Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 59, No. 1. Whole No. 338, January 1972

File #6: Beyond the Shadow by Joe Gores{©1971 by Joe Gores.}

Here is one of the most unusual Christmas Eve detective stories we have ever read… In the letter accompanying the original manuscript, the author, Joe Gores, short-story Edgar winner of 1969, wrote: “I tried to write this story on three levels. First, simply as a File Series story about the repossession of a car; second, as a new kind of procedural detective story; and third, as a ‘challenge to the reader’ (with a bow to E. Q.) in which the final twist, the revelation that explains all, comes in the last three words of the story.”

We’ll say no more now — but please take the author’s challenge seriously. It will add immeasurably to your reading enjoyment… Happy holiday!

Christmas Eve in San Francisco: bright decorations under alternating rain and mist. Despite the weather, the fancy shops ringing Union Square had been jammed with last-minute buyers, and the Santa Claus at Geary and Stockton had long since found a sheltered doorway from which to contemplate his imminent unemployment. Out on Golden Gate Avenue the high-shouldered charcoal Victorian which housed Daniel Kearny Associates was unusually dark and silent. Kearny had sent the office staff home at 2:30; soon after, Kathy Onoda, the Japanese office manager, had departed.

Sometime after 9:00, Giselle Marc stuck her shining blonde head through the open sliding door of Kearny’s cubbyhole in the DKA basement.

“You need me for anything more, Dan?”

Kearny looked up in surprise. “I thought I sent you girls home.”

“Year-end stuff I wanted a head start on,” she said lightly. Giselle was 26, tall and lithe, with a Master’s degree in history and all the brains that aren’t supposed to go with her sort of looks. That year she had no one special to go home to. “What about you?”

“I’ve been looking for a handle in that Bannock file for Golden Gate Trust. There’s a police A.P.B. out on Myra, the older girl, and since she’s probably driving the Lincoln that we’re supposed to repossess—”

“An A.P.B! Why?”

“The younger sister, Ruth, was found today over in Contra Costa County. Shot. Dead. She’d been there for several days.”

“And the police think Myra did it?” asked Giselle.

Kearny shrugged. Just then he looked his 44 hard driving years. Too many all-night searches for deadbeats, embezzlers, or missing relatives; too many repossessions after nonstop investigations; too many bourbons straight from too many hotel-room bottles with other men as hard as himself.

“The police want to talk to her, anyway. Some of the places we’ve had to look for those girls, I wouldn’t be surprised at anything that either one of them did. The Haight, upper Grant, the commune out on Sutter Street — how can people live like that, Giselle?”

“Different strokes for different folks, Dan’l.” She added thoughtfully, “That’s the second death in this case in a week.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Irma Carroll. The client’s wife.”

“She was a suicide,” objected Kearny. “Of course, for all we know, so was Ruth Bannock. Anyway, we’ve got to get that car before the police impound it. That would mean the ninety-day dealer recourse would expire, and the bank would have to eat the car.”

He flipped the Bannock file a foot in the air so that it fell on the desk and slewed out papers like a fanned deck of cards. “The bank’s deadline is Monday. That gives us only three days to come up with the car.”

He shook a cigarette from his pack as he listened to Giselle’s retreating heels, lit up, and then waved a hand to dispel the smoke from his tired eyes. A rough week. Rough year, actually, with the state snuffling around on license renewal because of this and that, and the constant unsuccessful search for a bigger office. There was that old brick laundry down on 11th Street for sale, but their asking price…

Ought to get home to Mama and the kids. Instead he leaned back in the swivel chair with his hands locked behind his head to stare at the ceiling in silence. The smoke of his cigarette drifted almost hypnotically upward.

