Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories

Raoul Fauconnier Whitfield was one of the pioneers of the hard-boiled genre. From 1926 to 1934, he wrote around ninety stories for Black Mask alone, twenty of which were about Joe Gar, the Spanish-Filipino detective with the Colt .45 automatic in his back pocket. These stories were penned under the pseudonym Ramon Decolta. In Joseph T. Shaw’s groundbreaking anthology The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (1946), Whitfield is the only writer who is honored twice, once as himself and once as Decolta.

Whitfield’s maiden novel, Green Ice (1930), was immoderately praised by none other than Dashiell Hammett, who described the work as “280 pages of naked action pounded into tough compactness by staccato, hammerlike writing.” Will Cuppy, the influential book critic of the New York Herald Tribune, declared unequivocally that Green Ice was superior to Hammett’s own Maltese Falcon, which was published the same year. Despite all this praise, Whitfield is one of the “great uncollecteds” of the hard-boiled genre.

The reason for Whitfield’s lack of recognition may be that, like Longfellow’s youngest heroine, when he was good, he was very, very good, but when he was bad, he was not very good at all. Much of his non-Black Mask work was churned-out air-war material (he had flown scout-fighters in World War I), written hastily and seemingly without thought, simply for the money. Nonetheless, when one sorts through the abundance of tales for Air Trails, War Stories, Battle Stories, and the like, there is gold to be found amid the dross. Certainly, his Joe Gar tales for Black Mask demand to be collected.

While Shaw described Whitfield as a “hard, patient, determined worker,” it appears that his writing often took a back seat. He came from a privileged and moneyed background and was something of a dandy, a far cry from the hard-bitten tough guy that much of his fiction hints he was. When in the money, he preferred to carouse, mostly with Hammett, who was a close friend as well as a major influence.

Whitfield moved to Hollywood in the late 1930s, and after becoming an enormously rich man, he stopped writing altogether. Eventually his money ran out. When he contracted tuberculosis, his old friend Hammett had to lend him $500 to pay for his hospitalization. In January 1945, Raoul Whitfield died.

Despite his production of an abundance of low-quality work, Whitfield was without a doubt one of the founders of hard-boiled fiction. There were times when he created, seemingly without effort, a tough, cold-hearted, thin-lipped piece of fiction; and there were the even rarer occasions when he sat down and wrote a story like “Mistral,” which was first published in the December 15, 1931, issue of Adventure and may well be the best story he ever wrote.

J. A.

Mistral (1931)

It was the way he ate spaghetti that first attracted my attention. I’d put Remmings on the Conte Grande, in a more or less sober condition, and the noon sailing vessel had got away from the Genoa docks. I’d been hungry, and I’d wandered along the dock section looking for a restaurant. The one I’d picked had fooled me; it smelled pretty badly and there were thousands of flies. They were persistent and buzzy and they seemed to like Italian food. But the spaghetti was good. As I wound it round my fork I looked around the small, dirty room and saw him. He was eating the stringy stuff, but he was cutting it with a knife. That seemed a bit stiff, in Genoa, and after I’d done two plates of it, smothered with a good Parmesan cheese, I looked him over just out of curiosity.

He was big and dark. He had black eyes and a lean face — very lean for his size. It was a hard face, yet there was softness in his eyes. I caught him once when he was inspecting fly specks on the ceiling, and noticed the scar under his chin. His skin was white and the scar stood out pretty clearly. I’d seen knife scars before, and this looked like one. It was long and slightly curved, and a nasty red color. I got the idea that it wasn’t a very old scar.

His suit was of gray material, a quiet cloth. It fit him very well. I decided that he wasn’t an Italian. He caught me looking at him, and it seemed to make him nervous. The next time I glanced in his direction I caught him watching me without appearing to do so. His hands were nervous and the muscles of his mouth twitched.

While I was drinking terrible coffee I heard him say—

“Damn flies!”

His voice was thick, but without accent. Two boats had come to Genoa that day from the States — a big one and a small one. I decided that he was an American and that he’d just arrived. He paid his check and went past me as I was trying to think in terms of the lira. I smiled a little, and he started to smile. But something changed his mind. He looked worried and frowned, turning his head away from me. He was better than six feet tall and had very broad shoulders, but his body hunched forward when he walked.

I thought about him several times as I drove toward the border town of Ventimiglia. At St. Remo I got my trunks from the rear of the car and had a swim in the Mediterranean. It was around three in the afternoon and the day was hot. I forgot about the scarred one until I’d driven across the border into France and had reached Monte Carlo. Before the Casino I stopped to light a cigaret, and a great yellow machine pulled up. It was of Italian make — a very expensive type of car. The chauffeur was an Italian. And from the rear of the machine my scarred friend descended. He spoke to the chauffeur and didn’t see me, and I turned my back as he went into the Casino. I was very curious about him. That fly filled, dock section eating place, the knifed spaghetti and this expensive machine — there was something strange in the combination.

I followed him into the Casino, and knew at once he had never been there before. He didn’t seem to know just what to do, and the ornate reception hall that lay ahead of him didn’t offer any solution. I felt that he’d expected to see the gambling tables immediately and he was confused. An attendant approached and spoke to him in French. He merely asked if he could be of service, but the scarred one did not understand.

I was very close to him and I acted on impulse. At his side I smiled.

“You buy an admission ticket in this room on your left,” I said, and gestured toward the room with the low counters and the cashiers behind them.

He stared at me with his dark eyes, and then they got very cold. The warmth went from them so suddenly that I started to turn away. But he said—

“Thanks, buddy.”

I nodded. Well, I was sure that he was an American and that he didn’t speak French and that he was afraid of something. And I was interested. But I knew that showing interest would be about the best way of learning nothing. So I sauntered into the room on my left and reached the billets de jour counter. I handed over my passport and ten francs and received the billet, after my name and number had been jotted down. It was all done pretty rapidly, and I was turning away when I heard the scarred one say—

“One admission—”

The Frenchman behind the counter smiled and asked for his passport. The scarred one didn’t understand, so I said, still helpfully butting in:

“He has to see your passport. Formality here.”

The dark eyes widened and his right hand went to the inside pocket of his gray coat. I caught the red color of the passport binding, but that was all. It slipped out of sight again and the scarred one swore.

“Must have left it — at home,” he muttered in his thickish voice.

That was a pretty bad one. He wasn’t giving me credit for having eyes or brains. But I smiled at him.

“You can still get inside,” I said. “Give him your name and the name of your villa or hotel. Tell him you’re very anxious to make a little play — you feel lucky. Smile at him.”

I expected him to say he couldn’t speak French, and to ask me if I would help. And I was prepared to tell him that the man behind the counter could speak five languages quite well, and English was one of them. But I was fooled. The scarred one smiled at the man behind the counter; he said that he’d left his passport in his hotel, and that he felt lucky and would like to try roulette.

The Casino employee smiled back, said that it was not good to leave one’s passport behind, and asked him his name. The scarred one said—

“Tom — Thomas Burke.”

I knew that he was lying. The man back of the counter continued to smile and asked the hotel and the town where Mr. Burke resided. The scarred one said—

“I stay at Cannes, at the Grand Hotel.”

The Grand Hotel was very safe. Practically every French and Italian Riviera town has a Grand Hotel, and I once knew a village that had two for a time. But it happened that the date was August the third, and the Grand Hotel in Cannes had only been opened three days. There were very few persons staying there; it did much better in the Winter season. The proprietor was a friend of mine; I had been at the hotel for a time the night previous and was quite sure no Thomas Burke was staying there.

The scarred one received his billet, which ticket entitled him to play roulette, but not baccarat. I went from the room ahead of him and into the large reception hall. The scarred one halted and lighted a cigaret very popular with Americans. I saw the color of the package reflected in the mirrors about the room. Then I passed into the salon and went to a table that was not too crowded.

The ball fell on red numbers four times in succession. I went to a change booth and bought four thousand-franc, oblong chips. Returning to the table, I placed one of the oblongs worth forty dollars on black. The ball rolled against the spin of the wheel, and finally dropped into the groove of a black number. A croupier raked another oblong chip against mine and I picked both of them up and left the table. I had won forty dollars in one play, and that completed my particular system for beating the Casino. It was not very often that I won my forty dollars on the first play, but quite often I was one bet ahead of the Casino before I lost my four or five oblongs.

And whenever I was that one bet ahead — I quit. I never attempted to gamble my limited funds against the Casino’s almost unlimited ones. And I remembered being told by one of the biggest gamblers of the Riviera that if all those who played at the Casino played as I did, it would be pretty tough for Monte Carlo. It was betting small money against big money, betting that the Casino would go broke before they did, that made it easy for the Casino.

As usual, I was pleased. I cashed in my chips and looked around for the scarred one. In the large salon I failed to see him immediately. When I did see him I strolled over to the table where he had seated himself. He had seven or eight hundred dollars worth of chips before him, and he was playing thousand-franc oblongs on the line between two numbers. He won once while I was watching, and his face was expressionless. The world’s greatest gambling casino did not awe him now; he was gambling. And it was easy to see that he was accustomed to gambling.

He won again, just before I left, but he did not smile. The pay-off was eighteen oblongs for his one. Seven hundred and twenty dollars. And it was his second eighteen-for-one win in several minutes.

Outside the Casino I stood for some seconds and thought about the passport I’d seen. I decided that the scarred one was a crook and did not care to take a chance.

Either the passport he had was a bad one and he didn’t wish it to get in Monte Carlo records, or it was a good one and he was afraid of a leak somewhere. Or he was afraid of something that might happen in the future, and a checking up at the Casino might follow.

Showing a passport at the border was something else again. And there was just the barest possibility that my scarred friend was a big shot, and might have been recognized and not allowed to play. That has happened at Monte Carlo. The Casino authorities are very careful about some details, and, as every one knows, they are very careless about others.

I forgot about him while driving the Grand Corniche. The day was very hot; there was not a breath of wind. At Nice I stopped at the Frigate bar for a champagne cocktail, and at a little beach between Nice and Cannes I got damp trunks from the rear of my small car and had another swim. Then I drove on again, wondering if Remmings on the way back home from Genoa were sober yet. I decided that he probably was not.

It was a bit cooler when I drove round that point of land to the east of Cannes. The town lay in a semicircle; the waterfront was crescent-shaped before me. On the far side were the Esterel Mountains coming down to the sea. It was a nice sight. A harsh horn from behind caused me to pull to the right of the road along the Croisette, and with a rush and another burst from its horn, a great yellow machine went past. I recognized the machine and the chauffeur, and caught a glimpse of the scarred man in the rear seat. He was grinning broadly, and I guessed that he d won quite a bit. But why hadn’t he stayed on, playing his winning streak to the limit?

The Grand Hotel was along the Croisette a distance beyond the spot where I should have turned off to my small hotel. But I didn’t turn off. I drove on slowly, and a square or so from the Grand I passed the big yellow machine, moving slowly. The chauffeur was grinning.

I sat in the car near the Grand and smoked a cigaret. When I went inside there was no sign of the scarred one, but my friend the proprietor was about. We went into his little office and talked about other things and then about the scarred one. Yes, he’d arrived. Traveling very light in a hired car. Just two bags, without many seals. His name was Anthony Senna; he was from New Orleans, in America. He had a room with bath, but not facing the Mediterranean.

I raised my eyebrows and my friend smiled at me.

“It was not a matter of money, I think,” he said. “It was a matter of wind.”

“Wind?”

My friend the proprietor nodded.

“Monsieur Senna, he does not like the wind,” he explained. “It keeps him awake of nights, it annoys him. And when there is a mistral, as you know, there is wind. Much wind.”

There was certainly much wind when there was a mistral. For three or six, and on rare occasions for nine days there was the wind. It blew straight in from the Mediterranean, out of a cloudless sky. It spread sand all over the Croisette — the curving road along the beach, with the fashionable bars and shops. It ripped awnings and sent smart yachts behind the concrete seawall to the tiny harbor. It battered ten-foot waves over the sand, and the spray from them was salty on your lips, a square from the Croisette. And all the time the sky was blue.

And the scarred one who had stated in Monte Carlo that his name was Thomas Burke, and in Cannes that it was Anthony Senna, did not like the wind. This one who had cold eyes when spoken to, and who cut spaghetti with a knife in a dirty, waterfront eating place in Genoa, and who played thousand-franc chips at Monte Carlo — the wind kept him awake at night.

“He stays here for some little time?” I asked my friend.

The proprietor shrugged.

“On the Riviera, who can tell how long one stays?” he countered. “But I have given him a room on the top floor, on the corner, facing the rear.”

“On the corner, facing the rear?” I repeated, puzzled.

I said that because one of the peculiar things about top floor corner rooms at the Grand was that they had only the two windows at the rear. There was no side window. And there was no room next to them, but rather very large linen closets. The rooms were apt to be hot at this time — very hot.

The proprietor nodded, and I said—

“I suppose he looked at some other rooms?”

My friend seemed a little surprised at my interest. But then we talked often of unimportant things — of things that seemed unimportant to us, and yet very important to others.

“Monsieur Senna looked at several rooms and selected the one at the east corner,” the proprietor told me.

“Well, in event of a mistral, he will hear only a little wind there,” I said.

And my friend agreed.

“The walls are very thick, and the window screens quite tight. He will hear only a little of the mistral,” he agreed.

A telegram from Paris took me to St. Raphael the next day. I was searching for a German by the name of Schmidt, who had stolen many marks from a small town bank somewhere near Berlin, and who the Paris office of the agency with which I was connected had heard was in the French Riviera town. The office had heard incorrectly, though the Schmidt at St. Raphael slightly resembled the German thief. He was a good fellow, this Schmidt, and after we had stood each other a few rounds of drinks I left him and drove over the Esterel Mountains toward Cannes. It had started to blow, and when I took my machine over the highest stretch of road, with the Mediterranean almost a thousand feet below, the car rocked from the gusts of wind.

“Mistral,” I said. “The beginning of one.”

And I thought about my friend with the scar on his chin and the warm eyes that got so suddenly cold. I drove pretty fast and reached Cannes around four. The wind was increasing; awnings were being hauled in and yachts were steaming into the small harbor, behind the concrete breakwater. Sand was swirling in eddies across the Croisette. The two most patronized of the beach bars, the Miramar and the Chatham, were deserted — it was three hours before cocktail time.

I went to my hotel and got the file that held my photographs. It was a big file in a special case, and I’d gone over two hundred photos the night before. I did another fifty and then quit. In the fingers of my right hand I held the likeness of my scarred one. The scar was missing, and the big one was wearing his hair differently. But he was my man. I turned the photo over and read:

There was a description of the scarred one that did the trick. I guessed that he’d got heavier, was wearing his hair differently and was only using that Senna tag when he was forced to. He knew that there was the carte d’identité business, probably, and that the local police would have his name from the hotel. I decided that his passport was all right, but that he hadn’t wanted Senna to get into Monte Carlo records. He’d played safe at the Grand, fearing the police, in event of any sort of accident, might check his passport.

Well, I knew who he was. And I remembered that Al Fess had been a big shot in Chicago, but had been driven out by Capone and had followed Horace Greeley’s advice to go West. He’d worked the big gambling barge beyond the three mile limit, and then things had started to go wrong. I remembered that the barge had been blown up once, and set fire another time. And not long after that Fess had been shot to death. My scarred one had been indicted and tried. No conviction. That trial would have taken place along in September or October, I figured. About a year ago.

I shoved the photo back in its proper file and smoked a couple of cigarets. The wind was cutting up now, but I didn’t mind it. The screens in my room’s three windows rattled, and something loose on a cornice somewhere made a pounding noise at intervals. I thought of the room Senna had selected and smiled a little grimly.

The theory I liked best was that Senna had murdered Al Fess, a year ago. He’d kept out of sight for awhile after his trial. Fess had been pretty big. Perhaps Senna had tried to move around a bit in the States. But it had been too tough. So he’d come across and had landed at Genoa. But he was still worried. He liked rooms with thick walls and without other rooms next to them. He liked them on the top floor. He was lonely and in a strange country, but he was afraid of strangers. In other words, Tony Senna must be a hunted man.

After a little while I had a swim in a sea that was getting rough by the minute. The waves were three and four feet high and, in the manner of the Mediterranean, they pounded to shore very close to each other. When I got back to the hotel after my swim the mistral was still picking up force. I changed into light flannels and slipped a Colt automatic into a deep hip pocket of the trousers. I couldn’t quite make up my mind about what I wanted to do with Senna. That is, whether I wanted to talk with him, or try to talk with him. Just out of curiosity — for he wasn’t wanted.

A chasseur brought in another telegram. After he’d taken my franc tip and had gone, I read it. It was coded simply — from the Paris office. I was to forget about Schmidt for the time. A client in Paris was very anxious to locate one Anthony Senna, who it was thought had landed in Genoa the day before. There was a description of Senna in code, and it included the scar. I was to locate Senna and wire the office. That was all. Except that there were the letters V.I., which meant “very important.”

I smoked another cigaret and smiled at the break putting Remmings on the Conte Grande had got me. And I felt a little sorry for Senna. My hunch was that Senna hadn’t come far enough away, or that he’d come to the wrong place. In any case, business was business. I went to the French telegraph and sent a coded wire to Paris. It was to the effect that one Anthony Senna who answered the required description was staying at the Grand Hotel at Cannes, France.

When I thought of the surprise this speed would cause, in Paris, I decided I rated a drink or two. So I drove against a rising wind and parked near the Chatham. Senna wasn’t there. It was after seven and the bar was crowded. The pajamas the women wore were as colorful as usual but had long ceased to startle me. I went outside, having trouble getting the door opened against the mistral wind, and went inside the Miramar.

At first I didn’t see my man. This bar was larger and noisier and more crowded. I went toward a small table in a far, dark corner. And then I saw Tony Senna. He was slouched low in one of the big lounging chairs. His big body was slumped, his arms were at his sides. From where he sat he had a view of the whole bar and of the entrance. On the table before him was a glass of beer. His face was twisted; he looked miserable.

When he caught sight of me he straightened a little. He started to smile. I waved a hand carelessly and watched the hard expression come into his eyes. But it went away, and he sort of grinned. He hesitated, then said thickly—

“Alone — have a drink?”

I hesitated. Being an agency man has its Judas moments. This was one of them. I’d sold this man out, and he was asking me to drink with him.

I said—

“All right — sure.”

I dropped into the lounge chair across the table from him, leaned forward.

“My name’s Benn,” I said, lying because I knew he would lie. And he did.

“Mine’s Burke,” he replied. “Tom Burke. Thanks for that tip at the Casino. I was kinda worried in there, and maybe I didn’t act right with you.”

I waved that off. A gust of the mistral wind made things sing and rattle outside. The big one shivered.

“Mistral,” I said pleasantly. “Just getting into action.”

He swore.

“Hate wind. Gets me. Mistral, eh? What in hell’s that?”

I ordered a whisky sour.

“Just wind,” I told him. “If it’s a real mistral it’ll last three days, or six — or nine. The nines are pretty rare.”

He sat up straight and blinked at me.

“Like this — for nine days!” he muttered. “Lord — I’d go crazy.”

I nodded.

“Some people do,” I said. “There’s a sort of unwritten French law — it applies to men and women living together. If one of them murders the other along about the eighth or ninth day, it doesn’t count.”

Senna stared at me.

“No kiddin’?” he muttered.

“That’s what they say — pretty hard to convict in such a case. The wind gets at you after four or five days. I’ve never seen a nine day affair, but I’ve been around for a couple of the six day sessions.”

He muttered something I didn’t catch and sipped his beer. Every few seconds he’d look toward the entrance, and his dark eyes were sharp. No one came in unless he saw him. I thought of the wire I’d just sent, and felt strange about it. The agency game can give you lousy moments.

When the waiter came with my whisky sour I lifted it slowly and said cheerfully—

“Here’s to crime!”

He grinned at that and raised his beer glass. I frowned at it.

“Beer’s no good here,” I told him. “It’s a waste of time.”

And he said a little grimly, without thinking too much—

“Yeah, but it doesn’t hurt my eyes or nerves any.”

There was something about the scarred one that I liked. I didn’t bother figuring just what it was. Perhaps I felt a little sorry for him. I had a very strong hunch that death was coming his way. His actions didn’t hurt my hunch any. He wasn’t exactly scared, but he was nervous. I wanted to know something, so I went after it.

“You haven’t been over here long, have you?” I asked, and didn’t make my voice too anxious.

He looked at me narrowly.

“I’m an engineer,” he said. “I’ve been down in Mexico — alone a lot. Had a couple of months leave due me, and grabbed a freighter for Genoa. Just an idea.”

I nodded. I didn’t believe that he was an engineer, but I did believe that he’d been in Mexico and that he’d been there alone. He was fed up, and he’d picked the Riviera and Cannes. And it hadn’t worked. And he was drinking with the man who had spotted him, turned his name up.

There was a crash of glass, somewhere beyond the bar. The entrance door opened and a group of people came in, laughing and letting the wind carry them along. Senna hunched down in the chair again.

“I hate wind,” he muttered. “I gotta get out of this town.”

I thought of my wire and didn’t like that idea. So I said:

“It’ll be blowing all along the Riviera. And you’d have to go pretty far back in the mountains to dodge this breeze. You can’t be sure — it may not stick. Tomorrow morning you may not feel a breath of wind.”

That was an ironic thought. A fast plane could reach Cannes from Paris in five hours. The regular planes did it in six. If some one wanted to see Senna badly enough, if I wasn’t going haywire on my basis and hunches, some one could be at the Grand Hotel around midnight. A good plane could edge into the wind and get down all right.

Senna said—

“You think it may let up, eh?”

I nodded, and finished my whisky sour.

“Sure,” I said. “Have one on me?”

He had another beer, and I had another sour. I tried to get him to open up a little, but he didn’t want to talk. He kept his eyes on the entrance door and on human faces that passed near our corner. I said—

“You played at the Casino — any luck?”

He grinned, showing white teeth. Then his dark eyes got hard and frowning.

“Yeah — too much, maybe,” he stated.

I looked puzzled.

“Too much?” I said.

He got sort of a silly smile on his face only it wasn’t all the way silly. After a few seconds of silence he said a little grimly:

“I’ve only been this lucky a few times in my life. And right after those times — I got unlucky. You know how it is.”

I finished my second sour and rose.

“Yes, sure,” I said. “I know how it is. See you again.”

He didn’t seem surprised at the abruptness of my departure.

“Yeah,” he said. “So long.”

I went out into the wind, got to a phone in the Miramar Hotel and called the office of the small flying field at the end of town. I was known there as Jay Benn, and sometimes I used a ship for a fast hop to Germany or Switzerland or Spain. In Cannes I was thought to be a pretty good American, with enough money but not too much. A fellow who liked that section of the coast.

I got Leon Demoigne on the phone and asked him to ring me if a plane landed around midnight. He said that he would if I wanted him to, but that he could tell me now that one was coming down from Paris. She was a fast monoplane, and there would be two passengers aboard, beside her pilot. I told him that was not the plane I was thinking about, and he said he’d advised by wire against the flight, but that the ship was apparently coming along anyway. He ended up by saying that it was probably bringing along a couple of crazy Americans who had heavy dates.

Even in French his idea didn’t sound right to me. I thought it was perfectly right that the plane was bringing along a couple of Americans. But I was quite certain they weren’t coming because of the kind of heavy dates Leon anticipated. And I was damned sure they weren’t crazy.

I had dinner alone at a small Russian restaurant, and the black bread didn’t taste as good as usual. The thing that got me was that I was pretty sure Tony Senna wasn’t wanted by the police. I was pretty sure that crooks were using a reputable agency, as they had used agencies before, to trace another crook. I had the feeling that I’d put Senna on the spot, and I didn’t like it. He was a killer and probably a lot of things that went with it, but it seemed to me he wasn’t going to have much of a chance. I could almost hear guns — and I could almost see the big scarred man going down. I might be all wrong, but the set-up framed things that way.

At ten o’clock I went back to the hotel and found the telegram I expected. It was from McKee, the agency head, and it was brief. I read, “Fine fast work clients pleased drop further investigation of Senna.” It was in code. And it convinced me that death was coming close to the big fellow. I was to drop out, which was not the ordinary method. The clients would handle things themselves. And they were pleased.

I lay on my bed and listened to the mistral wind howl. It was getting on my nerves too. After a half hour or so I made a decision. Business was business, but some of it took away too much self-respect. I drove to the Grand Hotel. Senna was not in. When I got to the Miramar bar he was just where I’d left him. He’d been eating sandwiches, and he was still drinking beer. He grinned at me.

“I couldn’t go out in that stuff,” he said. “So I just stuck here.”

I nodded and pulled a chair close to him. I ordered coffee and fin. He was looking at me with his dark eyes narrowed.

“Damn mistral!” he muttered. “You think it’ll last three days, maybe six?”

I said:

“You never can tell.” Then I went right into it. “Listen, Senna,” I said softly and without paying any attention to his start of surprise, “you got a tough break in Genoa. I happened to eat in the same spot and see you. I saw your passport edge, at the Casino in Monte Carlo, and I know some things. My name isn’t Benn — and I’m connected with an international detective agency. My office wired me to look for you, and I wired back that you were at the Grand Hotel here. Two Americans are coming down by plane — clients of the Paris office of my agency. They’re coming down to see you, and they’ll get here about midnight. It took me a little while to figure things out, and when I got them figured out I decided that you were being spotted out for killing Al Fess on his gambling barge, off Santa Monica. I didn’t like my part, so I’m warning you. That’s all of it.”

His big hands were gripping the table edge, and getting white with that grip. His dark eyes were slitted and cold. I kept my right hand on the Colt grip.

“I don’t think you’re the whitest guy that ever lived, Senna,” I said. “And I’ve got my hand on a rod now. So don’t do the wrong thing. What I want to get across is that my hunch is the law isn’t coming after you. Not my kind of law. You’ve got a couple of hours, and you don’t like wind. I’m all right, because I wired you were staying at the Grand, and you were. You can hire a machine—”

I stopped. Senna had taken his whitened knuckles away from the table. He was relaxed in the big chair, and his face held a terrible grin. He chuckled. I stared at him and he shook his head slowly.

“Lord!” he breathed. “Imagine a dick tipping me off! Imagine that!”

I smiled a little. But I didn’t say anything. He kept on shaking his head. After awhile he lighted a cigaret.

“I wouldn’t waste too much time, Senna,” I told him. “This wind may not hold up that plane too much.”

He shook his big head.

“I ain’t going away, Benn — or whatever your name is,” he said slowly, tonelessly. “I’ve been leaving places for a long time now. Going places — far places. Spots I didn’t like, see? They’ve been after me a long time. I ain’t saying I did for Fess, but if ever a guy rated a dose of lead, that rat did, see? But me, I’m staying here.”

“Don’t be a fool, Senna,” I said. “The law doesn’t want you—”

He looked suddenly tired.

“These guys are worse than the law, Benn,” he said wearily. “I tell you, I’m tired of running away. I’m staying here. Now you—” he raised a big forefinger and pointed it at me — “get the hell out of here!”

