Nightmare Town

Minera went over to a chair, sat down, put his elbows on his knees, his head between his hands, and stared blankly at the floor. Conrad was breathing as if he had been running.

Spade addressed Ferris, “Well?”

Ferris wiped his face with a handkerchief, put the handkerchief in his pocket, and said simply, “It was a shakedown.”

“And you killed him.”

Ferris’s blue eyes, looking into Spade’s yellow-gray ones, were clear and steady, as was his voice. “I did not,” he said. “I swear I did not. Let me tell you what happened. He sent me the book, as I told you, and I knew right away what that joke he wrote in the front meant. So the next day, when he phoned me and said he was coming over to talk over old times and to try to borrow some money for old times’ sake, I knew what he meant again, and I went down to the bank and drew out ten thousand dollars. You can check that up. It’s the Seaman’s National.”

“I will,” Spade said.

“As it turned out, I didn’t need that much. He wasn’t very big-time, and I talked him into taking five thousand. I put the other five back in the bank next day. You can check that up.”

“I will,” Spade said.

“I told him I wasn’t going to stand for any more taps, this five thousand was the first and the last. I made him sign a paper saying he’d helped in the – what I’d done – and he signed it. He left some time around midnight, and that’s the last I ever saw of him.”

Spade tapped the envelope that Ferris had given him. “And how about this note?”

“A messenger boy brought it at noon, and I came right over. Eli had assured me he hadn’t said anything to anybody, but I didn’t know. I had to face it, whatever it was.”

Spade turned to the others, his face wooden. “Well?”

Minera and Conrad looked at James, who made an impatient grimace and said, “Oh, sure, we sent him the letter. Why not? We was friends of Eli’s and we hadn’t been able to find him since he went to put the squeeze to this baby, and then he turns up dead, so we kind of like to have the gent come over and explain things.”

“You knew about the squeeze?”

“Sure. We was all together when he got the idea.”

“How’d he happen to get the idea?” Spade asked.

James spread the fingers of his left hand. “We’d been drinking and talking – you know the way a bunch of guys will, about all they’d seen and done – and he told a yarn about once seeing a guy boot another off a train into a canon, and he happens to mention the name of the guy that done the booting – Buck Ferris. And somebody says, ‘What’s this Ferris look like?’ Eli tells him what he looked like then, saying he ain’t seen him for fifteen years; and whoever it is whistles ‘and says, ‘I bet that’s the Ferris that owns about half the movie joints in the state. I bet you he’d give something to keep that back trail covered!’

“Well, the idea kind of hit Eli. You could see that. He thought a little while and then he got cagey. He asked what this movie Ferris’s first name is, and when the other guy tells him, ‘Roger,’ he makes out he’s disappointed and says, ‘No, it ain’t him. His first name was Martin.’ We all give him the ha-ha and he finally admits he’s thinking of seeing the gent, and when he called me up Thursday around noon and says he’s throwing a party at Pogey Hecker’s that night, it ain’t no trouble to figure out what’s what.”

“What was the name of the gentleman who was red-lighted?”

“He wouldn’t say. He shut up tight. You couldn’t blame him.”

“Then nothing. He never showed up at Fogey’s. We tried to get him on the phone around two o’clock in the morning, but his wife said he hadn’t been home, so we stuck around till four or five and then decided he had given us a run-around, and made Pogey charge the bill to him, and beat it. I ain’t seen him since – dead or alive.”

Spade said mildly. “Maybe. Sure you didn’t find Eli later that morning, taking him riding, swap him bullets for Ferris’s five thou, dump him in the -?”

A sharp double knock sounded on the door.

Spade’s face brightened. He went to the door and opened it.

A young man came in. He was very dapper, and very well proportioned. He wore a light topcoat and his hands were in its pockets. Just inside the door he stepped to the right, and stood with his back to the wall.

By that time another young man was coming in. He stepped to the left. Though they did not actually look alike, their common dapperness, the similar trimness of their bodies, and their almost identical positions – back to wall, hands in pockets, cold, bright eyes studying the occupants of the room – gave them the appearance of twins.

Then Gene Colyer came in. He nodded at Spade, but paid no attention t© the others in the room, though James said, “Hello, Gene.”

“Anything new?” Colyer asked Spade.

Spade nodded. “It seems this gentleman” – he jerked a thumb at Ferris -“ was -“

“Any place we can talk?”

“There’s a kitchen back here.”

Colyer snapped a “Smear anybody that pops” over his shoulder at the two dapper young men and followed Spade into the kitchen. He sat on the one kitchen chair and stared with unblinking green eyes at Spade while Spade told him what he had learned.

When the private detective had finished, the green-eyed man asked, “Well, what do you make of it?”

Spade looked thoughtfully at the other, “You’ve picked up something. I’d like to know what it is.”

Colyer said, “They found the gun in a stream a quarter of a mile from where they found him. It’s James’s – got the mark on it where it was shot out of his hand once in Vallejo.”

“That’s nice,” Spade said.

“Listen. A kid named Thurston says James comes to him last Wednesday and gets him to tail Haven. Thurston picks him up Thursday afternoon, puts him in at Ferris’s, and phones James. James tells him to take a plant on the place and let him know where Haven goes when he leaves, but some nervous woman in the neighbourhood puts in a ruble about the kid hanging around, and the cops chase him along about ten o’clock.”

Spade pursed his lips and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling.

Colyer’s eyes were expressionless, but sweat made his round face shiny, and his voice was hoarse. “Spade,” he said, “I’m going to turn him in.”

Spade switched his gaze from the ceiling to the protuberant green eyes.

“I’ve never turned in one of my people before,” Colyer said, “but this one goes. Julia’s got to believe I hadn’t anything to do with it if it’s one of my people and I turn him in, hasn’t she?”

Spade nodded slowly. “I think so.”

Colyer suddenly averted his eyes and cleared his throat. When he spoke again it was curtly. “Well, he goes.”