Silence. Unusual at DKA. Usually field men were coming in and going out. Phones were ringing, intercom was buzzing. Giselle or Kathy or Jane Goldson, the Limey wench whose accent lent a bit of class to the switchboard, calling down from upstairs with a hot one. O’Bannon in to bang the desk about the latest cuts in his expense account…

The Bannock Lincoln. Damned odd case. Stewart Carroll, the auto zone man at Golden Gate Trust, had waited three months before even assigning the car to DKA. That had been last Monday, the 21st. The same night Carroll’s wife committed suicide. And now one of the free-wheeling Bannock girls was dead, murdered maybe, in a state park on a mountain in the East Bay. One in the temple, the latest news broadcast had said.

Doubtful that the sister, Myra, had pulled the trigger; if he was looking for a head-roller in the case he’d pick that slick friend of theirs, that real-estate man down on Montgomery Street. Raymond Edwards. Now there was a guy capable of doing anything to…

The sound of the front door closing jerked Kearny’s eyes from the sound-proofed ceiling. He could see a man’s shadow cast thick and heavy down the garage. It might have belonged to Trinidad Morales, but he’d fired Morales last summer.

The man who appeared in the office doorway was built like Morales, short and broad and overweight, with a sleepy, pleasantly tough face. Maybe a couple of years younger than Kearny. Durable-looking. Giselle must have forgotten to set the outside lock.

“You’re looking hard for that Bannock Lincoln.”

“Any of your business?” asked Kearny almost pleasantly. Not a process server: he would have been advancing with a toothy grin as he reached for the papers to slap on the desk.

“Could be.” He sat down unbidden on the other side of the desk. “I’m a cop. Private tin, like you. We were hired by old man Bannock to find the daughters, same day you were hired by Golden Gate Trust to find the car.”

Kearny lit another cigarette. Neither Heslip nor Ballard had cut this one’s sign, which meant he had to be damned smooth.

“The police found one of the girls,” Kearny said.

“Yeah. Ruth. I was over in Contra Costa County when she turned up. Just got back. Clearing in the woods up on Mount Diablo, beside the ashes of a little fire.” He paused. “Pretty odd, Stewart Carroll letting that car get right up to the deadline before assigning it out.”

“He probably figured old man Bannock would make the payments even though he wasn’t on the contract.” Then Kearny added, his square hard face watchful, “You have anything that says who you are?”

The stocky man grunted and dug out a business card. Kearny had never heard of the agency. There were a lot of them he’d never heard of, mostly one-man shops with impressive-sounding names like this one.

“Well, that’s interesting, Mr. Wright,” he said. He stood up. “But it is Christmas Eve and—”

“Or maybe Carroll had other things on his mind,” Wright cut in almost dreamily. “His wife, Irma, for instance. Big fancy house out in Presidio Terrace — even had a fireplace in the bedroom where she killed herself. Ashes in the grate, maybe like she’d burned some papers, pictures, something like that.”

Kearny sat down. “A fire like the one where Ruth died?”

The stocky detective gave a short appreciative laugh. “The girls got a pretty hefty allowance — so why were they three months’ delinquent on their car payment? And why, the day before they disappeared — last Thursday, a week ago today — did they try to hit the old man up for some very substantial extra loot? Since they didn’t get it—”

“You checked the pawnshops.” It was the obvious move.

“Yeah. Little joint down on Third and Mission, the guy says that Myra, the older sister, came in and hocked a bunch of jewelry on Friday morning. Same day she and her sister disappeared. She had a cute little blonde with her at the pawnshop.”

Kearny stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. The smoke filled the cramped office. Cute little blonde didn’t fit the dead Ruth at all.

“Irma Carroll,” he said. “You think her husband delayed assigning the Lincoln for repossession because she asked him to. Why?”

“So old man Bannock wouldn’t know his daughters had financial woes,” beamed the other detective. “We got a positive ident on Irma Carroll from the pawnbroker. Plus she was away from home Friday — the day the sisters disappeared.”

“And on Monday she killed herself. When did Ruth die?”

“Friday night, Saturday morning, close as the coroner can tell.”

