“I’ve got the stuff,” I whispered under cover of the groaning.
That brought an answer.
“Jerry! Ah, come here to me!”
The groans went on, but fainter, in the other room. I crawled toward the woman’s voice. I went on hands and knees, bumping as carefully as possible against things. I couldn’t see anything. Midway, I put a hand down on a soggy bundle of fur—the late purple Frana. I went on.
Inés touched my shoulder with an eager hand.
“Give them to me,” were her first words.
I grinned at her in the dark, patted her hand, found her head, and put my mouth to her ear.
“Let’s get back in the bedroom,” I breathed, paying no attention to her request for the loot. “The Kid will be coming.” I didn’t doubt that he had bested Big Chin. “We can handle him better in the bedroom.”
I wanted to receive him in a room with only one door.
She led me—both of us on hands and knees—to the bedroom. I did what thinking seemed necessary as we crawled. The Kid couldn’t know yet how the Frenchman and I had come out. If he guessed, he would guess that the Frenchman had survived. He would be likely to put me in the chump class with Billie, and think the Frenchman could handle me. The chances were that he had got Big Chin, and knew it by now. It was black as black in the sitting-room, but he must know by now that he was the only living thing there.
He blocked the only exit from the apartment. He would think, then, that Inés and Maurois were still alive in it, with the spoils. What would he do about it? There was no pretense of partnership now. That had gone with the lights. The Kid was after the stones. The Kid was after them alone.
I’m no wizard at guessing the other guy’s next move. But my idea was that the Kid would be on his way after us, soon. He knew—he must know—that the police were coming; but I had him doped as crazy enough to disregard the police until they appeared. He’d figure that there would be only a couple of them—prepared for nothing more violent than a drinking-party. He could handle them—or he would think he could. Meanwhile, he would come after the stones.
The woman and I reached the bedroom, the room farthest back in the apartment, a room with only one door. I heard her fumbling with the door, trying to close it. I couldn’t see, but I got my foot in the way.
“Leave it open,” I whispered.
I didn’t want to shut the Kid out. I wanted to take him in.
On my belly, I crawled back to the door, felt for my watch, and propped it on the sill, in the angle between door and frame. I wriggled back from it until I was six or eight feet away, looking diagonally across the open doorway at the watch’s luminous dial.
The phosphorescent numbers could not be seen from the other side of the door. They faced me. Anybody who came through the door—unless he jumped—must, if only for a split-second, put some part of himself between me and the watch.
On my belly, my gun cocked, its butt steady on the floor, I waited for the faint light to be blotted out.
I waited a time. Pessimism: perhaps he wasn’t coming; perhaps I would have to go after him; perhaps he would run out, and I would lose him after all my trouble.
Inés, beside me, breathed quaveringly in my ear, and shivered.
“Don’t touch me,” I growled at her as she tried to cuddle against me.
She was shaking my arm.
Glass broke in the next room.
Silence.
The luminous patches on the watch burnt my eyes. I couldn’t afford to blink. A foot could pass the dial while I was blinking. I couldn’t afford to blink, but I had to blink. I blinked. I couldn’t tell whether something had passed the watch or not. I had to blink again. Tried to hold my eyes stiffly opened. Failed. I almost shot at the third blink. I could have sworn something had gone between me and the watch.
The Kid, whatever he was up to, made no sound.
The dark woman began to sob beside me. Throat noises that could guide bullets.
I lumped her with my eyes and cursed the lot—not aloud, but from the heart.
My eyes smarted. Moisture filmed them. I blinked it away, losing sight of the watch for precious instants. The butt of my gun was slimy with my hand’s sweat. I was thoroughly uncomfortable, inside and out.
Gunpowder burned at my face.
A screaming maniac of a woman was crawling all over me.
My bullet hit nothing lower than the ceiling.
I flung, maybe kicked, the woman off, and snaked backward. She moaned somewhere to one side. I couldn’t see the Kid—couldn’t hear him. The watch was visible again, farther away. A rustling.
The watch vanished.
I fired at it.
Two points of light near the floor gave out fire and thunder.
My gun-barrel as close to the floor as I could hold it, I fired between those points. Twice.
Twin flames struck at me again.
My right hand went numb. My left took the gun. I sped two more bullets on their way. That left one in my gun.
I don’t know what I did with it. My head filled up with funny notions. There wasn’t any room. There wasn’t any darkness. There wasn’t anything. …
I opened my eyes in dim light. I was on my back. Beside me the dark woman knelt, shivering and sniffling. Her hands were busy—in my clothes.
One of them came out of my vest with the jewel-bag.
Coming to life, I grabbed her arm. She squealed as if I were a stirring corpse. I got the bag again.
“Give them back, Jerry,” she wailed, trying frantically to pull my fingers loose. “They are my things. Give them!”
Sitting up, I looked around.
Beside me lay a shattered bedside lamp, whose fall—caused by carelessness with my feet, or one of the Kid’s bullets—had KO’d me. Across the room, face down, arms spread in a crucified posture, the Whosis Kid sprawled. He was dead.
