to be killed or not, it’s a cinch they have some connection with this affair. I’ll get off a batch of telegrams to the Agency’s branches, having the names on the list taken care of. I’ll try to have the three clippings traced, too.”

O’Gar looked at his watch and yawned.

“It’s after four. What say we knock off and get some sleep? I’ll leave word for the department’s expert to compare the typewriter with that letter signed E. B. and with that list to see if they were written on it. I guess they were, but we’ll make sure. I’ll have the park searched all around where we found Gantvoort as soon as it gets light enough to see, and maybe the missing shoe and the collar buttons will be found. And I’ll have a couple of the boys out calling on all the typewriter shops in the city to see if they can get a line on this one.”

I stopped at the nearest telegraph office and got off a wad of messages. Then I went home to dream of nothing even remotely connected with crime or the detecting business.

III

“A sleek kitten that dame!”

At eleven o’clock that same morning, when, brisk and fresh with five hours’ sleep under my belt, I arrived at the police detective bureau, I found O’Gar slumped down at his desk, staring dazedly at a black shoe, half a dozen collar buttons, a rusty flat key, and a rumpled newspaper—all lined up before him.

“What’s all this? Souvenir of your wedding?”

“Might as well be.” His voice was heavy with disgust. “Listen to this: one of the porters of the Seamen’s National Bank found a package in the vestibule when he started cleaning up this morning. It was this shoe—Gantvoort’s missing one—wrapped in this sheet of a five-day-old Philadelphia Record, and with these collar buttons and this old key in it. The heel of the shoe, you’ll notice, has been pried off, and is still missing. Whipple identifies it all right, as well as two of the collar buttons, but he never saw the key before. These other four collar buttons are new, and common gold-rolled ones. The key don’t look like it had had much use for a long time. What do you make of all that?”

I couldn’t make anything out of it.

“How did the porter happen to turn the stuff in?”

“Oh, the whole story was in the morning papers—all about the missing shoe and collar buttons and all.”

“What did you learn about the typewriter?” I asked.

“The letter and the list were written with it, right enough; but we haven’t been able to find where it came from yet. We checked up the doc who owns the coupe, and he’s in the clear. We accounted for all his time last night. Lagerquist, the grocer who found Gantvoort, seems to be all right, too. What did you do?”

“Haven’t had any answers to the wires I sent last night. I dropped in at the Agency on my way down this morning, and got four operatives out covering the hotels and looking up all the people named Bonfils they can find—there are two or three families by that name listed in the directory. Also I sent our New York branch a wire to have the steamship records searched to see if an Emil Bonfils had arrived recently; and I put a cable through to our Paris correspondent to see what he could dig up over there.”

“I guess we ought to see Gantvoort’s lawyer—Abernathy—and that Dexter woman before we do anything else,” the detective-sergeant said.

“I guess so,” I agreed, “let’s tackle the lawyer first. He’s the most important one, the way things now stand.”

Murray Abernathy, attorney-at-law, was a long, stringy, slow-spoken old gentleman who still clung to starched-bosom shirts. He was too full of what he thought were professional ethics to give us as much help as we had expected; but by letting him talk—letting him ramble along in his own way—we did get a little information from him. What we got amounted to this:

The dead man and Creda Dexter had intended being married the coming Wednesday. His son and her brother were both opposed to the marriage, it seemed, so Gantvoort and the woman had planned to be married secretly in Oakland, and catch a boat for the Orient that same afternoon; figuring that by the time their lengthy honeymoon was over they could return to a son and brother who had become resigned to the marriage.

A new will had been drawn up, leaving half of Gantvoort’s estate to his new wife and half to his son and daughter-in-law. But the new will had not been signed yet, and Creda Dexter knew it had not been signed. She knew—and this was one of the few points upon which Abernathy would make a positive statement—that under the old will, still in force, everything went to Charles Gantvoort and his wife.

The Gantvoort estate, we estimated from Abernathy’s roundabout statements and allusions, amounted to about a million and a half in cash value. The attorney had never heard of Emil Bonfils, he said, and had never heard of any threats or attempts at murder directed toward the dead man. He knew nothing—or would tell us nothing—that threw any light upon the nature of the thing that the threatening letter had accused the dead man of stealing.

From Abernathy’s office we went to Creda Dexter’s apartment, in a new and expensively elegant building only a few minutes’ walk from the Gantvoort residence.

Creda Dexter was a small woman in her early twenties. The first thing you noticed about her were her eyes. They were large and deep and the color of amber, and their pupils were never at rest. Continuously they changed size, expanded and contracted—slowly at times, suddenly at others—ranging incessantly from the size of pinheads to an extent that threatened to blot out the amber irides.

With the eyes for a guide, you discovered that she was pronouncedly feline throughout. Her every movement was the slow, smooth, sure one of a cat; and the contours of her rather pretty face, the shape of her mouth, her small nose, the set of her eyes, the swelling of her brows, were all cat-like. And the effect was heightened by the way she wore her hair, which was thick and tawny.