“Mmmm.” Kearny smoked silently for a moment. James (Jimmy) Wright — according to the name on his card — had a good breadth of shoulder, good thickness of chest and arm. Physically competent, despite his owl-like appearance. With a damned subtle mind besides. “I wonder how many other local women in the past year—”

Wright held up three fingers. “I started out with a list like a small-town phone book — every female suicide and disappearance in San Francisco since January first. Three of them knew the Bannock girls and the Carroll woman, and all three needed money and burned something before they killed themselves. No telling how many more just burned whatever it was they were buying and then sat tight.”

Kearny squinted through his cigarette smoke. He had long since forgotten about spending Christmas Eve with Jeanie and the kids.

“I figure you’ve got more than just that. Another connection maybe between your three suicides and the Bannock girls and Irma Carroll—” He paused to taste his idea, and liked it. “Raymond Edwards?”

The stocky man beamed again.

“Edwards. Yeah. I’d like to get a look at that bird’s tax returns. Real-estate office on Montgomery Street — but no clients. Fancy apartment out in the Sunset and spends plenty of money — but doesn’t seem to make any. What put you on to him?”

“Two of the hippies at that Sutter Street commune gave us a make on a cat in a Ferrari who was a steady customer for psilocybin — the ‘sacred mushrooms’ of the Mex Indians. On their description I ran Edwards through DMV in Sacramento and found he holds the pink on a Ferrari. A lot of car for a man with no visible income not to owe any money on. And — no other car.”

“I don’t see any significance in that,” objected Wright.

“You don’t sell real estate out of a Ferrari.”

The other detective nodded. “Got you. And Edwards made it down to his office exactly twice this week — to pick up his mail. But every night he made it to a house up on Telegraph Hill — each time with a different well-to-do dame.”

“But none of them the Bannock girls,” said Kearny.

The phone interrupted. That would be Jeanie, he thought as he picked up. But after a moment he extended the receiver to Wright.

“Yeah… I see.” He nodded and his eyes glistened. “Are you sure it was Myra? In this fog… that close, huh?” He listened some more. “Through the cellar window? Good. Yes. No. Kearny and I’ll go in — what?” Another pause. “I don’t give a damn about that, we need someone outside to tail her if she comes out before we do.”

He hung up, turned to Kearny.

“Myra just went into the Telegraph Hill place through a cellar window. She’s still in there. You heavy?”

“Not for years.” You wore a gun, you sometimes used it. “And what makes you so sure I’ll go along with you?”

The stocky detective grinned. “Find Myra, we find the Lincoln, right? Before the cops. You get your car, I get somebody who ain’t shy to back my play. I’d have a hell of a time scraping up another of my own men on Christmas Eve.”

Kearny unlocked the filing cabinet and from its middle drawer took out a Luger and a full clip. A German officer had fired it at him outside Aumetz in 1944, when the 106th Panzer SS had broken through to 90th Division HQ.

He dropped it into his right-hand topcoat pocket, stuck Wright’s card in his left. He had another question but it could wait.

The fog was thick and wet outside, glistening on the streets and haloing the lights. They walked past Kearny’s Ford station wagon, their shoes rapping hollow against the concrete. He felt twenty years old again. From a Van Ness bus they transferred to the California cable, transferred again on Nob Hill where the thick fog made pale blobs of the bright Christmas decorations on the Mark and the Fairmont. A band of caroling youngsters drifted past them, voices fog-muted. Alcatraz bellowed desolately from the black bay like an injured sea beast.

They were the only ones left on the car at the turn-around in the 500 block of Greenwich. Fog shrouded the crowded houses slanting steeply down the hill. Christmas trees brightened many windows, their candles flickering warmly through the steamy glass. The detectives paused in the light from the tavern on Grant and Greenwich.

“Which way?” asked Kearny.

“Up the hill. Then we work around to the Filbert Street steps. My man’ll meet us somewhere below Montgomery.”

They toiled up the steep brushy side of Telegraph beyond the Greenwich dead end, their shoes slipping in the heavy yellowish loam. Kearny went to one knee and cursed. When they paused at the head of the wooden Filbert Street steps, both men were panting and sweat sheened their faces. The sea-wet wind off the bay swirled fog around them, danced the widely-scattered street lights below.