Minera, James, and Conrad were seated when Spade and Colyer came out of the kitchen. Ferris was walking the floor. The two dapper young men had not moved.

Colyer went over to James. “Where’s your gun, Louis?” he asked.

James moved his right hand a few inches toward his left breast, stopped it, and said, “Oh, I didn’t bring it.”

With his gloved hand – open – Colyer struck James on the side of the face, knocking him out of his chair.

James straightened up, mumbling, “I didn’t mean nothing.” He put a hand to the side of his face. “I know I oughtn’t’ve done it, Chief, but when he called up and said he didn’t like to go up against Ferris without something and didn’t have any of his own, I said, ‘All right,’ and sent it over to him.”

Colyer said, “And you sent Thurston over to him, too.”

“We were just kind of interested in seeing if he did go through with it,” James mumbled.

“And you couldn’t’ve gone there yourself, or sent somebody else?”

“After Thurston had stirred up the whole neighbourhood?”

Colyer turned to Spade. “Want us to help you take them in, or want to call the wagon?”

“We’ll do it regular,” Spade said, and went to the wall telephone. When he turned away from it his face was wooden, his eyes dreamy. He made a cigarette, lit it, and said to Colyer, “I’m silly enough to think your Louis has got a lot of right answers in that story of his.”

James took his hand down from his bruised cheek and stared at Spade with astonished eyes.

Colyer growled, “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” Spade said softly, “except I think you’re a little too anxious to slam it on him.” He blew smoke out. “Why, for instance, should he drop his gun there when it had marks on it that people knew?”

Colyer said, “You think he’s got brains.”

“If these boys killed him, knew he was dead, why do they wait till the body’s found and things are stirred up before they go after Ferris again? What’d they turn his pockets inside out for if they hijacked him? That’s a lot of trouble and only done by folks that kill for some other reason and want to make it look like robbery.” He shook his head. “You’re too anxious to slam it on him. Why should they -“

“That’s not the point right now,” Colyer said. “The point is, why do you keep saying I’m too anxious to slam it on him?”

Spade shrugged. “Maybe to clear yourself with Julia as soon as possible and as clear as possible, maybe even to clear yourself with the police, and then you’ve got clients.”

Colyer said, “What?”

Spade made a careless gesture with his cigarette. “Ferris,” he said blandly. “He killed him, of course.”

Colyer’s eyelids quivered, though he did not actually blink.

Spade said, “First, he’s the last person we know of who saw Eli alive, and that’s always a good bet. Second, he’s the only person I talked to before Eli’s body turned up who cared whether they were holding out on me or not. The rest of you just thought I was hunting for a guy who’d gone away. He knew I was hunting for a man he’d killed, so he had to put himself in the clear. He was even afraid to throw that book away, because it had been sent up by the book store and could be traced, and there might be clerks who’d seen the inscription. Third, he was the only one who thought Eli was just a sweet, clean, lovable boy – for the same reasons. Fourth, that story about a blackmailer showing up at three o’clock in the afternoon, making an easy touch for five grand, and then sticking around till midnight is just silly, no matter how good the booze was. Fifth, the story about the paper Eli signed is still worse, though a forged one could be fixed up easy enough. Sixth, he’s got the best reason of anybody we know for wanting Eli dead.”

Colyer nodded slowly, “Still -“

“Still nothing,” Spade said. “Maybe he did the ten-thousand – out – five-thousand-back trick with his bank, but that was easy. Then he got this feebleminded blackmailer in his house, stalled him along until the servant had gone to bed, took the borrowed gun from him, shoved him downstairs into his car, took him for a ride – maybe took him already dead, maybe shot him down there by the bushes – frisked him clean to make identification harder and to make it look like robbery, tossed the gun in the water, and came home -“

He broke off to listen to the sound of a siren in the street. He looked then, for the first time since he had begun to talk, at Ferris.

Ferris’s face was ghastly white, but he held his eyes steady.

Spade said, “I’ve got a hunch, Ferris, that we’re going to find out about that red-lighting job, too. You told me you had your carnival company with a partner for a while when Eli was working for you, and then by yourself. We oughtn’t to have a lot of trouble finding out about your partner – whether he disappeared, or died a natural death, or is still alive.”

Ferris had lost some of his erectness. He wet his lips and said, “I want to see my lawyer. I don’t want to talk till I’ve seen my lawyer.”

Spade said, “It’s all right with me. You’re up against it, but I don’t like blackmailers myself. I think Eli wrote a good epitaph for them in that book back there – ‘Too many have lived.’”

THEY CAN ONLY HANG YOU ONCE

Samuel Spade said: “My name is Ronald Ames. I want to see Mr. Binnett – Mr. Timothy Binnett.”

“Mr, Binnett is resting now, sir,” the butler replied hesitantly. “Will you find out when I can see him? It’s important.” Spade cleared his throat. “I’m – uh – just back from Australia, and it’s about some of his properties there.”

The butler turned on his heel while saying, “I’ll see, sir,” and was going up the front stairs before he had finished speaking.

Spade made and lit a cigarette.

The butler came downstairs again. “I’m sorry; he can’t be disturbed now, but Mr. Wallace Binnett – Mr. Timothy’s nephew – will see you.”

Spade said, “Thanks,” and followed the butler upstairs.

Wallace Binnett was a slender, handsome, dark man of about Spade’s age – thirty-eight – who rose smiling from a brocaded chair, said, “How do you do, Mr. Ames?” waved his hand at another chair, and sat down again. “You’re from Australia?”

“Got in this morning.”

“You’re a business associate of Uncle Tim’s?”

Spade smiled and shook his head. “Hardly that, but I’ve some information I think he ought to have – quick.”

Wallace Binnett looked thoughtfully at the floor, then up at Spade. “I’ll do my best to persuade him to see you, Mr. Ames, but, frankly, I don’t know.”

Spade seemed mildly surprised. “Why?”

Binnett shrugged. “He’s peculiar sometimes. Understand, his mind seems perfectly all right, but he has the testiness and eccentricity of an old man in ill health and – well – at times he can be difficult.”