“Mr. Gantvoort and I,” she told us after the preliminary explanations had been disposed of, “were to have been married the day after tomorrow. His son and daughter-in-law were both opposed to the marriage, as was my brother Madden. They all seemed to think that the difference between our ages was too great. So to avoid any unpleasantness, we had planned to be married quietly and then go abroad for a year or more, feeling sure that they would all have forgotten their grievances by the time we returned.

“That was why Mr. Gantvoort persuaded Madden to go to New York. He had some business there—something to do with the disposal of his interest in a steel mill—so he used it as an excuse to get Madden out of the way until we were off on our wedding trip. Madden lived here with me, and it would have been nearly impossible for me to have made any preparations for the trip without him seeing them.”

“Was Mr. Gantvoort here last night?” I asked her.

“No. I expected him—we were going out. He usually walked over—it’s only a few blocks. When eight o’clock came and he hadn’t arrived, I telephoned his house, and Whipple told me that he had left nearly an hour before. I called up again, twice, after that. Then, this morning, I called up again before I had seen the papers, and I was told that he—”

She broke off with a catch in her voice—the only sign of sorrow she displayed throughout the interview. The impression of her we had received from Charles Gantvoort and Whipple had prepared us for a more or less elaborate display of grief on her part. But she disappointed us. There was nothing crude about her work—she didn’t even turn on the tears for us.

“Was Mr. Gantvoort here night before last?”

“Yes. He came over at a little after eight and stayed until nearly twelve. We didn’t go out.”

“Did he walk over and back?”

“Yes, so far as I know.”

“Did he ever say anything to you about his life being threatened?”

“No.”

She shook her head decisively.

“Do you know Emil Bonfils?”

“No.”

“Ever hear Mr. Gantvoort speak of him?”

“No.”

“At what hotel is your brother staying in New York?”

The restless black pupils spread out abruptly, as if they were about to overflow into the white areas of her eyes. That was the first clear indication of fear I had seen. But, outside of those tell-tale pupils, her composure was undisturbed.

“I don’t know.”

“When did he leave San Francisco?”

“Thursday—four days ago.”

O’Gar and I walked six or seven blocks in thoughtful silence after we left Creda Dexter’s apartment, and then he spoke.

“A sleek kitten—that dame! Rub her the right way, and she’ll purr pretty. Rub her the wrong way—and look out for the claws!”

“What did that flash of her eyes when I asked about her brother tell you?” I asked.

“Something—but I don’t know what! It wouldn’t hurt to look him up and see if he’s really in New York. If he is there today it’s a cinch he wasn’t here last night—even the mail planes take twenty-six or twenty-eight hours for the trip.”

“We’ll do that,” I agreed. “It looks like this Creda Dexter wasn’t any too sure that her brother wasn’t in on the killing. And there’s nothing to show that Bonfils didn’t have help. I can’t figure Creda being in on the murder, though. She knew the new will hadn’t been signed. There’d be no sense in her working herself out of that three-quarters of a million berries.”

We sent a lengthy telegram to the Continental’s New York branch, and then dropped in at the Agency to see if any replies had come to the wires I had got off the night before.

They had.

None of the people whose names appeared on the typewritten list with Gantvoort’s had been found; not the least trace had been found of any of them. Two of the addresses given were altogether wrong. There were no houses with those numbers on those streets—and there never had been.

IV

“Maybe that ain’t so foolish!”

What was left of the afternoon, O’Gar and I spent going over the street between Gantvoort’s house on Russian Hill and the building in which the Dexters lived. We questioned everyone we could find—man, woman and child—who lived, worked, or played along any of the three routes the dead man could have taken.

We found nobody who had heard the shot that had been fired by Bonfils on the night before the murder. We found nobody who had seen anything suspicious on the night of the murder. Nobody who remembered having seen him picked up in a coupe.

Then we called at Gantvoort’s house and questioned Charles Gantvoort again, his wife, and all the servants—and we learned nothing. So far as they knew, nothing belonging to the dead man was missing—nothing small enough to be concealed in the heel of a shoe.

The shoes he had worn the night he was killed were one of three pairs made in New York for him two months before. He could have removed the heel of the left one, hollowed it out sufficiently to hide a small object in it, and then nailed it on again; though Whipple insisted that he would have noticed the effects of any tampering with the shoe unless it had been done by an expert repairman.

This field exhausted, we returned to the Agency. A telegram had just come from the New York branch, saying that none of the steamship companies’ records showed the arrival of an Emil Bonfils from either England, France, or Germany within the past six months.

The operatives who had been searching the city for Bonfils had all come in empty-handed. They had found and investigated eleven persons named Bonfils in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Alameda. Their investigations had definitely cleared all eleven. None of these Bonfilses knew an Emil Bonfils. Combing the hotels had yielded nothing.

