Continental OP

By:

Dashiell Hammett

Contents

Bodies Piled Up

Mike, Alec, or Rufus

Death On Pine Street

The Tenth Clew

Bodies Piled Up

By:

Dashiell Hammett

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, 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 centre of the floor stood a maid, staring goggle-eyed at the closed door of the clothes-press. 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 centre 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 bathtub was a shattered gin bottle, which, from the strength of the odour 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 odourless.

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.

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 $2,200 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 the 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 race-horses. 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 Devetyn’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 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 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 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 bookmaker 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 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.

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 raw-boned 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 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? was being widely-advertised just then with gaily printed plum-coloured handbills. 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-coloured enveloped 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.

“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 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 — colour it, and imitate Cudner’s scar on my cheek. It dries with a shiny surface and, put on thick, will stand out 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.

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 — gray 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.

“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 realised, 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 gray 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 gray 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 Pigatti’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.

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 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 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 321, 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, rushed out, and got his.

“Cudner, being the sort he was, would figure that two murders were not 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-defence 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.

Mike, Alec, or Rufus

By:

Dashiell Hammett

I don’t know whether Frank Toplin was tall or short. All of him I ever got a look at was his round head — naked scalp and wrinkled face, both of them the colour and texture of Manila paper — propped up on white pillows in a big four-poster bed. The rest of him was buried under a thick pile of bedding.

Also in the room that first time were his wife, a roly-poly woman with lines in a plump white face like scratches in ivory; his daughter Phyllis, a smart popular-member-of-the-younger-set type; and the maid who had opened the door for me, a big-boned blond girl in apron and cap.

I had introduced myself as a representative of the North American Casualty Company’s San Francisco office, which I was in a way. There was no immediate profit in admitting I was a Continental Detective Agency sleuth, just now in the casualty company’s hire, so I held back that part.

“I want a list of the stuff yon lost,” I told Toplin, “but first —”

“Stuff?” Toplin’s yellow sphere of a skull bobbed off the pillows, and he wailed to the ceiling, “A hundred thousand dollars if a nickel, and he calls it stuff!”

Mrs. Toplin pushed her husband’s head down on the pillows again with a short-fingered fat hand.

“Now, Frank, don’t get excited,” she soothed him.

Phyllis Toplin’s dark eyes twinkled, and she winked at me.

The man in bed turned his face to me again, smiled a bit shame-facedly, and chuckled.

“Well, if you people want to call your seventy-five-thousand-dollar loss stuff, I guess I can stand it for twenty-five thousand.”

“So it adds up to a hundred thousand?” I asked.

“Yes. None of them were insured to their full value, and some weren’t insured at all.”

That was very usual. I don’t remember ever having anybody admit that anything stolen from them was insured to the hilt — always it was half, or at most, three-quarters covered by the policy.

“Suppose you tell me exactly what happened,” I suggested, and added, to head off another speech that usually comes, “I know you’ve already told the police the whole thing, but I’ll have to have it from you.”

“Well, we were getting dressed to go to the Bauers’ last night. I brought my wife’s and daughter’s jewellery — the valuable pieces — home with me from the safe-deposit box. I had just got my coat on and had called to them to hurry up when the doorbell rang.”

“What time was this?”

“Just about half-past eight. I went out of this room into the sitting-room across the passageway and was putting some cigars in my case when Hilda” — nodding at the blond maid — “came walking into the room, backward. I started to ask her if she had gone crazy, walking around backward, when I saw the robber. He —”

“Just a moment.” I turned to the maid. “What happened when you answered the bell?”

“Why, I opened the door, of course, and this man was standing there, and he had a revolver in his hand, and he stuck it against my — my stomach, and pushed me back into the room where Mr. Toplin was, and he shot Mr. Toplin, and —”

“When I saw him and the revolver in his hand” — Toplin took the story away from his servant — “it gave me a fright, sort of, and I let my cigar case slip out of my hand. Trying to catch it again — no sense in ruining good cigars even if you are being robbed — he must have thought I was trying to get a gun or something. Anyway, he shot me in the leg. My wife and Phyllis came running in when they heard the shot and he pointed the revolver at them, took all their jewels, and had them empty my pockets. Then he made them drag me back into Phyllis’s room, into the closet, and he locked us all in there. And mind you, he didn’t say a word all the time, not a word — just made motions with his gun and his left hand.”

“How bad did he bang your leg?”

“Depends on whether you want to believe me or the doctor. He says it’s nothing much. Just a scratch, he says, but it’s my leg that’s shot, not his!”

“Did he say anything when you opened the door?” I asked the maid.

“No, sir.”

“Did any of you hear him say anything while he was here?”

None of them had.

“What happened after he locked you in the closet?”

“Nothing that we knew about,” Toplin said, “until McBirney and a policeman came and let us out.”

“Who’s McBirney?”

“The janitor.”

“How’d he happen along with a policeman?”

“He heard the shot and came upstairs just as the robber was starting down after leaving here. The robber turned around and ran upstairs, then into an apartment on the seventh floor, and stayed there — keeping the woman who lives there, a Miss Eveleth, quiet with his revolver — until he got a chance to sneak out and get away. He knocked her unconscious before he left, and — and that’s all. McBirney called the police right after he saw the robber, but they got here too late to be any good.”

“How long were you in the closet?”

“Ten minutes — maybe fifteen.”

“What sort of looking man was the robber?”

“Short and thin and —”

“How short?”

“About your height, or maybe shorter.”

“About five feet five or six, say? What would he weigh?”

“Oh, I don’t know — maybe a hundred and fifteen or twenty. He was kind of puny.”

“How old?”

“Not more than twenty-two or—three.”

“Oh, Papa,” Phyllis objected, “he was thirty, or near it!”

“What do you think?” I asked Mrs. Toplin.

“Twenty-five, I’d say.”

“And you?” to the maid.

“I don’t know exactly, sir, but he wasn’t very old.”

“Light or dark?”

“He was light,” Toplin said. “He needed a shave and his beard was yellowish.”

“More of a light brown,” Phyllis amended.

“Maybe, but it was light.”

“What colour eyes?”

“I don’t know. He had a cap pulled down over them. They looked dark, but that might have been because they were in the shadow.”

“How would you describe the part of his face you could see?”

“Pale, and kind of weak-looking — small chin. But you couldn’t see much of his face; he had his coat collar up and his cap pulled down.”

“How was he dressed?”

“A blue cap pulled down over his eyes, a blue suit, black shoes, and black gloves — silk ones.”

“Shabby or neat?”

“Kind of cheap-looking clothes, awfully wrinkled.”

“What sort of gun?”

Phyllis Toplin put in her word ahead of her father.

“Papa and Hilda keep calling it a revolver, but it was an automatic a thirty-eight.”

“Would you folks know him if you saw him again?”

“Yes,” they agreed.

I cleared a space on the bedside table and got out a pencil and paper.

“I want a list of what he got, with as thorough a description of each piece as possible, and the price you paid for it, where you bought it, and when.” I got the list half an hour later.

“Do you know the number of Miss Eveleth’s apartment?” I asked.

“702, two floors above.”

I went up there and rang the bell. The door was opened by a girl of twenty-something, whose nose was hidden under adhesive tape. She had nice clear hazel eyes, dark hair, and athletics written all over her.

“Miss Eveleth?”

“Yes.”

“I’m from the insurance company that insured the Toplin jewellery, and I’m looking for information about the robbery.”

She touched her bandaged nose and smiled ruefully.

“This is some of my information.”

“How did it happen?”

“A penalty of femininity. I forgot to mind my own business. But what you want, I suppose, is what I know about the scoundrel. The doorbell rang a few minutes before nine last night and when I opened the door he was there. As soon as I got the door opened he jabbed a pistol at me and said, ‘Inside, kid!’

“I let him in with no hesitancy at all; I was quite instantaneous about it and he kicked the door to behind him.

“’Where’s the fire escape?’ he asked.

“The fire escape doesn’t come to any of my windows, and I told him so, but he wouldn’t take my word for it. He drove me ahead of him to each of the windows; but of course he didn’t find his fire escape, and he got peevish about it, as if it were my fault. I didn’t like some of the things he called me, and he was such a little half-portion of a man so I tried to take him in hand. But — well, man is still the dominant animal so far as I’m concerned. In plain American, he busted me in the nose and left me where I fell. I was dazed, though not quite all the way out, and when I got up he had gone. I ran out into the corridor then, and found some policemen on the stairs. I sobbed out my pathetic little tale to them and they told me of the Toplin robbery. Two of them came back here with me and searched the apartment. I hadn’t seen him actually leave, and they thought he might be foxy enough or desperate enough to jump into a closet and stay there until the coast was clear. But they didn’t find him here.”

“How long do you think it was after he knocked you down that you ran out into the corridor?”

“Oh, it couldn’t have been five minutes. Perhaps only half that time.”

“What did Mr. Robber look like?”

“Small, not quite so large as I; with a couple of days’ growth of light hair on his face; dressed in shabby blue clothes, with black cloth gloves.”

“How old?”

“Not very. His beard was thin, patchy, and he had a boyish face.”

“Notice his eyes?”

“Blue; his hair, where it showed under the edge of his cap, was very light yellow, almost white.”

“What sort of voice?”

“Very deep bass, though he may have been putting that on.”

“Know him if you’d see him again?”