I said as I rose slowly:

“Well, I warned you. I may be all wrong — but I tipped you, Senna.”

There was irony in his eyes.

“Sure, Benn,” he said. “Now you get the hell away from me.”

The plane landed at 12:10 by my wristwatch. It landed in a nasty wind, after circling the lighted field three times. She was a small monoplane, cabin type. I had my car on the Frejus road, with the lights out. After about ten minutes a car that had been waiting at the field turned into the main road and moved toward Cannes. I had to drive very fast to follow it. I was several squares behind when it reached the Grand Hotel. The wind was raising the devil with the palms along the Croisette; it seemed to be steadily increasing.

I parked a square away and went into the hotel by a side entrance. When I reached the main lobby no one was about but the concierge. He knew me. He said that the two gentlemen had said they didn’t want Monsieur Senna disturbed, but was he in his room. And he said that he had told them that Monsieur Senna was at the Blue Frog. And they had thanked him and departed. They had not engaged rooms and they had not brought any baggage into the hotel.

“How do you know Monsieur Senna is at the Blue Frog?” I asked.

The concierge shrugged.

“He has told me that he thought he would go there,” he returned. “He has asked me for a quiet place to drink, where there is music and yet not a crowd. And where the lights would not hurt his eyes.”

“C’est ça,” I muttered grimly.

Well, it was so. The Blue Frog was a small drinking and dancing place; there was a two-piece orchestra and the lights were dim. It was not smart and it didn’t get much of a crowd. I reflected that dim lights would give Senna a better chance, and that a small crowd would mean less chance of humans other than those concerned being hit by stray bullets. I wasn’t sure that Senna cared much about other humans, but every man has his particular code of what he calls honor. Senna was no exception.

The Blue Frog was just off the Route d’Antibe, the main business street of Cannes, at the east end of town. It was set back in some palms and there were no buildings very close to it. In my car I drove fast, parked a half square away and hurried on. I went in a side entrance and spotted Senna right away. His eyes were narrowed on mine and he was smiling. He wasn’t slumped in any lounging chair this time. He sat on a small, wooden chair. It had no arms. Both hands were in the pockets of his light suit coat, and he was seated slightly to the left of the table. He faced the side entrance directly, and the main entrance to the place was in a line with his big body.

I stood for several seconds looking at him. Then I went to the bar. I ordered Scotch, straight. The two-piece orchestra was playing “Ay-yi-yi,” with the guitar dominating the piano. There were only a few people inside, mistrals kept folk at home. And that was good, too.

When I lifted my drink, my fingers were shaking a little. There was a mirror beyond the bar, and I looked into it. I could see the front entrance. The barman saw my shaking fingers and guessed wrong. He said that the mistral was not good, it did bad things with one’s nerves. I agreed and downed the Scotch. As I set the glass on the counter my eyes went to the mirror, and I saw a tall, hard faced man come in. I turned and looked toward the side entrance. A shorter, heavier man stepped inside the dimly lighted room, letting a rush of wind in with him. A girl laughed shrilly, and the orchestra continued its swift rhythm.

I think they both saw Senna at the same instant. With so few people in the place that wasn’t hard. I saw the shorter one of the two stiffen, and his coat material came up from the bottom. There were two terrific crashes. No Maxim silenced guns, these. There were screams. The short one took one step forward and crashed to the floor.

I swung around and stared at Senna. There was another gun crash and his big body jerked. But his right hand came up. His left battered the table aside and he walked toward the main entrance and toward the tall, hard faced man. There was another gun crash and Senna’s left arm hung limp at his side. His gun was up, extended in his right hand. He kept walking, his face twisted in a terrible smile. The tall one was staring at him; he fired again but the bullet went wild. It tore artificial flowers from a wall behind Senna.

And then Senna worked his gun. It crashed again and again. I counted four shots, and then all sound was merged into a terrible roar. When the roar died away, I went toward the two motionless figures on the floor near the door. The tall one was dead. Senna was alive; he said weakly, as I leaned over him:

“The others — done?”

I left him and went to the side entrance door. The thickset one was dead, too. The bullet had ripped upward through his mouth. I went back and kneeled beside Senna.

“Both done,” I told him.

He tried to grin, but it was too tough. He said, very weakly:

“Sure — I got — Al Fess.” And a few seconds later he said, “Guy — I can’t hear — that damn wind—”

“Take it easy, Senna—”

I couldn’t think of anything else to say. He closed his eyes and after a few seconds more he said weakly:

“Funny — if it hadn’t been for that damn wind — I might have — run again. But it just — made me sore — made me want to — stick here—”

He didn’t say any more. He was dead when a very excited gendarme reached my side and asked a dozen questions one after another. I answered one of them and went to the bar for another drink. It was some time before I got it. As I sipped it I decided that it was just as well Senna had had a funny idea about the wind, if he had had it. You can’t always be running away from things.

The mistral lasted three days, and when it was over the sun was very hot.

The Blue Frog did a big business; the proprietor put a frame around a hole made by one of the bullets that missed Senna. The smart crowd went in for a look, and the French townspeople went in too. The proprietor told me he would have liked to frame one of Tony Senna’s bullets, but that couldn’t be done. Senna hadn’t missed.

There were a great many hard-drinking detectives in the pulp magazines and novels of the 1930s. Consumption of alcohol in large amounts not only was a reaction to the demons of poverty and the Depression, but was considered chic in some circles, a badge of honor in others. Nick and Nora Charles, Dashiell Hammett’s husband-and-wife team, are crime fiction’s champion boozers of that bygone era. A close second is Louis Frederick Nebel’s wisecracking newspaperman, Kennedy of the Free Press.

Kennedy is not just a user of alcohol, but an admitted abuser, a serious drunk. In one of his many appearances in the pages of Black Mask, “Bad News” (March 1934), he imbibes so much liquor that he is barely able to function as either a news hawk or a human being. Nevertheless, Kennedy has a wry wit and an unparalleled “nose for news,” and his adventures in tandem with Police Captain MacBride of fictitious Richmond City are unfailingly exciting and entertaining pulp fare. The first Black Mask appearance of the popular duo was in “Raw Law” (September 1928), the first of five installments in a series billed as “The Crimes of Richmond City.” Thirty-six other tales featuring Kennedy and MacBride in major and minor roles followed over the next eight years, culminating with “Deep Bed” in the August 1936 issue. “Backwash” (May 1932) is a novelette concerned with the kidnapping of a governor-elect; it showcases MacBride as typically tough and professional, Kennedy as typically haphazard and sodden, and their relationship as typically adversarial.

Nebel began selling regularly to the pulps when he was in his teens, using his own name as well as such pseudonyms as Eric Lewis and Grimes Hill; detective fiction and northern adventure stories (he once worked in Canada’s north woods) were his primary interests. The Kennedy and MacBride stories were one of the two prominent series he created for Joseph T. Shaw during Shaw’s ten-year editorial reign at Black Mask. The other starred “Tough Dick” Donahue, an operative for the Inter-State Detective Agency who was not above using illegal methods to achieve his goals. Donahue appeared in fifteen stories between 1930 and 1935, a half-dozen of which were collected in Six Deadly Dames (1950). Nebel’s third major series was published in Dime Detective from 1931 to 1937. This one concerned another hard-bitten private eye, Cardigan, whose escapades were chronicled in forty-three novelettes, six of which were gathered in book form under the title The Adventures of Cardigan (1988).

In the early 1930s, Nebel wrote his only three novels: two suspense tales, Sleepers East (1933) and Fifty Roads to Town (1936), and a bibulous mainstream story of Depression-era New York City, But Not the End (1934). In 1937, he abandoned both novels and the pulps to concentrate on stories for Collier’s, Liberty, and other slick magazines, a career in fiction at which he was successful for more than twenty years. His last few stories marked a belated return to the mystery field, being published in such genre periodicals as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

B. P.

Backwash (1932)

Kennedy, leaning on the bar with his left elbow and with his chin propped on his left hand, laid his right palm on the top of the siphon, pressed down with the heel of his hand and fizzed seltzer hard into a glass of rye. Rye and seltzer geysered, splashed down on a newspaper George the barman was reading.

George looked up. “Well!” he growled.

“My error,” Kennedy said, absently. He raised a hand to his lips to camouflage the disorders of indigestion, then stirred his drink with a glass swizzle stick.

“You’re drunk,” George said indignantly, patting the despoiled newspaper with a towel.

Kennedy raised his drink. “I say with Dryden, ‘Bacchus ever fair and young.’ This bootleg is the fairest in color and the youngest in age I’ve ever guzzled.”

“What are you talking about? That there liquor is a month old.”

Kennedy’s eyes drooped; he opened them with an effort. “What the hell is that radio mumbling about?”

“Dunno.” George turned and gave one of the dials a twist. “Police alarms,” he said.

“Is there no escape from monotony?”

“Shut up a minute,” George growled.

A blunt voice was broadcasting:

“Richmond City Police Headquarters. Attention all cars. All cars attention. Governor-elect Cortland Wayne left his home on Westover Boulevard at seven o’clock this evening. He was driving a black Cadillac coupe; license number six — B as in bottom — four — six; license number six — B as in bottom — forty-six. A black Cadillac coupé. He was to speak at the Foursquare Club at thirty minutes past seven o’clock. He did not arrive there. He is not home. It is now eleven-fifteen o’clock. Foul play is indicated. Stop and investigate any black Cadillac coupe. Report. Again: Attention all cars. All cars attention. Governor-elect Cortland Wayne...”

Kennedy stood back on his heels, blinking.

George said: “Cripes, did you hear that?”

Kennedy weaved. “Where’s my coat?”

“Over on that hook.”

Kennedy wheeled, lost his balance, regained it and lunged towards a wall rack. He unhooked his topcoat, got his right arm into the left sleeve, dropped his hat. George bounded around the bar and straightened him out. Kennedy stepped on his hat. George picked it up and slapped it, battered as it was, on Kennedy’s head. Kennedy smashed into the door, got it open and barged out.

Before the door had stopped swinging, it whipped open violently. Kennedy ran headlong into the bar, drained his drink, turned and sloped out again. He hove on to the sidewalk, overran the curb, regained the sidewalk and broke into something between a skip and a hobble. A block farther on he reached a main drag, stood swaying breathless on the corner. He put fingers in his mouth and whistled. A taxi’s brakes screeched.

Corinne Wayne was a tall woman of thirty. Her hair was russet and full of unexpected gleams and shimmers. Her eyes were large, luminous, her mouth full and exquisite. She had pale satiny skin touched with a faint glow of damask on the cheeks. Her throat was columnar. At college she had been adjudged the most beautiful girl in her graduating class.

MacBride, appearing in the drawing-room doorway, ducked his spare-boned head.

Corinne, rising from a tapestry wing-chair, said: “I’m so glad you came, Captain.”

She extended a hand whose wrist was encircled by a bracelet of hammered silver links. MacBride, carrying his derby in his left hand, crossed the room and took her hand with his right.

“I came right over,” he said.

Her eyes were red-rimmed and she held a crumpled damp handkerchief in her left hand. She put the handkerchief to her lips, gestured wearily to a divan, sat down in the wing-chair. MacBride unbuttoned his dark blue Chesterfield, dropped to the divan and held his derby on one knee. His blue suit was neatly pressed, his black shoes shone, his shaven face was ruddy from the cold.

He said: “Cort left here at seven, huhn?”

“Yes.”

“Sharp?”

She nodded. “He left at seven. It was Mason’s night off, so Cort drove the coupe himself.”

“He wasn’t nervous, was he?”

“No. He was in the best of spirits.”

“When did they call from the Foursquare Club?”

“At eight. I told them he’d left. I began to worry. I called them again at nine and he hadn’t arrived. I spoke with Carl Davenport. He told me not to worry. Then they started telephoning a lot of places — where they thought he might have gone. I did also. We didn’t want to notify the police and start a hullaballoo until we were sure. At eleven I couldn’t stand it any longer. I called Carl Davenport. He hadn’t been successful. I told him I was going to report. What do you suppose has happened?”

MacBride said: “We’ve got all the patrol cars on the lookout. I’ve ordered out special squads and all the flyers from every precinct. We’ve notified the authorities in surrounding towns.”

“Do... do you suppose it’s... abduction?”

MacBride looked at the inside of his hat. “It has the earmarks, Mrs. Wayne.”

“Oh!”

He gestured with his hat. “In which case we can rest assured that he’s come to no bodily harm.”

“But... but it might be political opposition. It might be some gang. You know that as soon he gets in office he’s going to push through the Rittenmoore Bill. And if a gang—”

The skipper frowned. “I wouldn’t think of that, Mrs. Wayne.”

She muffled a sob in her handkerchief.

MacBride said: “If it’s a kidnap job, you’ll get word by tomorrow. A phone call. Or maybe they’ll make Cort write a letter. Whatever it is, let me know right off the bat.”

“But if they demand money — and if you interfere...”

“Cort’s an old friend of mine,” MacBride said. “You can bank on it that I’ll do whatever I think’s best for him. For the time being, try to be calm. You’re not going to gain anything by worrying. That’s an easy thing for me to say, but try it, anyhow. And do as I say. As soon as you hear, let me know.”

She said, haltingly: “And if you’re not in the office?”

“When a job like this breaks, I sleep at Headquarters.”

There were footsteps on a hardwood floor; they became muffled on a rug; drummed louder again on wood. Corinne looked towards the reception hall. A man came long-legged in through the doorway.

“Corinne—”

Seeing MacBride, his voice stopped and his footsteps slowed down. He was a tall man, darkly handsome; young and with a lean smooth poise. He bowed.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

Corinne had risen. A hand started towards her breast, fell away back to her side.

“Captain MacBride,” she said. “Mr. Figueroa.”

MacBride got slowly to his feet.

Figueroa bowed again but remained where he had stopped. “How do you do.” And to Corinne: “I just heard over the radio—”

“Yes, yes,” she sighed, looking away.

“I came to see if there is anything I might do.”

She sighed. “Nothing. Nothing yet. Thank you so much, Manuel.”

Figueroa had taken a handkerchief from his breast pocket. He rubbed his palms on it, then patted his temples and shrugged his shoulders at MacBride. “It’s quite terrible,” he said.

MacBride, thinking of the woman, said: “I wouldn’t say that. It’s nothing to give a rousing cheer about, but on the other hand there’s no sense getting all steamed up.”

Corinne sat down, rested her elbow on an arm of the chair and sobbed quietly in her handkerchief.

Figueroa said: “Is there no clue?”

“We only got the report half an hour ago and everything’s being done.” MacBride buttoned his Chesterfield. “Remember what I told you, Mrs. Wayne. Good-night. Good-night, Mr. Figueroa.”

Figueroa’s voice was off-key — “I’m glad to have met you, Captain.”

“Thanks.”

MacBride strode to the door, went across the reception hall towards the front entrance. A maid appeared and opened the latch. MacBride, glancing in an elongated mirror beside the open door, saw Figueroa standing in the drawing-room doorway, watching him. MacBride’s step faltered. But he picked it up. He did not look around. He went out. He went down four veranda steps, passed beneath a white porte-cochere and took a pale cement walk that crossed a lawn between blue spruces. He could see the right front cowl-light of the police phaeton. He heard low querulous voices.

Achermann, the driver, was holding a spare figure by the arm and saying: “Nix, I said; nix.”

“Hey,” MacBride said.

“It’s this pest,” Achermann complained.

Kennedy said: “It’s getting so nowadays that a private citizen takes his life in his hands every time he goes out.”

“Yeah?” MacBride muttered. “Who’s been picking on you?”

“Achy, here—”

“Oh, yeah?” MacBride muttered. “Well, I told Achy to kick any stray newshawks where it would do good if they clowned around.”

“Ah, my pal,” Kennedy sighed.

Achermann said: “The reason I’m holding him up, Cap, is that the souse can’t stand. He fell out of a taxi, fell over the curb and started crawling up the path there on hands and knees.”

Kennedy’s tired smile wavered. “I’ve got to get a statement from Mrs. Wayne.”

“Put him in the back, Achy,” MacBride said. “Get in, Kennedy! Get in!” Impatient, he took Kennedy away from Achermann, lifted him bodily and piled him into the tonneau. Climbing in, he said: “Shoot, Achy.”

The phaeton moved, purred two blocks to an automatic traffic light, made a U-turn on the green and headed back towards midtown. The wind was raw and rowdy. Stars twinkled back of a mackerel sky. The canvas top rat-a-tatted petulantly and the wind whistled in varied keys past lights and braces.

Kennedy was slumped in one corner, his hat still as battered as when he had left George’s. Knuckles of his right hand were skinned. There was a ragged tear in his trousers.

“You make me sick,” MacBride complained. “What the living hell induced you to take a header off the water wagon again?”

“Well, it was about seven o’clock, and I was off duty, and at the time it bore the hallmark of a swell idea.”

“If you were off duty, you gonoph, then what’s the idea of this do-or-die monkey business over an interview?”

Kennedy hiccoughed. “I never — uh — thought of that.”

MacBride leaned forward and said alongside Achermann’s ear: “Twenty-five Olympia Street.”

Kennedy went to sleep. Number 25 Olympia Street had an electric sign swung out over the sidewalk. It said: Turkish Baths.

MacBride said: “Give me a hand, Achy.”

Sergeant Otto Bettdecken was holding down the central room desk. He lowered a half-eaten hamburger from his red jowls when MacBride came in and clamped a half-drunk bottle of Canadian ale between his commodious knees.

“Anything?” MacBride clipped, preoccupied.

“A lady’s Pomeranian pup ran away at 10:35 and answers to the name of Goo-goo and—”

“I mean about Wayne.”

“Oh, Wayne. Oh, yes. Oh, that Caddy coupe: Sorensen found it parked on Luke Street between Jockey and Havemeyer. It was empty. Jaekel went right down to look for fingerprints.”

“Any blood?”

“Sorensen says nope.”

“When’d he find it?”

“Just after you left. At twenty minutes past eleven.”

MacBride said: “Give Sorensen special mention. That was snappy work. And for crying out loud wipe the beer suds off your chin.”

He went down the wide corridor and climbed a flight of stairs. He walked with his hands thrust into his overcoat pockets and his eyes were still preoccupied. He entered his warm neat office, took off his coat, draped it on a hanger and clipped the hanger on a costumer. He absentmindedly flipped specks of dust from his hat and then put the hat on top of the costumer.

He went to his desk, picked up a charred briar and stuffed it from a glass jar of tobacco. He lit up. He watched the match burn till the flame almost touched his fingers. He popped the match into a glass tray.

Dropping into the swivel-chair with the worn leather cushion, he leaned back and propped his heels on the desk. Thought went round and round in his eyes.

He pressed a button and turned towards a rectangular brown box. A voice said: “Yes, Captain?”

“Did you notify all cars that Cortland Wayne’s coupe was found?”

“All them.”

“Okey. Broadcast to cars 36 and 38 in the Fourth Precinct to investigate every house in Jockey, Havemeyer and Luke Streets. Vacant houses also. Question residents and report. Broadcast to all cars: Search blind alleys, stop all speeding cars and investigate. Investigate any suspicious character.”

He returned to his pipe.

A knock sounded on the door.

“Come in,” MacBride said.

Carl Davenport loomed in the doorway. “Glad I found you, Captain.”

“Hello, Mr. Davenport. Sit down.”

They shook and Davenport took a straight-backed chair, laid one hand on the other atop a silver-knobbed walking stick. He was in evening clothes. A great rock of a man nearing seventy, the rock was crystallizing at the edges. A mane of hair, white and flowing like white silk, swept back from a broad impressive forehead. White thatching for eyebrows. A jaw that still defied loose jowls. Blue eyes like a glacial lake, deep-set and penetrating.

“No word, I understand.”

“No,” MacBride said. “They found the car.”

“Where?”

“Luke Street. Abandoned.”

The blue eyes had a touch of frost. “What do you make of it, Captain?”

MacBride puffed. Puffed again. Said: “Offhand, I’d say it’s a kidnap. We’ll get the shake-down in the morning.”

“We?”

“Mrs. Wayne, of course.”

Davenport cleared his throat. Latent power was evident in his voice when he said: “I came here to ask you, Captain, in no shape, manner or form to attempt to interfere.”

“I don’t get you.”

“I mean insofar as the safe return of Cortland is concerned. Mrs. Wayne has money. We, his aides, have plenty and we intend putting forth any amount to insure his safe return. This gubernatorial campaign was a stiff one. Cortland won by a fair margin. His inauguration will mark an epic in the history of the state. We who have stood beside him do not want this to have been all in vain. As a boy, I held Cortland on my knee. I saw him grow to be the youngest governor-elect this state has ever known. I coached him. I might say I have been his mentor. Anything I could have done, anything I can do, was and is not too much.”

MacBride said, pointing his pipe-stem: “I know. I get you. Well, I’ve known him too — ten years. I knew him when he was Assistant State’s Attorney. I tell you I think he’ll be the swellest governor this state’s ever had or ever will. Take it from me, I’m just as anxious as you are to get him back safely. When that’s done — if it is a kidnap—”

“You don’t think it might not be?”

“There’s no telling. The Rittenmoore Bill will make carrying a gun without a license a penal offense carrying a minimum sentence of fifteen years. He’s sworn to put that bill through. If it is a kidnap, and when he’s back safe, I’ll go after the guys. My word of honor that there’ll be no police interference beforehand.”

Davenport stood up. “Captain...” His hand was extended.

MacBride rose and gripped it.

Davenport said: “I am infinitely happy that we both realize in Cortland Wayne the man of the hour. I am glad that through the years I have been his guiding light, willing to sacrifice anything in order to put him one notch upward, always. I am not bragging. Forgive me my elation.”

“Any idea who’s behind this kidnap — if it is a kidnap?”

“None,” Davenport said. “You?”

“No-o.”

“You say that peculiarly.”

MacBride straightened. “I was just thinking. It’s nothing. Be seeing you, sir.”

Davenport’s keen eyes flicked MacBride’s spare-boned face. He started to say something. Cleared his throat instead. He went out with a slow sedate step.

MacBride reached for a phone. “Moriarity or Cohen around?... Send him up.”

It was Cohen. Dapper, well-dressed, one-time a fast lad in the prize ring. “And me holding four kings.”

MacBride said, looking at his pipe-bowl, “Name of Manuel Figueroa. Friend of Mrs. Wayne. Find out what he does, where he goes, who he knows. And keep it to yourself until you tell me. Start now.”

“Where should I start?”

“That’s your job, Ike.”

Indefatigable in his haphazard way, Kennedy drifted in at a quarter to one, found MacBride in shirt sleeves over a bowl of chili and a mug of coffee. Kennedy looked refreshed, though weariness was still in his eyes, around his mouth; a droll weariness that seemed more of the soul than of the body.

“Thanks for the bath, skipper.”

“Don’t mention it. Boy-oh-boy, were you crocked!”

Kennedy expired into a chair, his weathered hat lopped over one ear. “Please omit the post mortems. It was from Othello: ‘O God, that men should put an enemy into their mouths to steal away their brains.’ Remember?”

“How the hell would I remember something I’ve never read?”

“Ah... that leads around to something else again. Something Spanish this time.”

“Huh?”

“You read it once. You should remember.”

MacBride finished the chili. “Go on, go on.”

“Manuel Figueroa.”

MacBride choked on a mouthful of coffee, spattered the desk.

Kennedy went on drowsily: “A year ago. A play called Spanish Bayonet put on by the Amateur Art Theatre. The feminine lead was played by Corinne Wayne; the male by — you guessed it the first time — Manuel Figueroa. Quite a lot of pawing on the part of the male in the third act. Recollect?”

“No.”

“You should.”

“All right, then. Now what’s the connection?”

“Well, I was pretty whoofled tonight, but not so whoofled that I didn’t recognize Manuel hot-foot into the Wayne casa. You were there. Must have seen him.”

“I did.”

“Two and two make — what?” He laughed. “Or rather, one and one — make what?”

MacBride scowled. “All right. What?”

“Love’s a funny thing,” Kennedy sighed.

“Are you still drunk?”

Kennedy pushed his hat down over his eyes, bent his head so that only his mouth was visible. His mouth began wearing a droll smile.

MacBride swiveled his chair. His voice dropped to a hard, blunt tone. “Whatever you think, Kennedy, you keep it to your sweet self.”

“A crack like that indicates that you think similarly.”

“You heard me!”

“Could I help hearing you?”

MacBride glared at the mouth that was wicked and wise — and gentle — and a little weak.

A steam radiator began clanking and went on clanking while neither MacBride nor Kennedy said anything.

The morning papers cut loose. It was something to shout about, the disappearance of a governor-elect. Newsmen arrived from other cities by train, bus, car and plane. They hit Headquarters like a deluge and circulated throughout its chambers. They practically took over two rooms in the building, robbed other offices of chairs and tables.

High pressure special correspondents arrived in baggy coats and carrying portable typewriters. A bootlegger succeeded in delivering a case of gin through a back entrance. Two Boston newshawks drove up with two cases of ginger ale and a gunnysack of ice. An enterprising New York correspondent tried to get the local electric company to wire the room and then tried to get a special wire directly from the room to his home office. MacBride sat on that idea like a ton of brick.

He was pointed, saying to the gang: “Now pipe this, you eggs. I’m on this job — me personally. What I say around this scatter pretty much goes and I’m telling you now, one and all of you, that I’ll not stand for any lousy shenanigans. It’s only through a kind-hearted commissioner that you’re being allowed to stay in these rooms. I don’t want any prowling around halls. I don’t want to hear raps on doors. I don’t want any spitting on the floor or see any bright cartoons on the walls. When there’s any news — you’ll get it. In the meantime, no monkey shines or you’ll get slid on to the pavement.”

A wiseacre, winking at a confrère, said: “Any pungent supplement to add to that, Captain?”

“Maybe a punch in the kisser for smart Alecks like you,” MacBride said, and went out.

When he strode into his office Ike Cohen was sitting on the desk.

“So you got back,” MacBride said. “Well?”

“Figueroa’s a young sculptor. Like Mrs. Wayne, he’s still a member of the Amateur Art Theatre. He’s got a studio on West Walnut Street. He owes two months rent there. He owes his tailor three hundred and ten dollars. Owes his bootlegger a hundred and twenty-five. Has a balance in his bank of eight hundred and six dollars and forty-three cents.”

“Where’d you find all this?”

“I went around to art museums first thing this morning. I saw one of his figures. I got his address there. I went over and he wasn’t in. I got the door open and fanned his studio. I busted open a trunk — fixed it again — and found six photographs of Mrs. Wayne. He’s also modeled a bust of her — from the waist up. It was locked in a closet. I saw letters from an insurance company reminding him he was two hundred bucks in arrears. There was also a letter from an auto finance company reminding him he was four hundred in arrears. I didn’t find a bill marked ‘paid’ in the whole place. I found a lot of photographs, all locked up, of other women with tender sentiments on the backs. I also found — this.”

He drew a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, passed it to MacBride. It read:

MacBride looked up. “Oh, yeah?”

“Uhuhn.”