O’Gar and I went to dinner together—a quiet, grouchy sort of meal during which we didn’t speak six words apiece—and then came back to the Agency to find that another wire had come in from New York.

Madden Dexter arrived McAlpin Hotel this morning with Power of Attorney to sell Gantvoort interest in B. F. and F. Iron Corporation. Denies knowledge of Emil Bonfils or of murder. Expects to finish business and leave for San Francisco tomorrow.

I let the sheet of paper upon which I had decoded the telegram slide out of my fingers, and we sat listlessly facing each other across my desk, looking vacantly each at the other, listening to the clatter of charwomen’s buckets in the corridor.

“It’s a funny one,” O’Gar said softly to himself at last.

I nodded. It was.

“We got nine clews,” he spoke again presently, “and none of them have got us a damned thing.

“Number one: the dead man called up you people and told you that he had been threatened and shot at by an Emil Bonfils that he’d had a run-in with in Paris a long time ago.

“Number two: the typewriter he was killed with and that the letter and list were written on. We’re still trying to trace it, but with no breaks so far. What the hell kind of a weapon was that, anyway? It looks like this fellow Bonfils got hot and hit Gantvoort with the first thing he put his hand on. But what was the typewriter doing in a stolen car? And why were the numbers filed off it?”

I shook my head to signify that I couldn’t guess the answer, and O’Gar went on enumerating our clews.

“Number three: the threatening letter, fitting in with what Gantvoort had said over the phone that afternoon.

“Number four: those two bullets with the crosses in their snoots.

“Number five: the jewel case.

“Number six: that bunch of yellow hair.

“Number seven: the fact that the dead man’s shoe and collar buttons were carried away.

“Number eight: the wallet, with two ten-dollar bills, three clippings, and the list in it, found in the road.

“Number nine: finding the shoe next day, wrapped up in a five-day-old Philadelphia paper, and with the missing collar buttons, four more, and a rusty key in it.

“That’s the list. If they mean anything at all, they mean that Emil Bonfils whoever he is—was flimflammed out of something by Gantvoort in Paris in 1902, and that Bonfils came to get it back. He picked Gantvoort up last night in a stolen car, bringing his typewriter with him—for God knows what reason! Gantvoort put up an argument, so Bonfils bashed in his noodle with the typewriter, and then went through his pockets, apparently not taking anything. He decided that what he was looking for was in Gantvoort’s left shoe, so he took the shoe away with him. And then—but there’s no sense to the collar button trick, or the phoney list, or—”

“Yes there is!” I cut in, sitting up, wide awake now. “That’s our tenth clew—the one we’re going to follow from now on. That list was, except for Gantvoort’s name and address, a fake. Our people would have found at least one of the five people whose names were on it if it had been on the level. But they didn’t find the least trace of any of them. And two of the addresses were of street numbers that didn’t exist!

“That list was faked up, put in the wallet with the clippings and twenty dollars—to make the play stronger—and planted in the road near the car to throw us off-track. And if that’s so, then it’s a hundred to one that the rest of the things were cooked up too.

“From now on I’m considering all those nine lovely clews as nine bum steers. And I’m going just exactly contrary to them. I’m looking for a man whose name isn’t Emil Bonfils, and whose initials aren’t either E or B; who isn’t French, and who wasn’t in Paris in 1902. A man who hasn’t light hair, doesn’t carry a .45-calibre pistol, and has no interest in Personal advertisements in newspapers. A man who didn’t kill Gantvoort to recover anything that could have been hidden in a shoe or on a collar button. That’s the sort of a guy I’m hunting for now!”

The detective-sergeant screwed up his little green eyes reflectively and scratched his head.

“Maybe that ain’t so foolish!” he said. “You might be right at that. Suppose you are—what then? That Dexter kitten didn’t do it—it cost her three-quarters of a million. Her brother didn’t do it—he’s in New York. And, besides, you don’t croak a guy just because you think he’s too old to marry your sister. Charles Gantvoort? He and his wife are the only ones who make any money out of the old man dying before the new will was signed. We have only their word for it that Charles was home that night. The servants didn’t see him between eight and eleven. You were there, and you didn’t see him until eleven. But me and you both believe him when he says he was home all that evening. And neither of us think he bumped the old man off—though of course he might. Who then?”

“This Creda Dexter,” I suggested, “was marrying Gantvoort for his money, wasn’t she? You don’t think she was in love with him, do you?”

“No. I figure, from what I saw of her, that she was in love with the million and a half.”

“All right,” I went on. “Now she isn’t exactly homely—not by a long shot. Do you reckon Gantvoort was the only man who ever fell for her?”

“I got you! I got you!” O’Gar exclaimed. “You mean there might have been some young fellow in the running who didn’t have any million and a half behind him, and who didn’t take kindly to being nosed out by a man who did. Maybe—maybe.”