“Yes, indeed!” She put a gentle finger on her bandaged nose. “My nose would know, as the ads say, anyway!”

From Miss Eveleth’s apartment I went down to the office on the first floor, where I found McBirney, the janitor, and his wife, who managed the apartment building. She was a scrawny little woman with the angular mouth and nose of a nagger; he was big, broad-shouldered, with sandy hair and moustache, good-humoured, shiftless red face, and genial eyes of a pale and watery blue.

He drawled out what he knew of the looting.

“I was fixin’ a spigot on the fourth floor when I heard the shot. I went up to see what was the matter, an’ just as I got far enough up the front stairs to see the Toplins’ door, the fella came out. We seen each other at the same time, an’ he aims his gun at me. There’s a lot o’ things I might of done, but what I did do was to duck down an’ get my head out o’ range. I heard him run upstairs, an’ I got up just in time to see him make the turn between the fifth and sixth floors.

“I didn’t go after him. I didn’t have a gun or nothin’, an’ I figured we had him cooped. A man could get out o’ this buildin’ to the roof of the next from the fourth floor, an’ maybe from the fifth, but not from any above that; an’ the Toplins’ apartment is on the fifth. I figured we had this fella. I could stand in front of the elevator an’ watch both the front an’ back stairs; an’ I rang for the elevator, an’ told Ambrose, the elevator boy, to give the alarm an’ run outside an’ keep his eye on the fire escape until the police came.

“The missus came up with my gun in a minute or two, an’ told me that Martinez — Ambrose’s brother, who takes care of the switchboard an’ the front door — was callin’ the police. I could see both stairs plain, an’ the fella didn’t come down them; an’ it wasn’t more’n a few minutes before the police — a whole pack of ‘em — came from the Richmond Station. Then we let the Toplins out of the closet where they were, an’ started to search the buildin’. An’ then Miss Eveleth came runnin’ down the stairs, her face an’ dress all bloody, an’ told about him bein’ in her apartment; so we were pretty sure we’d land him. But we didn’t. We searched every apartment in the buildin’, but didn’t find hide nor hair of him.”

“Of course you didn’t!” Mrs. McBirney said unpleasantly. “But if you had—”

“I know,” the janitor said with the indulgent air of one who has learned to take his pannings as an ordinary part of married life, “if I’d been a hero an’ grabbed him, an’ got myself all mussed up. Well, I ain’t foolish like old man Toplin, gettin’ himself plugged in the foot, or Blanche Eveleth, gettin’ her nose busted. I’m a sensible man that knows when he’s licked — an’ I ain’t jumpin’ at no guns!”

“No! You’re not doing anything that —”

This Mr. and Mrs. stuff wasn’t getting me anywhere, so I cut in with a question to the woman. “Who is the newest tenant you have?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Jerald — they came the day before yesterday.”

“What apartment?”

“704 — next door to Miss Eveleth.”

“Who are these Jeralds?”

“They come from Boston. He told me he came out here to open a branch of a manufacturing company. He’s a man of at least fifty, thin and dyspeptic—looking.”

“Just him and his wife?”

“Yes. She’s poorly too — been in a sanatorium for a year or two.”

“Who’s the next newest tenant?”

“Mr. Heaton, in 535. He’s been here a couple of weeks, but he’s down in Los Angeles right now. He went away three days ago and said he would be gone for ten or twelve days.”

“What does he look like and what does he do?”

“He’s with a theatrical agency and he’s kind of fat and red-faced.”

“Who’s the next newest?”

“Miss Eveleth. She’s been here about a month.”

“And the next?”

“The Wageners in 923. They’ve been here going on two months.”

“What are they?”

“He’s a retired real-estate agent. The others are his wife and son Jack — a boy of maybe nineteen. I see him with Phyllis Toplin a lot.”

“How long have the Toplins been here?”

“It’ll be two years next month.”

I turned from Mrs. McBirney to her husband.

“Did the police search all these people’s apartments?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We went into every room, every alcove, an’ every closet from cellar to roof.”

“Did you get a good look at the robber?”

“Yeah. There’s a light in the hall outside of the Toplins’ door, an’ it was shinin’ full on his face when I saw him.”

“Could he have been one of your tenants?”

“No, he couldn’t.”

“Know him if you saw him again?”

“You bet.”

“What did he look like?”

“A little runt, a light-complected youngster of twenty-three or—four in an old blue suit.”

“Can I get hold of Ambrose and Martinez — the elevator and door boys who were on duty last night — now?”

The janitor looked at his watch.

“Yeah. They ought to be on the job now. They come on at two.”

I went out into the lobby and found them together, matching nickels.

They were brothers, slim, bright-eyed Filipino boys. They didn’t add much to my dope.

Ambrose had come down to the lobby and told his brother to call the police as soon as McBirney had given him his orders, and then he had to beat it out the back door to take a plant on the fire escapes. The fire escapes ran down the back and one side wall. By standing a little off from the corner of those walls, the Filipino had been able to keep his eyes on both of them, as well as on the back door.

There was plenty of illumination, he said, and he could see both fire escapes all the way to the roof, and he had seen nobody on them.

Martinez had given the police a rap on the phone and had then watched the front door and the foot of the front stairs. He had seen nothing.

I had just finished questioning the Filipinos when the street door opened and two men came in. I knew one of them: Bill Garren, a police detective on the Pawnshop Detail. The other was a small blond youth all flossy in pleated pants, short, square-shouldered coat, and patent-leather shoes with fawn spats to match his hat and gloves. His face wore a sullen pout. He didn’t seem to like being with Garren.

“What are you up to around here?” the detective hailed me.

“The Toplin doings for the insurance company,” I explained.

“Getting anywhere?” he wanted to know.

“About ready to make a pinch,” I said, not altogether in earnest and not altogether joking.

“The more the merrier,” he grinned. “I’ve already made mine,” nodding at the dressy youth. “Come on upstairs with us.”

The three of us got into the elevator and Ambrose carried us to the fifth floor. Before pressing the Toplin bell, Garren gave me what he had.

“This lad tried to soak a ring in a Third Street shop a little while ago — an emerald and diamond ring that looks like one of the Toplin lot. He’s doing the clam now; he hasn’t said a word — yet. I’m going to show him to these people; then I’m going to take him down to the Hall of Justice and get words out of him — words that fit together in nice sentences and everything!”

The prisoner looked sullenly at the floor and paid no attention to this threat. Garren rang the bell and the maid Hilda opened the door. Her eyes widened when she saw the dressy boy, but she didn’t say anything as she led us into the sitting-room, where Mrs. Toplin and her daughter were. They looked up at us.

“Hello, Jack!” Phyllis greeted the prisoner.

“’Lo, Phyl,” he mumbled, not looking at her.

“Among friends, huh? Well, what’s the answer?” Garren demanded of the girl.

She put her chin in the air and although her face turned red, she looked haughtily at the police detective.

“Would you mind removing your hat?” she asked.

Bill isn’t a bad bimbo, but he hasn’t any meekness. He answered her by tilting his hat over one eye and turning to her mother.

“Ever see this lad before?”

“Why, certainly!” Mrs. Toplin exclaimed. “That’s Mr. Wagener who lives upstairs.”

“Well,” said Bill, “Mr. Wagener was picked up in a hock shop trying to get rid of this ring.” He fished a gaudy green and white ring from his pocket. “Know it?”

“Certainly!” Mrs. Toplin said, looking at the ring. “It belongs to Phyllis, and the robber —” Her mouth dropped open as she began to understand. “How could Mr. Wagener —?”

“Yes, how?” Bill repeated.

The girl stepped between Garren and me, turning her back on him to face me. “I can explain everything,” she announced.

That sounded too much like a movie subtitle to be very promising, but —

“Go ahead,” I encouraged her.

“I found that ring in the passageway near the front door after the excitement was over. The robber must have dropped it. I didn’t say anything to Papa and Mamma about it, because I thought nobody would ever know the difference, and it was insured, so I thought I might as well sell it and be in that much money. I asked Jack last night if he could sell it for me and he said he knew just how to go about it. He didn’t have anything to do with it outside of that, but I did think he’d have sense enough not to try to pawn it right away!”

She looked scornfully at her accomplice.

“See what you’ve done!” she accused him.

He fidgeted and pouted at his feet.

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” Bill Garren said sourly. “That’s a nifty! Did you ever hear the one about the two Irishmen that got in the Y.W.C.A. by mistake?”

She didn’t say whether she had heard it or not.

“Mrs. Toplin,” I asked, “making allowances for the different clothes and the unshaven face, could this lad have been the robber?”

She shook her head with emphasis. “No! He could not!”

“Set your prize down, Bill,” I suggested, “and let’s go over in a corner and whisper things at each other.”

“Right.”

He dragged a heavy chair to the centre of the floor, sat Wagener on it, anchored him there with handcuffs — not exactly necessary, but Bill was grouchy at not getting his prisoner identified as the robber — and then he and I stepped out into the passageway. We could keep an eye on the sitting-room from there without having our low-voiced conversation overheard.

“This is simple,” I whispered into his big red ear. “There are only five ways to figure the lay. First: Wagener stole the stuff for the Toplins. Second: the Toplins framed the robbery themselves and got Wagener to peddle it. Third: Wagener and the girl engineered the deal without the old folks being in on it. Fourth: Wagener pulled it on his own hook and the girl is covering him up. Fifth: she told us the truth. None of them explains why your little playmate should have been dumb enough to flash the ring downtown this morning, but that can’t be explained by any system. Which of the five do you favour?”