“Where’d you find this?”

“On the floor back of his desk. It must have fallen down.”

MacBride folded the note carefully, tucked it into his wallet, looked keenly at Cohen. “Keep this to yourself, Ike.”

“Sure. What do you think?”

“What do you?”

Cohen shrugged. “Maybe I’m naturally bad-minded.”

“Well, I’m not. And I think with you.”

“That makes Corinne Wayne a nice girl then.”

“Yeah, swell.”

“And Figueroa a gigolo.”

MacBride said: “I’ve got an old-fashioned word for that guy.”

“What’s that?”

“Since I joined the Boy Scouts I promised not to swear.”

Cohen yawned. “On the eve, so to speak, of the governor-elect’s inauguration. And umpteen reporters with their teepees pitched downstairs.”

“There’s one thing we’ve got to do, Ike.” MacBride squared off in front of Cohen and chewed on his lip. “We’ve got to keep Cort Wayne’s name as clean as we can.”

“You’re my boss, so what now?”

“Okey, Ike. Pound your ear a while and come up smiling.”

Number 48 West Walnut Street was a three-storied stucco building with a broad skylight on the north slanting roof. The broad glass hall-door was open. MacBride climbed the stairs and knocked on the door of the top apartment. Figueroa opened the door. Cigarette smoke made blue-gray skeins across his face.

“Oh, yes — Captain MacBride.”

“Hello,” MacBride said.

Figueroa let him in, closed the door. A small cubicle served as a reception hall. Off to the left was a living-room. Beyond, a broad airy studio. Figueroa regarded the back of MacBride’s bony head as the skipper strode into the living-room.

“Nice place,” MacBride offered.

“Won’t you sit down?”

“Thanks.”

“I have some rather fair Scotch—”

“No thanks. Never touch it till I’ve had lunch.” He crossed his legs, regarded the inside of his derby. “I see you’re an artist...” He gestured towards the studio.

“Sculptor.”

“Busy?”

“Moderately so.”

MacBride turned his hat around and looked at the crown. “You act too, don’t you?”

“Just as an amateur. I’m a member of the Amateur Art Theatre.”

“That’s right. You’ve played with Mrs. Wayne there, haven’t you?”

“Quite a bit.”

“I take it you’re a friend of the family.”

“Yes. Yes, indeed.”

MacBride nodded. “Yes, I noticed you ran right over to see if you could help Mrs. Wayne. Cort’s an old friend of mine. Great guy. I’ve got a hunch he’s very much in love with his wife. She’s a very good-looking woman. Should make a swell hostess at the capital. I believe in that. I’m old-fashioned that way. I believe a wife should help her husband in every way she can; stick by him; do nothing that might embarrass him — or even ruin him. It’s her duty. Don’t you?”

“Why, yes. Why, yes of course.”

MacBride had been stuffing his pipe. He lit up. “Have you any other source of income besides what you get out of your profession?”

“No, none.”

MacBride puffed. “We’ve been checking up on all of Cort’s friends and so-called friends. We happen to know exactly how much you have in the bank. I hope you don’t mind. It’s just a sort of precautionary measure. We’ve done the same on lots of others. You don’t, do you?”

“Well — I’d never thought about it. But if — if that comes in line of police routine — why, of course, I can’t help minding.”

MacBride stood up and looked at the inside of his hat. “You kind of catch on then how tough it would be on you if, say, in a day or a week or a month or so your bank balance jumped a number of thousand dollars.”

Figueroa stepped back. “I don’t quite see—”

MacBride put on his hat. “Think it over.” He walked to the door, opened it. “Good morning, Mr. Figueroa.”

He went out.

Corinne’s hand shook and that made the plain white sheet of paper shake and rustle. She dropped on to the divan and read the message over again. She looked at the clock on the mantel. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. She sat staring at the message and, after a while, not seeing it. Her eyes filled and a few tears rolled down her cheeks.

She rose with a little outcry followed by a sob which she muffled in her handkerchief. She stood for a moment staring at a sunlit window and sobbing softly. Her tall body shook. She went by fits and starts across the room, into the reception hall. She sat down at a telephone table. She read the message again. She unpronged the receiver and put it to her ear. The hand that held it trembled.

“Please... Police Headquarters.”

While she waited she blew her nose softly and used the knuckles of her hand to wipe her eyes.

“Captain MacBride, please... Hello... hello. Captain MacBride?... This is Mrs. Wayne. Will you come right over?”

The receiver going back into the prong made not a sound.

It took MacBride twenty minutes flat to get over. He came in like a clean blast of wind bringing some of the cold outdoors with him.

“Yes, Mrs. Wayne.”

She gave him the letter. He read it:

There was no name signed.

“How’d it come?” MacBride said.

“Special Delivery.”

She showed him the envelope. He folded the letter and inserted it in the envelope, on which name and address had been printed.

“At least,” the skipper said, “he’s safe. Who’ll you send?”

She thought. “All of our friends are one way or another connected with politics. Except Manuel Figueroa.”

MacBride blinked.

She looked at him. “Cort thinks so much of him. He’ll do anything for me, Manuel will. I’ll... call him.”

“Wait. Can you get the money?”

“I’ve a small checking account. But Carl Davenport told me not to worry. He said as soon as I heard I should call him and he’d turn over the proper amount.”

MacBride went to the phone and made a call. “Mr. Davenport, this is MacBride... Can you come right over to Wayne’s place?... Can you bring fifteen thousand in centuries?... Good. Yeah, right away.”

He hung up and turned to find Corrine regarding him. “Now if you’ll call Mr. Figueroa...”

She put the call through.

They went back into the drawing-room and she sank exhausted into the divan. “I hope everything will work out.”

He could see her profile. His lips drew tightly across his teeth and relaxed when she turned towards him.

He said: “Everything’ll be okey.”

“Oh, I hope so... I hope so.”

Davenport arrived first, breathing heavily. The maid tried to take his overcoat but he detoured around her and went straight into the drawing-room, doffing his hat.

“Mrs. Wayne. Captain.”

“The letter came through,” MacBride clipped and passed it to Davenport.

Davenport put on pince-nez and read, his lips moving silently. “Well,” he said, “it is bitter medicine, but nothing compared with the assurance of Cort’s safe return. I trust, Captain, that there will be no interference.”

“I gave you my word.”

“Who is going?”

There was the sound of footsteps and Figueroa strode quickly into the room, stopped short, made a curt bow.

Corinne was saying: “Manuel, you’ve got to do something for us, if you will.”

“Of course...”

His dark eyes shot from MacBride to Davenport.

“Manuel,” she went on, “we have a letter from Cort’s abductors demanding fifteen thousand. We... Mr. Davenport has the money. Will... will you take it?”

Figueroa squinted. “What?”

“Will you take the money to the place they specify in the letter?”

A flush seemed to creep over his dark cheeks, his eyes appeared to become dazed.

“Manuel, will you?”

“But... but—”

MacBride cut in. “Mrs. Wayne thought you’d be only too glad to do this for her.”

Figueroa started to draw his handkerchief from his breast pocket. He didn’t. He fussed with the cuffs of his coat, twisted his neck in his collar.

Davenport was leaning back on his heels, looking for all the world like a fat critical prelate. But his eyes were narrow-lidded, his lips a little tight.

Figueroa coughed. “Yes... yes of course. Only too glad to... to do whatever I can.”

Davenport beamed and his voice came heavy-timbered: “This is very fine indeed.” He drew a long brown envelope from his inside pocket.

MacBride was saying: “You’ll take your car, Mr. Figueroa. Hit the Old West Road out of town. Two miles beyond Sandy Crossing, where the railroad’s built an underpass — two miles beyond there you’ll see the ruins of a farmhouse on the right. Check by your speedometer. In front of the house is one of those old R. F. D. boxes. Slip this package in there and drive on. Don’t wait. Drive like hell once you’ve planted the money.”

Figueroa’s dark eyes were glazed. “I see. Had I better go armed?”

“No. Absolutely no.”

“I see. Will you... will the police cover me?”

MacBride shook his head. “No. We want to get Cortland Wayne back whole. If police followed you there might be a jam and he might get hurt.”

Figueroa’s voice had become a whisper. “At what time?”

“Reach there at about ten. Leave here at nine-thirty.”

Figueroa straightened, moistened his lips. “Of course,” his whisper said.

Manuel Figueroa entered his studio apartment, kicked the door shut with his heel, scaled his hat clear across the room, heaved out of his swanky polo coat. Stopping short, he stood erect, very tall; placed a hand at either temple and then drew the hands backward over his ebon hair. His lips were set in a tight ironic line, his dark eyes were alive with crossfires of thought.

“So, Manuel, old fellow!” he said aloud.

He used a key to unlock a closet door. From the closet he drew a bust of Corinne Wayne. He used a hammer to chip away any likeness. He opened a trunk, took out six photographs of Corinne Wayne. In a fireplace where embers still glowed he burned the pictures, knelt and watched the paper become waferlike ashes.

Rising, he stood spread-legged and massaged his palms slowly together. From his inner pocket he drew the long brown envelope. He crossed to his desk, sat down and carefully counted the bills. Exactly fifteen thousand.

He went out and down to a corner drug-store, entered a telephone booth and called the ticket office at Union Station.

“Reserve for — ah — Courtney Blaine a drawing-room on the nine-fifty p. m. train for New York. That reaches New York at eleven-fifty, doesn’t it?... Yes, I want a reservation on the fast express.”

He hung up and thumbed the telephone book. He made a call to a local agent for a transatlantic steamship company. “Can I get a stateroom on the Magnetic leaving New York at twelve-thirty tonight?... Well, please arrange and see. I shall drop by at four o’clock... Mr. Figueroa.”

He caught a taxi outside and went to a luggage store. He carried two suitcases to the Hotel Ardmore and checked in as Louis Massara. He went out again and took a cab to his bank, where he withdrew seven hundred dollars, leaving a hundred and six dollars and forty-three cents.

It took him an hour to buy two new suits, a sports outfit with knickers, shirts, socks, underwear and shoes. He specified that these articles be delivered at his hotel not later than five o’clock. Then he picked up his reservation at Union Station; went to the steamship ticket agency and found he was able to secure a stateroom to Le Havre, France. When he arrived back at his apartment he had eighty dollars in cash — sufficient to get him to New York and aboard the Magnetic.

Into a gladstone he threw odds and ends; shaving articles, slippers, a silk robe, his passport. And in one of the compartments he stuffed the packet containing fifteen thousand dollars.

He mused aloud, “And when that is gone there will be women abroad eager to support a handsome young man. Ah, yes, Manuel!” He chuckled liquidly to himself.

He left the paraphernalia of his profession. He left his trunk, a large valise, some objects of art. He left three suits in the closet, and an overcoat. He left four pairs of shoes. Going out with the gladstone, he left the door unlocked. His car was in a garage up the street, but he did not take it. A taxi carried him to the Hotel Ardmore.

Kennedy said: “On the up and up, skipper, hasn’t there been any word from Wayne — or about him?”

“Kennedy,” MacBride said, “I told you that when there is any news it’ll be broadcast. Another thing I’d like to know is, who the hell invited you in my office?”

“Pardon me if I seem not to have been made aware of the fact that you were issuing invitations. Are they engraved ’n’ everything?”

“Waltz me around a little more and it’ll be engraved on your nice sweet jaw, my son.”

Kennedy seemed very comfortable in the armchair. “Captain, I like the atmosphere of your office. The warmth, the genial and abounding good-will exuded by the Department’s chiefest exponent of right makes right and wrong, wrong. I carry home with me to my drab hall bedroom a vision of your kindly, smiling face, the tranquil benediction of your smile—”

“Oh, yeah?”

“The feeling of good fellowship, the remembered homilies, the beatific aspect of your profile and, by the way, how is Mrs. Wayne?”

MacBride took his eyes from the clock, which indicated a quarter to nine. “You heard me, sweetheart. Scram.”

“And by the way, what do you think of Manuel Figueroa?”

MacBride stood up, darkening. “Kennedy, I’m in no mood to be monkeyed with.”

“I was just getting around to telling you, O Captain, that I’ve found out things about Figueroa. Three years ago he lived in Boston, was supported by Mrs. K.T.P. Weems-Colbrooke, the wife of the president of the Western Ocean Mercantile. Supported for a year. He has no standing as a sculptor anywhere. He’s never had a piece exhibited, has never sold — well — not even a miniature of the Washington Monument. The lady’s daughter fell for him. He got in Dutch with the girl and lammed. No complaint could be made because he held the whip-hand over mama. This never got in the papers. I remember the name, though — Figueroa. Will Smythe gave me the yarn two years ago. He used to be publicity agent for the Western Ocean Mercantile. I’ve a good memory.

“It recalls another anecdote from the amours of our hero. At a newspaper club in New York three years ago I met Jim Mapes, late of the Indianapolis Star-Express. Love in the midlands. Mrs. Jennifer Carnes, wife of a potent midland banker, had Figueroa under her wing. One day her husband noticed a twenty-thousand dollar rope of pearls missing from her collection. She said she’d lost them. You figure it out. A month later our hero spreads himself in a Boston studio. Cute?”

MacBride drummed on the desk with his fingers and bored Kennedy with a hard stare. “Kennedy, you spring that in your lousy rag and you’re through in this city. You spring that and blow up Cort Wayne’s balloon and I’m on you like hell-fire.”

“I’m just telling you, old tomato. I’m just trying to suggest, possibly, the X quantity behind this abduction. I’m just trying to give you a faint idea of what kind of a crum this greaseball is.”

MacBride sat down. “Thanks, Kennedy. Thanks. I’ve got ideas about that baby myself. But you give me more. You make me begin to—” He cut himself short and snapped a look at Kennedy. One eye narrowed. He unlocked a drawer and hauled out a bottle of Golden Wedding. He uncorked it, set two glasses side by side.

“This calls for a drink, Kennedy.”

“Ah... ‘drink down all unkindness,’ skipper — with the Bard of Avon.”

“I still think you’re going ga-ga, but what the hell.”

They had two more drinks. MacBride rose then, saying, “I’ll be back in a minute.” He left the bottle on the desk. He went out, locked the door, went down the hall and entered another office. He picked up a phone.

“MacBride... Switch all calls for me to extension twenty-one. Pay no attention to any calls coming from eighteen... That’s right. Now try locating Moriarity.”

He sat down at the desk, knocked out his dead pipe, restuffed it and lit up. He looked at his watch. Five minutes to nine. Put the watch away in his vest pocket and puffed furiously on his pipe. He got up and paced the room, back and forth, back and forth.

Moriarity came in saying, “Moved?”

“Listen, Mory. I locked Kennedy up in my office with a bottle of rye. It’s a dirty trick but I don’t want him pulling a tail on me. I’m going places. I may even do things — if I see scenery. Here’s the key to my office. You stay in here and take any calls for me. And don’t let Kennedy out till you hear from me.”

“Oke, Cap.”

“If any of these reporters crowd you tell ’em I’m in the building. I’ll want to borrow your hat and overcoat.”

“Down in my locker. It’s open.”

“Thanks.”

MacBride went downstairs and got into Moriarity’s coat. It fit well enough, but the fedora was a little small. It set quaintly on MacBride’s bony head, but he pulled the brim down all around and that helped. He took the tunnel to the garage and found the mechanic there.

“The Ford touring with the curtains, Jerry.”

“You drivin’?”

“Yeah. But don’t tell anybody. I’m supposed to be in the building.”

“I gotcha.”

The flivver was black, had no police markings. MacBride drove it out of the garage and lit out for the West End. At nine-fifteen he passed Wayne’s house, saw Figueroa’s roadster parked in front. He drove on and parked at the next block. Traffic plowed past continuously. He twisted around in the seat and kept his eyes on the little cowl-lights that marked Figueroa’s roadster.

At exactly nine-thirty the lights moved, were replaced by headlights that swung into westbound traffic. MacBride started the flivver, saw the roadster go by and stop at a red traffic signal beyond. MacBride crawled into the traffic and was the third behind Figueroa when the roadster started again.

Westover Boulevard climbed upward beyond Laurel Street and the traffic ascended like an escalator. It reached a peak, then sloped away westward, going down gradually to the corporation limit, leaving the big houses behind. The flivver ducked around slow moving vehicles, maintained a comparatively equal distance behind the roadster, never approached it too closely.

Traffic thinned out but three cars were still between the roadster and the flivver. Ahead, MacBride saw the white blur of the railroad underpass. He saw the roadster pass beneath it. MacBride passed beneath, and now Westover Boulevard became the Old West Road. Three hundred yards beyond, Riding Pike crossed it north and south.

The roadster made a left turn into Riding Pike. MacBride slapped his foot down on the accelerator, let a southbound sedan head him off and then swung in behind it. He took his gun from its holster and laid it on the seat beside him. A few oaths sizzled on his lips and then his lips clamped tightly shut and he tipped Moriarity’s hat lower on his forehead.

The roadster was picking up speed. MacBride had to pass the sedan, and when he did he saw the roadster taking a turn in the Pike fast. The straightaway ended. The Pike became serpentine and MacBride kept his foot jammed down on the throttle. On a moonlit rise ahead he saw the silhouette of the roadster; then it dropped from sight, and when MacBride topped the rise he saw the roadster sweeping ahead and far below. The flivver roared and shook and the wind hammered the loose curtains.

He saw the roadster make a left turn into Black Horse Road. He followed it and had to go a mile before he picked up the red tail-light again. Houses appeared, then a settlement, then a suburb of the city. The roadster shot beneath a raised grade-crossing, turned sharp left, climbed a short hill.

MacBride was going too fast to make the turn. He jammed on the brake and sat tight while the flivver skidded fifty feet. Then he backed up, shifted and swung left hard. He gave the motor the gun to make the short grade and saw Figueroa hauling a bag from the rumble. He went over the hump, jammed on the brake and raised dust skidding past the roadster. On his left was a suburban station of the main line.

He knocked open the door and scooped his gun off the seat as he bounded out. Figueroa saw him and dropped everything but the gladstone. He leaped and ducked beneath the station platform. MacBride went under after him, stumbled over a track and rebounded to his feet.

Figueroa jumped from behind a supporting pillar, scaled the tracks and went under the platform opposite. MacBride followed and crowded him against a stone wall. He walloped his gun against Figueroa’s stomach and flattened him upright against the wall.

“Give me that dough, you punk!”

“I... I—”

“You heard me! I’ve got to get out on the Old West Road and deliver it. Wayne’s a friend of mine and if I had the time to pinch you I’d do it. But I’ll get you later. Wayne’s the only guy matters now. Shake it out, you two-timing so-and-so!”

Far up the line a locomotive whistle hooted.

“I can kill you,” MacBride gritted. “I can let you have it in your dirty guts and by I will if you don’t fork over that money!”

Figueroa’s breath was stifled. He shoved his hand into his inside pocket, dragged out the brown envelope. MacBride snatched it and stepped back.

“Remember, greaseball,” he said, “I’ll be after you inside of an hour. But there’s no time now.”

He turned and raced across the tracks, beneath the platform. He reached the flivver and as he whipped it down through the underpass he heard the train puff into the station. He hit the Black Horse at sixty miles an hour, wheeled the car into Riding Pike and held the accelerator flat to the boards on the way north. For once he wasn’t a cop. He was a friend of governor-elect Wayne. He had to deliver shake-down money to insure the release and safe return of Cortland Wayne. It was against his code, against his principles. It griped him, but a life that mattered was at stake.

He took the turn into Old West Road much too fast. He felt the car heave. He toiled with the wheel, heard the rasp of the rubber, felt the rear end slew, then snap back again. He was off the road. He saw the windows of a filling station rear up in front of him, heard a man’s hoarse cry. He hit. Glass exploded and flew. Metal snarled and cracked and the hard stone of the filling station did not budge.

He went through the curtains, did a somersault and landed asprawl on cinders. He lay slightly dazed and blinking while figures ran around him and bent over him. Time seemed to fly, but somehow an ambulance got there and he was still blinking while a white-coated figure ran fingers over his body. Suddenly he made a sweeping motion with his hands and sat up.

“Hey, take it easy,” a voice growled.

MacBride saw things clearly. He saw the ambulance, the doctor, a motorcycle cop, and the flivver. The crushed and hardly recognizable flivver.

“Now, now,” the doctor was saying.

“I’m MacBride,” the skipper declared.

The doctor said: “I don’t give a damn—”

“Oh,” the motorcycle cop cut in. “That’s right! Captain MacBride! This is Enders, Captain; Ninth Precinct.”

“Hello, Enders.”

MacBride was on his feet. Moriarity’s hat was ruined and the seat was completely removed from Moriarity’s overcoat. But MacBride slapped the hat on and looked comically pugnacious. He brushed the doctor out of the way and jumped to the wreck of the flivver. From its ruins he drew the brown envelope. But somehow it had been gashed in two. He held the pieces up and looked at them. The envelope had been stuffed with newspaper.

He whipped around. “Enders! Enders, where the hell are you?”

“Here, sir!”

“Lend me your motorcycle.”

He forked the machine, gunned it hard, walked it off the cinders and went booming away towards the city.

Enders scratched his head. “The skipper always was wild as a coot.”

The maid let MacBride in. He went past her without seeing her. He even forgot to remove his hat. Moriarity’s hat was cocked over one eyebrow and the seat of the skipper’s pants showed through the ragged hole in Moriarity’s coat. His jaw looked teak-hard and a bitter glint was in his eye.

He ran into Davenport. “Mr. Davenport, more dough — and as quick as you can get it. That greaseball pulled the old two-time and Cort—”

“Sh! Sh!”

“Now don’t shush me. I figured that guy was a heel and I tailed him. He didn’t take the Old West Road. He lit out down Riding Pike and went over Black Horse to the Wentwood main-line station. I took the envelope away from him. I wanted to pinch the sweet double-crosser but I had no time. I wanted to get that dough to the spot. I piled up the car into a filling station — and lucky I did. The envelope contained newspaper. He’d taken out the dough and was on the lam. Come on now — rake up some dough—”

“Not so loud. Not so loud. Cort just came back.”

“What!”

“He’s in bed. Upstairs. Mrs. Wayne is with him.”

“You mean to say—”

“Please, Captain, please!”

MacBride straightened and his jaw set. He clipped: “Okey.” He pivoted and walked hard-heeled to the telephone. Davenport heaved after him and grabbed his arm.

“What are you going to do?”

“Get Figueroa. I know what train he’s on.”

Davenport got between MacBride and the telephone. He shook his white-maned old head. “No, Captain, No.”

“What the hell do you mean — no?”

Davenport’s blue eyes keened to fine glacial points. “You promised you’d do everything within your power to keep Cort’s name clean.”

“What’s this got to do with Cort? Get away from that phone.”

“No. Listen. Figueroa is on his way. Everything has worked out as I hoped. I know where he’s going. New York. He’s booked on the steamship Magnetic for France. I had a secret agent following him. I know just what he did.”

MacBride narrowed his eyes. “I don’t get you.”

Davenport took a deep breath. “You know how I feel about Cort. You know I said that I would do anything to prevent a blemish on his name or his household. I know I can tell you this in strictest confidence. I know or suspect that you already have some knowledge of how things stood.

“In Cort’s kidnaping I saw an opportunity to get rid of Figueroa. It was a long chance but I took it. Had not Mrs. Wayne suggested that he go with the money, I should have done so. I wanted him to go. I knew from what I’d heard of this leech that once he got fifteen thousand in his hands he would abscond with it. I wanted just that to happen.”

“But—”

“Let me finish. I knew that Figueroa and Mrs. Wayne were more than friends. I was resolved one way or another to get rid of Figueroa without breaking an inch of scandal and without making Cort aware of the fact that this liaison was existent.

“So Figueroa was to take the money to the designated point. A trusted agent of mine followed him. This man also carried an envelope containing fifteen thousand. If Figueroa had gone to the designated point, my agent should have gone on about his business. But we had Figueroa reasoned out. He absconded. My agent, who was only a block behind you when you reached the underpass, carried the money to the rendezvous and shortly afterward Cort walked in that door, haggard and worn but all right otherwise. He had been kept blindfolded all the time. He was helped from a car at a North Side street corner, still blindfolded, and the car had driven away before he got the blindfold off.

“Figueroa is gone. You might say I could have offered him a sum outright, but with bribery there is always backwash, later on. Now he has committed robbery, grand larceny. But no one knows but you and my trusted agent. He will not come back. Leave it that way, Captain.” MacBride rocked on his heels. “What am I going to tell that flock of newshawks? Here I’ve been clowning all around town, busting up cars and a filling station.”

“You could say that you saw a car trailing my agent. You were afraid it contained a newspaperman or perhaps even gangsters who may have found out the identity of the man carrying the ransom. You hailed the car and it started off. You chased it. You noticed it had no rear license plate...”

“I get you, Mr. Davenport. In other words, I take the merry razz from the boys and likely a hot calling-down from the chief.”

“You like Cort, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“And your shoulders are broad, Captain.”

MacBride cracked a hard tight grin. His voice was low, saying: “Okey. I’ll be the goat then: But just let somebody try riding me! Just let them!”

A great deal of mystery surrounds the life of Paul Cain (George Carrol Sims), including who, precisely, he was and what he did during large slices of his life. He seems to have been one of a kind, a man congenitally at odds with normality. Only very recently has it been established that his birth name was Sims and not Ruric, the latter a surname he used throughout his career. He was George Ruric when he worked as a production assistant on Josef von Sternberg’s The Salvation Hunters (1925) and Peter Ruric when he was a successful screenwriter from the late 1930s into the 1940s. As Paul Cain, he wrote almost solely for Black Mask. Of seventeen stories for Black Mask, five were “cannibalized” into his only novel, the extraordinary Fast One (1933), and seven were collected into Seven Slayers (1946).

Cain claimed to have led a colorful, even rackety existence, roaming the globe (South America, North Africa, the Near East, points north, east, south, and west) and posing, among other things, as a tramp-steamer boatswain’s mate, a Dadaist painter, and a professional gambler. The last disguise was most likely a true part of Cain’s résumé, since, as William F. Nolan has pointed out, the gambling scenes in Fast One were clearly written by someone who had been there.

Fast One was considered by the modern critic E. R. Hagemann to be “one of the toughest... and most brutal gangster stories ever written.” The anonymous reviewer for the New York Times Book Review described it as “a ceaseless welter of bloodshed and frenzy, a sustained bedlam of killing and fiendishness.” While Hagemann’s view is clearly positive and the Times critic’s negative, both comments seem to be apt. Like all great works of art, Fast One keeps being rediscovered and lauded, worthy of every word of praise that has been showered on it.

“Trouble-Chaser” is as mean and lean as anything Cain ever wrote; it is written in a stripped-down prose style that makes the understatement of Ernest Hemingway look flowery and the minimalism of Andrew Vachss seem somehow overblown. It has not been reprinted anywhere since its first appearance in Black Mask more than sixty years ago.