From the front of the apartment—almost indistinguishable from the throbbing in my head—came the pounding of heavy blows. The police were kicking down the unlocked door.
The woman went quiet. I whipped my head around. The knife stung my cheek—put a slit in the lapel of my coat. I took it away from her.
There was no sense to this. The police were already here. I humored her, pretending a sudden coming to full consciousness.
“Oh, it’s you!” I said. “Here they are.”
I handed her the silk bag of jewels just as the first policeman came into the room.
XIII
I didn’t see Inés again before she was taken back East to be hit with a life-sentence in the Massachusetts big house. Neither of the policemen who crashed into her apartment that night knew me. The woman and I were separated before I ran into anyone who did know me, which gave me an opportunity to arrange that she would not be tipped off to my identity. The most difficult part of the performance was to keep myself out of the newspapers, since I had to tell the coroner’s jury about the deaths of Billie, Big Chin, Maurois and the Whosis Kid. But I managed it. So far as I know, the dark woman still thinks I am Jerry Young, the bootlegger.
The Old Man talked to her before she left San Francisco. Fitting together what he got from her and what the Boston branch got, the history runs like this:
A Boston jeweler named Tunnicliffe had a trusted employee named Binder. Binder fell in with a dark woman named Inés Almad. The dark woman, in turn, had a couple of shifty friends—a Frenchman named Maurois, and a native of Boston whose name was either Carey or Cory, but who was better known as the Whosis Kid. Out of that sort of combination almost anything was more than likely to come.
What came was a scheme. The faithful Binder—part of whose duties it was to open the shop in the morning and close it at night—was to pick out the richest of the unset stones bought for the holiday trade, carry them off with him one evening, and turn them o
ver to Inés. She was to turn them into money.
To cover up Binder’s theft, the Whosis Kid and the Frenchman were to rob the jeweler’s shop immediately after the door was opened the following morning. Binder and the porter—who would not notice the absence of the most valuable pieces from the stock—would be the only ones in the shop. The robbers would take whatever they could get. In addition to their pickings, they were to be paid two hundred and fifty dollars apiece, and in case either was caught later, Binder could be counted on not to identify them.
That was the scheme as Binder knew it. There were angles he didn’t suspect.
Between Inés, Maurois and the Kid there was another agreement. She was to leave for Chicago with the stones as soon as Binder gave them to her, and wait there for Maurois and the Kid. She and the Frenchman would have been satisfied to run off and let Binder hold the sack. The Whosis Kid insisted that the hold-up go through as planned, and that the foolish Binder be killed. Binder knew too much about them, the Kid said, and he would squawk his head off as soon as he learned he had been double-crossed.
The Kid had his way, and he had shot Binder.
Then had come the sweet mess of quadruple and sextuple crossing that had led all three into calamity: the woman’s private agreements with the Kid and Maurois—to meet one in St. Louis and the other in New Orleans—and her flight alone with the loot to San Francisco.
Billie was an innocent bystander—or almost. A lumber-handler Inés had run into somewhere, and picked up as a sort of cushion against the rough spots along the rocky road she traveled.
THE SCORCHED FACE
A Novelette of the Continental Sleuth
Black Mask, May 1925
Here’s another realistic detective tale by Mr. Hammett, formerly of the Pinkertons. It has a ring of truth in it that makes you forget that you are only reading and not actually following the San Francisco sleuth around.
I
“We expected them home yesterday,” Alfred Banbrock wound up his story. “When they had not come by this morning, my wife telephoned Mrs. Walden. Mrs. Walden said they had not been down there—had not been expected, in fact.”
“On the face of it, then,” I suggested, “it seems that your daughters went away of their own accord, and are staying away on their own accord?”
Banbrock nodded gravely. Tired muscles sagged in his fleshy face.
“It would seem so,” he agreed. “That is why I came to your agency for help instead of going to the police.”
“Have they ever disappeared before?”
“No. If you read the papers and magazines, you’ve no doubt seen hints that the younger generation is given to irregularity. My daughters came and went pretty much as they pleased. But, though I can’t say I ever knew what they were up to, we always knew where they were in a general way.”
“Can you think of any reason for their going away like this?”
He shook his weary head.
“Any recent quarrels?” I probed.
“N—” He changed it to: “Yes—although I didn’t attach any importance to it, and wouldn’t have recalled it if you hadn’t jogged my memory. It was Thursday evening—the evening before they went away.”
“And it was about—?”
“Money, of course. We never disagreed over anything else. I gave each of my daughters an adequate allowance—perhaps a very liberal one. Nor did I keep them strictly within it. There were few months in which they didn’t exceed it. Thursday evening they asked for an amount of money even more than usual in excess of what two girls should need. I wouldn’t give it to them, though I finally did give them a somewhat smaller amount. We didn’t exactly quarrel—not in the strict sense of the word—but there was a certain lack of friendliness between us.”
“And it was after this disagreement that they said they were going down to Mrs. Walden’s, in Monterey, for the week-end?”