“I like ‘em all,” he grumbled. “But what I like most is that I’ve got this baby right — got him trying to pass a hot ring. That suits me fine. You do the guessing. I don’t ask for any more than I’ve got.”

“It doesn’t irritate me any either,” I agreed. “The way it stands the insurance company can welsh on the policies — but I’d like to smoke it out a little further, far enough to put away anybody who has been trying to run a hooligan on the North American. We’ll clean up all we can on this kid, stow him in the can, and then see what further damage we can do.”

“All right,” Garren said. “Suppose you get hold of the janitor and that Eveleth woman while I’m showing the boy to old man Toplin and getting the maid’s opinion.”

I nodded and went out into the corridor, leaving the door unlocked behind me. I took the elevator to the seventh floor and told Ambrose to get hold of McBirney and send him to the Toplins’ apartment. Then I rang Blanche Eveleth’s bell.

“Can you come downstairs for a minute or two?” I asked her. “We’ve a prize who might be your friend of last night.”

“Will I?” She started toward the stairs with me. “And if he’s the right one, can I pay him back for my bartered beauty?”

“You can,” I promised. “Go as far as you like, so you don’t maul him too badly to stand trial.”

I took her into the Toplins’ apartment without ringing the bell, and found everybody in Frank Toplin’s bedroom. A look at Garren’s glum face told me that neither the old man nor the maid had given him a nod on the prisoner.

I put the finger on Jack Wagener. Disappointment came into Blanche Eveleth’s eyes. “You’re wrong,” she said. “That’s not he.”

Garren scowled at her. It was a pipe that if the Toplins were tied up with young Wagener, they wouldn’t identify him as the robber. Bill had been counting on that identification coming from the two outsiders — Blanche Eveleth and the janitor — and now one of them had flopped.

The other one rang the bell just then and the maid brought him in.

I pointed at Jack Wagener, who stood beside Garren staring sullenly at the floor.

“Know him, McBirney?”

“Yeah, Mr. Wagener’s son, Jack.”

“Is he the man who shooed you away with a gun last night?”

McBirney’s watery eyes popped in surprise.

“No,” he said with decision, and began to look doubtful.

“In an old suit, cap pulled down, needing a shave — could it have been him?”

“No-o-o-o,” the janitor drawled, “I don’t think so, though it — You know, now that I come to think about it, there was something familiar about that fella, an’ maybe — By cracky, I think maybe you’re right — though I couldn’t exactly say for sure.”

“That’ll do!” Garren grunted in disgust.

An identification of the sort the janitor was giving isn’t worth a damn one way or the other. Even positive and immediate identifications aren’t always the goods. A lot of people who don’t know any better — and some who do, or should — have given circumstantial evidence a bad name. It is misleading sometimes. But for genuine, undiluted, pre-war untrustworthiness, it can’t come within gunshot of human testimony. Take any man you like — unless he is the one in a hundred thousand with a mind trained to keep things straight, and not always even then — get him excited, show him something, give him a few hours to think it over and talk it over, and then ask him about it. It’s dollars to doughnuts that you’ll have a hard time finding any connection between what he saw and what he says he saw. Like this McBirney — another hour and he’d be ready to gamble his life on Jack Wagener’s being the robber.

Garren wrapped his fingers around the boy’s arm and started for the door.

“Where to, Bill?” I asked.

“Up to talk to his people. Coming along?”

“Stick around a while,” I invited. “I’m going to put on a party. But first, tell me, did the coppers who came here when the alarm was turned in do a good job?”

“I didn’t see it,” the police detective said. “I didn’t get here until the fireworks were pretty well over, but I understand the boys did all that could be expected of them.”

I turned to Frank Toplin. I did my talking to him chiefly because we — his wife and daughter, the maid, the janitor, Blanche Eveleth, Garren and his prisoner, and I — were grouped around the old man’s bed and by looking at him I could get a one-eyed view of everybody else.

“Somebody has been kidding me somewhere,” I began my speech. “If all the things I’ve been told about this job are right, then so is Prohibition. Your stories don’t fit together, not even almost. Take the bird who stuck you up. He seems to have been pretty well acquainted with your affairs. It might be luck that he hit your apartment at a time when all of your jewellery was on hand, instead of another apartment, or your apartment at another time. But I don’t like luck. I’d rather figure that he knew what he was doing. He nicked you for your pretties, and then he galloped up to Miss Eveleth’s apartment. He may have been about to go downstairs when he ran into McBirney, or he may not. Anyway, he went upstairs, into Miss Eveleth’s apartment, looking for a fire escape. Funny, huh? He knew enough about the place to make a push-over out of the stick-up, but he didn’t know there were no fire escapes on Miss Eveleth’s side of the building.

“He didn’t speak to you or to McBirney, but he talked to Miss Eveleth, in a bass voice. A very, very deep voice. Funny, huh? From Miss Eveleth’s apartment he vanished with every exit watched. The police must have been here before he left her apartment and they would have blocked the outlets first thing, whether McBirney and Ambrose had already done that or not. But he got away. Funny, huh? He wore a wrinkled suit, which might have been taken from a bundle just before he went to work, and he was a small man. Miss Eveleth isn’t a small woman, but she would be a small man. A guy with a suspicious disposition would almost think Blanche Eveleth was the robber.”

Frank Toplin, his wife, young Wagener, the janitor, and the maid were gaping at me. Garren was sizing up the Eveleth girl with narrowed eyes, while she glared white-hot at me. Phyllis Toplin was looking at me with a contemptuous sort of pity for my feeble-mindedness.

Bill Garren finished his inspection of the girl and nodded slowly.

“She could get away with it,” he gave his opinion, “indoors and if she kept her mouth shut.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Exactly, my eye!” Phyllis Toplin exploded. “Do you two correspondence-school detectives think we wouldn’t know the difference between a man and a woman dressed in man’s clothes? He had a day or two’s growth of hair on his face — real hair, if you know what I mean. Do you think he could have fooled us with false whiskers? This happened, you know, it’s not in a play!”

The others stopped gaping, and heads bobbed up and down.

“Phyllis is right.” Frank Toplin backed up his offspring. “He was a man — no woman dressed like one.”

His wife, the maid, and the janitor nodded vigorous endorsements.

But I’m a bull-headed sort of bird when it comes to going where the evidence leads. I spun to face Blanche Eveleth.

“Can you add anything to the occasion?” I asked her.

She smiled very sweetly at me and shook her head.

“All right, bum,” I said. “You’re pinched. Let’s go.”

Then it seemed she could add something to the occasion. She had something to say, quite a few things to say, and they were all about me. They weren’t nice things. In anger her voice was shrill, and just now she was madder than you’d think anybody could get on short notice. I was sorry for that. This job had run along peacefully and gently so far, hadn’t been marred by any rough stuff, had been almost ladylike in every particular; and I had hoped it would go that way to the end. But the more she screamed at me the nastier she got. She didn’t have any words I hadn’t heard before, but she fitted them together in combinations that were new to me. I stood as much of it as I could.

Then I knocked her over with a punch in the mouth.

“Here! Here!” Bill Garren yelled, grabbing my arm.

“Save your strength, Bill,” I advised him, shaking his hand off and going over to yank the Eveleth person up from the floor. “Your gallantry does you credit, but I think you’ll find Blanche’s real name is Mike, Alec, or Rufus.”

I hauled her (or him, whichever you like) to his or her feet and asked it: “Feel like telling us about it?”

For answer I got a snarl.

“All right,” I said to the others, “in the absence of authoritative information I’ll give you my dope. If Blanche Eveleth could have been the robber except for the beard and the difficulty of a woman passing for a man, why couldn’t the robber have been Blanche Eveleth before and after the robbery by using a — what do you call it? — strong depilatory on his face, and a wig? It’s hard for a woman to masquerade as a man, but there are lots of men who can get away with the feminine role. Couldn’t this bird, after renting his apartment as Blanche Eveleth and getting everything lined up, have stayed in his apartment for a couple of days letting his beard grow? Come down and knock the job over? Beat it upstairs, get the hair off his face, and get into his female rig in, say, fifteen minutes? My guess is that he could. And he had fifteen minutes. I don’t know about the smashed nose. Maybe he stumbled going up the stairs and had to twist his plans to account for it — or maybe he smacked himself intentionally.”

My guesses weren’t far off, though his name was Fred — Frederick Agnew Rudd. He was known in Toronto, having done a stretch in the Ontario Reformatory as a boy of nineteen, caught shoplifting in his she-make-up. He wouldn’t come through, and we never turned up his gun or the blue suit, cap, and black gloves, although we found a cavity in his mattress where he had stuffed them out of the police’s sight until later that night, when he could get rid of them. But the Toplin sparklers came to light piece by piece when we had plumbers take apart the drains and radiators in apartment 702.

Death On Pine Street

By:

Dashiell Hammett

A plump maid with bold green eyes and a loose, full-lipped mouth led me up two flights of steps and into an elaborately furnished boudoir, where a woman in black sat at a window. She was a thin woman of a little more than thirty, this murdered man’s widow, and her face was white and haggard.

“You are from the Continental Detective Agency?” she asked before I was two steps inside the room.

“Yes.”