J. A.

Trouble-Chaser (1934)

Mae lived at the Mara Apartments on Rossmore. It was about nine o’clock when I got there and the party hadn’t got going. I mean by that that nobody was falling down and nobody had been smacked over the skull with a bottle. There were six or seven people there besides Mae and Tony I didn’t know any of them, which was just as well. Tony opened the door, and made a pass at introducing me, and Mae came in from the kitchen and we went into a big clinch. She was demonstrative that way when she had two or three fifths of gin under her belt, whoever it might be.

Tony fixed me a drink. I took it because I knew better than to argue about a thing like that; I carried it around with me most of the time I was there and when anybody would ask me if I wanted a drink I’d show them the full glass.

Tony was Italian — from Genoa I think. He was very dark and slim, with shiny blue-black hair, bright black eyes, a swell smile. I’d known him for five or six years — I knew him back in New York when he was trying to build up a bottle business around the Grant Hotel. We’d never been particularly friendly but we always liked each other well enough. When he came to California he looked me up and I got him a job running case-stuff for Eddie Garda. I introduced Tony to Mae Jackman when she was a class C extra-girl and not doing so well at it. They’d been living together for about a year. Tony was in business for himself and doing well enough to live at the Mara. Mae still worked in pictures occasionally and that helped.

Mae jockeyed me out into the kitchen as soon as she could. She leaned against the sink and sucked up most of a glass of gin and ginger ale and whispered dramatically: “We’ve got to get rid of Tony.”

I am not the most patient person in the world, with drunks. I looked at her with what I hoped would penetrate her gin haze as an extremely disgusted expression.

She went on hurriedly in the stage whisper: “I mean for a minute. I’ve got something I want to show you an’ I don’t want him busting in.” She finished her drink and then with a very wise and meaning look, said, Wait, and coasted back into the living-room.

I poured the gin in my glass into the sink and filled the glass with ginger ale and ice.

She came back in a minute. “I sent him up to Cora’s to get some ice,” she said. Cora was Mae’s side-kick; she lived upstairs.

Mae steered me through the short corridor into the bedroom and closed the door behind us. She went to the dresser and dug around in the bottom drawer for a minute and came up with a folded piece of yellow paper and handed it to me. I unfolded it and held it under the light at the head of the bed; it was Louis L. Steinlen’s personal check for twenty-five hundred dollars. Steinlen was the executive head of the Astra Motion Picture Company.

I said: “That’s swell, Mae.” I handed the check back to her and she held it with the light shining down on it and looked at it and then looked up at me.

“It’s swell,” she said — “an’ it’s going to be a lot sweller.”

She smiled and her face lost its set drunken look for a moment. She was a very pretty girl and when she smiled she was almost beautiful.

I said: “So what?” I wasn’t very enthusiastic about staying in the bedroom with her because Tony might come back sooner than she expected and he was a long way from being stone sober — I didn’t want him to get any trick ideas.

Mae kept on smiling at me. She said: “So this is the amount” — she bobbed her head at the check — “of your cut for helping me make a deal with Steinlen.”

I had a faint idea of what she was getting at, but not enough to help much. I said: “What the hell are you talking about?”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. “We’re going to sell Steinlen his two-bit check for twenty-five grand,” she said.

I didn’t say anything. I felt like laughing but I didn’t... I waited.

“This little piece of paper,” she went on, “is worth its weight in radium.” She glanced down fondly at the check, then back up at me. She was not smiling any more. “Steinlen has been chasing me for months. Last week-end Tony went up to Frisco on business — I went to Arrowhead with Steinlen — on business.” She smiled again, slowly. She held the check in one hand and whipped the index finger of her other hand with it. “This is a little token of the deal.”

I said: “That’s quite a token.” I liked Mae at that moment about ninety per cent less than I’d ever liked her, and she’d never been the kind of girl I’d want to take home and introduce to the folks. I didn’t tell her I thought she’d been extravagantly overpaid — that was pretty obvious. I waited for her to go on and let me in on what I had to do with it all.

She went into a fast song and dance about what a cinch it was going to be to take Steinlen for the twenty-five grand, about how it wasn’t technically blackmail because she was simply exchanging his check — a check that he’d have a hell of a hard time explaining to his wife — for the cash ten times as much cash. She said the reason she wanted me to come in on it was because she thought I could make the deal better than she could and because we’d have to be careful not to let the twenty-five-hundred-dollar check get out of our hands before we got the cash.

When she finished I grinned at her without any particular warmth and said: “Why don’t you have Tony work with you on this?”

She said: “Don’t be a sap, Red — if Tony knew about this, or found out about it, he’d cut my throat.” Then she went on to cuss Tony out and explain that she was all washed up with him, and had been for a long time and that she was going to scram to Europe as soon as she got her big dough.

When she got all that out of her system I lit into her and told her that in the first place she was crazy as a bedbug to figure on beating Steinlen out of anything, and in the second place I wouldn’t show in a deal of that kind if it was for a million, and a natural — I was getting along too well legitimately — and in the third place she was an awful sucker to finagle around with something that Tony might find out about before she could get away. I finally wound up by explaining to her, with gestures, that my job was keeping people out of trouble, not getting them into it.

She took it fairly easy. She said she was sorry I couldn’t see it her way, and that she’d have to find somebody else or do it herself. She said that however she worked it would have to be done quickly because Steinlen’s wife, who was Sheila Dale the Astra star, was due back from location the next morning — and Steinlen would be psychologically ripe for the touch with his wife coming in. Mae was a bright girl in some ways. It’s too bad she was so full of larceny — bad company I guess.

We went back out into the kitchen and she fixed a drink for herself and started fixing one for me and I showed her my full glass.

She said: “I know I don’t have to tell you to keep this under your hat...”

I smiled and shook my head and drank some of the ginger ale in a kind of silent toast to her success. Then I tried to talk her out of it again in a roundabout way but it was no go — she’d made up her mind. A couple drunks weaved out into the kitchen and Mae mixed drinks for them.

Tony came in while they were there, which was just as well because it didn’t look like Mae and I had been doing our double act all the time he’d been out.

He said: “Cora made me stay an’ have a couple drinks with her. She is very sad and won’t come down.” He went on to explain to me that Cora’s boy-friend had walked out on her, and what a heel he was, and what he, Tony, would do to him if he saw him. Tony’s voice was very soft and he spoke each word very quietly, very distinctly, with just a trace of accent.

I glanced at Mae while Tony was telling me in detail what he would do to Cora’s boy-friend; she was gargling another drink.

I shoved off pretty soon and went down and got into a cab and went back to the Derby. In a little while the fight crowd started drifting in and Franey and Broun and a bookmaker named Connie Hartley came in and we had a few drinks and sat around and told lies. I’d been on the wagon for a couple weeks and I was getting pretty sick of it — I had quite a few drinks. Hartley had some racing-forms and Franey and I picked a few losers for Saturday.

After a while Franey and Hartley and I went out to the Colony Club and there was a friend of mine there who was a swell piano player. We listened to him and had a lot more drinks. I got home about four.

I woke sometime around eleven I guess, but I didn’t get up right away. I made a couple phone calls and then tried to get back to sleep but that was out. Finally I rolled over to the edge of the bed and looked down at the extra which had been shoved under the door. By twisting my head around I could read the headline:

I got up then, and sat on the bed and read the story. Mae Jackman had been murdered at around three-thirty in the morning, as near as the police could figure, in her apartment at the Mara. The body had been discovered at eight-thirty by the maid. The dragnet was out for Tony Aricci.

I had breakfast at a little joint down the street a few doors from the hotel. When I went back up to my room there was a man standing in the dim elbow of the corridor just outside my door. It was Tony. He stepped close to me and jabbed an automatic into my belly. I unlocked the door and we went into my room and closed the door.

I said: “What’s it all about?”

Tony’s face was something I still dream about when I have too much lobster and cherry brandy. His usually dark swarthy skin was gray; his mouth was a dark gray slit across the lower part of his face, and his eyes were stark crazy.

When he spoke it sounded like the words were coming up out of a well. He said: “You killed Mae.” There was no intonation — the words were of exactly the same pitch.

I didn’t feel especially good. I edged away from him slowly, sat down very slowly in the chair by the window. While I was doing that I was saying: “For the love of the — Tony — where did you get such a dumb idea?”

He said: “If you didn’t kill her you know who did. She’s been calling you for three days. You talked to her alone last night while I was at Cora’s — all the time I was away. There is something I do not know. I have known there was something I did not know for a long time. You must tell me what it is. If you do not tell me what it is I am going to kill you.”

If I have any gift for figuring whether people mean what they say, he meant it. I stalled, lit a cigarette.

I said: “Sit down, Tony.”

He shook his head very sharply.

I went on. “You’re on the wrong track, Tony. If that gang of drunks officed you that Mae and I were in the bedroom while you were upstairs — she took me in to show me the stills on her last picture. We talked about old times...” I leaned forward, shook my head slowly. “I thought you had killed her when I read it in the paper just now. I thought you’d had one of your battles and you’d gone a little too far.”

He wilted suddenly. He fell down on his knees beside the bed and the automatic clattered to the floor and he put his head in his arms on the bed and sobbed in a terrible dry way like a sick animal. He said brokenly and his voice was muffled by his arms, seemed to come from very far away: “My dear God. My dear God! I kill her! — I kill her who I loved more than anything! Why, my dear God, do they say I killed her?...”

It was embarrassing to see a guy like Tony break down like that. I got up and picked up the automatic and dropped it into the pocket of my topcoat and patted Tony’s shoulder. I didn’t know what else to do and I didn’t know what to say, so I went back and sat down and looked out the window.

Pretty soon Tony got up. He said: “I had to go to Long Beach last night. I left Mae about one-thirty. All the gang had gone home. I did not get back until a little while ago. I stopped at Sardis for breakfast because I did not want to wake Mae up — and I saw the paper.” He cleared his throat. “I am going to Cora. Cora will know something — she will tell me what it is...”

I said: “No. You are not going to do anything like that. You can’t stay here because if the Law finds out I came to your place last night they’ll come here to ask me a lot of questions, but I’m going to take you to a friend of mine upstairs and I want you to stay with her until I come back. I’m going to see what I can do about getting you in the clear and if I can’t do that we will see what we can do about getting you out of town.”

He smiled in a way that was not pleasant to see. He said: “I do not care about the clear, and I do not care about getting away. I care about finding the man who killed Mae and cutting his heart out of his body.”

I nodded and tried to look as if I felt like doing the same thing. I steered him out of the room and we went up the back stairs to the eighth floor and I knocked at Opal Crane’s door. Opal was still in bed; she yelled, “Who is it?” and I told her and in a minute she came to the door and opened it. She was rubbing her eyes and yawning and when I introduced Tony to her and told her I wanted her to let him stay there a little while she didn’t look very enthusiastic.

She jerked her head at Tony, who had sat down and was staring out the window, and said: “Hot?”

I nodded.

She looked a little less enthusiastic and I asked her if she thought I’d ask her to do it if I wasn’t sure it was all right. She shook her head and yawned some more and went into the bathroom.

I said to Tony: “I’ll be back or call you as soon as I can.”

He bobbed his head up and down vacantly and then he said: “Give me my gun.”

I said: “No. You won’t need it, and I might.”

I left him sitting by the window staring out into the gray morning and went out softly and closed the door.

Back in my room I called up Danny Scheyer who is a police reporter on the Post. I asked him to find out all he could about the inside on the Jackman murder, whether the police were satisfied that it was Tony or were working on any other angles. I asked him particularly to find out if a check that might have some bearing on the case had been found on Mae or in the apartment. Scheyer had a swell in at headquarters and I knew he’d get all the dope there was to get. I told him I’d call him again in a little while.

It was almost twelve-thirty and I figured Steinlen would be at lunch but I called up anyway. He was at lunch and I talked to his secretary. I told her I wanted to make an appointment with Steinlen for around one-thirty and she asked what I wanted to see him about. I told her to tell him that Mister Black, from Arrowhead, would be over at one-thirty and that his business was very personal. Then I went over to the Derby and had some more coffee.

I called Scheyer again from the Derby and he said they hadn’t found anything on Mae or in the apartment that meant anything and that it looked like a cinch for Tony Aricci.

I said: “Maybe not.” I told Scheyer he’d get first call on anything I turned up and thanked him.

Steinlen was younger than I’d figured him to be — somewhere between thirty-five and forty. He was a thin, nervous man with a long, bony face, deep-set brown eyes. His hands were always moving.

He said: “What can I do for you, Mister Black?”

I leaned forward and put my cigarette out in a tray on his desk and then leaned back and made myself comfortable. I said: “You can’t do anything for me but I can do an awful lot for you.”

He smiled a little and moved his head up and down. “People are doing things for me all the time,” he said. “That’s the reason I’m getting so gray.” He scratched his long nose and then put his hand down on the desk and drummed with his fingers. “What are you selling?”

“I sell peace of mind,” I said. “They used to call me the Trouble-Chaser back East. I kept people out of jams — and when they got into jams I got them out. I worked at it then — now it’s more or less of a hobby.”

He was still smiling. He said: “Go on.”

The way he kept moving his hands made me jumpy. I still had my topcoat on and I was practically lying down in the chair; I had my hand on Tony’s gun in my coat pocket.

I said: “You murdered Mae Jackman.”

His face didn’t change. He stopped drumming on the desk with his fingers and he was entirely still for maybe ten or fifteen seconds. He was looking straight at me and he was still smiling. Then he shook his head very slowly and said: “No.”

I said something a little while ago about a gift for figuring whether people mean what they say. Something like fifteen years of intensive study and research into the intricacies of draw and stud poker are pretty fair training for that sort of thing. I mean I’m not exactly a sucker for a liar, and so help me I believed Steinlen.

I said: “Who did?”

Steinlen shook his head again slowly. “Aricci, I suppose.”

By that time my sails were flapping. I’d been so sure Steinlen was it, and now I was so sure he wasn’t — I felt like I’d been double-crossed. Anyway, I wasn’t going to let it go at that. My hunch was that Steinlen was telling the truth but I don’t play my hunches that far. I wanted to know.

I said: “Aricci didn’t do it.” I said it as if I was sure of it.

Steinlen laughed a little. “You are very sure.”

I told him I was very sure and told him why. I told him that if Aricci had killed Mae the check would have figured in it and if Aricci had the check he, Steinlen, wouldn’t be alive to be talking about it.

When I mentioned the check Steinlen’s expression changed for the first time. His face became almost eager. He said: “Are you sure the police did not find the check?”

I nodded.

He asked: “Who, besides yourself, knew about it?”

“Only you,” I said — “and, evidently, whoever has it now.” I lit a cigarette and watched Steinlen’s face. I said: “As long as that check is in existence it’s an axe over your head. If the police get it, it will tie you up with the murder. If Aricci gets it or finds out about it, he’ll kill you as sure as the two of us are sitting here.”

Steinlen was staring blankly out the window. He nodded slightly.

“I think you’d better tell me all you know about the whole business,” I went on. “Maybe I can get an angle.”

He swung around in the swivel-chair to face me; he was smiling again. He said: “Did you come here to arrest me?”

I shook my head. “Not necessarily. I wouldn’t put the pinch on anyone unless there wasn’t anything else left to do. I came here convinced that you did the trick and I intended getting it in writing and then giving you about twenty-four hours’ head start. I wasn’t especially fond of Mae, and I think her check idea was pretty raw, but I like Tony pretty well and I know he’s innocent and I’m not going to have him holding the bag.”

He said: “And you are sure of my innocence, too?”

I smiled a little and said: “Pretty sure.”

He started drumming on the desk again. He said: “Mae telephoned me about two this morning. She was very drunk. She said that Tony had gone out, that she was alone.”

I said: “Uh-huh. Tony went to Long Beach. He left the apartment about one-thirty.”

Steinlen scratched his nose. “Can’t he establish an alibi in Long Beach?”

“Not with the people he was doing business with. They wouldn’t be worth a nickel as an alibi.”

Steinlen nodded, went on: “Mae told me what she wanted — twenty-five thousand dollars in cash. She said if I didn’t give it to her she was going to Mrs. Steinlen with my check and tell her that I had seduced her and then tried to buy her off for twenty-five hundred...” He smiled crookedly. “Her idea was very sound — the check was irrefutable proof. Picture producers don’t give extra-girls twenty-five-hundred-dollar checks as birthday gifts...”

I said: “That was a very chump piece of business for you to do. How come?”

Steinlen laughed shortly, bitterly, shook his head. “I guess we all think we’re character sharks,” he said. “I thought she was on the level.”

One of the phones on his desk rang and he picked it up and told his secretary to put whoever was calling on. While the connection was being made he said, “Pardon me,” and then he said, “Hello, Sheila,” into the phone. He talked to her for several minutes; he asked her how the location trip had been and whether she had received his last letter. Every fifth word was darling or baby or honey. Finally he asked her if she was coming to the studio, and said he’d try to get home early and hung up.

He said: “That was Mrs. Steinlen — she just got back from location in Arizona.”

Then he went on about Mae. He said she’d insisted on his meeting her at the corner of Rosewood and Larchmont — she didn’t want him to come to the Mara because somebody might see him come in. The corner of Rosewood and Larchmont was only a couple blocks from the Mara. He explained to her that he couldn’t get the money in the middle of the night but she was very drunk; she said he’d better get it and hung up on him. He’d decided to meet her and reason with her and talk her out of it until the next day, anyway, so he’d have time to figure out what he was going to do. He went to the corner of Rosewood and Larchmont and waited from two thirty-five until almost four o’clock. She didn’t show, so he figured that Tony had come back and she couldn’t get away; he went home and tried to sleep. The first thing he knew about the murder was when he read it in the paper after he got to the studio, about ten o’clock.

The more he talked the dizzier I got about the whole layout. It would have been a cinch for Tony to start to Long Beach and then sneak back — he was suspicious of Mae, anyway — and catch her going out to meet Steinlen. He would probably have knocked her down and frisked her and found the check and that would have been that. Tony was a pretty bad boy when he was mad. But if that’s the way it had been and Tony had put on that act for me so I’d help him — then Tony was the greatest actor in the world and wasting his time bootlegging. He was not only the greatest actor in the world but I was degenerating into a prize sucker and losing my eyesight.

On the other hand, Steinlen didn’t even have the alibi of having been at home. He said he’d been on the corner of Rosewood and Larchmont from two thirty-five till almost four. Mae had been killed around three-thirty. Steinlen could have pulled that off very nicely — he didn’t have a leg to stand on, except that I thought he was telling the truth. Maybe Steinlen was the world’s greatest actor. It was a cinch Mae hadn’t strangled herself.

I began to think very seriously about chucking the whole thing — after all, it was none of my business — if I wasn’t careful I’d be getting myself jammed up.

Steinlen said suddenly: “I’ll give five thousand dollars for that check.”

That made it my business. I told Steinlen I’d call him later and left the studio.

Tony had gone. Opal said he’d sat at the window for about a half hour without saying anything and then jumped up suddenly and gone.

I went back down to my room and lay down on the bed and tried to figure things out. Tony and Steinlen were both naturals to have put the chill on Mae, but unless I was entirely screwy neither of them had.

It suddenly occurred to me that maybe I’d been overlooking a bet in Cora. Maybe there’d been some kind of jealous play on Tony that I didn’t know anything about. I remembered how long he’d stayed with her the night before and how much he’d carried on about her guy walking out on her. That might have been a gag to cover up something else. It was a pretty long shot but I was mixed up enough about the whole business by that time to try anything. I called Cora and she wasn’t in. I told the switchboard girl to ask her to call me. Then I lay down again and fell asleep.

When I woke up it was twenty minutes after four and the phone was ringing. It was Bill Fraley; he said Dingo, a horse we’d made a fair-sized bet on the night before, had romped in, we’d won four hundred and thirty dollars apiece. I told him I’d meet him over at the cigar store where Hartley made book and I took a shower and shaved and went downstairs.

When I stopped at the desk for my mail there was a fellow named Gleason — an assistant cameraman that I’d known casually for a year or so — leaning on the counter talking to the clerk. We said hello and I asked him what he’d been doing and he said he’d just got back from location at Phoenix with the Sheila Dale outfit. He said he was living at the hotel and we gave each other the usual song and dance about calling each other up and getting together real soon, then I went over to the cigar store and met Bill and collected my bet from Hartley. Bill and I went into the Derby and had something to eat. I called up Cora again but she wasn’t in.

After a while I called Steinlen. A man answered the phone in his outer office, instead of the secretary. When he asked who was calling I had a hunch and said Mister Smith and when he asked what I wanted to talk to Steinlen about I said I wanted to talk to him about a bill that was long overdue.

The man said: “Mister Steinlen committed suicide about a half-hour ago,” and hung up.

Fraley looked at me and said: “You look like you’d just seen a ghost.”

I told him I had.

Steinlen wasn’t the kind of guy to bump himself off. It looked very much like Tony to me; it looked like whoever had murdered Mae had reached Tony in some way and let him get a flash of the check. They could have explained having the check by saying that Mae had been afraid Tony would find it and had given it to them for safe keeping. In the state of mind Tony was in he’d go for that. It all fitted in with the Cora angle. She’d killed Mae, and when Tony went to her after he left Opal’s she’d shown him the check and told him that that was what Steinlen was after when he killed Mae.

I called up Danny Scheyer again. He said, “What about that scoop?” and I told him to hold everything and give me all the details of the Steinlen suicide. He said Steinlen had shot himself at about five o’clock in his office at the Astra Studio. Mrs. Steinlen had been with him at the time and had tried to stop him. She had been unable to give any reason for Steinlen’s act, had been taken home in a hysterical condition. I told Scheyer I’d call him back.

Well, that let Tony out — and it looked very much like it stuck Steinlen. It looked like he’d given Mae the works, in spite of my hunch that he hadn’t. Maybe he hadn’t been able to find the check and was afraid it would turn up, or maybe his wife had found out about the Jackman affair and had figured he murdered her and had faced him with it.

Then Fraley said: “So Steinlen bumped himself off?”

I nodded.

Fraley smiled a little, shook his head. He said: “It’s a wonder he didn’t do it a long time ago — with that wife of his...”

I took that a little. I said: “What do you mean?”

“I mean she’s the original jealous and vindictive female that all the others are copied from; she’s had her spurs in him ever since they were married.” Bill finished his coffee. “She was a plenty bad actor when I knew her back in Chi, and she’s had her nose full of junk for the last couple years — that makes her three times as bad...”

I said: “Heroin?”

Bill bobbed his head.

I said: “I didn’t know about that...”

Bill grinned, said: “You don’t get around very much. You’re the kind of bug they publish the fan magazines for.”

I had an idea. It turned out to be my only good idea for the day, which isn’t saying a hell of a lot for it. I went back over to the hotel and called the cameraman Gleason from downstairs. I asked him if Sheila Dale had come back with the rest of the company.

Gleason said: “Huh-uh. We finished all the scenes she was in yesterday — she flew back last night.”

I went up to my room and got Tony’s automatic. When I went back downstairs Fraley had come over from the Derby and was talking to the girl at the cigar counter. I asked him if he had any idea who Dale got her stuff from and he said he supposed it was Mike Gorman, or at least Gorman would have a line on it. I looked up Steinlen’s home address in the telephone book and went out and got into a cab.

On the way out to North Hollywood I stopped at the apartment house on Highland Avenue where Gorman lived. A blonde gal in a green kimono came to the door and said Mike was asleep. I said it was important and went past her into the bedroom. Mike was lying on the bed with his clothes on. He was pretty drunk.

The blonde had followed me into the bedroom; I told her I wanted to talk to Mike alone and she made a few nasty remarks and went out.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and asked Mike if he’d been peddling junk to Dale. He laughed as if that was a very wild idea and shook his head and said: “Certainly not.”

I said: “Listen, Mike — something big is going to break and you’re going to be roped into it. If you’ll be on the level about this with me I can fix it.”

He shook his head again and said: “I haven’t sold any stuff for six months. It’s too tough...”

I got up and looked down at him and said: “All right, Mike — I tried to help you.”

When I started out of the room he sat up and swung around to sit on the edge of the bed. He said, “Wait a minute,” and when I turned around and went back he said: “What’s it all about?”

I used a lot of big words and asked him again about Dale and he hemmed and hawed and finally said he wasn’t Dale’s regular connection but he’d sold her some stuff a few times. He said he’d never done business with Dale personally — it was always through her maid, a German girl named Boehme.

I told Mike I’d see that his name didn’t get mixed up with what I referred to mysteriously as the “Case” and went back out to the cab.

On the way out through Cahuenga Pass I had one of those trick hunches that I was being followed but I couldn’t spot anybody and I wasn’t trusting my hunches very much by that time, anyway.

It was pretty dark. The Steinlen house was lit up like a Christmas tree upstairs. I told the driver to wait and walked up the driveway and around to the back door. A big Negress opened the door.

I said: “I want to see Miss Boehme. It is very important.”

The Negress told me to wait and in a minute a very thin, washed-out woman with dull black hair and very light watery blue eyes came to the door, said: “I am Miss Boehme. What do you want?”

I stepped close to her and spoke in a very low voice. I told her I was a friend of Gorman’s, that Gorman had been picked up and that his address-book with her name in it as a customer had been found by the police. I told her Gorman had sent word to me to reach all his customers and tell them to get rid of any junk they had around.

She acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about for a minute, but I pressed it and she finally said okey and thanked me.

Then I told her I had an idea how she could beat the whole business and get her name out of it and said I wanted to use the phone. I went past her into the kitchen when I asked about the phone because I didn’t want to give her a chance to stall out of it. I wanted to get into the house.

She looked pretty scared in the light. She took me through the kitchen, through a dark hall, into a little room that was more a library than anything else. I asked her if there were any servants in the house that might be listening in at any of the other phone extensions and she said only the cook — the Negress. She said Mrs. Steinlen was upstairs lying down.

The phone was on a stand near one of the windows. There was a big chair beside it and I sat down and picked up the phone. There wasn’t very much light in the room: there were two big heavily shaded floor lamps and one small table lamp on a desk in one corner. There was enough light though to watch the Boehme woman’s face.

I dialed a number and then I pushed the receiver-hook down with my elbow so that the call didn’t register and then I let the hook up again. I was turning my body to watch Boehme when I clicked the hook — she didn’t see it. She was standing by the table in the middle of the room, staring at me and looking pretty scared.

When I’d waited long enough for somebody to have answered I said: “Hello, Chief. This is Red. I’m out at the Steinlen house — I’ve got Boehme and it all happened the way we’d figured... Yeah. Mrs. Steinlen flew back from Phoenix last night. She’d had some kind of steer that Steinlen was cheating so she didn’t let him know she was coming she thought she might walk in on something. She did... she walked in on the telephone call from Mae Jackman and listened in on the phone downstairs. She got Mae’s address from that and sneaked back out and jumped in her car and went over there... Sure — she killed Mae...”

I was guessing, watching Boehme. She’d turned a very nice shade of nile green; she was leaning against the table and her eyes looked like the eyes of a blind woman.