Just as they started down, the fog eddied to reveal, beyond the shadow of clearly etched foliage, the misty panorama of the bay. Off to the left was grimly lit Alcatraz, and ahead, to the right of dark Yerba Buena Island, the 11:00 o’clock ferry to Oakland, yellow pinpoints moving against the darkness. Then foliage closed in wetly on either side. The Luger was a heavy comfortable weight in Kearny’s pocket. He could see only about two yards ahead in the bone-chilling fog. When they crossed Montgomery the air carried the musty tang of fermenting grapes. The old Italians must make plenty of wine up here. There was another, more acrid scent; somewhere an animal bleated.

“They ought to pen up their goats once in a while,” chuckled Kearny’s companion. “They stink.”

More wooden steps in the fog. They paused where a narrow path led off into the grayness.

“Catfish Row,” muttered the stocky detective in Kearny’s ear. “My man ought to be around some—” He broke off as a short dark shape materialized at their elbow. “Dick?”

“Right.”

“She’s still inside?”

“Right.”

The newcomer pulled out a handkerchief to wipe the fog from his sharp-featured irritable face. Kearny got a vagrant whiff of scent.

“We’re going in,” breathed the stocky detective. “If the Bannock girl comes out, stick with her.”

“Right,” said Dick.

They started along an uneven brick path slippery with moss, then began climbing another set of narrow wooden steps which paralleled those on Filbert.

“Your man is talkative,” said Kearny drily.

“Canadian,” said the other. “A good detective.”

“But you don’t trust him in this.” Kearny then asked the question he hadn’t asked back in the office. “Why?”

Wright shrugged irritably. “I’ve got enough to do without having to watch him.” He didn’t elaborate.

They stopped and peered through the gloom at a three-storied narrow wooden house that looked egg-yolk yellow in the fog. Dripping bushes flanked it both uphill and down. There was a half basement; the uphill side had not been excavated from the rock. Myra Bannock must have entered by one of the blacked-out windows which flanked the gray basement door.

The two detectives climbed past it to the first-floor level. Here a small porch cantilevered out over the recessed basement. The front door and windows were decorated to echo the high-peaked roof of the house itself.

A big black man answered the bell. The hallway behind him was so dark that his face showed only highlights: brows, cheekbones, nose, lips, a gleam of eyeballs. He was wearing red. Red fez, red silk Nehru jacket over red striped shirt, red harem pants with baggy legs, red shoes with upturned toes.

“As-salaam aleikum,” he said.

“Mr. Maxwell, please,” said Wright briskly.

The door began to close. The dumpy detective stuck his foot in it and immediately a gong boomed in the back of the house. Kearny’s companion sank a fist into the middle of the red shirt as Kearny’s shoulder slammed into the door.

The guard was on his hands and knees in the dim hallway, gasping. His eyes rolled up at Kearny’s as the detectives stormed by him.

A door slammed up above. They climbed broad circular stairs in the gloom, guns out. Their shoulders in unison splintered a locked door at the head of the stairs. The room was blue-lit, seemingly empty except for incense, thick carpets, and strewn clothing of both sexes. Then they saw three women and a man crowded into a corner, a grotesque frightened jumble, all of them nude.

“Topless and bottomless,” grunted Kearny.

“But no Myra,” said Wright in a disgust that was practical, not moral. “Let’s dust.”

As they came out of the room, feet pounded down the stairs. They’d been faked out — drawn into the room by the slamming door so that someone who was trapped upstairs by their entrance could get by them. Peering down, Kearny saw Raymond Edwards’ head just sliding from view around the stairs’ old-fashioned newel post. Edwards. The real-estate promoter who didn’t promote real estate.

Kearny went over the banister, landed with a jar that clipped his jaw against his knee, stumbled to his feet, and charged down the hall. He went through an open doorway to meet a black fist traveling very rapidly in the other direction. The doorkeeper.