“Well, suppose we bury all this stuff we’ve been working on and try out that angle.”

“Suits me,” he said. “Starting in the morning, then, we spend our time hunting for Gantvoort’s rival for the paw of this Dexter kitten.”

V

“Meet Mr. Smith.”

Right or wrong, that’s what we did. We stowed all those lovely clews away in a drawer, locked the drawer, and forgot them. Then we set out to find Creda Dexter’s masculine acquaintances and sift them for the murderer.

But it wasn’t as simple as it sounded.

All our digging into her past failed to bring to light one man who could be considered a suitor. She and her brother had been in San Francisco three years. We traced them back the length of that period, from apartment to apartment. We questioned everyone we could find who even knew her by sight. And nobody could tell us of a single man who had shown an interest in her besides Gantvoort. Nobody, apparently, had ever seen her with any man except Gantvoort or her brother.

All of which, while not getting us ahead, at least convinced us that we were on the right trail. There must have been, we argued, at least one man in her life in those three years besides Gantvoort. She wasn’t—unless we were very much mistaken—the sort of woman who would discourage masculine attention; and she was certainly endowed by nature to attract it. And if there was another man, then the very fact that he had been kept so thoroughly under cover strengthened the probability of him having been mixed up in Gantvoort’s death.

We were unsuccessful in learning where the Dexters had lived before they came to San Francisco, but we weren’t so very interested in their earlier life. Of course it was possible that some old-time lover had come upon the scene again recently; but in that case it should have been easier to find the recent connection than the old one.

There was no doubt, our explorations showed, that Gantvoort’s son had been correct in thinking the Dexters were fortune hunters. All their activities pointed to that, although there seemed to be nothing downright criminal in their pasts.

I went up against Creda Dexter again, spending an entire afternoon in her apartment, banging away with question after question, all directed toward her former love affairs. Who had she thrown over for Gantvoort and his million and a half? And the answer was always nobody—an answer that I didn’t choose to believe.

We had Creda Dexter shadowed night and day—and it carried us ahead not an inch. Perhaps she suspected that she was being watched. Anyway, she seldom left her apartment, and then on only the most innocent of errands. We had her apartment watched whether she was in it or not. Nobody visited it. We tapped her telephone—and all our listening-in netted us nothing. We had her mail covered—and she didn’t receive a single letter, not even an advertisement.

Meanwhile, we had learned where the three clippings found in the wallet had come from—from the Personal columns of a New York, a Chicago, and a Portland newspaper. The one in the Portland paper had appeared two days before the murder, the Chicago one four days before, and the New York one five days before. All three of those papers would have been on the San Francisco newsstands the day of the murder—ready to be purchased and cut out by anyone who was looking for material to confuse detectives with.

The Agency’s Paris correspondent had found no less than six Emil Bonfilses—all bloomers so far as our job was concerned—and had a line on three more.

But O’Gar and I weren’t worrying over Emil Bonfils any more—that angle was dead and buried. We were plugging away at our new task—the finding of Gantvoort’s rival.

Thus the days passed, and thus the matter stood when Madden Dexter was due to arrive home from New York.

Our New York branch had kept an eye on him until he left that city, and had advised us of his departure, so I knew what train he was coming on. I wanted to put a few questions to him before his sister saw him. He could tell me what I wanted to know, and he might be willing to if I could get to him before his sister had an opportunity to shut him up.

If I had known him by sight I could have picked him up when he left his train at Oakland, but I didn’t know him; and I didn’t want to carry Charles Gantvoort or anyone else along with me to pick him out for me.

So I went up to Sacramento that morning, and boarded his train there. I put my card in an envelope and gave it to a messenger boy in the station. Then I followed the boy through the train, while he called out:

“Mr. Dexter! Mr. Dexter!”

In the last car—the observation-club car—a slender, dark-haired man in well-made tweeds turned from watching the station platform through a window and held out his hand to the boy.

I studied him while he nervously tore open the envelope and read my card. His chin trembled slightly just now, emphasizing the weakness of a face that couldn’t have been strong at its best. Between twenty-five and thirty, I placed him; with his hair parted in the middle and slicked down; large, too-expressive brown eyes; small well-shaped nose; neat brown mustache; very red, soft lips—that type.

I dropped into the vacant chair beside him when he looked up from the card.

“You are Mr. Dexter?”

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose it’s about Mr. Gantvoort’s death that you want to see me?”

“Uh-huh. I wanted to ask you a few questions, and since I happened to be in Sacramento, I thought that by riding back on the train with you I could ask them without taking up too much of your time.”

“If there’s anything I can tell you,” he assured me, “I’ll be only too glad to do it. But I told the New York detectives all I knew, and they didn’t seem to find it of much value.”

“Well, the situation has changed some since you left New York.” I watched his face closely as I spoke. “What we thought of no value then may be just what we want now.”