I went on, into the phone: “Steinlen didn’t know anything about it — he went over and waited for Mae on the corner of Rosewood and Larchmont and she didn’t show so he came home about four. Mrs. Steinlen hid out some place — probably with a friend or at a trick hotel where she wouldn’t be recognized — Steinlen didn’t even know she was back from location till this afternoon. Then she went to the studio and either scared Steinlen into his number or killed him herself and made it look like suicide — and I’ll lay six, two and even she did it herself... Uh-huh — a nice quiet girl...”

Boehme straightened up and turned slowly and started for the door.

I raised my head from the phone and said: “Wait a minute, baby.” I took Tony’s gun out of my pocket and held it on my lap.

Boehme stopped and turned and stared at the gun a minute without expression. Then she swayed a little and sank down to her knees, leaned forward and put her hands on the floor. I put the phone down and stood up and took two or three steps towards Boehme.

A woman’s voice said: “You’re a very smart man, aren’t you?” The voice was very soft, with a faint metallic quality underneath, like thin silk tearing.

Boehme toppled over sidewise and lay still.

I turned my head slowly and looked at the doorway on my left. There was a woman there in the semi-darkness of the hallway. As I looked at her she came forward into a little light; she was a very beautiful woman with soft golden hair caught into a big knot at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were large, heavily shadowed; her mouth was very red, very sharply cut. She wore a close-fitting light blue negligee and she held a heavy nickel-plated revolver very steadily in her right hand, its muzzle focused squarely on my stomach.

I was holding Tony’s automatic down at my side and I didn’t know whether Mrs. Steinlen had seen it or not until she said, still in that gentle, unexcited voice: “Put the gun on the table.”

She still moved towards me slowly; she was no more than six or seven feet from me. I looked at her without turning my body towards her or moving; I didn’t know whether to make a stab at using the gun or to put it on the table. She was in the full light of one of the floor lamps now and there was an expression in her eyes — the hard glitter of ice — that made me figure I’d lose either way.

I took two steps forward so that I could reach the table, but I didn’t put the gun down. I held it down stiff at my side and looked at her and tried to calculate my chances.

She said: “It is too bad so smart a man must die.”

She circled slowly until she was on the other side of the table; we were facing each other squarely across the table.

Then a shadow came silently out of the dark hallway behind her — the hallway that led to the kitchen. Tony moved towards her slowly; he walked like a somnambulist with his arms outstretched; his eyes were glazed, fixed in a blank, meaningless stare on the back of her head.

She raised the revolver slowly and I saw the muscles of her hand tense a little. I think she felt there was someone behind her but she did not trust her feeling enough; she raised the revolver and stared at me with cold, glittering eyes.

Then one of Tony’s arms went around her white throat and his other arm went smoothly, swiftly out along her arm, his hand grasped her hand and the revolver. They moved like one thing. It was like watching the complex, terribly efficient working of a deadly machine; Tony twisted her arm back slowly, steadily, his arm tightened around her throat slowly. Her eyes widened, the white transparent skin of her face grew dark.

Then suddenly the muzzle of the revolver stopped at her temple and I saw Tony’s finger tighten on the trigger. I moved towards them as swiftly as I could around the table and there was a sharp choked roar and I stopped suddenly. Tony released her slowly and she fell forward with the upper half of her body on the table, slid slowly off the table down on to the floor; the revolver with her fingers tightened spasmodically around its butt banged against one of the table legs.

I did not move for several seconds; I stood staring at Tony. He was standing with his legs widespread, looking into space, looking at some place a million miles away. Then, slowly, expression came into his eyes — a curious, almost tender expression. He glanced down at the woman at his feet and smiled a little. She was lying on her back and the small black spot on her temple grew slowly larger.

Tony smiled again and said very softly: “That is for Mae, my beautiful lady.”

I went to him very swiftly. I said: “How the hell did you get out here?”

He did not answer; he stood smiling a little, looking down at the dead woman. I shook his shoulder. He raised his smile to me, said: “I have been following you all day. I saw you from the window, from that girl’s room when you went to the Derby. I went down and got in my car and waited until you came out and followed you to the studio. I have been following you all afternoon — I knew finally you would take me to the one who killed Mae...”

I jerked my head towards the kitchen, asked: “Did the Negro girl see you come in?”

He shook his head. He said: “A woman came out and went upstairs above the garage right after you came in. Maybe that was her — maybe she lives there.”

I shoved his gun into his hands. I said: “Get out of here — quick.”

He shook his head, shrugged, gestured with one hand towards the woman on the floor.

I repeated: “Get out — quick.” I put my hands on his shoulders and shoved him towards the hallway.

He turned his head and stared at me in a puzzled sort of way with his lips pursed. Then he shrugged again and went slowly to the hallway and disappeared into its darkness.

I sat down and called the Post; after a minute or so I got Scheyer. I said: “Here’s your scoop. Sheila Dale murdered Mae Jackman. I think she murdered Steinlen, too, or at least she bulled him into killing himself — we can check on that. She shot herself about two minutes ago — very dead. I saw her do it but I couldn’t stop her. Tell your boss to hold the presses for an extra and grab a load of law and get out here to Steinlen’s. I’ll give you the details when you get here.”

I hung up and went over and looked Mrs. Steinlen over pretty carefully to be sure there weren’t any marks on her throat or any chance of Tony’s prints being on the revolver. Then I went out to the kitchen and got a glass of water to see what I could do about snapping Boehme out of the swoon.

The Negress came in from outside while I was getting the water. Her eyes were big as banjos. She said: “Didn’t ah heah a shot, Mistah?”

I told her she had, that Mrs. Steinlen had shot herself.

Her eyes got bigger. “Daid?”

I said: “Daid.”

I went back to the library and worked on Boehme. She came around in a little while and sat up and stared at Mrs. Steinlen and at the revolver in her clenched outstretched hand, then she put her hands up to her mouth and started moaning.

I told her to shut up and asked her if she knew where the check was. She acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about and I reminded her that if she’d help me all she could I’d see what I could do about forgetting the junk angle — about her acting as go-between and laying herself open to a bad rap on a narcotic charge.

She looked a lot more intelligent when I mentioned that and when I asked her about the check again she said she thought she could find it.

I was out of cigarettes but I found some in a box on the desk. I found an old edition of Stoddard’s Travel Lectures on one of the shelves and I sat down and made myself comfortable and read about Constantinople and waited.

During the economically ravaged 1930s, proletarian fiction became a favored form of protest among a small but influential group of young writers. Although widely labeled Communists and rabble-rousers, the majority were not political ideologues but earnest social reformers. Benjamin Appel, in an essay in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties (1968), refers to them as “mostly middle-class college graduates bemused by a vision of the Noble Worker, exploited by the Wicked Capitalists in Silk Hats, toiling away somewhere in Sweatballs County [who], beaten around the ears, hungry in the belly, somehow would become the savior of America.”

A number of factors, in particular World War II and the vehement anti-Communist backlash of the late 1940s and the 1950s, helped to end the proletarian vogue and the careers of such present-day virtual unknowns as Jack Conroy and William Rollins, Jr., who had published a score of nonpolitical crime stories in Black Mask in the 1920s and 1930s. Others, notably John Steinbeck and B. Traven, went on to write other types of fiction with less inflammatory, if no less earnest, subject matter. In the short time that proletarian fiction flourished, it did in fact help bring about some of the social changes championed by its writers. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is a notable example.

The plight of migrant farm workers in the West was a topic embraced by other writers besides Steinbeck. Daniel Mainwaring was one of these writers. Born and raised in California’s fertile Central Valley, he knew its land, people, and labor struggles as well as Steinbeck knew those of the nearby Salinas Valley. His first (and only mainstream) novel, One Against the Earth (1933), while not proletarian fiction, portrays Depression-era social problems in the Central Valley with a prolet’s zeal. “Fruit Tramp,” one of Mainwaring’s few short stories, first published in Harper’s in July 1934, has the same incisive qualities and is proletarian as well as Depression fiction. It is also, given its substance and implication, hard-boiled fiction of the very best kind.

In the mid-1930s, Mainwaring abandoned mainstream stories, with which he had had only limited success, in favor of mysteries. From 1936 to 1946, writing as Geoffrey Homes, he published a dozen first-rate novels set primarily in the valleys and foothills of north-central California and distinguished by fine dialogue and some of the most evocative descriptive writing to be found anywhere in the genre. He created three series detectives: newspaperman Robin Bishop, whose second case, The Doctor Died at Dusk (1936), concerns Central Valley labor strife; unconventional private eye Humphrey Campbell and his fat, lazy, and corrupt partner, Oscar Morgan; and Mexican cop Jose Manuel Madero. The last and best Homes novel, Build My Gallows High (1946), a taut, hard-edged nonseries thriller, so firmly established Mainwaring in Hollywood (he had begun writing B movies in 1942) that he produced no more fiction during the last three decades of his life. It was filmed in 1947, from Mainwaring’s screenplay, as Out of the Past — one of the half-dozen best noir crime films.

B. P.

Fruit Tramp (1934)

In July the fruit tramps came to Clovis. They put up tents in the eucalyptus grove along the track, and at night you could see them sitting around their little fires.

The Elbertas would be ripening when they drove in battered Fords and Chevrolets along the highway to the hills. Within a week a community would spring up in the grove to stay there until the last peach was in the sweat box and the last raisin had been hauled to the packing shed.

Every year or so, there was talk of turning the grove into a park, but no one did anything about it. Once in a while the townspeople sent Old Tim, the constable, over to make the fruit tramps clean up around the tents that looked like dirty bits of fungus growing against the tree trunks. Tim would hang about for a while talking to the children and telling the women to hang their washing so it could not be seen from the road.

“Them underdrawers now,” he would say. “They don’t look so good from John Good’s store. Better get ’em out of sight.” He would grumble a little and then go back to his chair on the porch of his office and sit there for the rest of the day, half asleep, his big hat pulled down over his eyes to keep out the glare of the sun, sucking at his dead pipe and shouting to the people he knew.

Farmers who needed help went to the grove and hired a family, children and all, paying the men so much a day to pick the fruit and the women and children a few cents a box for cutting peaches. Usually one of the little girls stayed at the camp to cook supper and have it ready when the family came back at dusk, and during the day in the fruit season you could see them bending over the pots or washing clothes or making miniature cities out of syrup cans and spools when they had nothing else to do.

For a while, during the War and right after it, fruit prices were good and the tramps made plenty of money. Six dollars a day the men were paid, and the women received as high as four or five cents a box. It wasn’t bad being a fruit tramp then.

But people in the cities stopped eating so many peaches and raisins. Prices went way down. The mortgage companies came, took the Lincolns and Cadillacs out of the barns, loaded the furniture the farmers had bought in good times into moving vans and drove away, and the banks foreclosed on the land and took over some of the farms.

Still the fruit tramps came every year when the Elbertas were turning yellow in the shiny leaves. Not so many came, but the grove was pretty well filled with men and women and children who drove along the highway leading to the hills and pitched their camps in the shade of the trees planted there by a man named Cole fifty years before.

When times were bad it wasn’t easy to make a living picking peaches and grapes, cutting the peaches in half, laying them in orderly rows on the trays. It was hard, unpleasant work. Out in the orchards the heat waves rose, and when you knelt on the earth to pick the fruit up the sand burned through your overalls. The cutting sheds offered little shelter from the sun, and the fuzz from the peaches crept up the women’s arms and down the necks of their dresses. They stood all day on the packed earth of the shed, picking the fruit up with their nimble fingers, jabbing the knife point into the soft flesh and, with a twist, halving the fruit.

The filled trays piled up, and before the stack was thirty high the shorter women and the little girls had to stand on boxes so they could reach. Usually the farmer’s youngest son rustled for the cutters, taking the empty boxes away, putting full ones in front of the women, pushing the cars loaded with trays of fruit into the sulphur houses which stood back of the sheds.

When the wind blew from the sulphur houses, the sheds were filled with yellow, choking smoke. In the early morning everyone would be cheerful and the girls would giggle when the rustler pushed against them and the women would shout at the men who drove up in the vineyard trucks. In the afternoon though everyone would be tired and cross and the rustler would growl at the women to hurry. By that time their skins would be covered with peach fuzz and would itch and burn and where they scratched themselves with sticky fingers a rash would break out.

Our family was so big that we didn’t have to hire any fruit tramps, but did the work ourselves. Sometimes when the crop was poor we went over to the Jap’s and helped him out. Other farmers thought father was lucky because he had so many children to do his work. He used to say, “Well, let them try to feed you for a while and then they’ll know who’s lucky.” Once he offered to trade ranches with John Cadwallader, who had one son. “I’ll take your boy. You take my mess of kids,” father said. “I’ll hire me some tramps to do the work. They feed themselves.”

When things got bad we didn’t feel it like the other farmers, or maybe it was because we hadn’t been used to anything much. It always took all the money father made to feed us, so we never bought a car or new furniture, and father said he couldn’t afford a mortgage.

The summer when prices were lowest didn’t affect us as it did the others. We were in a position to sit back and watch when the trouble with the fruit tramps started.

It was hot that year. There had been little rain and when June came the mountain tops were bare of snow. From the valley you could see little patches near the ragged crest of the ridge, like bits of paper scattered through the trees. The canals were dry and the river was so low we didn’t dare go swimming because they said we’d get typhoid fever. All night the engines throbbed, pulling the water from the deep cool sands, spilling it into the ditches, and sometimes late at night we would go over to the Jap’s and lie naked in the little pool near the pump, letting the cold water cover us. We had no pumping plant of our own, so the Jap gave us water when we needed it because we always helped him get his crop in when ours was poor.

The fruit tramps came again that year, more of them than ever. There were new faces in the grove. People who didn’t know what a raisin was put up tents and looked round for work. They came from farther away, from Los Angeles and San Francisco where things were bad too and work was hard to find. It was a cheap way to spend a summer, camped in a grove of eucalyptus trees rent free, and I suppose they figured the fruit had to be picked so the farmers would pay them to do it.

Around the first of July, when the Elbertas were coloring up enough so they could be shipped green, Aubrey Bell stopped by the bridge to talk to father.

“What you paying this year?” father asked.

“Don’t know. Last year we paid two bits an hour. We can’t now.”

“You’ll make more leaving the peaches on the trees,” father said.

“What you going to do?”

“We’ll get along,” father said, pointing to where we were sitting on the porch with mother stringing capri figs on wires. “I got all the help I need. All I got to do is feed ’em.”

“You’re lucky,” Aubrey said.

“Try it some time,” father said. “I’ll trade you the whole lot for a pair of mules.”

“You won’t trade me for a mule,” my sister Rose said.

“I couldn’t get a mule for you,” father said. “Who’d want you?”

“If we pay fifteen cents an hour, we can make a go of it,” Aubrey said. “I figure I can make a hundred and fifty bucks off my Elbertas if I pay that.”

“They won’t take it,” father said.

“Let ’em starve then.” Aubrey started his Ford and went away along the dusty, rutted road.

We heard no more about it for a week or so. Then father went in to town for some flour and rice and beans and talked for a long time to John Good. At dinner that night he told mother all the farmers had got together and decided to pay fifteen cents an hour to the pickers and a cent a box to the cutters.

“You’d make ten cents a day,” he told Rose.

“Not that much,” my brother Joe said. “Maybe eight.”

Rose threw a book at him and he grabbed her and they rolled over on the porch, almost upsetting the coal oil lamp.

“Stop it. I’ll lick you both,” mother said.

“That’s an awful little bit,” father said. “I’d hate to work for that.”

“I work for less,” mother said.

“Want to quit?”

“Sure,” mother said, but when we saw her face we knew she didn’t mean it.

“I’m sorry for the farmers,” father said. “But it’s their own fault. They bought a lot of junk when things were good. They put in electric lights and drove round in cars they couldn’t pay for. I guess they’ll always be like that though. I’m sorry for those tramps too. That isn’t such a nice way to live, camped in the center of town on the dirty ground with everybody looking at your washing hanging on the line, knowing how many holes there are in your undershirt, seeing you eat your dinner every night.”

“They don’t mind,” mother said.

“Some of them do. The new ones. There’s people camped in the grove who never was outside a city before. They’re going to make trouble, John says. Says some of them are Reds.”

“What’s Reds?” my sister Nell asked.

“Russians,” father said.

“But why Reds? Why not blues or pinks or yellows?” Nell asked.

“Call them anything you like,” father said. “I think it’s a lot of talk anyway. They don’t look bad to me. Only kind of pitiful and white-faced like they didn’t have enough to eat. I wanted to take the grub over and give it to them.”

“That would have been fine,” mother said. “Then you could have felt sorry for us.”

I took the wagon in to Clovis next day to have the blacksmith set the tires. I hung round the shop for a while, helping him with the forge, watching him as he spun the steel hoop on the anvil and hit it with his hammer while the sparks flew all around him and dropped in the inch-thick coat of coal dust on the floor. Then I went out into the sun and walked down the main street to John Good’s store.

A lot of farmers were hanging about outside, talking. After I listened for a time I found they were having trouble getting pickers. Some of the fruit tramps were willing to work for anything and they had gone out to the farms; but the rest said they’d rather starve than pick peaches for fifteen cents an hour.

Jake Cole came back from the grove pretty soon. “There’s a big guy over there who thinks he’s running things,” Jake said. “He’s getting the tramps all together and telling them not to work. He says they should get a living wage.”

“He’s a damn Communist,” Hal Bradley said.

There was a little hunchback in the crowd named Emory Whitfield who lived about a mile from our place. He got pretty excited and began waving his arms and swearing. “Those damn Rooshians,” he said, “they ought to go back to their own country. Who in hell do they think they are anyway?” When he talked he kept bobbing his head, and the hump on his back looked like something loose stuck inside of his blue work shirt. He hadn’t shaved for a long time and around his lips his red whiskers were brown from tobacco juice.

“He don’t look like a Rooshian to me,” Jake said. “He’s as white as I am.”

“You ain’t so white,” Hal said. “Maybe you would be if you went in the ditch once in a while.”

“You can’t tell about Communists by their looks,” a farmer I didn’t know said. “It’s the way they talk you can tell by.”

“Well, he’s always talking about a living wage,” Jake said.

“Then he’s a Red. They always talk like that,” the farmer said.

“Let’s all go over and talk to him,” Hal said. “Maybe if we put it up to him that we got to live too he’ll be reasonable.”

“Maybe he won’t. I already told him,” Jake said.

“It won’t do no hurt,” Hal said.

“Let’s run him out of town,” the hunchback said. “We been treating them too good, giving them a place to live and all. I been saying for years we shouldn’t let them live in the grove. Look how dirty they keep it.”

When I thought about the hunchback’s ranch and how dirty the house and yard and outhouses were, I snickered, but no one paid any attention to me. They went across the road and I followed, the hot dust burning my bare feet. I ran across quickly and stood in the shade as close as I could get to the tent where the big man they called a Communist lived. He was sitting on a lug box, cutting a chain out of a piece of white pine with a thin-bladed knife, but when he saw all the farmers he stood up. He was a big man with broad shoulders, bigger even than father, and through the faded blue shirt you could see the muscles on his arms like big lumps. His hair was as pale colored as straw and around his neck and ears it was ragged. Probably his wife cut his hair as mother did mine, with a pair of dull scissors.

Some of the other tramps left their tents and came over and stood behind the big man, and you could see he was different from them because his clothes were clean and his face and hands were clean and when he talked he spoke good English.

“Well, how about it?” Hal asked. “Jake here says you boys won’t work for less than two bits an hour.”

“That’s right,” the big man said.

“We can’t pay that,” Hal said and you could see he was trying to be nice about it. “We don’t make much off our farms. Hardly enough to pay the taxes. We can just get by if we pay fifteen cents.”

“Would you work for that?” the big man asked.

“If I was hungry I would,” Hal said.

“We aren’t that hungry,” the big man said.

Emory Whitfield pushed up to the front and waved his fist. “You will be before we get through with you,” he said.

“Shut up, Emory,” Hal said. “Let me do the talking. It won’t do no good to get tough about it.”

The big man smiled at Hal. “You seem reasonable. Now put yourself in our place. We have to eat too. I feel that it would be better not to work at all than to slave in this hot sun for nothing.”

“What do you mean nothing?” the hunchback yelled. “Ain’t we willing to pay you fifteen cents an hour and your women folks a cent a box for cutting?”

“You’re too kind.” The big man wasn’t smiling any more. “We won’t do it, so there’s no use talking about it.”

“By God! let’s run ’em out of town,” the hunchback said.

Hal grabbed Whitfield’s arm and told him to shut up. “You think it over,” he said to the big man. “We can’t pay no more and it ain’t because we don’t want to. We got to live too.”

“I know,” the big man said.

The crowd went back to the store. I was going to hang around but then I looked at the clock and remembered about the wagon. I hurried back to the blacksmith shop, hitched up the team, and drove on home. When I told father about the trouble at the grove he said I’d better keep away from the fruit tramps or I’d get hurt.

They didn’t give in and the farmers didn’t give in, so the Elbertas ripened on the trees, fell on the clods and rotted in the sun. Before the packing sheds, the empty refrigerator cars stood waiting and the crews of women who were to pack the peaches for shipment to the east were laid off. Four families got tired of going hungry and went to work on the Miller ranch. Because the other tramps were mad at them for not holding out, they moved their tents into the willows along Dry Creek.

There had been a couple of fist fights in Clovis already, and some of the tramps were threatening to dump out the fruit that lay on trays in Miller’s drying yard down by the river, or so the farmers said. A barn half filled with hay on the Thompson ranch caught fire and burned, and people round us blamed the tramps, though father was sure the Thompson boys had been smoking in the hay loft.

Some of the farmers wanted trouble but the rest were pretty upset about the whole business, feeling sorry for themselves and for the strikers. It wasn’t nice to go by the grove and see the women and kids sitting around looking like they needed something to eat. Four or five women in the town got groceries together and took them over to the camp. The big man thanked them and said they didn’t need charity, but when he wasn’t looking some of the others took the things the women brought. That’s what we heard from the farmers who stopped in at dusk to sit on the tank house steps and talk to father.

I saw the big man again two weeks after the strike started. Father and I were spreading trays in the drying yard on the sand, which was burning hot even though the sun was gone. After a while we knocked off to get a drink, and as I brought the cool water from the well I saw him coming through the orchard, carrying a shotgun.

Joe, standing on the porch with his face pressed against the screen, told father to look and pointed at the big man. “He’s going to dump our peaches out,” Joe whispered.

“Hush,” father said and when the man came across the yard, offered him the dipper filled with water.

The big man leaned his gun against the stairs and took the dipper.

“Any luck?” father asked.

The big man shook his head. “Thought I might get a rabbit. Didn’t see a single one.”

“We don’t eat rabbits round here this time of year,” father said. “They have sores on their necks.”

“They’d be better than nothing, at that.”

Father held out his hand. “My name’s Bigelow.”

“Mine’s Martin.”

“You don’t live around here.”

“No. I’m camped in the grove. One of the strikers.”

Joe had come out of the porch and stood near the pump. “Are you a Red?” he asked.

“Joe.” Father frowned at him.

“Do I look like it, son?” the big man asked and when father started to apologize, he laughed. “I know what they’ve been saying about us. It doesn’t hurt my feelings.”

Father rolled a cigarette and gave the papers and tobacco to Martin. “Sit on the steps a while.”

Martin sat down, poured the tobacco in a paper, made a cigarette.

“I’m neutral in this business,” father said. “I got so many kids I don’t hire any help. Couldn’t if I wanted to.”

“Do you blame us for holding out?”

“They can’t pay more.”

“Perhaps not. But it seems wrong to me to work for such a little bit. They’re taking advantage of our poverty.”

“You’ve never been a farmer, have you?”

“No. This is my first fling at it. Until now I worked in cities.”

“You don’t see things the way we do then,” father said.

“I guess not. I only know I won’t work for fifteen cents an hour, and as long as I can control the others, they won’t either.”

Father didn’t say anything more until mother told us supper was ready. “You might as well have supper with us, Mr. Martin.”

Martin stood up. “No thanks. They’re waiting for me in the grove.”

Mother came through the back door. “Please stay. I’ll fix some things for you to take home.”

“Thanks,” the big man said. “I couldn’t do that.” And he went away from us, down the lane to the bridge toward town. I watched him until his big form was out of sight.

Saturday morning, three weeks after the strike started, Jake Cole came over to borrow our hay wagon. One of his eyes was black and there was a bruise on his jaw.

“Celebrating?” father asked.

Jake shook his head. He was pretty serious. “We had a big fight in town last night. A bunch of us, maybe ten, went over to see if we couldn’t knock some sense into those guys.”

“Didn’t have much luck, did you?”

“We will,” Jake said.

“Let them alone,” father told him. “You’ll just get into trouble and your fruit will rot anyway.”

“We’re going to fix them to-night,” Jake said. “Last night we told ’em. I told that big guy, I said, ‘By God, either you pick our fruit for what we’ll pay you or get out of our town.’ ”

Father looked up from hooking the traces. “That sort of stuff gets you nowhere, Jake.”

“You talk like you was stringing along with them.” Jake sounded angry.

“Be yourself, Jake. I don’t want to see you get into trouble.”

“All the boys are going to be there. You better show up too.”

“Not me.”

“You getting yellow? Want us to think that?”

“I don’t care what you think,” father said. “Go haul your hay and cool off. If I didn’t know you so well I’d kick your pants for you.”

Jake drove off in our wagon. Father saw me standing around watching and told me to get the hell out in the fields and go to work. I took a shovel and ran out to where Joe was cutting a ditch across the lower end of the patch of Lovells. It would be three weeks yet before they were ripe, and father thought one last soaking would make them a lot bigger.

After supper father hitched the team to the buckboard and climbed to the seat. Joe and I asked if we could go along, but he said no, he had some business to attend to, and the best place for us was home. After he was out of sight we told mother we were going over to the Jap’s to swim and lit out on the short cut to Clovis.

We ran for a way, then Joe got out of breath and we lay down in a row of vines and looked at the moon coming up over the hills. It was pretty dark because there was only a piece of moon like a sickle you have just shined up on the grindstone hanging right back of Kings River canyon. The wind was soft and cool to our faces and it moved the arms of the grapevines a little, making a soft whispering sound as though it was trying to tell us something. Joe tugged at my arm. “Let’s hurry,” he said.

We walked fast along the creek, cut through the Malstar place to the road and then followed the railroad tracks to town.

“Better not let father see us,” Joe said. “He’d sure be mad.”

There was a packing shed right at the end of the grove, and we climbed on the platform and sat on some lug boxes, waiting. It was pretty quiet at first. Away off a train whistled twice and you could hear the engine puffing, the night was so still. In the grove people were talking and through the trees you could see them sitting around their fires.

A lot of automobiles were parked in front of the stores that faced the main street and up at the end of the line was our buckboard, the only one there, but father wasn’t in it.

Someone was talking in a loud voice over by John Good’s store. We moved our boxes back so no one could see us, and waited, and then a lot of men were crossing the road to the grove. It was too dark to see who they were, but I knew they were farmers and that father was probably with them. The crowd stopped not far from the tracks, right in front of us. Out of the trees came a bunch of men and the big man was in front.