“Ungh!” Kearny went down, gagging, but managed to wave Wright through the door where Edwards and the black man had just disappeared.

There was a crash within, and furious curses. A gun went off. Once more. Kearny tottered through the doorway, an old man again, to see another door across the room just closing and the stocky detective and the guard locked in a curious dance. The black man had the detective’s arms pinned at his side, and the detective was trying to shoot his captor in the foot.

Kearny’s Luger, swung in a wide backhand arc, made a thwucking sound against the black’s skull. The black shook his head, turned, grabbed Kearny, who dropped the Luger as he was bounced off the far wall. A hand came up under his jaw and shoved. He started to yell at the ceiling. His neck was going to break.

The black shuddered like a ship hitting a reef. Again. Again. Yet again. His hands went away. Wright was standing over the downed man, looking at his gun in a puzzled way.

“I hit him with it four times before he went down. Four times.”

“Edwards?” Kearny managed to gasp.

“That way.” He shook his head. “Four times.”

The door was locked. They broke through after several tries and went downstairs to the empty cellar. But there was another door; the durable detective kicked off the lock. A red glow and a chemical smell emerged.

“Darkroom,” said Kearny.

A girl came out stiffly, her eyes wide with shock. It was Myra Bannock. A solid meaty girl in a fawn pants suit with a white ruffled Restoration blouse. Square-toed high heels made her two inches taller than either of them.

“Did you kill him, sister?”

“Y — yes.”

Over her shoulder Kearny could see Edwards on the floor with one hand still stretched up into an open squat iron safe. He was dressed in 19th Century splendor: black velvet even to his shirt and shoes. Once in the temple, a contact wound with powder bums. Kearny looked at his watch automatically. They’d been in the house exactly six minutes. Six minutes? It seemed like a weekend.

“Why’d you come here tonight?” demanded the other detective.

“Pic-pictures. I wanted—” Her jaw started to tremble.

“What kind of scam was Edwards running?” Kearny wondered.

“Cult stuff, I’m sure,” said Wright. “Turning on wealthy young matrons to the Age of Aquarius or something. Getting them up here, doping them up, taking pictures of them doing things they’d pay to keep their parents or husbands from seeing.” He turned sharply to the girl. “What kind of pictures?”

“Ter-terrible. Nasty things. We — he would give us ‘sacred’ wine to drink. It — distorted — able to see beyond… beyond the shadow. At the time everything seemed right.” A long shudder ran through her flesh like the slow roll of an ocean wave.

“You and Ruth both?”

“Yes. Both. Together, even. With my own sister, with Irma—” She drew a ragged breath. “I sneaked in to get the negatives. I found the safe — but it was locked. Then Raymond ran in. I was behind the door.” She suddenly giggled, a little girl sound. “He opened the safe, and I saw the pictures inside, so I walked up and — and I shot him. Just shot him.”

Without warning she started to cry, great racking sobs that twisted her face and aged her. The stocky detective was on his knees at the safe, dragging out a thick sheaf of Kodacolor negatives and a heavy stack of prints.

“Where’d you get the gun?” he asked over his shoulder.

“On Third Street,” she got out through her sobs. “We pawned our jewelry to pay for the pictures.”

“Same gun your sister was killed with?” asked Kearny.

“Does this have to go on and on?” she demanded suddenly, with an abrupt synthetic calmness. “I killed him. Just take me in and—”

“We’re private,” snapped Wright. “Hired by your father to find you girls. Tell us what happened up on Mount Diablo.”

His tone got through and started words again.

“I — we opened the pictures we bought — Friday morning after we pawned the jewelry to pay for them. Just prints. No negatives. We knew then that he planned to ask for more money. Irma was trying to raise it, but Ruth and I decided to just — well, kill ourselves. So we drove up to the mountains to—” Her face was starting to crumple, but the detective held her with his eyes. “To do it. But then I said I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. I would burn the pictures and then come back with the gun. But when I started burning them — when I—”

“Keep going,” said Kearny.