“I want you to find my husband’s murderer.” Her voice was shrill, and her dark eyes had wild lights in them. “The police have done nothing. Four days, and they have done nothing. They say it was a robber, but they haven’t found him. They haven’t found anything!”

“But, Mrs. Gilmore,” I began, not exactly tickled to death with this explosion, “you must —”

“I know! I know!” she broke in. “But they have done nothing, I tell you—nothing. I don’t believe they’ve made the slightest effort. I don’t believe they want to find h—him!”

“Him?” I asked, because she had started to say her. “You think it was a man?”

She bit her lip and looked away from me, out of the window to where San Francisco Bay, the distance making toys of its boats, was blue under the early afternoon sun.

“I don’t know,” she said hesitantly; “it might have —”

Her face spun toward me — a twitching face — and it seemed impossible that anyone could talk so fast, hurl words out so rapidly one after the other.

“I’ll tell you. You can judge for yourself. Bernard wasn’t faithful to me. There was a woman who calls herself Cara Kenbrook. She wasn’t the first. But I learned about her last month. We quarreled. Bernard promised to give her up. Maybe he didn’t. But if he did, I wouldn’t put it past her — a woman like that would do anything — anything. And down in my heart I really believe she did it!”

“And you think the police don’t want to arrest her?”

“I didn’t mean exactly that. I’m all unstrung, and likely to say anything. Bernard was mixed up in politics, you know; and if the police found, or thought, that politics had anything to do with his death, they might — I don’t know just what I mean. I’m a nervous, broken woman, and full of crazy notions.” She stretched a thin hand out to me. “Straighten this tangle out for me! Find the person who killed Bernard!”

I nodded with empty assurance, still not any too pleased with my client.

“Do you know this Kenbrook woman?” I asked.

“I’ve seen her on the street, and that’s enough to know what sort of person she is!”

“Did you tell the police about her?”

“No-o.” She looked out of the window again, and then, as I waited, she added, defensively:

“The police detectives who came to see me acted as if they thought I might have killed Bernard. I was afraid to tell them that I had cause for jealousy. Maybe I shouldn’t have kept quiet about that woman, but I didn’t think she had done it until afterward, when the police failed to find the murderer. Then I began to think she had done it; but I couldn’t make myself go to the police and tell them that I had withheld information. I knew what they’d think. So I — You can twist it around so it’ll look as if I hadn’t known about the woman, can’t you?”

“Possibly. Now as I understand it, your husband was shot on Pine Street, between Leavenworth and Jones, at about three o’clock Tuesday morning. That right?”

“Yes.”

“Where was he going?”

“Coming home, I suppose; but I don’t know where he had been. Nobody knows. The police haven’t found out, if they have tried. He told me Monday evening that he had a business engagement. He was a building contractor, you know. He went out at about half-past eleven, saying he would probably be gone four or five hours.”

“Wasn’t that an unusual hour to be keeping a business engagement?”

“Not for Bernard. He often had men come to the house at midnight.”

“Can you make any guess at all where he was going that night?”

She shook her head with emphasis.

“No. I knew nothing at all about his business affairs, and even the men in his office don’t seem to know where he went that night.”

That wasn’t unlikely. Most of the B. F. Gilmore Construction Company’s work had been on city and state contracts, and it isn’t altogether unheard-of for secret conferences to go with that kind of work. Your politician-contractor doesn’t always move in the open.

“How about enemies?” I asked.

“I don’t know anybody that hated him enough to kill him.”

“Where does this Kenbrook woman live, do you know?”

“Yes — in the Garford Apartments on Bush Street.”

“Nothing you’ve forgotten to tell me, is there?” I asked, stressing the me a little.

“No, I’ve told you everything I know — every single thing.”

Walking over to California Street, I shook down my memory for what I had heard here and there of Bernard Gilmore. I could remember a few things — the opposition papers had been in the habit of exposing him every election year — but none of them got me anywhere. I had known him by sight: a boisterous, red-faced man who had hammered his way up from hod-carrier to the ownership of a half-million-dollar business and a pretty place in politics. ‘A roughneck with a manicure,’ somebody had called him; a man with a lot of enemies and more friends; a big, good-natured, hard-hitting rowdy.

Odds and ends of a dozen graft scandals in which he had been mixed up, without anybody ever really getting anything on him, flitted through my head as I rode downtown on the too-small outside seat of a cable car. Then there had been some talk of a bootlegging syndicate of which he was supposed to be the head...

I left the car at Kearny Street and walked over to the Hall of Justice. In the detectives’ assembly-room I found O’Gar, the detective-sergeant in charge of the Homicide Detail: a squat man of fifty who went in for wide-brimmed hats of the movie-sheriff sort, but whose little blue eyes and bullet-head weren’t handicapped by the trick headgear.

“I want some dope on the Gilmore killing,” I told him.

“So do I,” he came back. “But if you’ll come along I’ll tell you what little I know while I’m eating. I ain’t had lunch yet.”

Safe from eavesdroppers in the clatter of a Sutter Street lunchroom, the detective-sergeant leaned over his clam chowder and told me what he knew about the murder, which wasn’t much.

“One of the boys, Kelly, was walking his beat early Tuesday morning, coming down the Jones Street hill from California Street to Pine. It was about three o’clock — no fog or nothing — a clear night. Kelly’s within maybe twenty feet of Pine Street when he hears a shot. He whisks around the corner, and there’s a man dying on the north sidewalk of Pine Street, halfway between Jones and Leavenworth. Nobody else is in sight. Kelly runs up to the man and finds it’s Gilmore. Gilmore dies before he can say a word. The doctors say he was knocked down and then shot; because there’s a bruise on his forehead, and the bullet slanted upward in his chest. See what I mean? He was lying on his back when the bullet hit him, with his feet pointing toward the gun it came from. It was a thirty-eight.”

“Any money on him?”

O’Gar fed himself two spoons of chowder and nodded.

“Six hundred smacks, a coupla diamonds, and a watch. Nothing touched.”

“What was he doing on Pine Street at that time in the morning?”

“Damned if I know, brother. Chances are he was going home, but we can’t find out where he’d been. Don’t even know what direction he was walking in when he was knocked over. He was lying across the sidewalk with his feet to the curb; but that don’t mean nothing — he could of turned around three or four times after he was hit.”

“All apartment buildings in that block, aren’t there?”

“Uh-huh. There’s an alley or two running off from the south side; but Kelly says he could see the mouths of both alleys when the shot was fired — before he turned the corner — and nobody got away through them.”

“Reckon somebody who lives in that block did the shooting?” I asked.

O’Gar tilted his bowl, scooped up the last drops of the chowder, put them in his mouth, and grunted.

“Maybe. But we got nothing to show that Gilmore knew anybody in that block.”

“Many people gather around afterward?”

“A few. There’s always people on the street to come running if anything happens. But Kelly says there wasn’t anybody that looked wrong — just the ordinary night crowd. The boys gave the neighbourhood a combing, but didn’t turn up anything.”

“Any cars around?”

“Kelly says there wasn’t, that he didn’t see any, and couldn’t of missed seeing it if there’d been one.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

He got to his feet, glaring at me.

“I don’t think,” he said disagreeably; “I’m a police detective.”

I knew by that that somebody had been panning him for not finding the murderer.

“I have a line on a woman,” I told him. “Want to come along and talk to her with me?”

“I want to,” he growled, “but I can’t. I got to be in court this afternoon.”

In the vestibule of the Garford Apartments, I pressed the button tagged Miss Cara Kenbrook several times before the door clicked open. Then I mounted a flight of stairs and walked down a hall to her door. It was opened presently by a tall girl of twenty-three or—four in a black and white crepe dress.

“Miss Cara Kenbrook?”

“Yes.”

I gave her a card — one of those that tell the truth about me.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions; may I come in?”

“Do.”

Languidly she stepped aside for me to enter, closed the door behind me, and led me back into a living room that was littered with newspapers, cigarettes in all stages of consumption from unlighted freshness to cold ash, and miscellaneous articles of feminine clothing. She made room for me on a chair by dumping off a pair of pink silk stockings and a hat, and herself sat on some magazines that occupied another chair.

“I’m interested in Bernard Gilmore’s death,” I said, watching her face.

It wasn’t a beautiful face, although it should have been. Everything was there — perfect features; smooth, white skin; big, almost enormous, brown eyes — but the eyes were dead-dull, and the face was as empty of expression as a china doorknob, and what I said didn’t change it.

“Bernard Gilmore,” she said without interest. “Oh, yes.”

“You and he were pretty close friends, weren’t you?” I asked, puzzled by her blankness.

“We had been — yes.”

“What do you mean by had been?”

She pushed back a lock of her short-cut brown hair with a lazy hand.

“I gave him the air last week,” she said casually, as if speaking of something that had happened years ago.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Last week—Monday, I think — a week before he was killed.”

“Was that the time when you broke off with him?”

“Yes.”

“Have a row, or part friends?”

“Not exactly either. I just told him that I was through with him.”

“How did he take it?”

“It didn’t break his heart. I guess he’d heard the same thing before.”

“Where were you the night he was killed?”

“At the Coffee Cup, eating and dancing with friends until about one o’clock. Then I came home and went to bed.”

“Why did you split with Gilmore?”

“Couldn’t stand his wife.”

“Huh?”