I looked all through the crowd but couldn’t see father, and that made me feel better. Emory Whitfield stepped forward and began to yell, “Get the hell out of our town or we’ll run you out, you damned Bolsheviks.”

“We’re harming no one,” the big man said. “We have a right to do as we please.”

“Not in this town, you don’t.” Jake Cole moved toward the tramps beside the hunchback. “Pack up your trash and get out of here.”

“We stay here,” the big man said.

The farmers moved closer. A couple of them had shotguns under their arms. Others were carrying pitchforks and lumber. The tramps edged backward, all but the big man.

“They won’t hurt us,” he said.

“Not if you clear out we won’t,” Jake said.

“Don’t let them frighten you,” the big man told the other tramps.

The hunchback started to yell again, running back and forth between the crowds of men, yelling at the farmers to run the tramps out of town.

Someone was coming fast across the road. It was father, and Old Tim, the constable, trying to keep up with him.

“Let Tim handle this,” father told the farmers. “I routed him out and brought him over here. It’s his job. You boys go on home before you get into trouble.”

“You keep your nose out of this,” Jake said.

The hunchback was jumping up and down in front of father. “You got a mess of kids to do your work,” he said. “You don’t have to worry none. Come butting in here when it’s none of your damn business.”

“Send ’em all home, Tim,” father said. “To-morrow you can clear the camp out. Old man Galt will give you an order. But hell, they can’t move to-night.”

Jake stepped up close to father. “I said to keep your nose out of this.” Jake was pretty big but my father was a head taller and a lot broader. He grabbed Jake’s shoulder, spun him around, and planted his foot in the seat of Jake’s pants. “You got that coming to you, Jake,” he said. “Run along home.”

One of the farmers raised a club.

“Look out, father,” I yelled. It didn’t do any good. The two by four smashed against his head, he put up his hands, moved around like he was dizzy, and then fell down. Joe jumped off the platform screaming “Father, father” at the top of his voice, and I jumped after him.

And as we ran toward the crowd the big man jumped forward, grabbed Jake, and hurled him at the farmers. I caught Joe and held him because we couldn’t do any good. He kept screaming, clawing at my hands to get loose, and over his head I saw the men fighting, the big man hitting at the people I knew with his fists, all alone because the other tramps had run into the grove.

“Red. Bolshevik. Rooshian,” the hunchback was yelling. “Kill the bastard Rooshian.”

Hal Bradley grappled with the big man, but he was thin, and the tramp picked him up and tossed him out of the way as though he were a little boy. Then the big man stood there, telling them to come on, telling them to drive him out of town.

A gun went off and a red flame pointed at the big man. He put his hands over his belly and started moving backward, very slowly, toward the grove, but he didn’t get there. Maybe he tripped over something, I don’t know; but he fell down and a woman came running out to him, took his head in her arms, and started to cry.

All of a sudden the farmers were gone and father was sitting up, holding his head and swearing. We went over to him, and Joe held on to him tight and kept asking, “You all right, father, you all right?”

Old Tim helped father up and we all went over and looked at the big man. He wasn’t groaning, just lying stretched out with his head in the woman’s lap, and she was crying.

In the grove the fruit tramps were tearing the tents down and packing their stuff in automobiles, and inside of an hour there was only one tent left in the grove. That belonged to the big man and he didn’t need it any more.

In the 1930s and 1940s, James M. Cain was the most talked-about writer in the United States. His novels of that period, like the work of Dashiell Hammett a few years earlier, broke new ground in crime fiction. Until the publication of The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1934, sex was a topic handled with kid gloves and almost always peripheral to the central storyline. Cain made sex the primary motivating force of his fiction and presented it to his readers frankly, at times steamily.

But Cain was much more than just a purveyor of what one of his critics termed “hard-boiled eroticism.” His best works are masterful studies of average people caught up in and often destroyed by passion of one type or another: adultery, incest, hatred, greed, lust. They are also sharp, clear portraits of the times and places in which they were written, especially California during the Depression. As Cain himself said of his work in his preface to Three of a Kind (1942): “I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent.”

This is as true of his relatively few short stories as it is of such novels as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Serenade (1937), Love’s Lovely Counterfeit (1942), and Double Indemnity (1943). The best of his shorter pieces were collected in The Baby in the Icebox (1981); of these, “Brush Fire” is particularly fine. Its spare, elemental style (which “possesses the sleeve-holding, hypnotic power of an ancient Mariner’s tale,” in one reviewer’s eloquent phrase), sexual motivation, vivid depiction of life during the Depression, and grimly inevitable conclusion give it some of the powerful impact of Postman.

B. P.

Brush Fire (1936)

He banged sparks with his shovel, coughed smoke, cursed the impulse that had led him to heed that rumor down in the railroad yards that CCC money was to be had by all who wanted to fight this fire the papers were full of, up in the hills. Back home he had always heard them called forest fires, but they seemed to be brush fires here in California. So far, all he had got out of it was a suit of denims, a pair of shoes, and a ration of stew, served in an army mess kit. For that he had ridden twenty miles in a jolting truck out from Los Angeles to these parched hills, stood in line an hour to get his stuff, stood in line another hour for the stew, and then labored all night, the flames singeing his hair, the ground burning his feet through the thick brogans, the smoke searing his lungs, until he thought he would go frantic if he didn’t get a whiff of air.

Still the thing went on. Hundreds of them smashed out flames, set backfires, hacked at bramble, while the bitter complaint went around: “Why don’t they give us brush hooks if we got to cut down them bushes? What the hell good are these damn shovels?” The shovel became the symbol of their torture. Here and there, through the night, a grotesque figure would throw one down, jump on it, curse at it, then pick it up again as the hysteria subsided.

“Third shift, this way! Third shift, this way. Bring your shovels and turn over to shift number four. Everybody in the third shift, right over here.”

It was the voice of the CCC foreman, who, all agreed, knew as much about fighting fires as a monkey did. Had it not been for the state fire wardens, assisting at critical spots, they would have made no progress whatever.

“All right. Answer to your names when I call them. You got to be checked off to get your money. They pay today two o’clock, so yell loud when I call your name.”

“Today’s Sunday.”

“I said they pay today, so speak up when I call your name.”

The foreman had a pencil with a little bulb in the end of it which he flashed on and began going down the list.

“Bub Anderson, Lonnie Beal, K. Bernstein, Harry Deever...” As each name was called there was a loud “Yo,” so when his name was called, Paul Larkin, he yelled “Yo” too. Then the foreman was calling a name and becoming annoyed because there was no answer. “Ike Pendleton! Ike Pendleton!”

“He’s around somewhere.”

“Why ain’t he here? Don’t he know he’s got to be checked off?”

“Hey, Ike! Ike Pendleton!”

He came out of his trance with a jolt. He had a sudden recollection of a man who had helped him to clear out a brier patch a little while ago, and whom he hadn’t seen since. He raced up the slope and over toward the fire.

Near the brier patch, in a V between the main fire and a backfire that was advancing to meet it, he saw something. He rushed, but a cloud of smoke doubled him back. He retreated a few feet, sucked in a lungful of air, charged through the backfire. There, on his face, was a man. He seized the collar of the denim jacket, started to drag. Then he saw it would be fatal to take this man through the backfire that way. He tried to lift, but his lungful of air was spent: he had to breathe or die. He expelled it, inhaled, screamed at the pain of the smoke in his throat.

He fell on his face beside the man, got a little air there, near the ground. He shoved his arm under the denim jacket, heaved, felt the man roll solidly on his back. He lurched to his feet, ran through the backfire. Two or three came to his aid, helped him with his load to the hollow, where the foreman was, where the air was fresh and cool.

“Where’s his shovel? He ought to have turned it over to—”

“His shovel! Give him water!”

“I’m gitting him water; but one thing at a time—”

“Water! Water! Where’s that water cart?”

The foreman, realizing belatedly that a life might be more important than the shovel tally, gave orders to “work his arms and legs up and down.” Somebody brought a bucket of water, and little by little Ike Pendleton came back to life. He coughed, breathed with long shuddering gasps, gagged, vomited. They wiped his face, fanned him, splashed water on him.

Soon, in spite of efforts to keep him where he was, he fought to his feet, reeled around with the hard, terrible vitality of some kind of animal. “Where’s my hat? Who took my hat?” They clapped a hat on his head, he sat down suddenly, then got up and stood swaying. The foreman remembered his responsibility. “All right, men, give him a hand, walk him down to his bunk.”

“Check him off!”

“Check the rest of us! You ain’t passed the Ps yet!”

“O.K. Sing out when I call. Gus Ritter!”

“Yo!”

When the names had been checked, Paul took one of Ike’s arms and pulled it over his shoulder; somebody else took the other, and they started for the place, a half mile or so away on the main road, where the camp was located. The rest fell in behind. Dawn was just breaking as the little file, two and two, fell into a shambling step.

“Hep!... Hep!”

“Hey, cut that out! This ain’t no lockstep.”

“Who says it ain’t?”

When he woke up, in the army tent he shared with five others, he became aware of a tingle of expectancy in the air. Two of his tent mates were shaving; another came in, a towel over his arm, his hair wet and combed.

“Where did you get that wash?”

“They got a shower tent over there.”

He got out his safety razor, slipped his feet in the shoes, shaved over one of the other men’s shoulders, then started out in his underwear. “Hey!” At the warning, he looked out. Several cars were out there, some of them with women standing around them, talking to figures in blue denim.

“Sunday, bo. Visiting day. This is when the women all comes to say hello to their loved ones. You better put something on.”

He slipped on the denims, went over to the shower tent, drew towel and soap, stripped, waited his turn. It was a real shower, the first he had had in a long time. It was cold, but it felt good. There was a comb there. He washed it, combed his hair, put on his clothes, went back to his tent, put the towel away, made his bunk. Then he fell in line for breakfast — or dinner, as it happened, as it was away past noon. It consisted of corned beef, cabbage, a boiled potato, apricot pie, and coffee.

He wolfed down the food, washed up his kit, began to feel pretty good. He fell into line again, and presently was paid, $4.50 for nine hours work, at fifty cents an hour. He fingered the bills curiously. They were the first he had had in his hand since that day, two years before, when he had run away from home and begun this dreadful career of riding freights, bumming meals, and sleeping in flophouses.

He realized with a start they were the first bills he had ever earned in his twenty-two years; for the chance to earn bills had long since departed when he graduated from high school and began looking for jobs, never finding any. He shoved them in his pocket, wondered whether he would get the chance that night to earn more of them.

The foreman was standing there, in the space around which the tents were set up, with a little group around him. “It’s under control, but we got to watch it, and there’ll be another call tonight. Any you guys that want to work, report to me eight o’clock tonight, right here in this spot.”

By now the place was alive with people, dust, and excitement. Cars were jammed into every possible place, mostly second-, third-, and ninth-hand, but surrounded by neatly dressed women, children, and old people, come to visit the fire fighters in denim. In a row out front, icecream, popcorn, and cold-drink trucks were parked, and the road was gay for half a mile in both directions with pennants stuck on poles, announcing their wares. Newspaper reporters were around too, with photographers, and as soon as the foreman had finished his harangue, they began to ask him questions about the fire, the number of men engaged in fighting it, and the casualties.

“Nobody hurt. Nobody hurt at all. Oh, early this morning, fellow kind of got knocked out by smoke, guy went in and pulled him out, nothing at all.”

“What was his name?”

“I forget his name. Here... here’s the guy that pulled him out. Maybe he knows his name.”

In a second he was surrounded, questions being shouted at him from all sides. He gave them Ike’s name and his own, and they began a frantic search for Ike, but couldn’t find him. Then they decided he was the main story, not Ike, and directed him to pose for his picture. “Hey, not there; not by the ice-cream truck. We don’t give ice cream a free ad in this paper. Over there by the tent.”

He stood as directed, and two or three in the third shift told the story all over again in vivid detail. The reporters took notes, the photographers snapped several pictures of him, and a crowd collected. “And will you put it in that I’m from Spokane, Washington? I’d kind of like to have that in, on account of my people back there. Spokane, Washington.”

“Sure, we’ll put that in.”

The reporters left as quickly as they had come, and the crowd began to melt. He turned away, a little sorry that his big moment had passed so quickly. Behind him he half heard a voice: “Well, ain’t that something to be getting his picture in the paper?” He turned, saw several grins, but nobody was looking at him. Standing with her back to him, dressed in a blue silk Sunday dress, and kicking a pebble, was a girl. It was a girl who had spoken, and by quick elimination he decided it must be she.

The sense of carefree goofiness that had been growing on him since he got his money, since the crowd began to jostle him, since he had become a hero, focused somewhere in his head with dizzy suddenness. “Any objections?”

This got a laugh. She kept her eyes on the pebble but turned red and said: “No.”

“You sure?”

“Just so you don’t get stuck up.”

“Then that’s O.K. How about an ice-cream cone?”

“I don’t mind.”

“Hey, mister, two ice-cream cones.”

“Chocolate.”

“Both of them chocolate and both of them double.”

When they got their cones he led her away from the guffawing gallery which was beginning to be a bit irksome. She looked at him then, and he saw she was pretty. She was small, with blue eyes, dusty blonde hair that blended with the dusty scene around her, and a spray of freckles over her forehead. He judged her to be about his own age. After looking at him, and laughing rather self-consciously and turning red, she concentrated on the cone, which she licked with a precise technique. He suddenly found he had nothing to say, but said it anyhow: “Well, say — what are you doing here?”

“Oh — had to see the fire, you know.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Haven’t even found out where it is, yet.”

“Well, my, my! I see I got to show it to you.”

“You know where it is?”

“Sure. Come on.”

He didn’t lead the way to the fire, though. He took her up the arroyo, through the burned-over area, where the fire had been yesterday. After a mile or so of walking, they came to a little grove of trees beside a spring. The trees were live oak and quite green and cast a deep shade on the ground. Nobody was in sight, or even in earshot. It was a place the Sunday trippers didn’t know about.

“Oh, my! Look at these trees! They didn’t get burnt.”

“Sometimes it jumps — the fire, I mean. Jumps from one hill straight over to the other hill, leaves places it never touched at all.”

“My, but it’s pretty.”

“Let’s sit down.”

“If I don’t get my dress dirty.”

“I’ll put this jacket down for you to sit on.”

“Yes, that’s all right.”

They sat down. He put his arm around her, put his mouth against her lips.

It was late afternoon before she decided that her family might be looking for her and that she had better go back. She had an uncle in the camp, it seemed, and they had come as much to see him as to see the fire. She snickered when she remembered she hadn’t seen either. They both snickered. They walked slowly back, their little fingers hooked together. He asked if she would like to go with him to one of the places along the road to get something to eat, but she said they had brought lunch with them, and would probably stop along the beach to eat it, going back.

They parted, she to slip into the crowd unobtrusively; he to get his mess kit, for the supper line was already formed. As he watched the blue dress flit between the tents and disappear, a gulp came into his throat; it seemed to him that this girl he had held in his arms, whose name he hadn’t even thought to inquire, was almost the sweetest human being he had ever met in his life.

When he had eaten, and washed his mess kit and put it away, he wanted a cigarette. He walked down the road to a Bar-B-Q shack, bought a package, lit up, started back. Across a field, a hundred yards away, was the ocean. He inhaled the cigarette, inhaled the ocean air, enjoyed the languor that was stealing over him, wished he didn’t have to go to work. And then, as he approached the camp, he felt something ominous.

Ike Pendleton was there, and in front of him this girl, this same girl he had spent the afternoon with. Ike said something to her, and she backed off. Ike followed, his fists doubled up. The crowd was silent, seemed almost to be holding its breath. Ike cursed at her. She began to cry. One of the state police came running up to them, pushed them apart, began to lecture them. The crowd broke into a buzz of talk. A woman, who seemed to be a relative, began to explain to all and sundry: “What if she did go with some guy to look at the fire? He don’t live with her no more! He don’t support her — never did support her! She didn’t come up here to see him; never even knew he was up here! My land, can’t the poor child have a good time once in a while?”

It dawned on him that this girl was Ike’s wife.

He sat down on a truck bumper, sucked nervously at his cigarette. Some of the people who had guffawed at the ice-cream-cone episode in the afternoon looked at him, whispered. The policeman called over the woman who had been explaining things, and she and the girl, together with two children, went hurriedly over to a car and climbed into it. The policeman said a few words to Ike, and then went back to his duties on the road.

Ike walked over, picked up a mess kit, squatted on the ground between tents, and resumed a meal apparently interrupted. He ate sullenly, with his head hulked down between his shoulders. It was almost dark. The lights came on. The camp was not only connected to county water but to county light as well. Two boys went over to Ike, hesitated, then pointed to Paul. “Hey, mister, that’s him. Over there, sitting on the truck.”

Ike didn’t look up. When the boys came closer and repeated their news, he jumped up suddenly and chased them. One of them he hit with a baked potato. When they had run away he went back to his food. He paid no attention to Paul.

In the car, the woman was working feverishly at the starter. It would whine, the engine would start and bark furiously for a moment or two, then die with a series of explosions. Each time it did this, the woman would let in the clutch, the car would rock on its wheels, and then come to rest. This went on for at least five minutes, until Paul thought he would go insane if it didn’t stop, and people began to yell: “Get a horse!” “Get that damn oil can out of here and stop that noise!” “Have a heart! This ain’t the Fourth of July!”

For the twentieth time it was repeated. Then Ike jumped up and ran over there. People closed in after him. Paul, propelled by some force that seemed completely apart from himself, ran after him. When he had fought his way through the crowd, Ike was on the running board of the car, the children screaming, men trying to pull him back. He had the knife from the mess kit in his hand. “I’m going to kill her! I’m going to kill her! If it’s the last thing I do on earth, I’m going to kill her!”

“Oh, yeah!”

He seized Ike by the back of the neck, jerked, and slammed him against the fender. Then something smashed against his face. It was the woman, beating him with her handbag. “Go away! Git away from here!”

Ike faced him, lips writhing, eyes glaring a slaty gray against the deep red of the burns he had received that morning. But his voice was low, even if it broke with the intensity of his emotion. “Get out of my way, you! You got nothing to do with this.”

He lunged at Ike with his fist — missed. Ike struck with the knife. He fended with his left arm, felt the steel cut in. With his other hand he struck, and Ike staggered back. There was a pile of shovels beside him, almost tripping him up. He grabbed one, swung, smashed it down on Ike’s head. Ike went down. He stood there, waiting for Ike to get up, with that terrible vitality he had shown this morning. Ike didn’t move. In the car the girl was sobbing.

The police, the ambulance, the dust, the lights, the doctor working on his arm, all swam before his eyes in a blur. Somewhere far off, an excited voice was yelling: “But I got to use your telephone, I got to, I tell you! Guy saves a man’s life this morning, kills him tonight! It’s a hell of a story!” He tried to comprehend the point of this; couldn’t.

The foreman appeared, summoned the third shift to him in loud tones, began to read names. He heard his own name called, but didn’t answer. He was being pushed into the ambulance, handcuffed to one of the policemen.

Brett Halliday (Davis Dresser) was the creator of Michael Shayne, a red-haired Miami private detective who was enormously popular in the 1940s and 1950s. Shayne appeared in fifty novels written by Halliday, beginning with Dividend on Death (1939), and, after 1965, in another eighteen written by various ghostwriters under the Halliday byline. He also appeared in a series of seven B films starring Lloyd Nolan, among them Sleepers West (1941, based on Frederick Nebel’s Sleepers East [1933]) and Time to Kill (1942, based on Raymond Chandler’s High Window [1942]); in five additional B pictures in the late 1940s starring Hugh Beaumont; on the radio from 1944 to 1952 featuring Jeff Chandler, among others; and on television in 1960 and 1961 with Richard Denning. He also lent his name to Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine (1956–1985), one of the longest running crime-fiction periodicals. As critic Art Scott has noted, “Shayne is a tough, direct character, not tricked out with gimmicks, not given to guilt complexes or excessive philosophizing... Mike Shayne is the Generic Private Eye.”

Halliday began his writing career with neither Shayne nor crime fiction, but with soft-core sex and Western novels for the lending-library market. Between 1934 and 1942, he published sixteen of the former and ten of the latter under both his own name and various pseudonyms. His first detective novels, Mum’s the Word for Murder (1938) and The Kissed Corpse (1939), were published under the name Asa Baker and featured former Texas Ranger ferry Burke. Even after the success of Shayne, Dresser wrote one mystery under the name Andrew Wayne, two mysteries under the name Hal Debrett (in collaboration with Kathleen Rollins), and three hard-boiled paperback originals under the name Matthew Blood (in collaboration with Byerson Johnson).

In addition to his prolific output of novels, Halliday found time for an occasional shorter work. “Human Interest Stuff,” a nonseries story, is perhaps the strongest of them. Originally published in the pulp magazine Adventure in September 1938, this rough-and-tumble yarn has an offbeat narrative approach, a Mexican railroad-construction-camp setting, and a tight little twist in its tail.

B. P.

Human Interest Stuff (1938)

You want a human interest story for your paper on the execution tomorrow? A guy is slated for a one-way trip to hell in the electric chair, and all you see in it is a front page story!

That’s your business, of course. I never blame a man for doing his job. I’ve kept my mouth shut up to now for Sam’s sake, but he won’t mind after the juice is turned on in that little gray room.

You’re right. There is a whale of a story that hasn’t been told. I guess it’s what you’d call human interest stuff, all right.

I’m the only person that can give you the real low-down. Me, and one other. But it’s a cinch the other fellow isn’t going to talk for publication.

All right, if you promise to hold it until after they throw the switch tomorrow morning. I wouldn’t want Sam to be sore at me for spilling it.

Yeah. There’s a gap of five weeks unaccounted for from the time Bully Bronson’s murderer crossed the Rio Grande going south until he came back to fry in the hot seat.

A lot of living can be packed into five weeks. A hell of a lot, Mister.

It’s funny the way things worked to bring Sam and me together. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but things don’t — south of the Border.

I drifted into the railroad construction camp that morning, needing a job bad and not caring what kind of a job it was.

The American engineer, Hobbs, was down with tropical dysentery and was all set for a trip back to a hospital in the States. He had a young assistant he’d planned to leave in charge of the work, but the youngster was new to Mexico and just the night before I hit camp he had gone on a tear and drunk enough tequila to make the mistake of insulting a Mexican girl.

The girl’s father drained the cactus juice from his belly and left him in bad shape to take charge of a construction job.

With his fever at 105, Hobbs was in a tight spot when I happened along. They were filling the last gap in a railroad line that was to connect St. Louis with the west coast of Mexico and with the Orient by ship, and the rainy season was due in about six weeks.

That meant the fill and culverts had to be in place within six weeks — or else. The last gap was across that valley south of Terlingua, where plenty of water runs down from the mountains during the rainy season.

And there was more to it, really, than just beating the rainy season. The history of the St. Louis, Mexico & Asiatic Railroad goes back a lot of years to a group of men in St. Louis who dreamed of a direct route from their city to the Orient.

They backed their dream with money and started building the S. L. M. & A. from both ends toward the middle. Something happened — they ran out of money, I guess — and got the American end to within a hundred miles of the Border, and the Mexican end about two hundred miles south of the Border.

For forty years, the line was in a receivership and that three hundred mile gap was the difference between a dream and reality.

Just last year, they got money from somewhere and started filling that gap.

Now, it was narrowed to four miles, and you can’t blame Hobbs for jumping at any chance to get the grade finished before the rainy season came along and held them up another six months.

Yeah, that’s just what he did. He asked me a couple of questions to see if I knew my stuff, then put me in charge.

They took him north in a Ford ambulance at noon, and his assistant died at four o’clock — the Mexican knife having drained more from his belly than just the over-dose of tequila.

That put it strictly up to me. A job I hadn’t been formally introduced to, an all-Mexican crew of two hundred mule-skinners, a four-mile fill with drainage culverts to get in place — and the rainy season to beat.

I sat up all night in Hobbs’ tent with a gasoline lantern hanging from the ridge-pole, going over the blueprints and field books, trying to get the feel of the job.

We started moving dirt in the morning, and I tried to be all over the job at once.

Mexicans are funny. I’d rather work a job with Mex labor than any other kind, but they do take lots of bossing. The one thing they haven’t got is initiative. They’ll do anything they’re told, and do it well, but they have to be told or they won’t do a damn thing.

I was going nuts before the morning was half over. I had a transit set up in the middle of the gap, and a level at each end of the fill that we were working both ways.

Running from one instrument to another; setting a few curve stations with the transit; trotting back to drop in some blue-tops at one end of the fill; then going back to the other end to re-set slope stakes that had been dragged out by careless wheelers — it had me goofy.

With two hundred teams moving dirt all the time, you understand, and I had to keep them moving.

I was standing behind a level, cussing my Mexican rodman who was holding the level rod upside down on a stake, when I heard an American voice behind me:

“You wouldn’t be needing a spare engineer, Mister?”

A million dollars wouldn’t have sounded as good to me right then. I pushed back my hat and wiped a muddy mixture of sweat and dust from my forehead. The man was sitting a roan mare, looking down at me. He wore white whipcords and a white shirt, but he looked at home in the Texas saddle.

His eyes were blue and there was a flame in them. He didn’t blink while I stood there and stared. He was about thirty, and there was red sunburn on his face like a man gets when he comes fresh into the blistering heat south of the Rio Grande.

I couldn’t quite figure him out, but I only asked one question:

“Can you run a level?”

He stepped off the roan onto the soft fill and came toward me. There was a bulge under his shirt on the left side. I’ve seen enough shoulder holsters to know what it was.

The way he stepped up to the level, squinted through the telescope and adjusted the focus to his eye was all the answer my question needed.

You can tell just by the way a man walks up to a tripod whether he knows his stuff or not. It’s a trick of seeing the position of the three legs and not stepping close enough to any one of them to throw the instrument out of level. Engineers get so they do it subconsciously, and it’s a sure way of spotting a phoney.

He didn’t know the Mexican lingo, but you can set grade stakes with arm signals. I gave him the field book showing grade elevations for each station and told him to go to it.

I asked him his name as I started to the other end of the fill.

He gave me a steady look and said: “Just call me Sam.”

That was all right with me. I would have called him sweetheart if he’d wanted it that way. I was so damned glad to get some help that I didn’t care how many babies he had strangled back in the States.

I took three deep breaths and moved on down the job. Things began to take shape when I had time to study the blueprints and get squared around. With Sam handling one instrument, I felt the job was whipped.

By quitting time that night, everything was going smoothly. I could see it would be a cinch to finish in six weeks if Sam stuck with me.

I told him so after a feed of frijoles con chile and tortillas that the Mex cook dished up.

We were sitting together in the tent, and Sam nodded. He didn’t say anything. He was tired, and the sunburn on his face had deepened to a fiery red. He slouched back on his bunk and seemed to be busy with private thoughts.