“Ruth just grabbed the gun from the glove compartment and ran across the little clearing. I ran after her but she stopped and — and—” She started to cry.

“There’s no time for that now!” snarled the stocky detective to her tears. “Let’s have it.”

“She put the gun against her head and it made such a little noise.” Her eyes were puzzled now. “Like a twig breaking. Then she fell down.”

“Where have you been since then?” asked Kearny.

“I paid for a Lombard Street motel with a credit card and just stayed there. I wanted to shoot myself but I couldn’t. Tonight the radio said they had found Ruth. I knew then that I had to come here and get the negatives, so she wouldn’t have died for nothing.”

“Just dumb luck she made it here without being spotted by the cops,” said Kearny. He swung back to her. “Where did you leave the Lincoln?”

“On Montgomery. In front of Julius’s Castle.”

“Give me the keys.” She did. He said to Wright, “The pawnbroker isn’t about to identify the gun, since he sold it to her illegally in the first place. So if the cops find it here beside the body with only Edwards’ fingerprints on it—”

The squat detective’s eyes narrowed. He paused in his picture shuffling. “Yeah. It’ll work. And they’ll think Edwards burned whatever was in the safe before he did himself in. Yeah. Hand her over to Dick, tell him to take her back to her old man so his doctor can knock her out before they call in the police. I’ll—”

“You’ll bum the pictures,” said Kearny. “While I watch.”

Wright laughed, then handed a slim sheaf of them to Kearny. As Myra had said, they were indescribably nasty — acts performed by people strung out on the mind-altering psilocybin. The things people got themselves into while looking for kicks. It was lucky Edwards was dead or Kearny might have been tempted to do the job himself. He handed the pictures back.

“Burn them,” he said harshly. “All of them.”

The squat durable detective did. A good man, good when the trouble started. Myra drifted away into the fog with Dick’s hand on her arm. The Lincoln was parked by the closed restaurant, as she had said, and the key started it. No cops spotted Kearny getting it back to the DKA garage…

Kearny came to with a start, found himself slumped in his chair, his head hanging over the back at an odd angle, the edge of the typing stand digging into him. He groaned. His stomach hurt, his neck was stiff. Must have fallen asleep after getting the Lincoln—

Mists of sleep and dream cleared. He dug strong fingers into the back of his neck. Midnight and after, and he and Jeanie still faced a night of trimming the tree. The kids were at an age when Santa arrived while they slept, so Christmas morning dawned to awe and delight.

He stood up. Damned neck. Sleep and dream. Dream.

Dream.

Dammit! He’d fallen asleep over the Bannock file, with Stewart Carroll’s wife’s suicide on his mind, and Ruth Bannock’s death, and had dreamed the whole crazy thing! Fog. Cable cars. The house on Telegraph Hill.

He rubbed his neck again. So damned vivid; but there was no Greenwich Street cable car. Had there ever been? Catfish Row was now Napier Lane. And the Christmas trees now had, not candles, but strings of electric lights. Goats and the smell of wine were both long gone, fifty years or more, from Telegraph Hill.

He flipped through the big maroon Polk Cross-Street Directory to 491 Greenwich. Mike’s Grocery. In the dream, a tavern. And in the dream, an Oakland ferry: they had stopped running a dozen years before. No Bay Bridge either — it had been built in the ’thirties. As had Treasure Island, also missing from the dream, man-made in 1938, ’39, as a home for the San Francisco World’s Fair.

All so damned vivid. Usually a dream faded in a few minutes, but this one had remained, sharp and clear.

Kearny started to sit down, frowning, then stood up abruptly and felt his topcoat hanging on the rack. Damp. It should have dried off from the rain he’d ducked through this afternoon. Well, it hadn’t, that’s all. A better way to check: merely pull open the middle drawer of the filing cabinet to look at the Luger—

The Luger was gone.

Kearny stood quite still with the hairs tinging on the back of his sore neck. Then he slammed the drawer impatiently shut. Hell, it could have been missing for weeks.