“She was a nuisance.” This without the faintest glint of either annoyance or humour. “She came here one night and raised a racket; so I told Bernie that if he couldn’t keep her away from me he’d have to find another playmate.”

“Have you any idea who might have killed him?” I asked.

“Not unless it was his wife — these excitable women always do silly things.”

“If you had given her husband up, what reason would she have for killing him, do you think?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” she replied with complete indifference. “But I’m not the only girl that Bernie ever looked at.”

“Think there were others, do you? Know anything, or are you just guessing?”

“I don’t know any names,” she said, “but I’m not just guessing.”

I let that go at that and switched back to Mrs. Gilmore, wondering if this girl could be full of dope.

“What happened the night his wife came here?”

“Nothing but that. She followed Bernie here, rang the bell, rushed past me when I opened the door, and began to cry and call Bernie names. Then she started on me, and I told him that if he didn’t take her away I’d hurt her, so he took her home.”

Admitting I was licked for the time, I got up and moved to the door. I couldn’t do anything with this baby just now. I didn’t think she was telling the whole truth, but on the other hand it wasn’t reasonable to believe that anybody would lie so woodenly — with so little effort to be plausible.

“I may be back later,” I said as she let me out.

“All right.”

Her manner didn’t even suggest that she hoped I wouldn’t.

From this unsatisfactory interview I went to the scene of the killing, only a few blocks away, to get a look at the neighbourhood. I found the block just as I had remembered it and as O’Gar had described it: lined on both sides by apartment buildings, with two blind alleys — one of which was dignified with a name, Touchard Street — running from the south side.

The murder was four days old; I didn’t waste any time snooping around the vicinity; but, after strolling the length of the block, boarded a Hyde Street car, transferred at California Street, and went up to see Mrs. Gilmore again. I was curious to know why she hadn’t told me about her call on Cara Kenbrook.

The same plump maid who had admitted me earlier in the afternoon opened the door.

“Mrs. Gilmore is not at home,” she said. “But I think she’ll be back in half an hour or so.”

“I’ll wait,” I decided.

The maid took me into the library, an immense room on the second floor, with barely enough books in it to give it that name. She switched on a light — the windows were too heavily curtained to let in much daylight — crossed to the door, stopped, moved over to straighten some books on a shelf, and looked at me with a half-questioning, half-inviting look in her green eyes, started for the door again, and halted.

By that time I knew she wanted to say something, and needed encouragement. I leaned back in my chair and grinned at her, and decided I had made a mistake—the smile into which her slack lips curved held more coquetry than anything else. She came over to me, walking with an exaggerated swing of the hips, and stood close in front of me.

“What’s on your mind?” I asked.

“Suppose — suppose a person knew something that nobody else knew; what would it be worth to them?”

“That,” I stalled, “would depend on how valuable it was.”

“Suppose I knew who killed the boss?” She bent her face close down to mine, and spoke in a husky whisper. “What would that be worth?”

“The newspapers say that one of Gilmore’s clubs has offered a thousand-dollar reward. You’d get that.”

Her green eyes went greedy, and then suspicious.

“If you didn’t.”

I shrugged. I knew she’d go through with it — whatever it was — now; so I didn’t even explain to her that the Continental doesn’t touch rewards, and doesn’t let its hired men touch them.

“I’ll give you my word,” I said; “but you’ll have to use your own judgment about trusting me.”

She licked her lips.

“You’re a good fellow, I guess. I wouldn’t tell the police, because I know they’d beat me out of the money. But you look like I can trust you.” She leered into my face. “I used to have a gentleman friend who was the very image of you, and he was the grandest —”

“Better speak your piece before somebody comes in,” I suggested.

She shot a look at the door, cleared her throat, licked her loose mouth again, and dropped on one knee beside my chair.

“I was coming home late Monday night — the night the boss was killed — and was standing in the shadows saying good night to my friend, when the boss came out of the house and walked down the street. And he had hardly got to the corner, when she — Mrs. Gilmore — came out, and went down the street after him. Not trying to catch up with him, you understand; but following him. What do you think of that?”

“What do you think of it?”

“I think that she finally woke up to the fact that all of her Bernie’s dates didn’t have anything to do with the building business.”

“Do you know that they didn’t?”

“Do I know it? I knew that man! He liked ‘em — liked ‘em all.” She smiled into my face, a smile that suggested all evil. “I found that out soon after I first came here.”

“Do you know when Mrs. Gilmore came back that night — what time?”

“Yes,” she said, “at half-past three.”

“Sure?”

“Absolutely! After I got undressed I got a blanket and sat at the head of the front stairs. My room’s in the rear of the top floor. I wanted to see if they came home together, and if there was a fight. After she came in alone I went back to my room, and it was just twenty-five minutes to four then. I looked at my alarm clock.”

“Did you see her when she came in?”

“Just the top of her head and shoulders when she turned toward her room at the landing.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Lina Best.”

“All right, Lina,” I told her. “If this is the goods I’ll see that you collect on it. Keep your eyes open, and if anything else turns up you can get in touch with me at the Continental office. Now you’d better beat it, so nobody will know we’ve had our heads together.”

Alone in the library, I cocked an eye at the ceiling and considered the information Lina Best had given me. But I soon gave that up — no use trying to guess at things that will work out for themselves in a while. I found a book, and spent the next half-hour reading about a sweet young she—chump and a big strong he—chump and all their troubles.

Then Mrs. Gilmore came in, apparently straight from the street.

I got up and closed the door behind her, while she watched me with wide eyes.

“Mrs. Gilmore,” I said, when I faced her again, “why didn’t you tell me that you followed your husband the night he was killed?”

“That’s a lie!” she cried; but there was no truth in her voice. “That’s a lie!”

“Don’t you think you’re making a mistake?” I urged. “Don’t you think you’d better tell me the whole thing?”

She opened her mouth, but only a dry sobbing sound came out; and she began to sway with a hysterical rocking motion, the fingers of one black-gloved hand plucking at her lower lip, twisting and pulling it.

I stepped to her side and set her down in the chair I had been sitting in, making foolish clucking sounds — meant to soothe her — with my tongue. A disagreeable ten minutes — and gradually she pulled herself together; her eyes lost their glassiness, and she stopped clawing at her mouth.

“I did follow him.” It was a hoarse whisper, barely audible.

Then she was out of the chair, kneeling, with arms held up to me, and her voice was a thin scream.

“But I didn’t kill him! I didn’t! Please believe that I didn’t!”

I picked her up and put her back in the chair.

“I didn’t say you did. Just tell me what did happen.”

“I didn’t believe him when he said he had a business engagement,” she moaned. “I didn’t trust him. He had lied to me before. I followed him to see if he went to that woman’s rooms.”

“Did he?”

“No. He went into an apartment house on Pine Street, in the block where he was killed. I don’t know exactly which house it was — I was too far behind him to make sure. But I saw him go up the steps and into one — near the middle of the block.”

“And then what did you do?”

“I waited, hiding in a dark doorway across the street. I knew the woman’s apartment was on Bush Street, but I thought she might have moved, or be meeting him here. I waited a long time, shivering and trembling. It was chilly and I was frightened — afraid somebody would come into the vestibule where I was. But I made myself stay. I wanted to see if he came out alone, or if that woman came out. I had a right to do it — he had deceived me before.

“It was terrible, horrible — crouching there in the dark—cold and scared. Then — it must have been about half-past two — I couldn’t stand it any longer. I decided to telephone the woman’s apartment’ and find out if she was home. I went down to an all-night lunchroom on Ellis Street and called her up.”

“Was she home?”

“No! I tried for fifteen minutes, or maybe longer, but nobody answered the phone. So I knew she was in that Pine Street building.”

“And what did you do then?”

“I went back there, determined to wait until he came out. I walked up Jones Street. When I was between Bush and Pine I heard a shot. I thought it was a noise made by an automobile then, but now I know that it was the shot that killed Bernie.

“When I reached the corner of Pine and Jones, I could see a policeman bending over Bernie on the sidewalk, and I saw people gathering around. I didn’t know then that it was Bernie lying on the sidewalk. In the dark and at that distance I couldn’t even see whether it was a man or a woman.

“I was afraid that Bernard would come out to see what was going on, or look out of a window, and discover me; so I didn’t go down that way. I was afraid to stay in the neighbourhood now, for fear the police would ask me what I was doing loitering in the street at three in the morning — and have it come out that I had been following my husband. So I kept on walking up Jones Street, to California, and then straight home.”

“And then what?” I led her on.

“Then I went to bed. I didn’t go to sleep — lay there worrying over Bernie; but still not thinking it was he I had seen lying in the street. At nine o’clock that morning two police detectives came and told me Bernie had been killed. They questioned me so sharply that I was afraid to tell them the whole truth. If they had known I had reason for being jealous, and had followed my husband that night, they would have accused me of shooting him. And what could I have done? Everybody would have thought me guilty.

“So I didn’t say anything about the woman. I thought they’d find the murderer, and then everything would be all right. I didn’t think she had done it then, or I would have told you the whole thing the first time you were here. But four days went by without the police finding the murderer, and I began to think they suspected me! It was terrible! I couldn’t go to them and confess that I had lied to them, and I was sure that the woman had killed him and that the police had failed to suspect her because I hadn’t told them about her.