I got up and fiddled with the radio, a battery set that Hobbs had left behind. I got it working, and tuned in a news broadcast over a Fort Worth station. The announcer’s voice crackled in the quiet that had fallen over camp in the twilight:

“The search for the slayer of Bully Bronson shifts below the Mexican Border tonight. Authorities are convinced that Bronson’s assistant engineer, who murdered his chief in cold blood after an argument in a highway construction camp, has slipped through a cordon of officers in the Big Bend section and made his escape across the Rio Grande. This station has been requested by police to broadcast the following description to Mexican authorities who are warned that...”

I reached over and snapped the radio off. Sam was sitting up straight, watching me through slitted eyes. Three buttons of his shirt were open and his right arm was crooked at the elbow, gun-hand where it could go inside his shirt in a hurry.

I said: “To hell with that stuff. Everybody in this part of the country knows Bully Bronson needed killing. I hope they never get the guy that did it.”

Sam relaxed a little. He reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, drew out an empty pack. I tossed him my makings of Bull Durham and brown papers. He tore two papers and spilled half a sack of tobacco before he got a bulging cigarette rolled and licked.

When he had it burning, he said: “But murder is still murder.” He clamped his teeth together, like he was having a hard time keeping from saying too much.

“It’s not murder when a guy like Bully Bronson gets bumped,” I argued. “Hell, I know fifty men that’ll sleep easier tonight because Bronson is dead.”

“It’s murder when a man waits until another is asleep, then blows the top of his head off with a shotgun.” Sam’s voice was thin and shaky. His cigarette went to pieces in his fingers when he tried to draw on it.

“There’s a lot of things that go into a killing like that,” I told him. “No one will ever know how much the killer took off Bronson before he got up nerve to do the job. And, from what I know of Bronson, I figure it was smart to wait until the old devil was asleep, and then use a shotgun to make sure of doing a good job.”

Sam got another cigarette rolled without tearing the paper. He said, low:

“The law still calls it first degree murder.”

I nodded. I was watching his face. “If the law ever gets a chance to say anything about it. If he’s across the river, he doesn’t have to worry about the law.”

“There’s such a thing as extradition.”

I laughed. “You don’t know this country like I do. Extradition is just a big word south of the Rio Grande. What a man has done back in the States doesn’t count against him down here. A man leaves his past behind him when he crosses the river.”

Sam thought that over, dragging on his brown-paper cigarette. His lips twisted and he asked:

“Can a man ever get away from... his past?”

I stood up and yawned. I knew something was going to crack if we kept on along that line. I said:

“Hard work is the best medicine for that kind of thinking. We’ve got a tough job in front of us here. It’s going to take all both of us can do, working together, to put it over.”

I turned my back on him to give him time to think it over and get my meaning straight.

There was just enough daylight left to see the end of the railroad fill there in front of camp.

It’s an ugly, hard country south of the Big Bend. Nothing will grow in the hot sand except mesquite and cactus, and the only things that can live are lizards and long-eared jack-rabbits.

You forget how ugly it is in the darkness. Even the bare thorny mesquite and the spiny cactus plants look friendly. You’re able to take a deep breath again after trying not to breathe all day for fear of burning your lungs.

I remember every little thing as I stood there in the open doorway of the tent waiting for Sam to say something. A mule squealed in the corrals, and some of the Mexicans were singing to a guitar accompaniment.

Did you ever hear Mexicans singing one of their native songs? You’ve missed something.

A coyote howled on the far rim of the valley while I stood there. I suppose you’ve never heard a coyote’s howl drifting through the darkness across a valley either? That’s something else you’ve missed.

Sam’s voice was harsh, close to my ear: “The job isn’t my lookout.”

I pulled a lot of the cool evening air into my lungs. I knew this was the showdown. I had to make Sam see it my way.

“It’s my lookout, Sam. I didn’t ask for it, but here it is, dumped in my lap. It’s up to us to get the fill in place before water starts running down from the hills and washes it out.”

He leaned against the upright supporting pole and looked out over the valley.

I nodded toward the fill. “It’s our job, Sam.”

There was a twisted funny look on his face. “Engineers are damned fools.”

I agreed with him. “They just wouldn’t be engineers if they weren’t. They’d be ribbon clerks or shoe salesmen.”

He laughed, and I know he was thinking about a murdered man across the river:

“Men die and other men run away from the electric chair, but there’s always a job to think about.”

I turned back into the tent. I knew Sam was going to see me through. I said:

“After we get the grade ready for the track-laying crew will be time enough to talk about other things.”

He nodded, came back and sat on his bunk. The twisted look was gone from his face. “I suppose it might help a man... to get one more job under his belt.”

He took off his shirt, showing a shoulder harness with a .45 automatic in a clip holster.

Neither of us said anything as he unbuckled the harness and hung it over the head of his bunk.

It stayed there until the job was finished.

It wasn’t tough, as such jobs go. The usual run of luck you run into on construction work. Rock where you don’t expect to find it, and so much sand in the fill that it wouldn’t hold a two-to-one slope.

Too much sotol in camp on pay nights, grudges settled the Mexican way with knives which left us shorthanded until we could get more teamsters.

Sam was plenty okay. He didn’t have an awful lot of experience on dirt work, but he was built out of the stuff that makes engineers. With all the guts in the world, and never trying to get out from under when there was extra work to be done.

Lots of nights those first two weeks we worked until twelve or later under the hot glare of a gasoline lantern, figuring mass diagrams to balance the cut and fill, changing gradients.

Never a word between us about the search for Bully Bronson’s murderer — and the radio stayed turned off.

Your mind gets numbed after so long on a rush job that takes everything you’ve got. There aren’t any tomorrows and the yesterdays don’t count.

There’s only the present — with the heat and the dust, swarms of sand-flies, the shouts of teamsters getting their loaded wheelers up the hill, a thick haze rising from the valley with snow-capped mountain peaks showing dimly through it from the southwest, the two ends of a narrow railroad grade creeping toward each other so slowly that you’d swear you were making no progress at all if you didn’t have station stakes to tell you different.

Two white men on a job like that are bound to get pretty close, or learn to hate each other’s guts.

During those weeks Sam and I got about as close as two men can ever get. Without words, you understand. Neither of us were the kind to shoot off our mouths.

It wasn’t the sort of thing you talk about. Working side by side fifteen or twenty hours a day, words get sort of useless.

I quit being the boss after the first couple of days. We were just two engineers pushing a job through.

After it was finished?

Hell, I didn’t know.

I didn’t waste any time thinking about what would come after it was done. I don’t think Sam did, either.

Maybe one of us was a murderer. That didn’t count. See what I mean? The job was the only thing that counted.

No. I suppose you don’t understand. You’re a newspaper reporter. You’ve spent a lot of years practicing to get cynical. A job, to you, means something to work at eight hours a day and then forget while you go out sporting.

You asked for human interest stuff. I’m giving it to you even if you don’t recognize it.

Five weeks dropped out of the lives of two men while time stood still and a construction job went on.

You’re going to snort when I tell you how it ended. You’re going to say it doesn’t make sense and that men don’t act that way.

Maybe it won’t make sense to you. Maybe your readers won’t believe it if you print it.

But it did happen like I’m telling you.

By the end of three weeks I’d forgotten what I’d guessed was his reason for crossing the Border in a hurry. His automatic still hung at the head of his bunk, and neither of us had mentioned Bronson’s murder since that first night.

But you can’t get away from a thing like that. It was with us all the time.

Sam was right when he said a man can’t leave a thing like murder behind him just by crossing a muddy stream of water.

That’s why I got a prickly feeling up my spine one afternoon when I saw two riders pushing up a little cloud of dust in the valley between us and the river.

There was that subconscious sense of fear that had been riding me all the time. The feeling that our luck couldn’t possibly hold, that there was bound to be a pay-off.

I was running the last bit of center-line with the transit. Sam was on the far end of the fill, staking out a drainage culvert.

I swung the telescope on the riders half a mile away, and it brought them right up to me.

I knew I had guessed right. They spelled trouble. Slouching in the saddle, wearing dust-stained range clothing with cartridge belts slanting across their middles.

They were headed toward camp and I knew I had to keep them away from Sam if the fill was going to get finished.

I left the transit sitting there, and walked back to camp. The two riders were pulling in close when I stepped inside our tent.

One was a heavy man with a gray mustache. The other was long and lanky with a scar on his cheek. Both carried six-shooters in open holsters, and had saddle guns in boots slung beneath their right stirrup leathers.

Cow-country deputies, if I ever saw any.

They pulled up in front of the cook-tent and yelled for the cook. When he came to the door, the heavy one said:

“We heard across the river that you had a new gringo engineer here. Is that right?”

The cook was scared. He bobbed his head, sir: “Si, si, Senior. Es verdad.”

The scar jumped up and down on the thin man’s face. “Where’s he at? We’ve come to take him back.”

I waited to hear what the cook would say. He’d seen me pass by on my way to the tent. But Sam was new on the job, too, and he might send them out to Sam.

He didn’t. He pointed to the tent and told them I was inside.

I slid back and got hold of Sam’s automatic. It was cocked when I met them at the door.

They didn’t take time to get a good look at me. They saw the automatic and reached for their guns.

I was lucky. I got one through the hand and broke the other’s shoulder.

Then I called to the cook to bring some rope, and made him tie them up while they cussed a blue streak and told me I couldn’t do that to the Texas law.

They were still cussing when I loaded them onto their horses and took them to the nearest town; ten miles south.

A ten-dollar bill is talking-money to a pueblo chief of police. They had an adobe jail that I hoped would hold together until the job was finished. I knew it would be at least that long before they could get a message across the river and any action on it.

That’s the whole truth about that affair — the first time it’s been told. Sam didn’t have a thing to do with it. He didn’t even see the deputies. I told the cook to keep his mouth shut, and I told Sam the two shots he heard were me plugging at a coyote. I don’t think he believed me, but he didn’t ask any questions.

I know the government kicked up a row over the jailing of the two deputies in Mexico, but it happened just like I’ve told you. They were out of their own back yard, and they got what they were asking for when they crossed the Border.

The job rocked along. We were getting dirt moved and no one else bothered us.

It’s a funny country that way. People don’t bother you much. Hell, there have been revolutions begun and ended without ever getting into the newspapers. The Mexicans have a queer way of tending strictly to their own business and letting the other guy tend to his.

That is, it’ll seem queer to an American newspaper man. You make a living sticking your nose into other people’s affairs and you wouldn’t understand a Mexican’s lack of curiosity.

But that’s the way they are. It was as though our construction camp was in a vacuum, and we slept and worked and ate in that vacuum with no contact with the outside world.

There was a feeling of tensity between Sam and me as we began to see the end of the job coming up. We were going to finish a week ahead of schedule, but neither of us was any too happy about it.

When the last wheeler-load was dumped in place on the fill it was going to mark more than just the end of another job. It had been swell going while it lasted, but everything has to end.

I didn’t know what Sam was thinking when I’d catch him looking at me queerly those last few days as the two ends of the fill came together, and I didn’t want to know.

After that last load was dumped to grade would be time enough to find out what Sam was thinking.

We were going on stolen time and we both knew it. But neither one of us slowed up to make the job last longer. Not even the extra week we might have taken before there was danger of rains.

It’s something you can’t do much about — the pressure to put a job on through when the end is in sight.

I knew Sam pretty well by that time, better than I’ve ever known another man, but his private thoughts still remained a secret to me.

I guess no man ever wholly knows what’s in another’s mind. There’s a certain barrier that you can’t quite squeeze past. No matter how hard both of you try.

Know what I mean?

You’re married, aren’t you? All right. Take an honest look at your own thoughts. How well does your wife know them?

Don’t kid yourself. Make an honest-to-God checkup on the secrets you keep in your mind from her.

That’s what I’m talking about.

There’s a part of you that’s you. Which is probably as close to a definition of the human soul as anyone will ever get.

That’s the difference between a man and an animal. You can pretty well figure what an animal will do under a given set of circumstances. Only God ever knows what a man is going to do.

Which pretty well brings us up to the morning Sam and I stood and looked at the completed railroad fill. It was ten o’clock in the morning and the last yard of dirt had been dumped and spread to grade.

Sam had been to the tent, and he came back to see it ended with me. It was in the cards.

All at once, it was over. Teams were standing idle, and the Mexicans were squatting on their heels, sucking on cigarillos.

The sun was searing down and there was a heat haze hanging over the valley and everything was pretty much like it had been for weeks except that our job was done.

The track-laying crew would be coming along with cross-ties and steel. Trains would soon be running on schedule over the grade we had sweated out our guts on, and no one would think a damned thing about it.

The job didn’t seem so important after all.

I looked at Sam and I saw the same bulge inside his shirt that had been there when he first rode up on a roan mare. He had gone back to the tent to buckle on his .45.

That gave me an idea what to expect, but I still wasn’t sure what he had on his mind. I said:

“I don’t know why it makes any difference, Sam, but I would have hated to quit before this was finished.”

He said: “I know how you feel,” and we both stood there without saying anything for a little.

I didn’t look at him when I said: “There’s other jobs waiting to be done, south of here.”

“I know. It’s too bad we can’t do them together.”

“Can’t we?” Hell, I was so choked up that’s all I could trust myself to say.

Sam wasn’t choked up. His voice was clearer, harder, than I had heard it before:

“I’m afraid not. They’re still looking for Bronson’s murderer across the Rio Grande.”

“Do we have to worry about that?”

“Haven’t you known all along that it was my worry?”

I had, of course. There wasn’t any use trying to lie to Sam. I saw that same gleam in his blue eyes that had been there the first time I saw him.

My lips were parched. I wet them with a tongue that felt like a dry sponge.

“What are you figuring on doing, Sam?”

“I’ve got to go back across the Border where I belong.”

Well, there it was. Things had been building toward that ever since he stepped off the roan and took hold of the level.

I had known it was coming all along. Sam was that kind of an hombre.

Enough of an engineer to stay and see the job through, but too much of a man to take the easy way and go on down into the tropics with me, where they don’t give a damn how many men you’ve murdered.

I said: “I’m ready whenever you are. It’s been swell knowing you, Sam.”

And we shook hands.

There, Mister, is your human interest yarn. You know the rest of it. The newspapers gave the story a heavy play when we crossed the Border together. There were headlines about the lone American who had gone into Mexico and brought out Bronson’s murderer single-handed.

The feature writers did a lot of guessing about what happened during those five weeks.

Your paper will be the first to carry the straight story.

Am I sore at Sam?

No. Not even when I sit down in that chair tomorrow to pay the price for killing Bronson.

You see, Mister, I know how Sam felt about finishing his job. They picked him to go after me because he’d studied engineering in college.

But his real job was with the Texas Rangers.

“Waiting for Rusty” originally appeared in the October 1939 issue of Black Mask, which, strangely enough, published only this one story by William Cole. What is even more astonishing, given the tale’s excellence, is that Cole published no other story anywhere, according to Michael Cook and Stephen Miller’s exhaustive Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Fiction: A Checklist of Fiction in U.S. Pulp Magazines, 1915–1974 (1988). Of course, it is possible that Cole wrote extensively for the pulps, but under another name or even a variety of other names. Or perhaps he was just a lowly editor assigned to fill some space in the magazine. Still, Cole’s true identity remains a mystery.

At barely 1,400 words, “Waiting for Rusty” is one of the shortest stories in this collection, yet it is also one of the most remarkable. While it is a masterpiece of concision, it contains enough plot for a full-length novel. From the moment the fluffy-haired girl in the blue slicker enters the little roadhouse with her sawed-off-shotgun-wielding cohorts, it is at once clear that they are all on an undeviating path toward catastrophe. In so few words, Cole is able to transform his chief character into a tragic heroine of truly epic proportions.

“Waiting for Rusty” is a character piece, a story built along softer, more objective, more emotional lines than the vivid and often brutal hard-boiled tales of Joseph T. Shaw’s era at Black Mask. This was the era of Fanny Ellsworth, an accomplished yet different type of editor (of Ranch Romances fame) who, according to the writer Frank Gruber, “knew what she wanted.” What she wanted, as the writer Dwight Babcock learned from his agent once Ellsworth had taken over Black Mask’s editorial chair, was “a bit more emotion... leads played up in a more sympathetic manner...” Ellsworth brought into the Black Mask fold such moody noir talents as Steve Fisher and Cornell Woolrich, both of whom seem to epitomize her approach to the genre. All this leads one to wonder whether Ellsworth herself took a shot at writing a Black Mask story, with “Waiting for Rusty” as the result.

J. A.

Waiting for Rusty (1939)

One of these days I’m going to tell the sheriff. One of these days he’s going to blow his mouth off once too often and I’m going to take him out there and show him. I may get on the wrong side of him but it’ll be worth it...

I’m just closing up my little roadside place for the night when they come in. Dotty and three guys. One of the men has a sawed-off shotgun and he stands by the window. Dotty and the others come up to the bar.

“Evenin’, professor,” Dotty says, looking around. “You here alone?”

“Yeah,” I says, when I’m able to talk. “Yeah, but—”

“Good,” Dotty says. “Lock that back door and then start pourin’ rye.”

She’s wearing a blue slicker turned up at the neck and no hat. Her light hair is a little fluffed from the wind. She looks about the same as I remember she did when she went to the high school at Milbrook, only now you can’t look long at her eyes.

“Listen, Miss,” I says, “listen, you don’t want to stay here. They’re surrounding the whole county. I just got it over the radio.”

“He’s right,” the man at the window says. “We gotta keep movin’, Dot. We gotta keep movin’ — and fast, or we’ll wake up in the morgue.”

“Get outside,” Dotty tells him, “and keep your eyes open or you’ll wake up there anyway.”

She goes over and turns on the radio. The other two men keep walking around. They’re all smoking cigarettes, one right after the other.

I know enough to do what I’m told.

There’s nothing on the radio but some dance music. The two men look at each other; then the shorter one goes over to Dotty.

“I know how you feel, Dot,” he says. “But they’re right on our tail. We gotta—”

“I told you boys once,” Dot says, “and I’m not tellin’ you again. We wait here for Rusty.”

“But supposin’ he don’t come?” the man says. He has a way of rubbing his wrist. “Supposin’... supposin’ he can’t make it? Supposin’—”

“Supposin’ you dry up,” Dotty says. “Rusty said he’ll be here and when Rusty says something....”

The music breaks off and she whirls to listen to the press-radio flash. It’s about the same as the last. The police have thrown a drag-net around the entire northern part of the State and are confident of capturing Rusty Nelson and his mob at any hour. Dotty don’t think much of this but when she is called Rusty’s girl and Gun Moll, No. 1, she smiles and takes a bow.

“After the bank hold-up yesterday,” the announcer says, “Rusty and Dotty split up, one car going north, the other northwest. The State Trooper who tried to stop Dotty at Preston this afternoon died on the way to the hospital.”

“Too bad,” Dotty says. “He had the nicest blue eyes.”

A car goes by on the highway outside and they all stand still for a second. Then the music comes back loud and the men jump to tune it down low. The taller one is swearing under his breath.

“Canada ain’t big enough,” he says sarcastic-like. “We gotta meet here.”

Dotty don’t say anything.

In no time at all, they finish the bottle of rye. I open another.

“Maybe he couldn’t get through,” the shorter man says. “Maybe he tried to but couldn’t.”

There’s another radio flash. The cops have traced Rusty to Gatesville.

This makes Dotty feel a lot better. She laughs. “He’s near Gatesville,” she says, “like we’re near Siberia.”

She gets feeling pretty good, thinking of Rusty. She don’t mind the music now, the way the men do. She asks me if it comes from the Pavilion and I tell her yes.

“I was there once,” she says. “I went there with Rusty. They were havin’ a dance and he took me.” The men aren’t interested and she tells it to me. “I had to wear an old dress because that’s all I had, but Rusty, he sees me and says, ‘Gee, kid, where’d you get the new dress?’ and we hop in his boiler and roll down there.”

She has stopped walking around now and her eyes are all different.

“They have the whole place fixed up... those colored lights on a string and the tables under the trees and two bands on the platform. As soon as one stops, the other one starts. And there’s a guy goes around in a white coat with those little sandwiches and you can take all you want.”

There’s the scream of a siren in the distance. The men take out guns.

“The girls all wear flowers,” Dotty says. “And I don’t have none. But Rusty says, ‘You just wait here,’ and soon he’s back with a big bunch of flowers, all colors and kinds. Only I can’t wear half of them, there’s too many. And then we dance and drink punch until the cops come. And then we have to lam out of there; they say Rusty bust in the glass in the town florist shop.”

The siren is much louder now. The man with the shotgun runs in.

“A patrol car just passed!” he says. “Come on, let’s blow!”

Dotty don’t seem to hear. “Get back out there,” she tells him.

The man’s face goes even whiter. He looks at Dotty and then at the others. “I say we move,” he says. “Rusty or no Rusty. We’ll be knocked off here sure.”

The other men try to stop him but can’t.

“And we don’t even know that he’ll show. He might’ve turned south, or kept west. All the time we’re waitin’ here he might even be—”

Dotty has put her back to the bar. She waves a gun at the man.

“Get away from that door,” she says. She leans back on her elbows. “Drop that rattle and get over there. We don’t want to have to step over you.”

It takes the man a minute to get it. Then his knees begin to give. He opens his mouth a few times but nothing comes out.

Then there’s that static on the radio and the announcer telling how Rusty was nabbed down in Talbot. Dotty stands there and listens, resting back on the bar.

“Not a single shot was fired,” the announcer says. “The gangster was completely surprised by the raid. Alone in the hide-out with Nelson was a pretty dark-haired, unidentified girl.”

Then there’s that static and the music again.

Nobody looks at Dotty for a while. Then the man with the shotgun bolts for the door. No sooner he’s opened it, he shuts it again. “There’s a guy comin’ up the road,” he says. “He’s got on a badge.”

For what seems a long time, Dotty don’t move. Then she reaches out and snaps off the radio. “Let him come,” she says. “You guys get out in the car.”

The men don’t argue. They go out the back.

Dotty walks slowly to the door. When she speaks, her voice isn’t flat any more.

“You know,” she tells me, “it was funny about those flowers. They just wouldn’t stay put. Every minute I’d fix them and the next minute they’d slip. One of the girls said the pin was too big.”

She steps out on the porch, and I drop flat in back of the bar.

“Hello, copper,” I hear her say. The rest is all noise...

One of these days I’m going to show the sheriff. One of these days he’s going to tell once too often how he got Dotty and I’m going to take him out on the porch and show him...

Sure, she might have missed him, even Dotty might have missed him twice in a row. But she would never have put those two slugs in the ceiling. Not Dotty. Not unless she had reason to. Not unless she wanted to die.

Raymond Chandler brought to the hard-boiled genre the unique perspective of an American whose formative years had been spent in England. He was educated at Dulwich College, a liberal, classics-oriented school only a few notches down from Eton and other top-echelon institutions. In his five years there, Chandler gained a code of behavior, a moral tone, a sense of honor and public service, a broad knowledge of literary allusion, and an immense understanding of the precise workings of the English language. The last was a skill that stayed with him all his life. Even when he deliberately adopted colloquial American English (southern California variety), it became the most powerful weapon in his writing armory.

In his unpublished essay “Notes... on English and American Style,” Chandler justifies his own Anglophilic influences by arguing that “all the best American writing has been done by... cosmopolitans. They found [in the United States]... freedom of expression.... richness of vocabulary.... wideness of interest. But they had to have European taste to use the material.” Whether this assertion is true or not, Chandler’s sharp colloquialisms, vivid use of metaphor and allusion, trenchant wisecracks, and extraordinarily evocative scene-setting combine into a style that is distinct, memorable, and, on occasion, richly comic.

While Dashiell Hammett (whom Chandler admired up to a point) wrote from close experience about life at the tough end as a former Pinkerton operative, Chandler created his own world, in which villains are vicious, cops are corrupt, and women are (mostly) decadent. Chandler’s most famous character, Philip Marlowe, more than most detectives of his kind, is a righter of wrongs as well as a defender of values and moral precepts. He believes in justice, honesty, and faithfulness; he loathes injustice, dishonesty, and faithlessness. He is a “verray parfit gentil” gumshoe in a savage, threatening, neon-lit concrete jungle.

Marlowe is rather fond of taking his licks from thugs and sadistic cops, but this may be explained as a hangover from Chandler’s own school days. What cannot so easily be excused is the sentimentality that at times seeps into the stories like a northern California fog. It is Chandler’s worst and at the same time most curious fault. He knew perfectly well that his is a created and frequently melodramatized world, while his hero, for all his wisecracking toughness, is an impossible eternal Galahad. “The real-life private eye,” Chandler once wrote, “is a sleazy little drudge... [who] has about as much moral stature as a stop and go sign.” But Marlowe is different, and for this reason, Chandler seems to have been almost in love with him, in much the same way that Dorothy L. Sayers famously exhibited a distinct tendresse for her creation, Lord Peter Wimsey. Perhaps it is this very love for his hero that has made his books so good and enduring.

Chandler wrote seven complete novels, three of which — Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953) — are considered masterpieces by some. The Long Goodbye was arguably the first book since Hammett’s The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery.

Chandler was a perceptive critic of others’ work, although less so of his own. He did not care for “I’ll Be Waiting,” which he wrote in 1939 for the Saturday Evening Post. Perhaps the large sum of money he received for the story engendered a fit of guilt. To his friend the novelist William Campbell Gault he wrote in 1957: “It was too studied, too careful... I could have written it much better, without trying to be smooth and polished.” As though to demonstrate his less than acute judgment concerning his own talents, he went on: “I’m an improviser.” But, of course, this is precisely what Chandler was not. What he was a painstaking rewriter and polisher, whose diligence made “I’ll Be Waiting” a superbly atmospheric night-piece.

J. A.

I’ll Be Waiting (1939)

At one o’clock in the morning, Carl, the night porter, turned down the last of three table lamps in the main lobby of the Windermere Hotel. The blue carpet darkened a shade or two and the walls drew back into remoteness. The chairs filled with shadowy loungers. In the corners were memories like cobwebs.

Tony Reseck yawned. He put his head on one side and listened to the frail, twittery music from the radio room beyond a dim arch at the far side of the lobby. He frowned. That should be his radio room after one A.M. Nobody should be in it. That red-haired girl was spoiling his nights.

The frown passed and a miniature of a smile quirked at the corners of his lips. He sat relaxed, a short, pale, paunchy, middle-aged man with long, delicate fingers clasped on the elk’s tooth on his watch chain; the long delicate fingers of a sleight-of-hand artist, fingers with shiny, moulded nails and tapering first joints, fingers a little spatulate at the ends. Handsome fingers. Tony Reseck rubbed them gently together and there was peace in his quiet sea-grey eyes.

The frown came back on his face. The music annoyed him. He got up with a curious litheness, all in one piece, without moving his clasped hands from the watch chain. At one moment he was leaning back relaxed, and the next he was standing balanced on his feet, perfectly still, so that the movement of rising seemed to be a thing imperfectly perceived, an error of vision.

He walked with small, polished shoes delicately across the blue carpet and under the arch. The music was louder. It contained the hot, acid blare, the frenetic, jittering runs of a jam session. It was too loud. The red-haired girl sat there and stared silently at the fretted part of the big radio cabinet as though she could see the band with its fixed professional grin and the sweat running down its back. She was curled up with her feet under her on a davenport which seemed to contain most of the cushions in the room. She was tucked among them carefully, like a corsage in the florist’s tissue paper.

