I had listened to the boy’s story with a great show of sympathetic attentiveness. Now I scowled at him and spoke accusingly, but still not without friendliness.
“Stop spoofing! The money Papadopoulos showed you didn’t buy you. You met the girl and were too soft to turn her in. But your vanity—your pride in looking at yourself as a pretty cold proposition—wouldn’t let you admit it even to yourself. You had to have a hard-boiled front. So you were meat to Papadopoulos’ grinder. He gave you a part you could play to yourself—a super-gentleman-crook, a master-mind, a desperate suave villain, and all that kind of romantic garbage. That’s the way you went, my son. You went as far as possible beyond what was needed to save the girl from the hoosegow—just to show the world, but chiefly yourself, that you were not acting through sentimentality, but according to your own reckless desires. There you are. Look at yourself.”
Whatever he saw in himself—what I had seen or something else—his face slowly reddened, and he wouldn’t look at me. He looked past me at the distant road.
I looked into the lighted room beyond him. Tom-Tom Carey had advanced to the center of the floor, where he stood watching us. I jerked a corner of my mouth at him—a warning.
“Well,” the boy began again, but he didn’t know what to say after that. He shuffled his feet and kept his eyes from my face.
I stood up straight and got rid of the last trace of my hypocritical sympathy.
“Give me your gun, you lousy rat!” I snarled at him.
He jumped back as if I had hit him. Craziness writhed in his face. He jerked his gun chest-high.
Tom-Tom Carey saw the gun go up. The swarthy man fired twice. Jack Counihan was dead at my feet.
Mickey Linehan fired once. Carey was down on the floor, bleeding from the temple.
I stepped over Jack’s body, went into the room, knelt beside the swarthy man. He squirmed, tried to say something, died before he could get it out. I waited until my face was straight before I stood up.
Big Flora was studying me with narrowed gray eyes. I stared back at her.
“I don’t get it all yet,” she said slowly, “but if you—”
“Where’s Angel Grace?” I interrupted.
“Tied to the kitchen table,” she informed me, and went on with her thinking aloud. “You’ve dealt a hand that—”
“Yeah,” I said sourly, “I’m another Papadopoulos.”
Her big body suddenly quivered. Pain clouded her handsome brutal face. Two tears came out of her lower eye-lids.
I’m damned if she hadn’t loved the old scoundrel!
XII
It was after eight in the morning when I got back to the city. I ate breakfast and then went up to the Agency, where I found the Old Man going through his morning mail.
“It’s all over,” I told him. “Papadopoulos knew Nancy Regan was Taylor Newhall’s heiress. When he needed a hiding-place after the bank jobs flopped, he got her to take him down to the Newhall country place. He had two holds on her. She pitied him as a misused old duffer, and she was—even if innocently—an accomplice after the fact in the stick-ups.
“Pretty soon Papa Newhall had to go to Mexico on business. Papadopoulos saw a chance to make something. If Newhall was knocked off, the girl would have millions—and the old thief knew he could take them away from her. He sent Barrows down to the border to buy the murder from some Mexican bandits. Barrows put it over, but talked too much. He told a girl in Nogales that he had to go back ‘to ’Frisco to collect plenty from an old Greek,’ and then he’d return and buy her the world. The girl passed the news on to Tom-Tom Carey. Carey put a lot of twos together and got at least a dozen for an answer. He followed Barrows up here.
“Angel Grace was with him the morning he called on Barrows here—to find out if his ‘old Greek’ really was Papadopoulos, and where he could be found. Barrows was too full of morphine to listen to reason. He was so dope-deadened that even after the dark man began to reason with a knife-blade he had to whittle Barrows all up before he began to feel hurt. The carving sickened Angel Grace. She left, after vainly trying to stop Carey. And when she read in the afternoon papers what a finished job he had made of it, she tried to commit suicide, to stop the images from crawling around in her head.
“Carey got all the information Barrows had, but Barrows didn’t know where Papadopoulos was hiding. Papadopoulos learned of Carey’s arrival—you know how he learned. He sent Arlie to stop Carey. Carey wouldn’t give the barber a chance—until the swarthy man began to suspect Papadopoulos might be at the Newhall place. He drove down there, letting Arlie follow. As soon as Arlie discovered his destination, Arlie closed in, hell-bent on stopping Carey at any cost. That was what Carey wanted. He gunned Arlie, came back to town, got hold of me, and took me down to help wind things up.
“Meanwhile, Angel Grace, in the cooler, had made friends with Big Flora. She knew Flora but Flora didn’t know her. Papadopoulos had arranged a crush-out for Flora. It’s always easier for two to escape than one. Flora took the Angel along, took her to Papadopoulos. The Angel went for him, but Flora knocked her for a loop.
“Flora, Angel Grace and Ann Newhall, alias Nancy Regan, are in the county jail,” I wound up. “Papadopoulos, Tom-Tom Carey and Jack Counihan are dead.”
I stopped talking and lighted a cigarette, taking my time, watching cigarette and match carefully throughout the operation. The Old Man picked up a letter, put it down without reading it, picked up another.
“They were killed in course of making the arrests?” His mild voice held nothing but its usual unfathomable politeness.
“Yes. Carey killed Papadopoulos. A little later he shot Jack. Mickey—not knowing—not knowing anything except that the dark man was shooting at Jack and me—we were standing apart talking—shot and killed Carey.” The words twisted around my tongue, wouldn’t come out straight. “Neither Mickey nor Andy know that Jack— Nobody but you and I know exactly what the thing—exactly what Jack was doing. Flora Brace and Ann Newhall did know, but if we say he was acting on orders all the time, nobody can deny it.”
The Old Man nodded his grandfatherly face and smiled, but for the first time in the years I had known him I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking that if Jack had come through alive we would have had the nasty choice between letting him go free or giving the Agency a black-eye by advertising the fact that one of our operatives was a crook.
I threw away my cigarette and stood up. The Old Man stood also, and held out a hand to me.
“Thank you,” he said.
I took his hand, and I understood him, but I didn’t have anything I wanted to confess—even by silence.
“It happened that way,” I said deliberately. “I played the cards so we would get the benefit of the breaks—but it just happened that way.”
He nodded, smiling benignantly.
“I’m going to take a couple of weeks off,” I said from the door.
I felt tired, washed out.
About the Author
Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) charted a gritty new direction for American crime fiction, crafting true-to-life stories as brash as they are exacting. In 1922, he began writing fiction based on his experience as a private detective, and he pioneered the tough-minded, action-heavy, realistic style that became known as hardboiled. Among his best-known works are Red Harvest (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), The Thin Man (1934), and the Collected Case Files of the Continental Op, most of which were published in Black Mask magazine.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagin
ation or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“Foreword” Copyright © by 2016 Julie M. Rivett; “Introduction” Copyright © 2016 by Richard Layman; “Creeping Siamese” Copyright © 1926, “The Big Knockover” and “$106,000 Blood Money” Copyright © 1927 by Pro-Distributors; renewed by Pro-Distributors as agent for Dashiell Hammett, whose interest was conveyed by will in 1984 to the Dashiell Hammett Literary Property Trust. All Rights Reserved.
Cover design by Jamie Keenan
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