I paused while he moistened his lips and avoided my eyes. He may not know anything, I thought, but he’s certainly jumpy. I let him wait a few minutes while I pretended deep thoughtfulness. If I played him right, I was confident I could turn him inside out. He didn’t seem to be made of very tough material.

We were sitting with our heads close together, so that the four or five other passengers in the car wouldn’t overhear our talk; and that position was in my favor. One of the things that every detective knows is that it’s often easy to get information—even a confession—out of a feeble nature simply by putting your face close to his and talking in a loud tone. I couldn’t talk loud here, but the closeness of our faces was by itself an advantage.

“Of the men with whom your sister was acquainted,” I came out with it at last, “who, outside of Mr. Gantvoort, was the most attentive?”

He swallowed audibly, looked out of the window, fleetingly at me, and then out of the window again.

“Really, I couldn’t say.”

“All right. Let’s get at it this way. Suppose we check off one by one all the men who were interested in her and in whom she was interested.”

He continued to stare out of the window.

“Who’s first?” I pressed him.

His gaze flickered around to meet mine for a second, with a sort of timid desperation in his eyes.

“I know it sounds foolish, but I, her brother, couldn’t give you the name of even one man in whom Creda was interested before she met Gantvoort. She never, so far as I know, had the slightest feeling for any man before she met him. Of course it is possible that there may have been someone that I didn’t know anything about, but—”

It did sound foolish, right enough! The Creda Dexter I had talked to—a sleek kitten, as O’Gar had put it—didn’t impress me as being at all likely to go very long without having at least one man in tow. This pretty little guy in front of me was lying. There couldn’t be any other explanation.

I went at him tooth and nail. But when he reached Oakland early that night he was still sticking to his original statement—that Gantvoort was the only one of his sister’s suitors that he knew anything about. And I knew that I had blundered, had underrated Madden Dexter, had played my hand wrong in trying to shake him down too quickly—in driving too directly at the point I was interested in. He was either a lot stronger than I had figured him, or his interest in concealing Gantvoort’s murderer was much greater than I had thought it would be.

But I had this much: if Dexter was lying—and there couldn’t be much doubt of that—then Gantvoort had had a rival, and Madden Dexter believed or knew that this rival had killed Gantvoort.

When we left the train at Oakland I knew I was licked, that he wasn’t going to tell me what I wanted to know—not this night, anyway. But I clung to him, stuck at his side when we boarded the ferry for San Francisco, in spite of the obviousness of his desire to get away from me. There’s always a chance of something unexpected happening; so I continued to ply him with questions as our boat left the slip.

Presently a man came toward where we were sitting—a big burly man in a light overcoat, carrying a black bag.

“Hello, Madden!” he greeted my companion, striding over to him with outstretched hand. “Just got in and was trying to remember your phone number,” he said, setting down his bag, as they shook hands warmly.

Madden Dexter turned to me.

“I want you to meet Mr. Smith,” he told me, and then gave my name to the big man, adding, “he’s with the Continental Detective Agency here.”

That tag—clearly a warning for Smith’s benefit—brought me to my feet, all watchfulness. But the ferry was crowded—a hundred persons were within sight of us, all around us. I relaxed, smiled pleasantly, and shook hands with Smith. Whoever Smith was, and whatever connection he might have with the murder—and if he hadn’t any, why should Dexter have been in such a hurry to tip him off to my identity?—he couldn’t do anything here. The crowd around us was all to my advantage.

That was my second mistake of the day.

Smith’s left hand had gone into his overcoat pocket—or rather, through one of those vertical slits that certain styles of overcoats have so that inside pockets may be reached without unbuttoning the overcoat. His hand had gone through that slit, and his coat had fallen away far enough for me to see a snub-nosed automatic in his hand—shielded from everyone’s sight but mine—pointing at my waist-line.

“Shall we go on deck?” Smith asked—and it was an order.

I hesitated. I didn’t like to leave all these people who were so blindly standing and sitting around us. But Smith’s face wasn’t the face of a cautious man. He had the look of one who might easily disregard the presence of a hundred witnesses.

I turned around and walked through the crowd. His right hand lay familiarly on my shoulder as he walked behind me; his left hand held his gun, under the overcoat, against my spine.

The deck was deserted. A heavy fog, wet as rain,—the fog of San Francisco Bay’s winter nights,—lay over boat and water, and had driven everyone else inside. It hung about us, thick and impenetrable; I couldn’t see so far as the end of the boat, in spite of the lights glowing overhead.

I stopped.

Smith prodded me in the back.

“Farther away, where we can talk,” he rumbled in my ear.

I went on until I reached the rail.

The entire back of my head burned with sudden fire … tiny points of light glittered in the blackness before me … grew larger … came rushing toward me. …

VI

“Those damned horns!”