She didn’t turn her head. She leaned there, one hand in a small fist on her peach-colored knee. She was wearing lounging pyjamas of heavy ribbed silk embroidered with black lotus buds.

“You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” Tony Reseck asked.

The girl moved her eyes slowly. The light in there was dim, but the violet of her eyes almost hurt. They were large, deep eyes without a trace of thought in them. Her face was classical and without expression.

She said nothing.

Tony smiled and moved his fingers at his sides, one by one, feeling them move. “You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” he repeated gently.

“Not to cry over,” the girl said tonelessly.

Tony rocked back on his heels and looked at her eyes. Large, deep, empty eyes. Or were they? He reached down and muted the radio.

“Don’t get me wrong,” the girl said. “Goodman makes money, and a lad that makes legitimate money these days is a lad you have to respect. But this jitterbug music gives me the backdrop of a beer flat. I like something with roses in it.”

“Maybe you like Mozart,” Tony said.

“Go on, kid me,” the girl said.

“I wasn’t kidding you, Miss Cressy. I think Mozart was the greatest man that ever lived — and Toscanini is his prophet.”

“I thought you were the house dick.” She put her head back on a pillow and stared at him through her lashes. “Make me some of that Mozart,” she added.

“It’s too late,” Tony sighed. “You can’t get it now.”

She gave him another long lucid glance. “Got the eye on me, haven’t you, flatfoot?” She laughed a little, almost under her breath. “What did I do wrong?”

Tony smiled his toy smile. “Nothing, Miss Cressy. Nothing at all. But you need some fresh air. You’ve been five days in this hotel and you haven’t been outdoors. And you have a tower room.”

She laughed again. “Make me a story about it. I’m bored.”

“There was a girl here once had your suite. She stayed in the hotel a whole week, like you. Without going out at all, I mean. She didn’t speak to anybody hardly. What do you think she did then?”

The girl eyed him gravely. “She jumped her bill.”

He put his long delicate hand out and turned it slowly, fluttering the fingers, with an effect almost like a lazy wave breaking. “Uh-uh. She sent down for her bill and paid it. Then she told the hop to be back in half an hour for her suitcases. Then she went out on her balcony.”

The girl leaned forward a little, her eyes still grave, one hand capping her peach-colored knee. “What did you say your name was?”

“Tony Reseck.”

“Sounds like a hunky.”

“Yeah,” Tony said. “Polish.”

“Go on, Tony.”

“All the tower suites have private balconies, Miss Cressy. The walls of them are too low for fourteen storeys above the street. It was a dark night, that night, high clouds.” He dropped his hand with a final gesture, a farewell gesture. “Nobody saw her jump. But when she hit, it was like a big gun going off.”

“You’re making it up, Tony.” Her voice was a clean dry whisper of sound.

He smiled his toy smile. His quiet sea-grey eyes seemed almost to be smoothing the long waves of her hair. “Eve Cressy,” he said musingly. “A name waiting for lights to be in.”

“Waiting for a tall dark guy that’s no good, Tony. You wouldn’t care why. I was married to him once. I might be married to him again. You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime.” The hand on her knee opened slowly until the fingers were strained back as far as they would go. Then they closed quickly and tightly, and even in that dim light the knuckles shone like little polished bones. “I played him a low trick once. I put him in a bad place — without meaning to. You wouldn’t care about that either. It’s just that I owe him something.”

He leaned over softly and turned the knob on the radio. A waltz formed itself dimly on the air. A tinsel waltz, but a waltz. He turned the volume up. The music gushed from the loud-speaker in a swirl of shadowed melody. Since Vienna died, all waltzes are shadowed.

The girl put her head on one side and hummed three or four bars and stopped with a sudden tightening of her mouth.

“Eve Cressy,” she said. “It was in lights once. At a bum night club. A dive. They raided it and the lights went out.”

He smiled at her almost mockingly. “It was no dive while you were there, Miss Cressy... That’s the waltz the orchestra always played when the old porter walked up and down in front of the hotel entrance, all swelled up with his medals on his chest. The Last Laugh. Emil Jannings. You wouldn’t remember that one, Miss Cressy.”

“Spring, Beautiful Spring,” she said. “No, I never saw it.”

He walked three steps away from her and turned. “I have to go upstairs and palm doorknobs. I hope I didn’t bother you. You ought to go to bed now. It’s pretty late.”

The tinsel waltz stopped and a voice began to talk. The girl spoke through the voice. “You really thought something like that — about the balcony?”

He nodded. “I might have,” he said softly. “I don’t any more.”

“No chance, Tony.” Her smile was a dim lost leaf. “Come and talk to me some more. Redheads don’t jump, Tony. They hang on — and wither.”

He looked at her gravely for a moment and then moved away over the carpet. The porter was standing in the archway that led to the main lobby. Tony hadn’t looked that way yet, but he knew somebody was there. He always knew if anybody was close to him. He could hear the grass grow, like the donkey in The Blue Bird.

The porter jerked his chin at him urgently. His broad face above the uniform collar looked sweaty and excited. Tony stepped up close to him and they went together through the arch and out to the middle of the dim lobby.

“Trouble?” Tony asked wearily.

“There’s a guy outside to see you, Tony. He won’t come in. I’m doing a wipe-off on the plate glass of the doors and he comes up beside me, a tall guy. ‘Get Tony,’ he says, out of the side of his mouth.”

Tony said: “Uh-huh,” and looked at the porter’s pale blue eyes. “Who was it?”

“Al, he said to say he was.”

Tony’s face became as expressionless as dough. “Okay.” He started to move off.

The porter caught his sleeve. “Listen, Tony. You got any enemies?”

Tony laughed politely, his face still like dough.

“Listen, Tony.” The porter held his sleeve tightly. “There’s a big black car down the block, the other way from the hacks. There’s a guy standing beside it with his foot on the running board. This guy that spoke to me, he wears a dark-colored, wrap-around overcoat with a high collar turned up against his ears. His hat’s way low. You can’t hardly see his face. He says, ‘Get Tony,’ out of the side of his mouth. You ain’t got any enemies, have you, Tony?”

“Only the finance company,” Tony said. “Beat it.”

He walked slowly and a little stiffly across the blue carpet, up the three shallow steps to the entrance lobby with the three elevators on one side and the desk on the other. Only one elevator was working. Beside the open doors, his arms folded, the night operator stood silent in a neat blue uniform with silver facings. A lean, dark Mexican named Gomez. A new boy, breaking in on the night shift.

The other side was the desk, rose marble, with the night clerk leaning on it delicately. A small neat man with a wispy reddish mustache and cheeks so rosy they looked rouged. He stared at Tony and poked a nail at his mustache.

Tony pointed a stiff index finger at him, folded the other three fingers tight to his palm, and flicked his thumb up and down on the stiff finger. The clerk touched the other side of his mustache and looked bored.

Tony went on past the closed and darkened news-stand and the side entrance to the drugstore, out to the brass-bound plate-glass doors. He stopped just inside them and took a deep, hard breath. He squared his shoulders, pushed the doors open and stepped out into the cold, damp night air.

The street was dark, silent. The rumble of traffic on Wilshire, two blocks away, had no body, no meaning. To the left were two taxis. Their drivers leaned against a fender, side by side, smoking. Tony walked the other way. The big dark car was a third of a block from the hotel entrance. Its lights were dimmed and it was only when he was almost up to it that he heard the gentle sound of its engine turning over.

A tall figure detached itself from the body of the car and strolled towards him, both hands in the pockets of the dark overcoat with the high collar. From the man’s mouth a cigarette tip glowed faintly, a rusty pearl.

They stopped two feet from each other.

The tall man said: “Hi, Tony. Long time no see.”

“Hello, Al. How’s it going?”

“Can’t complain.” The tall man started to take his right hand out of his overcoat pocket, then stopped and laughed quietly. “I forgot. Guess you don’t want to shake hands.”

“That don’t mean anything,” Tony said. “Shaking hands. Monkeys can shake hands. What’s on your mind, Al?”

“Still the funny little fat guy, eh, Tony?”

“I guess,” Tony winked his eyes tight. His throat felt tight.

“You like your job back there?”

“It’s a job.”

Al laughed his quiet laugh again. “You take it slow, Tony. I’ll take it fast. So it’s a job and you want to hold it. Oke. There’s a girl named Eve Cressy flopping in your quiet hotel. Get her out. Fast and right now.”

“What’s the trouble?”

The tall man looked up and down the street. A man behind in the car coughed lightly. “She’s hooked with a wrong number. Nothing against her personal, but she’ll lead trouble to you. Get her out, Tony. You got maybe an hour.”

“Sure,” Tony said aimlessly, without meaning.

Al took his hand out of his pocket and stretched it against Tony’s chest. He gave him a light, lazy push. “I wouldn’t be telling you just for the hell of it, little fat brother. Get her out of there.”

“Okay,” Tony said, without any tone in his voice.

The tall man took back his hand and reached for the car door. He opened it and started to slip in like a lean black shadow.

Then he stopped and said something to the men in the car and got out again. He came back to where Tony stood silent, his pale eyes catching a little dim light from the street.

“Listen, Tony. You always kept your nose clean. You’re a good brother, Tony.”

Tony didn’t speak.

Al leaned towards him, a long urgent shadow, the high collar almost touching his ears. “It’s trouble business, Tony. The boys won’t like it, but I’m telling you just the same. This Cressy was married to a lad named Johnny Ralls. Ralls is out of Quentin two, three days, or a week. He did a three-spot for manslaughter. The girl put him there. He ran down an old man one night when he was drunk, and she was with him. He wouldn’t stop. She told him to go in and tell it or else. He didn’t go in. So the Johns come for him.”

Tony said, “That’s too bad.”

“It’s kosher, kid. It’s my business to know. This Ralls flapped his mouth in stir about how the girl would be waiting for him when he got out, all set to forgive and forget, and he was going straight to her.”

Tony said: “What’s he to you?” His voice had a dry, stiff crackle, like thick paper.

Al laughed. “The trouble boys want to see him. He ran a table at a spot on the Strip and figured out a scheme. He and another guy took the house for fifty grand. The other lad coughed up, but we still need Johnny’s twenty-five. The trouble boys don’t get paid to forget.”

Tony looked up and down the dark street. One of the taxi drivers flicked a cigarette stub in a long arc over the top of one of the cabs. Tony watched it fall and spark on the pavement. He listened to the quiet sound of the big car’s motor.

“I don’t want any part of it,” he said. “I’ll get her out.”

Al backed away from him, nodding. “Wise kid. How’s mom these days?”

“Okay,” Tony said.

“Tell her I was asking for her.”

“Asking for her isn’t anything,” Tony said.

Al turned quickly and got into the car. The car curved lazily in the middle of the block and drifted back toward the corner. Its lights went up and sprayed on a wall. It turned a corner and was gone. The lingering smell of its exhaust drifted past Tony’s nose. He turned and walked back to the hotel, and into it. He went along to the radio room.

The radio still muttered, but the girl was gone from the davenport in front of it. The pressed cushions were hollowed out by her body. Tony reached down and touched them. He thought they were still warm. He turned the radio off and stood there, turning a thumb slowly in front of his body, his hand flat against his stomach. Then he went back through the lobby toward the elevator bank and stood beside a majolica jar of white sand. The clerk fussed behind a pebbled-glass screen at one end of the desk. The air was dead.

The elevator bank was dark. Tony looked at the indicator of the middle car and saw that it was at 14.

“Gone to bed,” he said under his breath.

The door of the porter’s room beside the elevators opened and the little Mexican night operator came out in street clothes. He looked at Tony with a quiet sidewise look out of eyes the colour of dried-out chestnuts.

“Good night, boss.”

“Yeah,” Tony said absently.

He took a thin dappled cigar out of his vest pocket and smelled it. He examined it slowly, turning it around in his neat fingers. There was a small tear along the side. He frowned at that and put the cigar away.

There was a distant sound and the hand on the indicator began to steal around the bronze dial. Light glittered up in the shaft and the straight line of the car floor dissolved the darkness below. The car stopped and the doors opened, and Carl came out of it.

His eyes caught Tony’s with a kind of jump and he walked over to him, his head on one side, a thin shine along his pink upper lip.

“Listen, Tony.”

Tony took his arm in a hard swift hand and turned him. He pushed him quickly, yet somehow casually, down the steps to the dim main lobby and steered him into a corner. He let go of the arm. His throat tightened again, for no reason he could think of.

“Well?” he said darkly. “Listen to what?”

The porter reached into a pocket and hauled out a dollar bill. “He gimme this,” he said loosely. His glittering eyes looked past Tony’s shoulder at nothing. They winked rapidly. “Ice and ginger ale.”

“Don’t stall,” Tony growled.

“Guy in 14B,” the porter said.

“Lemme smell your breath.”

The porter leaned toward him obediently.

“Liquor,” Tony said harshly.

“He gimme a drink.”

Tony looked down at the dollar bill. “Nobody’s in 14B. Not on my list,” he said.

“Yeah. There is.” The porter licked his lips and his eyes opened and shut several times. “Tall dark guy.”

“All right,” Tony said crossly. “All right. There’s a tall dark guy in 14B and he gave you a buck and a drink. Then what?”

“Gat under his arm,” Carl said, and blinked.

Tony smiled, but his eyes had taken on the lifeless glitter of thick ice. “You take Miss Cressy up to her room?”

Carl shook his head. “Gomez. I saw her go up.”

“Get away from me,” Tony said between his teeth. “And don’t accept any more drinks from the guests.”

He didn’t move until Carl had gone back into his cubby-hole by the elevators and shut the door. Then he moved silently up the three steps and stood in front of the desk, looking at the veined rose marble, the onyx pen set, the fresh registration card in its leather frame. He lifted a hand and smacked it down hard on the marble. The clerk popped out from behind the glass screen like a chipmunk coming out of its hole.

Tony took a flimsy out of his breast pocket and spread it on the desk. “№ 14B on this,” he said in a bitter voice.

The clerk wisped politely at his mustache. “So sorry. You must have been out to supper when he checked in.”

“Who?”

“Registered as James Watterson, San Diego.” The clerk yawned. “Ask for anybody?”

The clerk stopped in the middle of the yawn and looked at the top of Tony’s head. “Why, yes. He asked for a swing band. Why?”

“Smart, fast and funny,” Tony said. “If you like ’em that way.” He wrote on his flimsy and stuffed it back into his pocket. “I’m going upstairs and palm doorknobs. There’s four tower rooms you ain’t rented yet. Get up on your toes, son. You’re slipping.”

“I make out,” the clerk drawled, and completed his yawn. “Hurry back, pop. I don’t know how I’ll get through the time.”

“You could shave that pink fuzz off your lip,” Tony said, and went across to the elevators.

He opened up a dark one and lit the dome light and shot the car up to fourteen. He darkened it again, stepped out and closed the doors. This lobby was smaller than any other, except the one immediately below it. It had a single blue-panelled door in each of the walls other than the elevator wall. On each door was a gold number and letter with a gold wreath around it. Tony walked over to 14A and put his ear to the panel.

He heard nothing. Eve Cressy might be in bed asleep, or in the bathroom, or out on the balcony. Or she might be sitting there in the room, a few feet from the door, looking at the wall. Well, he wouldn’t expect to be able to hear her sit and look at the wall. He went over to 14B and put his ear to that panel. This was different. There was a sound in there. A man coughed. It sounded somehow like a solitary cough. There were no voices. Tony pressed the small nacre button beside the door.

Steps came without hurry. A thickened voice spoke through the panel. Tony made no answer, no sound. The thickened voice repeated the question. Lightly, maliciously, Tony pressed the bell again.

Mr. James Watterson, of San Diego, should now open the door and give forth noise. He didn’t. A silence fell beyond that door that was like the silence of a glacier. Once more Tony put his ear to the wood. Silence utterly.

He got out a master key on a chain and pushed it delicately into the lock of the door. He turned it, pushed the door inward three inches and withdrew the key. Then he waited.

“All right,” the voice said harshly. “Come in and get it.”

Tony pushed the door wide and stood there, framed against the light from the lobby. The man was tall, black-haired, angular and white-faced. He held a gun. He held it as though he knew about guns.

“Step right in,” he drawled.

Tony went in through the door and pushed it shut with his shoulder. He kept his hands a little out from his sides, the clever fingers curled and slack. He smiled his quiet little smile.

“Mr. Watterson?”

“And after that what?”

“I’m the house detective here.”

“It slays me.”

The tall, white-faced, somehow handsome and somehow not handsome man backed slowly into the room. It was a large room with a low balcony around two sides of it. French doors opened out on the little, private, open-air balcony that each of the tower rooms had. There was a grate set for a log fire behind a paneled screen in front of a cheerful davenport. A tall misted glass stood on a hotel tray beside a deep, cozy chair. The man backed toward this and stood in front of it. The large, glistening gun drooped and pointed at the floor.

“It slays me,” he said. “I’m in the dump an hour and the house copper gives me the buzz. Okay, sweetheart, look in the closet and bathroom. But she just left.”

“You didn’t see her yet,” Tony said.

The man’s bleached face filled with unexpected lines. His thickened voice edged toward a snarl. “Yeah? Who didn’t I see yet?”

“A girl named Eve Cressy.”

The man swallowed. He put his gun down on the table beside the tray. He let himself down into the chair backwards, stiffly, like a man with a touch of lumbago. Then he leaned forward and put his hands on his kneecaps and smiled brightly between his teeth. “So she got here, huh? I didn’t ask about her yet. I’m a careful guy. I didn’t ask yet.”

“She’s been here five days,” Tony said. “Waiting for you. She hasn’t left the hotel a minute.”

The man’s mouth worked a little. His smile had a knowing tilt to it. “I got delayed a little up north,” he said smoothly. “You know how it is. Visiting old friends. You seem to know a lot about my business, copper.”

“That’s right, Mr. Ralls.”

The man lunged to his feet and his hand snapped at the gun. He stood leaning over, holding it on the table, staring. “Dames talk too much,” he said with a muffled sound in his voice, as though he held something soft between his teeth and talked through it.

“Not dames, Mr. Ralls.”

“Huh?” The gun slithered on the hard wood of the table. “Talk it up, copper. My mind reader just quit.”

“Not dames. Guys. Guys with guns.”

The glacier silence fell between them again. The man straightened his body slowly. His face was washed clean of expression, but his eyes were haunted. Tony leaned in front of him, a shortish plump man with a quiet, pale, friendly face and eyes as simple as forest water.

“They never run out of gas — those boys,” Johnny Ralls said, and licked at his lip. “Early and late, they work. The old firm never sleeps.”

“You know who they are?” Tony said softly.

“I could maybe give nine guesses. And twelve of them would be right.”

“The trouble boys,” Tony said, and smiled a brittle smile.

“Where is she?” Johnny Ralls asked harshly.

“Right next door to you.”

The man walked to the wall and left his gun lying on the table. He stood in front of the wall, studying it. He reached up and gripped the grillwork of the balcony railing. When he dropped his hand and turned, his face had lost some of its lines. His eyes had a quieter glint. He moved back to Tony and stood over him.

“I’ve got a stake,” he said. “Eve sent me some dough and I built it up with a touch I made up north. Case dough, what I mean. The trouble boys talk about twenty-five grand.” He smiled crookedly. “Five C’s I can count. I’d have a lot of fun making them believe that, I would.”

“What did you do with it?” Tony asked indifferently.

“I never had it, copper. Leave that lay. I’m the only guy in the world that believes it. It was a little deal I got suckered on.”

“I’ll believe it,” Tony said.

“They don’t kill often. But they can be awful tough.”

“Mugs,” Tony said with a sudden bitter contempt. “Guys with guns. Just mugs.”

Johnny Ralls reached for his glass and drained it empty. The ice cubes tinkled softly as he put it down. He picked his gun up, danced it on his palm, then tucked it, nose down, into an inner breast pocket. He stared at the carpet.

“How come you’re telling me this, copper?”

“I thought maybe you’d give her a break.”

“And if I wouldn’t?”

“I kind of think you will,” Tony said.

Johnny Ralls nodded quietly. “Can I get out of here?”

“You could take the service elevator to the garage. You could rent a car. I can give you a card to the garage-man.”

“You’re a funny little guy,” Johnny Ralls said.

Tony took out a worn ostrich-skin billfold and scribbled on a printed card. Johnny Ralls read it, and stood holding it, tapping it against a thumbnail.

“I could take her with me,” he said, his eyes narrow.

“You could take a ride in a basket too,” Tony said. “She’s been here five days, I told you. She’s been spotted. A guy I know called me up and told me to get her out of here. Told me what it was all about. So I’m getting you out instead.”

“They’ll love that,” Johnny Ralls said. “They’ll send you violets.”

“I’ll weep about it on my day off.”

Johnny Ralls turned his hand over and stared at the palm. “I could see her, anyway. Before I blow. Next door to here, you said?”

Tony turned on his heel and started for the door. He said over his shoulder, “Don’t waste a lot of time, handsome. I might change my mind.”

The man said, almost gently: “You might be spotting me right now, for all I know.”

Tony didn’t turn his head. “That’s a chance you have to take.”

He went on to the door and passed out of the room. He shut it carefully, silently, looked once at the door of 14A and got into his dark elevator. He rode it down to the linen-room floor and got out to remove the basket that held the service elevator open at that floor. The door slid quietly shut. He held it so that it made no noise. Down the corridor, light came from the open door of the housekeeper’s office. Tony got back into his elevator and went on down to the lobby.

The little clerk was out of sight behind his pebbled-glass screen, auditing accounts. Tony went through the main lobby and turned into the radio room. The radio was on again, soft. She was there, curled on the davenport again. The speaker hummed to her, a vague sound so low that what it said was as wordless as the murmur of trees. She turned her head slowly and smiled at him.

“Finished palming doorknobs? I couldn’t sleep worth a nickel. So I came down again. Okay?”

He smiled and nodded. He sat down in a green chair and patted the plump brocade arms of it. “Sure, Miss Cressy.”

“Waiting is the hardest kind of work, isn’t it? I wish you’d talk to that radio. It sounds like a pretzel being bent.”

Tony fiddled with it, got nothing he liked, set it back where it had been.

“Beer-parlour drunks are all the customers now.”

She smiled at him again.

“I don’t bother you being here, Miss Cressy?”

“I like it. You’re a sweet little guy, Tony.”

He looked stiffly at the floor and a ripple touched his spine. He waited for it to go away. It went slowly. Then he sat back, relaxed again, his neat fingers clasped on his elk’s tooth. He listened. Not to the radio — to far-off, uncertain things, menacing things. And perhaps to just the safe whir of wheels going away into a strange night.

“Nobody’s all bad,” he said out loud.

The girl looked at him lazily. “I’ve met two or three I was wrong on, then.”

He nodded. “Yeah,” he admitted judiciously. “I guess there’s some that are.”

The girl yawned and her deep violet eyes half closed. She nestled back into the cushions. “Sit there a while, Tony. Maybe I could nap.”

“Sure. Not a thing for me to do. Don’t know why they pay me.”

She slept quickly and with complete stillness, like a child. Tony hardly breathed for ten minutes. He just watched her, his mouth a little open. There was a quiet fascination in his limpid eyes as if he was looking at an altar.

Then he stood up with infinite care and padded away under the arch to the entrance lobby and the desk. He stood at the desk listening for a little while. He heard a pen rustling out of sight. He went around the corner to the row of house phones in little glass cubbyholes. He lifted one and asked the night operator for the garage.

It rang three or four times and then a boyish voice answered: “Windermere Hotel. Garage speaking.”

“This is Tony Reseck. That guy Watterson I gave a card to. He leave?”

“Sure, Tony. Half an hour almost. Is it your charge?”

“Yeah,” Tony said. “My party. Thanks. Be seein’ you.”

He hung up and scratched his neck. He went back to the desk and slapped a hand on it. The clerk wafted himself around the screen with his greeter’s smile in place. It dropped when he saw Tony.

“Can’t a guy catch up on his work?” he grumbled.

“What’s the professional rate on 14B?”

The clerk stared morosely. “There’s no professional rate in the tower.”

“Make one. The fellow left already. Was there only an hour.”

“Well, well,” the clerk said airily. “So the personality didn’t click tonight. We get a skip-out.”

“Will five bucks satisfy you?”

“Friend of yours?”

“No. Just a drunk with delusions of grandeur and no dough.”

“Guess we’ll have to let it ride, Tony. How did he get out?”

“I took him down the service elevator. You was asleep. Will five bucks satisfy you?”

“Why?”

The worn ostrich-skin wallet came out and a weedy five slipped across the marble. “All I could shake him for,” Tony said loosely.

The clerk took the five and looked puzzled. “You’re the boss,” he said, and shrugged. The phone shrilled on the desk and he reached for it. He listened and then pushed it toward Tony. “For you.”

Tony took the phone and cuddled it close to his chest. He put his mouth close to the transmitter. The voice was strange to him. It had a metallic sound. Its syllables were meticulously anonymous.

“Tony? Tony Reseck?”

“Talking.”

“A message from Al. Shoot?”

Tony looked at the clerk. “Be a pal,” he said over the mouthpiece. The clerk flicked a narrow smile at him and went away. “Shoot,” Tony said into the phone.

“We had a little business with a guy in your place. Picked him up scramming. Al had a hunch you’d run him out. Tailed him and took him to the kerb. Not so good. Backfire.”

Tony held the phone very tight and his temples chilled with the evaporation of moisture. “Go on,” he said. “I guess there’s more.”

“A little. The guy stopped the big one. Cold. Al... Al said to tell you good-bye.”

Tony leaned hard against the desk. His mouth made a sound that was not speech.

“Get it?” The metallic voice sounded impatient, a little bored. “This guy had him a rod. He used it. Al won’t be phoning anybody anymore.”

Tony lurched at the phone, and the base of it shook on the rose marble. His mouth was a hard dry knot.

The voice said: “That’s as far as we go, bud. G’night.” The phone clicked dryly, like a pebble hitting a wall.

Tony put the phone down in its cradle very carefully, so as not to make any sound. He looked at the clenched palm of his left hand. He took a handkerchief out and rubbed the palm softly and straightened the fingers out with his other hand. Then he wiped his forehead. The clerk came around the screen again and looked at him with glinting eyes.

“I’m off Friday. How about lending me that phone number?”

Tony nodded at the clerk and smiled a minute frail smile. He put his handkerchief away and patted the pocket he had put it in. He turned and walked away from the desk, across the entrance lobby, down the three shallow steps, along the shadowy reaches of the main lobby, and so in through the arch to the radio room once more. He walked softly, like a man moving in a room where somebody is very sick. He reached the chair he had sat in before and lowered himself into it inch by inch. The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats. Her breath made no slightest sound against the vague murmur of the radio.

Tony Reseck leaned back in the chair and clasped his hands on his elk’s tooth and quietly closed his eyes.