“So I employed you. But I was afraid to tell even you the whole truth. I thought that if I just told you there had been another woman and who she was, you could do the rest without having to know that I had followed Bernie that night. I was afraid you would think I had killed him, and would turn me over to the police if I told you everything. And now you do believe it! And you’ll have me arrested! And they’ll hang me! I know it! I know it!”

She began to rock crazily from side to side in her chair.

“Sh-h-h,” I soothed her. “You’re not arrested yet. Sh-h-h.”

I didn’t know what to make of her story. The trouble with these nervous, hysterical women is that you can’t possibly tell when they’re lying and when telling the truth unless you have outside evidence — half of the time they themselves don’t know.

“When you heard the shot,” I went on when she had quieted down a bit, “you were walking north on Jones, between Bush and Pine? You could see the corner of Pine and Jones?”

“Yes — clearly.”

“See anybody?”

“No — not until I reached the corner and looked down Pine Street. Then I saw a policeman bending over Bernie, and two men walking toward them.”

“Where were the two men?”

“On Pine Street east of Jones. They didn’t have hats on — as if they had come out of a house when they heard the shot.”

“Any automobiles in sight either before or after you heard the shot?”

“I didn’t see or hear any.”

“I have some more questions, Mrs. Gilmore,” I said, “but I’m in a hurry now. Please don’t go out until you hear from me again.”

“I won’t,” she promised, “but —”

I didn’t have any answers for anybody’s questions, so I ducked my head and left the library.

Near the street door Lina Best appeared out of a shadow, her eyes bright and inquisitive.

“Stick around,” I said without any meaning at all, stepped around her, and went on out into the street.

I returned then to the Garford Apartments, walking, because I had a lot of things to arrange in my mind before I faced Cara Kenbrook again. And, even though I walked slowly, they weren’t all exactly filed in alphabetical order when I got there. She had changed the black and white dress for a plush like gown of bright green, but her empty doll’s face hadn’t changed.

“Some more questions,” I explained when she opened the door.

She admitted me without word or gesture, and led me back into the room where we had talked before.

“Miss Kenbrook,” I asked, standing beside the chair, she had offered me, “why did you tell me you were home in bed when Gilmore was killed?”

“Because it’s so.” Without the flicker of a lash.

“And you wouldn’t answer the doorbell?”

I had to twist the facts to make my point. Mrs. Gilmore had phoned, but I couldn’t afford to give this girl a chance to shunt the blame for her failure to answer off on central.

She hesitated for a split second.

“No — because I didn’t hear it.”

One cool article, this baby! I couldn’t figure her. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, whether she was the owner of the world’s best poker face or was just naturally stupid. But whichever she was, she was thoroughly and completely it!

I stopped trying to guess and got on with my probing.

“And you wouldn’t answer the phone either?”

“It didn’t ring — or not enough to awaken me.”

I chuckled — an artificial chuckle — because central could have been ringing the wrong number. However...

“Miss Kenbrook,” I lied, “your phone rang at two-thirty and at two-forty that morning. And your doorbell rang almost continually from about two-fifty until after three.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “but I wonder who’d be trying to get me at that hour.”

“You didn’t hear either?”

“No.”

“But you were here?”

“Yes — who was it?” carelessly.

“Get your hat,” I bluffed, “and I’ll show them to you down at headquarters.”

She glanced down at the green gown and walked toward an open bedroom door.

“I suppose I’d better get a cloak, too,” she said.

“Yes,” I advised her, “and bring your toothbrush.”

She turned around then and looked at me, and for a moment it seemed that some sort of expression — surprise, maybe — was about to come into her big brown eyes; but none actually came. The eyes stayed dull and empty.

“You mean you’re arresting me?”

“Not exactly. But if you stick to your story about being home in bed at three o’clock last Tuesday morning, I can promise you you will be arrested. If I were you I’d think up another story.”

She left the doorway slowly and came back into the room, as far as a chair that stood between us, put her hands on its back, and leaned over it to look at me. For perhaps a minute neither of us spoke — just stood there staring at each other, while I tried to keep my face as expressionless as hers.

“Do you really think,” she asked at last, “that I wasn’t here when Bernie was killed?”

“I’m a busy man, Miss Kenbrook.” I put all the certainty I could fake into my voice. “If you want to stick to your funny story, it’s all right with me. But please don’t expect me to stand here and argue about it. Get your hat and cloak.”

She shrugged, and came around the chair on which she had been leaning.

“I suppose you do know something,” she said, sitting down. “Well, it’s tough on Stan, but women and children first.”

My ears twitched at the name Stan, but I didn’t interrupt her.

“I was in the Coffee Cup until one o’clock,” she was saying, her voice still flat and emotionless. “And I did come home afterward. I’d been drinking vino all evening, and it always makes me blue. So after I came home I got to worrying over things. Since Bernie and I split, finances haven’t been so good. I took stock that night — or morning — and found only four dollars in my purse. The rent was due, and the world looked damned blue.

“Half-lit on dago wine as I was, I decided to run over and see Stan, tell him all my troubles, and make a touch. Stan is a good egg and he’s always willing to go the limit for me. Sober, I wouldn’t have gone to see him at three in the morning; but it seemed a perfectly sensible thing to do at the time.

“It’s only a few minutes’ walk from here to Stan’s. I went down Bush Street to Leavenworth, and up Leavenworth to Pine. I was in the middle of that last block when Bernie was shot — I heard it. And when I turned the corner into Pine Street I saw a copper bending over a man on the pavement right in front of Stan’s. I hesitated for a couple of minutes, standing in the shadow of a pole, until three or four men had gathered around the man on the sidewalk. Then I went over.

“It was Bernie. And just as I got there I heard the copper tell one of the men that he had been shot. It was an awful shock to me. You know how things like that will hit you!”

I nodded, though God knows there was nothing in this girl’s face, manner, or voice to suggest shock. She might have been talking about the weather.

“Dumbfounded, not knowing what to do,” she went on, “I didn’t even stop. I went on, passing as close to Bernie as I am to you now, and rang Stan’s bell. He let me in. He had been half-undressed when I rang. His rooms are in the rear of the building, and he hadn’t heard the shot, he said. He didn’t know Bernie had been killed until I told him. It sort of knocked the wind out of him. He said Bernie had been there — in Stan’s rooms — since midnight, and had just left.

“Stan asked me what I was doing there, and I told him my tale of woe. That was the first time Stan knew that Bernie and I were so thick. I met Bernie through Stan, but Stan didn’t know we had got so chummy.

“Stan was worried for fear it would come out that Bernie had been to see him that night, because it would make a lot of trouble for him — some sort of shady deal they had on, I guess. So he didn’t go out to see Bernie. That’s about all there is to it. I got some money from Stan, and stayed in his rooms until the police had cleared out of the neighbourhood; because neither of us wanted to get mixed up in anything. Then I came home. That’s straight — on the level.”

“Why didn’t you get this off your chest before?” I demanded, knowing the answer.

It came.

“I was afraid. Suppose I told about Bernie throwing me down, and said I was close to him — a block or so away — when he was killed, and was half-full of vino? The first thing everybody would have said was that I had shot him! I’d lie about it still if I thought you’d believe me.”

“So Bernie was the one who broke off, and not you?”

“Oh, yes,” she said lightly.

I lit a Fatima and breathed smoke in silence for a while, and the girl sat placidly watching me.

Here I had two women — neither normal. Mrs. Gilmore was hysterical, abnormally nervous. This girl was dull, subnormal. One was the dead man’s wife; the other his mistress; and each with reason for believing she had been thrown down for the other. Liars, both; and both finally confessing that they had been near the scene of the crime at the time of the crime, though neither admitted seeing the other. Both, by their own accounts, had been at that time even further from normal than usual — Mrs. Gilmore filled with jealousy; Cara Kenbrook, half-drunk.

What was the answer? Either could have killed Gilmore; but hardly both — unless they had formed some sort of crazy partnership, and in that event —

Suddenly all the facts I had gathered — true and false — clicked together in my head. I had the answer — the one simple, satisfying answer!

I grinned at the girl, and set about filling in the gaps in my solution.

“Who is Stan?” I asked.

“Stanley Tennant — he has something to do with the city.”

Stanley Tennant. I knew him by reputation, a —

A key rattled in the hall door.

The hall door opened and closed, and a man’s footsteps came toward the open doorway of the room in which we were. A tall, broad-shouldered man in tweeds filled the doorway — a ruddy-faced man of thirty-five or so, whose appearance of athletic blond wholesomeness was marred by close-set eyes of an indistinct blue.

Seeing me, he stopped — a step inside the room.

“Hello, Stan!” the girl said lightly. “This gentleman is from the Continental Detective Agency. I’ve just emptied myself to him about Bernie. Tried to stall him at first, but it was no good.”

The man’s vague eyes switched back and forth between the girl and me. Around the pale irises his eyeballs were pink.

He straightened his shoulders and smiled too jovially.

“And what conclusion have you come to?” he inquired.

The girl answered for me.

“I’ve already had my invitation to take a ride.”

Tennant bent forward. With an unbroken swing of his arms, he swept a chair up from the floor into my face. Not much force behind it, but quick.

I went back against the wall, fending off the chair with both arms — threw it aside — and looked into the muzzle of a nickeled revolver.

A table drawer stood open — the drawer from which he had grabbed the gun while I was busy with the chair. The revolver, I noticed, was of .38 calibre.

“Now” — his voice was thick, like a drunk’s — “turn around.”