Semi-consciousness! I found myself mechanically keeping afloat somehow and trying to get out of my overcoat. The back of my head throbbed devilishly. My eyes burned. I felt heavy and logged, as if I had swallowed gallons of water.

The fog hung low and thick on the water—there was nothing else to be seen anywhere. By the time I had freed myself of the encumbering overcoat my head had cleared somewhat, but with returning consciousness came increased pain.

A light glimmered mistily off to my left, and then vanished. From out of the misty blanket, from every direction, in a dozen different keys, from near and far, fog-horns sounded. I stopped swimming and floated on my back, trying to determine my whereabouts.

After a while I picked out the moaning, evenly spaced blasts of the Alcatraz siren. But they told me nothing. They came to me out of the fog without direction—seemed to beat down upon me from straight above.

I was somewhere in San Francisco Bay, and that was all I knew, though I suspected the current was sweeping me out toward the Golden Gate.

A little while passed, and I knew that I had left the path of the Oakland ferries—no boat had passed close to me for some time. I was glad to be out of that track. In this fog a boat was a lot more likely to run me down than to pick me up.

The water was chilling me, so I turned over and began swimming, just vigorously enough to keep my blood circulating while I saved my strength until I had a definite goal to try for.

A horn began to repeat its roaring note nearer and nearer, and presently the lights of the boat upon which it was fixed came into sight. One of the Sausalito ferries, I thought.

It came quite close to me, and I halloed until I was breathless and my throat was raw. But the boat’s siren, crying its warning, drowned my shouts.

The boat went on and the fog closed in behind it.

The current was stronger now, and my attempts to attract the attention of the Sausalito ferry had left me weaker. I floated, letting the water sweep me where it would, resting.

Another light appeared ahead of me suddenly—hung there for an instant—disappeared.

I began to yell, and worked my arms and legs madly, trying to drive myself through the water to where it had been.

I never saw it again.

Weariness settled upon me, and a sense of futility. The water was no longer cold. I was warm with a comfortable, soothing numbness. My head stopped throbbing; there was no feeling at all in it now. No lights, now, but the sound of fog-horns … fog-horns … fog-horns ahead of me, behind me, to either side; annoying me, irritating me.

But for the moaning horns I would have ceased all effort. They had become the only disagreeable detail of my situation—the water was pleasant, fatigue was pleasant. But the horns tormented me. I cursed them petulantly and decided to swim until I could no longer hear them, and then, in the quiet of the friendly fog, go to sleep. …

Now and then I would doze, to be goaded into wakefulness by the wailing voice of a siren.

“Those damned horns! Those damned horns!” I complained aloud, again and again.

One of them, I found presently, was bearing down upon me from behind, growing louder and stronger. I turned and waited. Lights, dim and steaming, came into view.

With exaggerated caution to avoid making the least splash, I swam off to one side. When this nuisance was past I could go to sleep. I sniggered softly to myself as the lights drew abreast, feeling a foolish triumph in my cleverness in eluding the boat. Those damned horns. …

Life—the hunger for life—all at once surged back into my being.

I screamed at the passing boat, and with every iota of my being struggled toward it. Between strokes I tilted up my head and screamed. …

VII

“You have a lot of fun, don’t you?”

When I returned to consciousness for the second time that evening, I was lying on my back on a baggage truck, which was moving. Men and women were crowding around, walking beside the truck, staring at me with curious eyes.

I sat up.

“Where are we?” I asked.

A little red-faced man in uniform answered my question.

“Just landing in Sausalito. Lay still. We’ll take you over to the hospital.”

I looked around.

“How long before this boat goes back to San Francisco?”

“Leaves right away.”

I slid off the truck and started back aboard the boat.

“I’m going with it,” I said.

Half an hour later, shivering and shaking in my wet clothes, keeping my mouth clamped tight so that my teeth wouldn’t sound like a dice-game, I climbed into a taxi at the Ferry Building and went to my flat.

There, I swallowed half a pint of whisky, rubbed myself with a coarse towel until my skin was sore, and, except for an enormous weariness and a worse headache, I felt almost human again.

I reached O’Gar by phone, asked him to come up to my flat right away, and then called up Charles Gantvoort.

“Have you seen Madden Dexter yet?” I asked him.

“No, but I talked to him over the phone. He called me up as soon as he got in. I asked him to meet me in Mr. Abernathy’s office in the morning, so we could go over that business he transacted for father.”

“Can you call him up now and tell him that you have been called out of town—will have to leave early in the morning—and that you’d like to run over to his apartment and see him tonight?”

“Why yes, if you wish.”

“Good! Do that. I’ll call for you in a little while and go over to see him with you.”

“What is—”

“I’ll tell you about it when I see you,” I cut him off.

O’Gar arrived as I was finishing dressing.

“So he told you something?” he asked, knowing of my plan to meet Dexter on the train and question him.