Spade asked slowly: “He’s already refused to see me?”

“Yes.”

Spade rose from his chair. His blond satan’s face was expressionless.

Binnett raised a hand quickly. “Wait, wait,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to make him change his mind. Perhaps if -“ His dark eyes suddenly became wary. “You’re not simply trying to sell him something, are you?”

“No.”

The wary gleam went out of Binnett’s eyes. “Well, then, I think I can -“

A young woman came in crying angrily, “Wally, that old fool has – “ She broke off with a hand to her breast when she saw Spade.

Spade and Binnett had risen together. Binnett said suavely: “Joyce, this is Mr. Ames. My sister-in-law, Joyce Court.”

Spade bowed.

Joyce Court uttered a short, embarrassed laugh and said: “Please excuse my whirlwind entrance.” She was a tall, blue-eyed, dark woman of twenty-four or -five with good shoulders and a strong, slim body. Her features made up in warmth what they lacked in regularity. She wore wide-legged blue satin pyjamas.

Binnett smiled good-naturedly at her and asked: “Now what’s all the excitement?”

Anger darkened her eyes again and she started to speak. Then she looked at Spade and said: “But we shouldn’t bore Mr. Ames with our stupid domestic affairs. If -“ She hesitated.

Spade bowed again. “Sure,” he said, “certainly.”

“I won’t be a minute,” Binnett promised, and left the room with her.

Spade went to open the doorway through which they had vanished and, standing just inside, listened. Their footsteps became inaudible. Nothing else could be heard. Spade was standing there – his yellow-gray eyes dreamy – when he heard the scream. It was a woman’s scream, high and shrill with terror. Spade was through the doorway when he heard the shot, It was a pistol shot, magnified, reverberated by walls and ceilings.

Twenty feet from the doorway Spade found a staircase, and went up it three steps at a time. He turned to the left. Halfway down the hallway a woman lay on her back on the floor.

Wallace Binnett knelt beside her, fondling one of her hands desperately, crying in a low, beseeching voice: “Darling, Molly, darling!”

Joyce Court stood behind him and wrung her hands while tears streaked her cheeks.

The woman on the floor resembled Joyce Court but was older, and her face had a hardness the younger one’s had not.

“She’s dead, she’s been killed,” Wallace Binnett said incredulously, raising his white face toward Spade. When Binnett moved his head Spade could see the round hole in the woman’s tan dress over her heart and the dark stain which was rapidly spreading below it.

Spade touched Joyce Court’s arm. “Police, emergency hospital – phone,” he said. As she ran toward the stairs he addressed Wallace Binnett: “Who did -“

A voice groaned feebly behind Spade.

He turned swiftly. Through an open doorway he could see an old man in white pyjamas lying sprawled across a rumpled bed. His head, a shoulder, an arm dangled over the edge of the bed. His other hand held his throat tightly. He groaned again and his eyelids twitched, but did not open.

Spade lifted the old man’s head and shoulders and put them up on the pillows. The old man groaned again and took his hand from his throat. His throat was red with half a dozen bruises. He was a gaunt man with a seamed face that probably exaggerated his age.

A glass of water was on a table beside the bed. Spade put water on the old man’s face and, when the old man’s eyes twitched again, leaned down and growled softly: “Who did it?”

The twitching eyelids went up far enough to show a narrow strip of bloodshot gray eyes. The old man spoke painfully, putting a hand to his throat again: “A man – he -“ He coughed.

Spade made an impatient grimace. His lips almost touched the old man’s ear. “Where’d he go?” His voice was urgent.

A gaunt hand moved weakly to indicate the rear of the house and fell back on the bed.

The butler and two frightened female servants had joined Wallace Binnett beside the dead woman in the hallway.

“Who did it?” Spade asked them.

They stared at him blankly.

“Somebody look after the old man,” he growled, and went down the hallway.

At the end of the hallway was a rear staircase. He descended two flights and went through a pantry into the kitchen. He saw nobody. The kitchen door was shut but, when he tried it, not locked. He crossed a narrow back yard to a gate that was shut, not locked. He opened the gate. There was nobody in the narrow alley behind it.

He sighed, shut the gate, and returned to the house.

Spade sat comfortably slack in a deep leather chair in a room that ran across the front second story of Wallace Binnett’s house. There were shelves of books and the lights were on. The window showed outer darkness weakly diluted by a distant street lamp. Facing Spade, Detective-Sergeant Polhaus – a big, carelessly shaven, florid man in dark clothes that needed pressing – was sprawled in another leather chair; Lieutenant Dundy – smaller, compactly built, square-faced – stood with legs apart, head thrust a little forward, in the centre of the room.

Spade was saying: “… and the doctor would only let me talk to the old man a couple of minutes. We can try it again when he’s rested a little, but it doesn’t look like he knows much. He was catching a nap and he woke up with somebody’s hands on his throat dragging him around the bed. The best he got was a one-eyed look at the fellow choking him. A big fellow, he says, with a soft hat pulled down over his eyes, dark, needing a shave. Sounds like Tom.” Spade nodded at Polhaus.

The detective-sergeant chuckled, but Dundy said, “Go on,” curtly.

Spade grinned and went on: “He’s pretty far gone when he hears Mrs. Binnett scream at the door. The hands go away from his throat and he hears the shot and just before passing out he gets a flash of the big fellow heading for the rear of the house and Mrs. Binnett tumbling down on the hall floor. He says he never saw the big fellow before.”

“What size gun was it?” Dundy asked.

“Thirty-eight. Well, nobody in the house is much more help. Wallace and his sister-in-law, Joyce, were in her room, so they say, and didn’t see anything but the dead woman when they ran out, though they think they heard something that could’ve been somebody running downstairs – the back stairs.