“Possibly. I’m not sure of that point. I don’t think I heard of it until the next morning, but they may have told my wife before that. I shall ask her if you wish.”
“And you know of no other possible reason for their running away?”
“None. I can’t think that our dispute over money—by no means an unusual one—had anything to do with it.”
“What does their mother think?”
“Their mother is dead,” Banbrock corrected me. “My wife is their stepmother. She is only two years older than Myra, my older daughter. She is as much at sea as I.”
“Did your daughters and their stepmother get along all right together?”
“Yes! Yes! Excellently! If there was a division in the family, I usually found them standing together against me.”
“Your daughters left Friday afternoon?”
“At noon, or a few minutes after. They were going to drive down.”
“The car, of course, is still missing?”
“Naturally.”
“What was it?”
“A Locomobile, with a special cabriolet body. Black.”
“You can give me the license and engine numbers?”
“I think so.”
He turned in his chair to the big roll-top desk that hid a quarter of one office wall, fumbled with papers in a compartment, and read the numbers over his shoulder to me. I put them on the back of an envelope.
“I’m going to have this car put on the police department list of stolen machines,” I told him. “It can be done without mentioning your daughters. The police bulletin might find the car for us. That would help us find your daughters.”
“Very well,” he agreed, “if it can be done without disagreeable publicity. As I told you at first, I don’t want any more advertising than is absolutely necessary—unless it becomes likely that harm has come to the girls.”
I nodded understanding, and got up.
“I want to go out and talk to your wife,” I said. “Is she home now?”
“Yes, I think so. I’ll phone her and tell her you are coming.”
II
IN a big limestone fortress on top a hill in Sea Cliff, looking down on ocean and bay, I had my talk with Mrs. Banbrock. She was a tall dark girl of not more than twenty-two years, inclined to plumpness.
She couldn’t tell me anything her husband hadn’t at least mentioned, but she could give me finer details.
I got descriptions of the two girls:
Myra—20 years old; 5 feet 8 inches; 150 pounds; athletic; brisk, almost masculine manner and carriage; bobbed brown hair; brown eyes; medium complexion; square face, with large chin and short nose; scar over left ear, concealed by hair; fond of horses and all outdoor sports. When she left the house she wore a blue and green wool dress, small blue hat, short black seal coat, and black slippers.
Ruth—18 years; 5 feet 4 inches; 105 pounds; brown eyes; brown bobbed hair; medium complexion; small oval face; quiet, timid, inclined to lean on her more forceful sister. When last seen she had worn a tobacco-brown coat trimmed with brown fur over a grey silk dress, and a wide brown hat.
I got two photographs of each girl, and an additional snapshot of Myra standing in front of the cabriolet. I got a list of the things they had taken with them—such things as would naturally be taken on a week-end visit. What I valued most of what I got was a list of their friends, relatives, and other acquaintances, so far as Mrs. Banbrock knew them.
“Did they mention Mrs. Walden’s invitation before their quarrel with Mr. Banbrock?” I asked, when I had my lists stowed away.
“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Banbrock said thoughtfully. “I didn’t connect the two things at all. They didn’t really quarrel with their father, you know. It wasn’t harsh enough to be called a quarrel.”
“Did you see them when they left?”
“Assuredly! They left at about half-past twelve Friday afternoon. They kissed me as usual when they went, and t
here was certainly nothing in their manner to suggest anything out of the ordinary.”
“You’ve no idea at all where they might have gone?”
“None.”
“Can’t even make a guess?”
“I can’t. Among the names and addresses I have given you are some of friends and relatives of the girls in other cities. They may have gone to one of those. Do you think we should—?”
“I’ll take care of that,” I promised. “Could you pick out one or two of them as the most likely places for the girls to have gone?”
She wouldn’t try it.
“No,” she said positively, “I could not.”
From this interview I went back to the Agency, and put the Agency machinery in motion; arranging to have operatives from some of the Continental’s other branches call on the out-of-town names on my list; having the missing Locomobile put on the police department list; turning one photograph of each girl over to a photographer to be copied.
That done, I set out to talk to the persons on the list Mrs. Banbrock had given me. My first call was on a Constance Delee, in an apartment building on Post Street. I saw a maid. The maid said Miss Delee was out of town. She wouldn’t tell me where her mistress was, or when she would be back.
From there I went up on Van Ness Avenue and found a Wayne Ferris in an automobile salesroom: a sleek-haired young man whose very nice manners and clothes completely hid anything else—brains for instance—he might have had. He was very willing to help me, and he knew nothing. It took him a long time to tell me so. A nice boy.
Another blank: “Mrs. Scott is in Honolulu.”
In a real estate office on Montgomery Street I found my next one—another sleek, stylish, smooth-haired young man with nice manners and nice clothes. His name was Raymond Elwood. I would have thought him a no more distant relative of Ferris than cousin if I hadn’t known that the world—especially the dancing, teaing world—was full of their sort. I learned nothing from him.
Then I drew some more blanks: “Out of town,” “Shopping,” “I don’t know where you can find him.”