“Yes,” I said with sour sarcasm, “but I came near forgetting what it was. I grilled him all the way from Sacramento to Oakland, and couldn’t get a whisper out of him. On the ferry coming over he introduces me to a man he calls Mr. Smith, and he tells Mr. Smith that I’m a gum-shoe. This, mind you, all happens in the middle of a crowded ferry! Mr. Smith puts a gun in my belly, marches me out on deck, raps me across the back of the head, and dumps me into the bay.”

“You have a lot of fun, don’t you?” O’Gar grinned, and then wrinkled his forehead. “Looks like Smith would be the man we want then—the buddy who turned the Gantvoort trick. But what the hell did he want to give himself away by chucking you overboard for?”

“Too hard for me,” I confessed, while trying to find which of my hats and caps would sit least heavily upon my bruised head. “Dexter knew I was hunting for one of his sister’s former lovers, of course. And he must have thought I knew a whole lot more than I do, or he wouldn’t have made that raw play—tipping my mitt to Smith right in front of me.

“It may be that after Dexter lost his head and made that break on the ferry, Smith figured that I’d be on to him soon, if not right away; and so he’d take a desperate chance on putting me out of the way. But we’ll know all about it in a little while,” I said, as we went down to the waiting taxi and set out for Gantvoort’s.

“You ain’t counting on Smith being in sight, are you?” the detective-sergeant asked.

“No. He’ll be holed up somewhere until he sees how things are going. But Madden Dexter will have to be out in the open to protect himself. He has an alibi, so he’s in the clear so far as the actual killing is concerned. And with me supposed to be dead, the more he stays in the open, the safer he is. But it’s a cinch that he knows what this is all about, though he wasn’t necessarily involved in it. As near as I could see, he didn’t go out on deck with Smith and me tonight. Anyway he’ll be home. And this time he’s going to talk—he’s going to tell his little story!”

Charles Gantvoort was standing on his front steps when we reached his house. He climbed into our taxi and we headed for the Dexters’ apartment. We didn’t have time to answer any of the questions that Gantvoort was firing at us with every turning of the wheels.

“He’s home and expecting you?” I asked him.

“Yes.”

Then we left the taxi and went into the apartment building.

“Mr. Gantvoort to see Mr. Dexter,” he told the Philippine boy at the switchboard.

The boy spoke into the phone.

“Go right up,” he told us.

At the Dexters’ door I stepped past Gantvoort and pressed the button.

Creda Dexter opened the door. Her amber eyes widened and her smile faded as I stepped past her into the apartment.

I walked swiftly down the little hallway and turned into the first room through whose open door a light showed.

And came face to face with Smith!

We were both surprised, but his astonishment was a lot more profound than mine. Neither of us had expected to see the other; but I had known he was still alive, while he had every reason for thinking me at the bottom of the bay.

I took advantage of his greater bewilderment to the extent of two steps toward him before he went into action.

One of his hands swept down.

I threw my right fist at his face—threw it with every ounce of my 180 pounds behind it, re-enforced by the memory of every second I had spent in the water and every throb of my battered head.

His hand, already darting down for his pistol, came back up too late to fend off my punch.

Something clicked in my hand as it smashed into his face, and my hand went numb.

But he went down—and lay where he fell.

I jumped across his body to a door on the opposite side of the room, pulling my gun loose with my left hand.

“Dexter’s somewhere around!” I called over my shoulder to O’Gar, who with Gantvoort and Creda, was coming through the door by which I had entered. “Keep your eyes open!”

I dashed through the four other rooms of the apartment, pulling closet doors open, looking everywhere—and I found nobody.

Then I returned to where Creda Dexter was trying to revive Smith, with the assistance of O’Gar and Gantvoort.

The detective-sergeant looked over his shoulder at me.

“Who do you think this joker is?” he asked.

“My friend Mr. Smith.”

“Gantvoort says he’s Madden Dexter.”

I looked at Charles Gantvoort, who nodded his head.

“This is Madden Dexter,” he said.

VIII

“I hope you swing!”

We worked upon Dexter for nearly ten minutes before he opened his eyes.

As soon as he sat up we began to shoot questions and accusations at him, hoping to get a confession out of him before he recovered from his shakiness—but he wasn’t that shaky.

All we could get out of him was:

“Take me in if you want to. If I’ve got anything to say I’ll say it to my lawyer, and to nobody else.”

Creda Dexter, who had stepped back after her brother came to, and was standing a little way off, watching us, suddenly came forward and caught me by the arm.

“What have you got on him?” she demanded, imperatively.

“I wouldn’t want to say,” I countered, “but I don’t mind telling you this much. We’re going to give him a chance in a nice modern court-room to prove that he didn’t kill Leopold Gantvoort.”

“He was in New York!”

“He was not! He had a friend who went to New York as Madden Dexter and looked after Gantvoort’s business under that name. But if this is the real Madden Dexter then the closest he got to New York was when he met his friend on the ferry to get from him the papers connected with the B. F. & F. Iron Corporation transaction; and learned that I had stumbled upon the truth about his alibi—even if I didn’t know it myself at the time.”