“The butler -his name’s Jarboe – was in here when he heard the scream and shot, so he says. Irene Kelly, the maid, was down on the ground floor, so she says. The cook, Margaret Finn, was in her room – third floor back – and didn’t even hear anything, so she says. She’s deaf as a post, so everybody else says. The back door and gate were unlocked, but are supposed to be kept locked, so everybody says. Nobody says they were in or around the kitchen or yard at the time.” Spade spread his hands in a gesture of finality. “That’s the crop.”

Dundy shook his head. “Not exactly,” he said. “How come you were here?”

Spade’s face brightened. “Maybe my client killed her,” he said. “He’s Wallace’s cousin, Ira Binnett. Know him?”

Dundy shook his head. His blue eyes were hard and suspicious.

“He’s a San Francisco lawyer,” Spade said, “respectable and all that. A couple of days ago he came to me with a story about his uncle Timothy, a miserly old skinflint, lousy with money and pretty well broken up by hard living. He was the black sheep of the family. None of them had heard of him for years. But six or eight months ago he showed up in pretty bad shape every way except financially – he seems to have taken a lot of money out of Australia – wanting to spend his last days with his only living relatives, his nephews Wallace and Ira.

“That was all right with them. Only living relatives’ meant ‘only heirs’ in their language. But by and by the nephews began to think it was better to be an heir than to be one of a couple of heirs – twice as good, in fact – and started fiddling for the inside track with the old man. At least, that’s what Ira told me about Wallace, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Wallace would say the same thing about Ira, though Wallace seems to be the harder up of the two. Anyhow, the nephews fell out, and then Uncle Tim, who had been staying at Ira’s, came over here. That was a couple of months ago, and Ira hasn’t seen Uncle Tim since, and hasn’t been able to get in touch with him by phone or mail.

“That’s what he wanted a private detective about. He didn’t think Uncle Tim would come to any harm here – oh, no, he went to a lot of trouble to make that clear – but he thought maybe undue pressure was being brought to bear on the old boy, or he was being hornswoggled somehow, and at least being told lies about his loving nephew Ira. He wanted to know what was what. I waited until today, when a boat from Australia docked, and came up here as a Mr. Ames with some important information for Uncle Tim about his properties down there. All I wanted was fifteen minutes alone with him.” Spade frowned thoughtfully. “Well, I didn’t get them. Wallace told me the old man refused to see me. I don’t know.”

Suspicion had deepened in Dundy’s cold blue eyes. “And where is this Ira Binnett now?” he asked.

Spade’s yellow-gray eyes were as guileless as his voice. “I wish I knew. I phoned his house and office and left word for him to come right over, but I’m afraid -“

Knuckles knocked sharply twice on the other side of the room’s one door. The three men in the room turned to face the door.

Dundy called, “Come in.”

The door was opened by a sunburned blond policeman whose left hand held the right wrist of a plump man of forty or forty-five in well-fitting gray clothes. The policeman pushed the plump man into the room. “Found him monkeying with the kitchen door,” he said.

Spade looked up and said: “Ah!” His tone expressed satisfaction. “Mr. Ira Binnett, Lieutenant Dundy, Sergeant Polhaus.”

Ira Binnett said rapidly: “Mr. Spade, will you tell this man that -“

Dundy addressed the policeman: “All right. Good work. You can leave him.”

The policeman moved a hand vaguely toward his cap and went away.

Dundy glowered at Ira Binnett and demanded, “Well?”

Binnett looked from Dundy to Spade. “Has something -“

Spade said: “Better tell him why you were at the back door instead of the front.”

Ira Binnett suddenly blushed. He cleared his throat in embarrassment. He said: “I – uh – I should explain. It wasn’t my fault, of course, but when Jarboe – he’s the butler – phoned me that Uncle Tim wanted to see me he told me he’d leave the kitchen door unlocked, so Wallace wouldn’t have to know I’d -“

“What’d he want to see you about?” Dundy asked.

“I don’t know. He didn’t say. He said it was very important.”

“Didn’t you get my message?” Spade asked.

Ira Binnett’s eyes widened. “No. What was it? Has anything happened? What is -“

Spade was moving toward the door. “Go ahead,” he said to Dundy. “I’ll be right back.”

He shut the door carefully behind him and went up to the third floor.

The butler Jarboe was on his knees at Timothy Binnett’s door with an eye to the keyhole. On the floor beside him was a tray holding an egg in an egg-cup, toast, a pot of coffee, china, silver, and a napkin.

Spade said: “Your toast’s going to get cold.”

Jarboe, scrambling to his feet, almost upsetting the coffeepot in his haste, his face red and sheepish, stammered: “I – er – beg your pardon, sir. I wanted to make sure Mr. Timothy was awake before I took this in.” He picked up the tray. “I didn’t want to disturb his rest if -“

Spade, who had reached the door, said, “Sure, sure,” and bent over to put his eye to the keyhole. When he straightened up he said in a mildly complaining tone: “You can’t see the bed – only a chair and part of the window.”

The butler replied quickly: “Yes, sir, I found that out.”

Spade laughed.

The butler coughed, seemed about to say something, but did not. He hesitated, then knocked lightly on the door.

A tired voice said, “Come in.”

Spade asked quickly in a low voice: “Where’s Miss Court?”

“In her room, I think, sir, the second door on the left,” the butler said.

The tired voice inside the room said petulantly: “Well, come on in.”

The butler opened the door and went in. Through the door, before the butler shut it, Spade caught a glimpse of Timothy Binnett propped up on pillows in his bed.

Spade went to the second door on the left and knocked. The door was opened almost immediately by Joyce Court. She stood in the doorway, not smiling, not speaking.

He said: “Miss Court, when you came into the room where I was with your brother-in-law you said, ‘Wally, that old fool has -‘ Meaning Timothy?”

She stared at Spade for a moment. Then: “Yes.”

“Mind telling me what the rest of the sentence would have been?”

She said slowly: “I don’t know who you really are or why you ask, but I don’t mind telling you. It would have been ‘sent for Ira.’ Jarboe had just told me.”

“Thanks.”

She shut the door before he had turned away.

He returned to Timothy Binnett’s door and knocked on it.