I turned my back to him, felt a hand moving over my body, and my gun was taken away.

“All right,” he said, and I faced him again.

He stepped back to the girl’s side, still holding the nickel-plated revolver on me. My own gun wasn’t in sight — in his pocket perhaps. He was breathing noisily, and his eyeballs had gone from pink to red. His face, too, was red, with veins bulging in the forehead.

“You know me?” he snapped.

“Yes, I know you. You’re Stanley Tennant, assistant city engineer, and your record is none too lovely.” I chattered away on the theory that conversation is always somehow to the advantage of the man who is looking into the gun. “You’re supposed to be the lad who supplied the regiment of well-trained witnesses who turned last year’s investigation of graft charges against the engineer’s office into a comedy. Yes, Mr. Tennant, I know you. You’re the answer to why Gilmore was so lucky in landing city contracts with bids only a few dollars beneath his competitors. Yes, Mr. Tennant, I know you. You’re the bright boy who —”

I had a lot more to tell him, but he cut me off.

“That will do out of you!” he yelled. “Unless you want me to knock a corner off your head with this gun.”

Then he addressed the girl, not taking his eyes from me.

“Get up, Cara.”

She got out of her chair and stood beside him. His gun was in his right hand, and that side was toward her. He moved around to the other side.

The fingers of his left hand hooked themselves inside the girl’s green gown where it was cut low over the swell of her breasts. His gun never wavered from me. He jerked his left hand, ripping her gown down to the waistline.

“He did that, Cara,” Tennant said.

She nodded.

His fingers slid inside the flesh-coloured undergarment that was now exposed, and he tore that as he had torn the gown.

“He did that.”

She nodded again.

His bloodshot eyes darted little measuring glances at her face — swift glances that never kept his eyes from me for the flash of time I would have needed to tie into him.

Then — eyes and gun on me — he smashed his left fist into the girl’s blank white face.

One whimper — low and not drawn out — came from her as she went down in a huddle against the wall. Her face —w ell, there wasn’t much change in it. She looked dumbly up at Tennant from where she had fallen.

“He did that,” Tennant was saying.

She nodded, got up from the floor, and returned to her chair.

“Here’s our story.” The man talked rapidly, his eyes alert on me. “Gilmore was never in my rooms in his life, Cara, and neither were you. The night he was killed you were home shortly after one o’clock, and stayed here. You were sick — probably from the wine you had been drinking — and called a doctor. His name is Howard. I’ll see that he’s fixed. He got here at two-thirty and stayed until three-thirty.

“Today, this gumshoe, learning that you had been intimate with Gilmore, came here to question you. He knew you hadn’t killed Gilmore, but he made certain suggestions to you — you can play them up as strong as you like; maybe say that he’s been annoying you for months — and when you turned him down he threatened to frame you.

“You refused to have anything to do with him, and he grabbed you, tearing your clothes, and bruising your face when you resisted. I happened to come along then, having an engagement with you, and heard you scream. Your front door was unlocked, so I rushed in, pulled this fellow away, and disarmed him. Then we held him until the police — whom we will phone for — came. Got that?”

“Yes, Stan.”

“Good! Now listen: When the police get here this fellow will spill all he knows of course, and the chances are that all three of us will be taken in. That’s why I want you to know what’s what right now. I ought to have enough pull to get you and me out on bail tonight, or, if worse comes to worst, to see that my lawyer gets to me tonight — so I can arrange for the witnesses we’ll need. Also I ought to be able to fix it so our little fat friend will be held for a day or two, and not allowed to see anybody until late tomorrow — which will give us a good start on him. I don’t know how much he knows, but between your story and the stories of a couple of other smart little ladies I have in mind, I’ll fix him up with a rep that will keep any jury in the world from ever believing him about anything.”

“How do you like that?” he asked me, triumphantly.

“You big clown,” I laughed at him, “I think it’s funny!”

But I didn’t really think so. In spite of what I thought I knew about Gilmore’s murder — in spite of my simple, satisfactory solution — something was crawling up my back, my knees felt jerky, and my hands were wet with sweat. I had had people try to frame me before — no detective stays in the business long without having it happen — but I had never got used to it. There’s a peculiar deadliness about the thing — especially if you know how erratic juries can be — that makes your flesh crawl, no matter how safe your judgment tells you you are.

“Phone the police,” Tennant told the girl, “and for God’s sake keep your story straight!”

As he tried to impress that necessity on the girl his eyes left me.

I was perhaps five feet from him and his level gun.

A jump — not straight at him — off to one side — put me close.

The gun roared under my arm. I was surprised not to feel the bullet. It seemed that he must have hit me.

There wasn’t a second shot.

I looped my right fist over as I jumped. It landed when I landed. It took him too high—up on the cheek-bone — but it rocked him back a couple of steps.

I didn’t know what had happened to his gun. It wasn’t in his hand any more. I didn’t stop to look for it. I was busy, crowding him back — not letting him set himself — staying close to him — driving at him with both hands.

He was a head taller than I, and had longer arms, but he wasn’t any heavier or stronger. I suppose he hit me now and then as I hammered him across the room. He must have. But I didn’t feel anything.

I worked him into a corner. Jammed him back in a corner with his legs cramped under him — which didn’t give him much leverage to hit from. I got my left arm around his body, holding him where I wanted him. And I began to throw my right fist into him.

I liked that. His belly was flabby, and it got softer every time I hit it. I hit it often.

He was chopping at my face, but by digging my nose into his chest and holding it there I kept my beauty from being altogether ruined. Meanwhile I threw my right fist into him.

Then I became aware that Cara Kenbrook was moving around behind me; and I remembered the revolver that had fallen somewhere when I had charged Tennant. I didn’t like that; but there was nothing I could do about it — except put more weight in my punches. My own gun, I thought, was in one of his pockets. But neither of us had time to hunt for it now.

Tennant’s knees sagged the next time I hit him.

Once more, I said to myself, and then I’ll step back, let him have one on the button, and watch him fall.

But I didn’t get that far.

Something that I knew was the missing revolver struck me on the top of the head. An ineffectual blow — not clean enough to stun me — but it took the steam out of my punches.

Another.

They weren’t hard; these taps, but to hurt a skull with a hunk of metal you don’t have to hit it hard.

I tried to twist away from the next bump, and failed. Not only failed, but let Tennant wiggle away from me.

That was the end.

I wheeled on the girl just in time to take another rap on the head, and then one of Tennant’s fists took me over the ear.

I went clown in one of those falls that get pugs called quitters — my eyes were open, my mind was alive, but my legs and arms wouldn’t lift me up from the floor.

Tennant took my own gun out of a pocket, and with it held on me, sat down in a Morris chair, to gasp for the air I had pounded out of him. The girl sat in another chair; and I, finding I could manage it, sat up in the middle of the floor and looked at them.

Tennant spoke, still panting.

“This is fine — all the signs of a struggle we need to make our story good!”

“If they don’t believe you were in a fight,” I suggested sourly, pressing my aching head with both hands, “you can strip and show them your little tummy.”

“And you can show them this!”

He leaned down and split my lip with a punch that spread me on my back.

Anger brought my legs to life. I got up on them. Tennant moved around behind the Morris chair. My black gun was steady in his hand.

“Go easy,” he warned me. “My story will work if I have to kill you — maybe work better.”

That was sense. I stood still.

“Phone the police, Cara,” he ordered.

She went out of the room, closing the door behind her; and all I could hear of her talk was a broken murmur.

Ten minutes later three uniformed policemen arrived. All three knew Tennant, and they treated him with respect. Tennant reeled off the story he and the girl had cooked up, with a few changes to take care of the shot that had been fired from the nickeled gun and our rough-house. She nodded her head vigorously whenever a policeman looked at her. Tennant turned both guns over to the white-haired sergeant in charge.

I didn’t argue, didn’t deny anything, but told the sergeant:

“I’m working with Detective Sergeant O’Gar on a job. I want to talk to him over the phone and then I want you to take all three of us down to the detective bureau.”

Tennant objected to that, of course; not because he expected to gain anything, but on the off-chance that he might. The white-haired sergeant looked from one of us to the other in puzzlement. Me, with my skinned face and split lip; Tennant, with a red lump under one eye where my first wallop had landed; and the girl, with most of the clothes above the waistline ripped off and a bruised cheek.

“It has a queer look, this thing,” the sergeant decided aloud, “and I shouldn’t wonder but what the detective bureau was the place for the lot of you.”

One of the policemen went into the hall with me, and I got O’Gar on the phone at his home. It was nearly ten o’clock by now, and he was preparing for bed.

“Cleaning up the Gilmore murder,” I told him. “Meet me at the Hall. Will you get hold of Kelly, the patrolman who found Gilmore, and bring him down there? I want him to look at some people.”

“I will that,” O’Gar promised, and I hung up.

The “wagon” in which the three policemen had answered Cara Kenbrook’s call carried us down to the Hall of Justice, where we all went into the captain of detectives’ office. McTighe, a lieutenant, was on duty.

I knew McTighe, and we were on pretty good terms, but I wasn’t an influence in local politics, and Tennant was. I don’t mean that McTighe would have knowingly helped Tennant frame me; but with me stacked up against the assistant city engineer, I knew who would get the benefit of any doubt there might be.