She jerked around to face her brother.

“Is that on the level?” she asked him.

He sneered at her, and went on feeling with the fingers of one hand the spot on his jaw where my fist had landed.

“I’ll say all I’ve got to say to my lawyer,” he repeated.

“You will?” she shot back at him. “Well, I’ll say what I’ve got to say right now!”

She flung around to face me again.

“Madden is not my brother at all! My name is Ives. Madden and I met in St. Louis about four years ago, drifted around together for a year or so, and then came to Frisco. He was a con man—still is. He made Mr. Gantvoort’s acquaintance six or seven months ago, and was getting him all ribbed up to unload a fake invention on him. He brought him here a couple of times, and introduced me to him as his sister. We usually posed as brother and sister.

“Then, after Mr. Gantvoort had been here a couple times, Madden decided to change his game. He thought Mr. Gantvoort liked me, and that we could get more money out of him by working a fancy sort of badger-game on him. I was to lead the old man on until I had him wrapped around my finger—until we had him tied up so tight he couldn’t get away—had something on him—something good and strong. Then we were going to shake him down for plenty of money.

“Everything went along fine for a while. He fell for me—fell hard. And finally he asked me to marry him. We had never figured on that. Blackmail was our game. But when he asked me to marry him I tried to call Madden off. I admit the old man’s money had something to do with it—it influenced me—but I had come to like him a little for himself. He was mighty fine in lots of ways—nicer than anybody I had ever known.

“So I told Madden all about it, and suggested that we drop the other plan, and that I marry Gantvoort. I promised to see that Madden was kept supplied with money—I knew I could get whatever I wanted from Mr. Gantvoort. And I was on the level with Madden. I liked Mr. Gantvoort, but Madden had found him and brought him around to me; and so I wasn’t going to run out on Madden. I was willing to do all I could for him.

“But Madden wouldn’t hear of it. He’d have got more money in the long run by doing as I suggested—but he wanted his little handful right away. And to make him more unreasonable he got one of his jealous streaks. He beat me one night!

“That settled it. I made up my mind to ditch him. I told Mr. Gantvoort that my brother was bitterly opposed to our marrying, and he could see that Madden was carrying a grouch. So he arranged to send Madden East on that steel business, to get him out of the way until we were off on our wedding trip. And we thought Madden was completely deceived—but I should have known that he would see through our scheme. We planned to be gone about a year, and by that time I thought Madden would have forgotten me—or I’d be fixed to handle him if he tried to make any trouble.

“As soon as I heard that Mr. Gantvoort had been killed I had a hunch that Madden had done it. But then it seemed like a certainty that he was in New York the next day, and I thought I had done him an injustice. And I was glad he was out of it. But now—”

She whirled around to her erstwhile confederate.

“Now I hope you swing, you big sap!”

She spun around to me again. No sleek kitten, this, but a furious, spitting cat, with claws and teeth bared.

“What kind of looking fellow was the one who went to New York for him?”

I described the man I had talked to on the train.

“Evan Felter,” she said, after a moment of thought. “He used to work with Madden. You’ll probably find him hiding in Los Angeles. Put the screws on him and he’ll spill all he knows—he’s a weak sister! The chances are he didn’t know what Madden’s game was until it was all over.”

“How do you like that?” she spat at Madden Dexter. “How do you like that for a starter? You messed up my little party, did you? Well, I’m going to spend every minute of my time from now until they pop you off helping them pop you!”

And she did, too—with her assistance it was no trick at all to gather up the rest of the evidence we needed to hang him. And I don’t believe her enjoyment of her three-quarters of a million dollars is spoiled a bit by any qualms over what she did to Madden. She’s a very respectable woman now, and glad to be free of the con-man.

Black Mask, 1 January 1924

From the Author of “The Tenth Clew”

Thanks for the check for “The Tenth Clew.”

And I want to plead guilty to a bit of cowardice in connection with the story. The original of Creda Dexter didn’t resemble a kitten at all. She looked exactly like a bull-pup—and she was pretty in the bargain!

Except for her eyes, I never succeeded in determining just what was responsible for the resemblance, but it was a very real one.

When, however, it came to actually putting her down on paper, my nerve failed me. “Nobody will believe you if you write a thing like that,” I told myself. “They’ll think you’re trying to spoof them.” So, for the sake of plausibility, I liked about her!

Sincerely,

Dashiell Hammett

San Francisco

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 by Julie M. Rivett; “Introduction” Copyright © 2016 by Richard Layman; “It” and “Bodies Piled Up” (“House Dick”) Copyright © 1923, “The Tenth Clew” Copyright © 1924 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

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

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

Introduction: The Early Years, 1923–1924

It

Bodies Piled Up

The Tenth Clew

About the Author

Copyright