“Who is it now?” the old man’s voice demanded.

Spade opened the door. The old man was sitting up in bed.

Spade said: “This Jarboe was peeping through your keyhole a few minutes ago,” and returned to the library.

Ira Binnett, seated in the chair Spade had occupied, was saying to Dundy and Polhaus: “And Wallace got caught in the crash, like most of us, but he seems to have juggled accounts trying to save himself. He was expelled from the Stock Exchange.”

Dundy waved a hand to indicate the room and its furnishings. “Pretty classy layout for a man that’s busted.”

“His wife has some money,” Ira Binnett said, “and he always lived beyond his means.”

Dundy scowled at Binnett. “And you really think he and his missus weren’t on good terms?”

“I don’t think it,” Binnett replied evenly. “I know it.”

Dundy nodded. “And you know he’s got a yen for the sister-in-law, this Court?”

“I don’t know that. But I’ve heard plenty of gossip to the same effect.”

Dundy made a growling noise in his throat, then asked sharply: “How does the old man’s will read?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know whether he’s made one.” He addressed Spade, now earnestly: “I’ve told everything I know every single thing.”

Dundy said, “It’s not enough.” He jerked a thumb at the door. “Show him where to wait, Tom, and let’s have the widower in again.”

Big Polhaus said, “Right,” went out with Ira Binnett, and returned with Wallace Binnett, whose face was hard and pale.

Dundy asked: “Has your uncle made a will?”

“I don’t know,” Binnett replied.

Spade put the next question, softly: “Did your wife?”

Binnett’s mouth tightened in a mirthless smile. He spoke deliberately: “I’m going to say some things I’d rather not have to say. My wife, properly, had no money. When I got into financial trouble some time ago I made some property over to her, to save it. She turned it into money without my knowing about it till afterward. She paid our bills – our living expenses – out of it, but she refused to return it to me and she assured me that in no event – whether she lived or died or we stayed together or were divorced – would I ever be able to get hold of a penny of it. I believed her, and still do.”

“You wanted a divorce?” Dundy asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It wasn’t a happy marriage.”

“Joyce Court?”

Binnett’s face flushed. He said stiffly: “I admire Joyce Court tremendously, but I’d’ve wanted a divorce anyway.”

Spade said: “And you’re sure – still absolutely sure – you don’t know anybody who fits your uncle’s description of the man who choked him?”

“Absolutely sure.”

The sound of the doorbell ringing came faintly into the room.

Dundy said sourly, “That’ll do.”

Binnett went out.

Polhaus said: “That guy’s as wrong as they make them. And -“

From below came the heavy report of a pistol fired indoors.

The lights went out.

In darkness the three detectives collided with one another going through the doorway into the dark hall. Spade reached the stairs first. There was a clatter of footsteps below him, but nothing could be seen until he reached a bend in the stairs. Then enough light came from the street through the open front door to show the dark figure of a man standing with his back to the open door.

A flashlight clicked in Dundy’s hand – he was at Spade’s heels – and threw a glaring white beam of light on the man’s face. He was Ira Binnett. He blinked in the light and pointed at something on the floor in front of him.

Dundy turned the beam of his light down on the floor. Jarboe lay there on his face, bleeding from a bullet-hole in the back of his head.

Spade grunted softly.

Tom Polhaus came blundering down the stairs, Wallace Binnett close behind him. Joyce Court’s frightened voice came from farther up: “Oh, what’s happened? Wally, what’s happened?”

“Where’s the light switch?” Dundy barked.

“Inside the cellar door, under these stairs,” Wallace Binnett said. “What is it?”

Polhaus pushed past Binnett toward the cellar door.

Spade made an inarticulate sound in his throat and, pushing Wallace Binnett aside, sprang up the stairs. He brushed past Joyce Court and went on, heedless of her startled scream. He was halfway up the stairs to the third floor when the pistol went off up there.

He ran to Timothy Binnett’s door. The door was open. He went in.

Something hard and angular struck him above his right ear, knocking him across the room, bringing him down on one knee. Something thumped and clattered on the floor just outside the door.

The lights came on.

On the floor, in the centre of the room, Timothy Binnett lay on his back bleeding from a bullet wound in his left forearm. His pajama jacket was torn. His eyes were shut.

Spade stood up and put a hand to his head. He scowled at the old man on the floor, at the room, at the black automatic pistol lying on the hallway floor. He said: “Come on, you old cut-throat. Get up and sit on a chair and I’ll see if I can stop that bleeding till the doctor gets here.”

The man on the floor did not move.

There were footsteps in the hallway and Dundy came in, followed by the two younger Binnetts. Dundy’s face was dark and furious. “Kitchen door wide open,” he said in a choked voice. “They run in and out like -“

“Forget it,” Spade said. “Uncle Tim is our meat.” He paid no attention to Wallace Binnett’s gasp, to the incredulous looks on Dundy’s and Ira Binnett’s faces. “Come on, get up,” he said to the old man on the floor, “and tell us what it was the butler saw when he peeped through the keyhole.”

The old man did not stir.

“He killed the butler because I told him the butler had peeped,” Spade explained to Dundy. “I peeped, too, but didn’t see anything except that chair and the window, though we’d made enough racket by then to scare him back to bed. Suppose you take the chair apart while I go over the window.” He went to the window and began to examine it carefully. He shook his head, put a hand out behind him, and said: “Give me the flashlight.”

Dundy put the flashlight in his hand.

Spade raised the window and leaned out, turning the light on the outside of the building. Presently he grunted and put his other hand out, tugging at a brick a little below the sill. Presently the brick came loose. He put it on the window-sill and stuck his hand into the hole its removal had made. Out of the opening, one at a time, he brought an empty black pistol holster, a partially filled box of cartridges, and an unsealed manila envelope.