But what if the Luger was found in a yellow house on Telegraph Hill, a house with a dead body in the basement and a safe full of ashes? So? The gun had never been registered, and it was tougher to get fingerprints off them than people realized.

Dammit, he thought, stop it. It had been a dream, just a dream. And despite the dream he still had to find the Bannock Lincoln before the deadline. He strode around the desk, slid back the glass door, stuck his head out to look down the garage.

Kearny’s face felt suddenly stiff. Bright gleam of chrome and black enamel. Correct license plate. He went out, stiff-legged like a dog getting ready to fight, rapped his knuckles on the sleek streamlined hood. Real. The Bannock Lincoln. How in hell—

Larry Ballard, of course. Larry had been working the case, had spotted the car, repo’d it, dropped it off in the garage without even knowing that Kearny was asleep in his sound-proofed cubbyhole.

But what if Ballard hadn’t repo’d the car?

Well, then, dammit, Kearny would dummy up some sort of report for the client. They had the car, that was the important thing. And — well, there would be some rational explanation if Larry hadn’t been the one who’d brought it in.

Kearny left the office, setting the alarms and double-locking the basement door to activate them. He walked slowly down to the Ford station wagon. What did it all add up to? A crazy dream that couldn’t be true, because it was mixed up with San Francisco of fifty years ago. Certain things seemed to have slopped over from the dream into subsequent reality, but there was a rational explanation for all of them— there must be. He would take that rational explanation, every time. Dan Kearny was not a fanciful man.

He reached for his keys in the topcoat pocket and touched a small oblong of thin cardboard. He looked at it for a long moment, then with an almost compulsive gesture he flipped it into the gutter between his car and the curb. It had probably been in his pocket for a week — people were always handing him business cards. Especially guys in his own racket, guys with little one-man outfits sporting those impressive-sounding names.

Kearny snorted as he got into the station wagon. What was the name on his business card? Oh, yeah.

Continental Detective Agency.

I think I have invented a new kind of procedural detective story — what might be termed a “procedural fantasy.” While it uses the dream “story-within-a-story” which antedates even William Langland’s The Vision of Pierce Plowman (1550), it is also a Files Series procedural.

There are numerous clues in the story that suggest it is a dream, beginning with Kearny and Jimmy Wright walking past Kearny’s car as if it doesn’t exist in the time continuum the two men now inhabit. Some clues — for example, candles on Christmas trees — should be apparent to all readers; others — such as the nonexistent Bay Bridge — would obviously have more significance to those who are familiar with San Francisco.

Because the story grew out of my personal conviction that San-Francisco-in-the-fog still belongs to Dashiell Hammett, I have inserted quite a few clues pointing to the identity of Jimmy Wright.

First, the plot was frankly adapted from Hammett’s masterly Continental Op story, The Scorched Face; even DKA’s client (Golden Gate Trust) was borrowed from it, as were the first names of other characters.

Next, the detective on stakeout was obviously that old Continental hand, Dick Foley. Besides retaining his first name, I described him essentially as Hammett did in Red Harvest. (It was in Red Harvest, you’ll remember, that Foley suspected the Continental Op of murder and was sent away with the remark, “I’ve got enough to do without having to watch you.”)

As for Jimmy Wright himself, his physical description, reiterated throughout Beyond the Shadow, is that of the Continental Op. His slang is the Op’s slang, not that of Kearny’s age: “private tin” for private investigator; “bird” for a man (instead of a girl); and “let’s dust” instead of today’s hipper “let’s split.”

To those who may claim I have cheated in giving him any name at all (we know the Continental Op was nameless in Hammett’s tales), I would like to point out that the name itself is the clinching proof of his identity. As evidence I submit the editorial remarks of Ellery Queen which preceded Who Killed Bob Teal? in the July 1947 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (also included in the Dashiell Hammett original paperback titled Dead Yellow Women, 1947):

Q.E.D.

Joe Gores