My head was thumping and roaring just now, with knots all over it where the girl had beaned me. I sat down, kept quiet, and nursed my head while Tennant and Cara Kenbrook, with a lot of details that they had not wasted on the uniformed men, told their tale and showed their injuries.

Tennant was talking — describing the terrible scene that had met his eyes when, drawn by the girl’s screams, he had rushed into her apartment — when O’Gar came into the office. He recognised Tennant with a lifted eyebrow, and came over to sit beside me.

“What the hell is all this?” he muttered.

“A lovely mess,” I whispered back. “Listen — in that nickel gun on the desk there’s an empty shell. Get it for me.”

He scratched his head doubtfully, listened to the next few words of Tennant’s yarn, glanced at me out of the corner of his eye, and then went over to the desk and picked up the revolver.

McTighe looked at him — a sharp, questioning look.

“Something on the Gilmore killing,” the detective-sergeant said, breaking the gun.

The lieutenant started to speak, changed his mind, and O’Gar brought the shell over and handed it to me.

“Thanks,” I said, putting it in my pocket. “Now listen to my friend there. It’s a good act, if you like it.”

Tennant was winding up his history.

“... Naturally a man who tried a thing like that on an unprotected woman would be yellow, so it wasn’t very hard to handle him after I got his gun away from him. I hit him a couple of times, and he quit — begging me to stop, getting down on his knees. Then we called the police.”

McTighe looked at me with eyes that were cold and hard. Tennant had made a believer of him, and not only of him — the police-sergeant and his two men were glowering at me. I suspected that even O’Gar — with whom I had been through a dozen storms — would have been half-convinced if the engineer hadn’t added the neat touches about my kneeling.

“Well, what have you got to say?” McTighe challenged me in a tone which suggested that it didn’t make much difference what I said.

“I’ve got nothing to say about this dream,” I said shortly. “I’m interested in the Gilmore murder — not in this stuff.” I turned to O’Gar. “Is the patrolman here?”

The detective-sergeant went to the door, and called: “Oh, Kelly!”

Kelly came in — a big, straight-standing man, with iron-gray hair and an intelligent fat face.

“You found Gilmore’s body?” I asked.

“I did.”

I pointed at Cara Kenbrook.

“Ever see her before?”

His gray eyes studied her carefully.

“Not that I remember,” he answered.

“Did she come up the street while you were looking at Gilmore, and go into the house he was lying in front of?”

“She did not.”

I took out the empty shell O’Gar had got for me, and chucked it down on the desk in front of the patrolman.

“Kelly,” I asked, “why did you kill Gilmore?”

Kelly’s right hand went under his coat-tail at his hip.

I jumped for him.

Somebody grabbed me by the neck. Somebody else piled on my back. McTighe aimed a big fist at my face, but it missed. My legs had been suddenly kicked from under me, and I went down hard with men all over me.

When I was yanked to my feet again, big Kelly stood straight up by the desk, weighing his service revolver in his hand. His clear eyes met mine, and he laid the weapon on the desk. Then he unfastened his shield and put it with the gun.

“It was an accident,” he said simply.

By this time the birds who had been manhandling me woke up to the fact that maybe they were missing part of the play — that maybe I wasn’t a maniac. Hands dropped off me, and presently everybody was listening to Kelly.

He told his story with unhurried evenness, his eyes never wavering or clouding. A deliberate man, though unlucky.

“I was walkin’ my beat that night, an’ as I turned the corner of Jones into Pine I saw a man jump back from the steps of a buildin’ into the vestibule. A burglar, I thought, an’ cat-footed it down there. It was a dark vestibule, an’ deep, an’ I saw somethin’ that looked like a man in it, but I wasn’t sure.

‘“Come out o’ there!’ I called, but there was no answer. I took my gun in my hand an’ started up the steps. I saw him move just then, comin’ out. An’ then my foot slipped. It was worn smooth, the bottom step, an’ my foot slipped. I fell forward, the gun went off, an’ the bullet hit him. He had come out a ways by then, an’ when the bullet hit him he toppled over frontwise, tumblin’ clown the steps onto the sidewalk.

“When I looked at him I saw it was Gilmore. I knew him to say ‘howdy’ to, an’ he knew me — which is why he must o’ ducked out of sight when he saw me comin’ around the corner. He didn’t want me to see him comin’ out of a buildin’ where I knew Mr. Tennant lived, I suppose, thinkin’ I’d put two an’ two together, an’ maybe talk.

“I don’t say that I did the right thing by lyin’, but it didn’t hurt anybody. It was an accident, but he was a man with a lot of friends up in high places, an’ — accident or no — I stood a good chance of bein’ broke, an’ maybe sent over for a while. So I told my story the way you people know it. I couldn’t say I’d seen anything suspicious without maybe puttin’ the blame on some innocent party, an’ I didn’t want that. I’d made up my mind that if anybody was arrested for the murder, an’ things looked bad for them, I’d come out an’ say I’d done it. Home, you’ll find a confession all written out — written out in case somethin’ happened to me — so nobody else’d ever be blamed. “That’s why I had to say I’d never seen the lady here. I did see her — saw her go into the buildin’ that night — the buildin’ Gilmore had come out of. But I couldn’t say so without makin’ it look bad for her; so I lied. I could have thought up a better story if I’d had more time, I don’t doubt, but I had to think quick. Anyways, I’m glad it’s all over.”

KELLY AND the other uniformed policeman had left the office, which now held McTighe, O’Gar, Cara Kenbrook, Tennant, and me. Tennant had crossed to my side, and was apologising.

“I hope you’ll let me square myself for this evening’s work. But you know how it is when somebody you care for is in a jam. I’d have killed you if I had thought it would help Cara — on the level. Why didn’t you tell us that you didn’t suspect her?”

“But I did suspect the pair of you,” I said. “It looked as if Kelly had to be the guilty one; but you people carried on so much that I began to feel doubtful. For a while it was funny — you thinking she had done it, and she thinking you had, though I suppose each had sworn to his or her innocence. But after a time it stopped being funny. You carried it too far.”

“How did you rap to Kelly?” O’Gar, at my shoulder, asked.

“Miss Kenbrook was walking north on Leavenworth — and was halfway between Bush and Pine — when the shot was fired. She saw nobody, no cars, until she rounded the corner. Mrs. Gilmore, walking north on Jones, was about the same distance away when she heard the shot, and she saw nobody until she reached Pine Street. If Kelly had been telling the truth, she would have seen him on Jones Street. He said he didn’t turn the corner until after the shot was fired.

“Either of the women could have killed Gilmore, but hardly both; and I doubted that either could have shot him and got away without running into Kelly or the other. Suppose both of them were telling the truth — what then? Kelly must have been lying! He was the logical suspect anyway — the nearest known person to the murdered man when the shot was fired.

“To back all this up, he had let Miss Kenbrook go into the apartment building at three in the morning, in front of which a man had just been killed, without questioning her or mentioning her in his report. That looked as if he knew who had done the killing. So I took a chance with the empty-shell trick, it being a good bet that he would have thrown his away, and would think that —”

McTighe’s heavy voice interrupted my explanation.

“How about this assault charge?” he asked, and had the decency to avoid my eye when I turned toward him with the others.

Tennant cleared his throat.

“Er—ah — in view of the way things have turned out, and knowing that Miss Kenbrook doesn’t want the disagreeable publicity that would accompany an affair of this sort, why, I’d suggest that we drop the whole thing.” He smiled brightly from McTighe to me. “You know nothing has gone on the records yet.”

“Make the big heap play his hand out,” O’Gar growled in my ear. “Don’t let him drop it.”

“Of course if Miss Kenbrook doesn’t want to press the charge,” McTighe was saying, watching me out of the tail of his eye, “I suppose —”

“If everybody understands that the whole thing was a plant,” I said, “and if the policemen who heard the story are brought in here now and told by Tennant and Miss Kenbrook that it was all a lie — then I’m willing to let it go at that. Otherwise, I won’t stand for a hush-up.”

“You’re a damned fool!” O’Gar whispered. “Put the screws on them!”

But I shook my head. I didn’t see any sense in making a lot of trouble for myself just to make some for somebody else — and suppose Tennant proved his story...

So the policemen were found, and brought into the office again, and told the truth.

And presently Tennant, the girl, and I were walking together like three old friends through the corridors toward the door, Tennant still asking me to let him make amends for the evening’s work.

“You’ve got to let me do something!” he insisted. “It’s only right!”

His hand dipped into his coat, and came out with a thick billfold.

“Here,” he said, “let me —”

We were going, at that happy moment, down the stone vestibule steps that lead to Kearny Street — six or seven steps there are.

“No,” I said, “let me —”

He was on the next to the top step, when I reached up and let go.

He settled in a rather limp pile at the bottom.

Leaving his empty-faced lady love to watch over him, I strolled up through Portsmouth Square toward a restaurant where the steaks come thick.

The Tenth Clew

By:

Dashiell Hammett

“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 memorandum book; three letters in slit envelopes that were addressed to the dead man; some other papers; a bunch or 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 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 f* 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.”

 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 bun 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 trunk,” 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 Gantvoort’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, 5444 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 Dr. 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 memorandum 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.

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 irises.

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 La 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.

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 m 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-dollars 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 phony 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-caliber 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.”

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 nickered 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 we 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. . . .

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, dun 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. . . .

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 coining 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.

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 eke.”

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 bun 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 bun 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.