Holding these things in his hands, he turned to face the others. Joyce Court came in with a basin of water and a roll of gauze and knelt beside Timothy Binnett. Spade put the holster and cartridges on a table and opened the manila envelope. Inside were two sheets of paper, covered on both sides with boldly pencilled writing. Spade read a paragraph to himself, suddenly laughed, and began at the beginning again, reading aloud:

“’I, Timothy Kieran Binnett, being sound of mind and body, do declare this to be my last will and testament. To my dear nephews, Ira Binnett and Wallace Bourke Binnett, in recognition of the loving kindness with which they have received me into their homes and attended my declining years, I give and bequeath, share and share alike, all my worldly possessions of whatever kind, to wit, my carcass and the clothes I stand in.

“’I bequeath them, furthermore, the expense of my funeral and these memories: First, the memory of their credulity in believing that the fifteen years I spent in Sing Sing were spent in Australia; second, the memory of their optimism in supposing that those fifteen years had brought me great wealth, and that if I lived on them, borrowed from them, and never spent any of my own money, it was because I was a miser whose hoard they would inherit; and not because I had no money except what I shook them down for; third, for their hopefulness in thinking that I would leave either of them anything if I had it; and, lastly, because their painful lack of any decent sense of humour will keep them from ever seeing how funny this has all been. Signed and sealed this-‘”

Spade looked up to say: “There is no date, but it’s signed Timothy Kieran Binnett with flourishes.”

Ira Binnett was purple with anger, Wallace’s face was ghastly in its pallor and his whole body was trembling. Joyce Court had stopped working on Timothy Binnett’s arm.

The old man sat up and opened his eyes. He looked at his nephews and began to laugh. There was in his laughter neither hysteria nor madness: it was sane, hearty laughter, and subsided slowly.

Spade said: “All right, now you’ve had your fun. Let’s talk about the killings:”

“I know nothing more about the first one than I’ve told you,” the old man said, “and this one’s not a killing, since I’m only -“

Wallace Binnett, still trembling violently, said painfully through his teeth: “That’s a lie. You killed Molly. Joyce and I came out of her room when we heard Molly scream, and heard the shot and saw her fall out of your room, and nobody came out afterward.”

The old man said calmly: “Well, I’ll tell you: it was an accident. They told me there was a fellow from Australia here to see me about some of my properties there. I knew there was something funny about that somewhere” – he grinned – “not ever having been there. I didn’t know whether one of my dear nephews was getting suspicious and putting up a game on me or what, but I knew that if Wally wasn’t in on it he’d certainly try to pump the gentleman from Australia about me and maybe I’d lose one of my free boarding houses.” He chuckled.

“So I figured I’d get in touch with Ira so I could go back to his house if things worked out bad here, and I’d try to get rid of this Australian. Wally’s always thought I’m half-cracked” – he leered at his nephew – “and’s afraid they’ll lug me off to a madhouse before I could make a will in his favour, or they’ll break it if I do. You see, he’s got a pretty bad reputation, what with that Stock Exchange trouble and all, and he knows no court would appoint him to handle my affairs if I went screwy – not as long as I’ve got another nephew” – he turned his leer on Ira – “who’s a respectable lawyer. So now I know that rather than have me kick up a row that might wind me up in the madhouse, he’ll chase this visitor, and I put on a show for Molly, who happened to be the nearest one to hand. She took it too seriously, though.

“I had a gun and I did a lot of raving about being spied on by my enemies in Australia and that I was going down and shoot this fellow. But she got too excited and tried to take the gun away from me, and the first thing I knew it had gone off, and I had to make these marks on my neck and think up that story about the big dark man.” He looked contemptuously at Wallace. “I didn’t know he was covering me up. Little as I thought of him, I never thought he’d be low enough to cover up his wife’s murderer – even if he didn’t like her – just for the sake of money.”

Spade said: “Never mind that. Now about the butler?”

“I don’t know anything about the butler,” the old man replied, looking at Spade with steady eyes.

Spade said: “You had to kill him quick, before he had time to do or say anything. So you slip down the back stairs, open the kitchen door to fool people, go to the front door, ring the bell, shut the door, and hide in the shadow of the cellar door under the front steps. When Jarboe answered the doorbell you shot him – the hole was in the back of his head – pulled the light switch just inside the cellar door, and ducked up the back stairs in the dark and shot yourself carefully in the arm. I got up there too soon for you; so you smacked me with the gun, chucked it through the door, and spread yourself on the floor while I was shaking pinwheels out of my noodle.”

The old man sniffed again. “You’re just -“

“Stop it,” Spade said patiently. “Don’t let’s argue. The first killing was an accident – all right. The second couldn’t be. And it ought to be easy to show that both bullets, and the one in your arm, were fired from the same gun. What difference does it make which killing we can prove first-degree murder on? They can only hang you once.” He smiled pleasantly. “And they will.”

A MAN NAMED THIN

Papa was, though I may be deemed an undutiful son for saying it, in an abominable mood. His chin protruded across the desk at me in a fashion that almost justified the epithet of brutal which had once been applied to it by an unfriendly journalist; and his moustache seemed to bristle with choler of its own, though this was merely the impression I received. It would be preposterous to assume actual change in the moustache which, whatever Papa’s humour, was always somewhat irregularly salient.

“So you’re still fooling with this damned nonsense of yours?”

On Papa’s desk, under one of his hands, lay a letter which, its odd shape and colour informed me immediately, was from the editor of The Jongleur to whom, a few days before, I had sent a sonnet.

“If you mean my writing,” I replied respectfully, but none the less staunchly; for my thirtieth birthday being some months past, I considered myself entitled to some liberty of purpose, even though that purpose might be distasteful to Papa. “If you mean my writing, Papa, I assure you I am not fooling, but am completely in earnest.”

“But why in” – if now and then I garble Papa’s remarks in reporting them, it is not, I beg you to believe, because he is addicted to incoherencies, but simply because he frequently saw fit to sacrifice the amenities of speech to what he considered a vigour of expression – “do you have to pick on poetry? Aren’t there plenty of other things to write about? Why, Robin, you could write some good serious articles about our work, articles that would tell the public the truth about it and at the same time give us some advertising.”

“One writes what one is impelled to write,” I began not too hopefully, for this was by no means the first time I had begun thus. “The creative impulse is not to be coerced into -“

“Florence!”

I do not like to say Papa bellowed, but the milder synonyms are not entirely adequate to express the volume of sound he put into our stenographer’s given name by which he insisted on addressing her.

Miss Queenan appeared at the door – an unfamiliar Miss Queenan who did not advance to Papa’s desk with that romping mixture of flippancy and self-assurance which the press, with its propensity to exaggerate, has persuaded our generation to expect; instead, she stood there awaiting Papa’s attention.

“After this, Florence, will you see that my desk is not cluttered up with correspondence dealing with my son’s Mother Goose rhymes!”

“Yes, Mr. Thin,” she replied in a voice surprisingly meek for someone accustomed to speak to Papa as if she were a member of his family.

“My dear Papa,” I endeavoured to remonstrate when Miss Queenan had retired, “I really think -“

“Don’t dear Papa me! And you don’t think! Nobody that thought could be such a…”

It would serve no purpose to repeat Papa’s words in detail. They were, for the most part, quite unreasonable, and not even my deep-seated sense of filial propriety could enable me to keep my face from showing some of the resentment I felt; but I heard him through in silence and when he had underscored his last sentence by thrusting The Jongleur’s letter at me, I withdrew to my office.

The letter, which had come to Papa’s desk through the carelessness of the editor in omitting the Jr. from my name, had to do with the sonnet I have already mentioned – a sonnet entitled Fictitious Tears. The editor’s opinion was that its concluding couplet, which he quoted in his letter, was not, as he politely put it, up to my usual standard, and he requested that I rewrite it, adjusting it more exactly to the tone of the previous lines, for which it was, he thought, a trifle too serious.

And glisten there no less incongruously

Than Christmas balls on deadly upas tree.

I reminded myself, as I took my rhyming dictionary from behind Gross’s Kriminal Psychologic where, in the interest of peace, I habitually concealed it, that I had not been especially pleased with those two lines; but after repeated trials I had been unable to find more suitable ones. Now, as I heard the noon whistles, I brought out my carbon copy of the sonnet and determined to devote the quiet of the luncheon hour to the creation of another simile that would express incongruity in a lighter vein.

To that task I addressed myself, submerging my consciousness to such an extent that when I heard Papa’s voice calling “Robin!” with a force that fairly agitated the three intervening partitions, I roused as if from sleep, with a suspicion that the first call I had heard had not been the first Papa had uttered. This suspicion was confirmed when, putting away paper and books, I hastened into Papa’s presence.

“Too busy listening to the little birdies twitter to hear me?” But this was mere perfunctory gruffness; his eyes were quite jovial so that in a measure I was prepared for his next words. “Barnable’s stuck up. Get to it.”

The Barnable Jewellery company’s store was six blocks from our offices, and a convenient street car conveyed me there before Papa’s brief order was five minutes old. The store, a small one, occupied a portion of the ground floor of the Bulwer Building, on the north side of O’Farrell Street, between Powell and Stockton Streets. The store’s neighbours on the ground floor of the same building were, going east toward Stockton Street, a haberdasher (in whose window, by the way, I noticed an intriguing lavender dressing robe), a barber shop, and a tobacconist’s; and going westward toward Powell Street, the main entrance and lobby of the Bulwer Building, a prescription druggist, a hatter, and a lunchroom.

At the jeweller’s door a uniformed policeman was busily engaged in preventing a curious crowd, most of whom presumably out on their luncheon hours, from either blocking the sidewalk or entering the store. Passing through this throng, I nodded to the policeman, not that I was personally acquainted with him but because experience had taught me that a friendly nod will often forestall questions, and went into the store.

Detective-Sergeant Hooley and Detective Strong of the Police Department were in the store. In one hand the former held a dark gray cap and a small automatic pistol which did not seem to belong to any of the people to whom the detectives were talking: Mr. Barnable, Mr. Barnable’s assistant, and two men and a woman unknown to me.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” I addressed the detectives. “May I participate in the inquiry?”

“Ah, Mr. Thin!”

Sergeant Hooley was a large man whose large mouth did nothing to shape his words beyond parting to emit them, so that they issued somewhat slovenly from a formless opening in his florid face. His face held now, as when I had engaged him in conversation heretofore, an elusively derisive expression – as if, with intent to annoy, he pretended to find in me, in my least word or act, something amusing. The same impulse was noticeable in the stressed mister with which he invariably prefixed my name, notwithstanding that he called Papa, Bob, a familiarity I was quite willing to be spared.

“As I was telling the boys, participating is just exactly what we need.” Sergeant Hooley exercised his rather heavy wit. “Some dishonest thief has been robbing the joint. We’re about through inquiring, but you look like a fellow that can keep a secret, so I don’t mind letting you in on the dirt, as we used to say at dear old Harvard.”

I am not privy to the quirk in Sergeant Hooley’s mind which makes attendance at this particular university constitute, for him, a humorous situation; nor can I perceive why he should find so much pleasure in mentioning that famous seat of learning to me who, as I have often taken the trouble to explain to him, attended an altogether different university.

“What seems to have happened,” he went on, “is that some bird come in here all by himself, put Mr. Barnable and his help under the gun, took ‘em for what was in the safe, and blew out, trampling over some folks that got in his way. He then beat it up to Powell Street, jumped into a car, and what more do you want to know?”

“At what time did this occur?”

“Right after twelve o’clock, Mr. Thin – not more than a couple of minutes after, if that many,” said Mr. Barnable, who had circled the others to reach my side. His brown eyes were round with excitement in his round brown face, but not especially melancholy, since he was insured against theft in the company on whose behalf I was now acting.

“He makes Julius and me lay down on the floor behind the counter while he robs the safe, and then he backs out. I tell Julius to get up and see if he’s gone, but just then he shoots at me.” Mr. Barnable pointed a spatulate finger at a small hole in the rear wall, near the ceiling. “So I didn’t let Julius get up till I was sure he’d gone. Then I phoned the police and your office.”

“Was anyone else, anyone besides you and Julius, in the store when the robber entered?”

“No. We hadn’t had anyone in for maybe fifteen minutes.”

“Would you be able to identify the robber if you were to see him again, Mr. Barnable?”

“Would I? Say, Mr. Thin, would Carpentier know Dempsey?”

This counter-question, which seemed utterly irrelevant, was intended, I assumed, as an affirmative.

“Kindly describe him for me, Mr. Barnable.”

“He was maybe forty years old and tough-looking, a fellow just about your size and complexion.” I am, in height and weight, of average size, and my complexion might best be described as medium, so there was nothing in any way peculiar about my having these points of resemblance to the robber; still I felt that the jeweller had been rather tactless in pointing them out. “His mouth was kind of pushed in, without much lips, and his nose was long and flattish, and he had a scar on one side of his face. A real tough-looking fellow!”

“Will you describe the scar in greater detail, Mr. Barnable?”

“It was back on his cheek, close to his ear, and ran all the way down from under his cap to his jawbone.”

“Which cheek, Mr. Barnable?”

“The left,” he said tentatively, looking at Julius, his sharp-featured young assistant. When Julius nodded, the jeweller repeated, with certainty, “The left.”

“How was he dressed, Mr. Barnable?”

“A blue suit and that cap the sergeant has got. I didn’t notice anything else.”

“His eyes and hair, Mr. Barnable?”

“Didn’t notice.”

“Exactly what did he take, Mr. Barnable?”

“I haven’t had time to check up yet, but he took all the unset stones that were in the safe – mostly diamonds. He must have got fifty thousand dollars’ worth if he got a nickel!”

I permitted a faint smile to show on my lips while I looked coldly at the jeweller.

“In the event that we fail to recover the stones, Mr. Barnable, you are aware that the insurance company will require proof of the purchase of every missing item.”

He fidgeted, screwing his round face up earnestly.

“Well, anyways, he got twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth, if it’s the last thing I ever say in this world, Mr. Thin, on my word of honour as a gentleman.”

“Did he take anything besides the unset stones, Mr. Barnable?”

“Those and some money that was in the safe – about two hundred dollars.”

“Will you please draw up a list immediately, Mr. Barnable, with as accurate a description of each missing item as possible. Now what evidence have we, Sergeant Hooley, of the robbers subsequent actions?”

“Well, first thing, he subsequently bumped into Mrs. Dolan as he was making his getaway. Seems she was -“

“Mrs. Dolan has an account here,” the jeweller called from the rear of the store when he and Julius had gone to comply with my request. Sergeant Hooley jerked his thumb at the woman who stood on my left.

She was a woman of fewer years than forty, with humorous brown eyes set in a healthily pink face. Her clothes, while neat, were by no means new or stylish, and her whole appearance was such as to cause the adjective “capable” to come into one’s mind, an adjective further justified by the crisp freshness of the lettuce and celery protruding from the top of the shopping-bag in her arms.

“Mrs. Dolan is manager of an apartment building on Ellis Street,” the jeweller concluded his introduction, while the woman and I exchanged smiling nods.

“Thank you, Mr. Barnable. Proceed, Sergeant Hooley.”

“Thank you, Mr. Thin. Seems she was coming in to make a payment on her watch, and just as she put a foot inside the door, this stick-up backed into her, both of them taking a tumble. Mr. Knight, here, saw the mix-up, ran in, knocked the thug loose from his cap and gun, and chased him up the street.”

One of the men present laughed deprecatorily past an upraised sunburned hand which held a pair of gloves. He was a weather-browned man of athletic structure, tall and broad-shouldered, and dressed in loose tweeds.

“My part wasn’t as heroic as it sounds,” he protested. “I was getting out of my car, intending to go across to the Orpheum for tickets, when I saw this lady and the man collide. Crossing the sidewalk to help her up, nothing was further from my mind than that the man was a bandit. When I finally saw his gun he was actually on the point of shooting at me. I had to hit him, and luckily succeeded in doing so just as he pulled the trigger. When I recovered from my surprise I saw he had dropped his gun and run up the street, so I set out after him. But it was too late. He was gone.”

“Thank you, Mr. Knight. Now, Sergeant Hooley, you say the bandit escaped in a car?”

“Thank you, Mr. Thin,” he said idiotically, “I did. Mr. Glenn here saw him.”

“I was standing on the corner,” said Mr. Glenn, a plump man with what might be called the air of a successful salesman.

“Pardon me, Mr. Glenn, what corner?”

“The corner of Powell and O’Farrell,” he said, quite as if I should have known it without being told. “The northeast corner, if you want it exactly, close to the building line. This bandit came up the street and got into a coupe that was driving up Powell Street. I didn’t pay much attention to him. If I heard the shot I took it for an automobile noise. I wouldn’t have noticed the man if he hadn’t been bare-headed, but he was the man Mr. Barnable described – scar, pushed-in mouth, and all.”

“Do you know the make or license number of the car he entered, Mr. Glenn?”

“No, I don’t. It was a black coupe’, and that’s all I know. I think it came from the direction of Market Street. A man was driving it, I believe, but I didn’t notice whether he was young or old or anything about him.”

“Did the bandit seem excited, Mr. Glenn? Did he look back?”

“No, he was as cool as you please, didn’t even seem in a hurry. He just walked up the street and got into the coupe, not looking to right or left.”

“Thank you, Mr. Glenn. Now can anyone amplify or amend Mr. Barnable’s description of the bandit?”

“His hair was gray,” Mr. Glenn said, “iron-gray.”

Mrs. Dolan and Mr. Knight concurred in this, the former adding, “I think he was older than Mr. Barnable said – closer to fifty than to forty – and his teeth were brown and decayed in front.”

“They were, now that you mention it,” Mr. Knight agreed.

“Is there any other light on the matter, Sergeant Hooley?”

“Not a twinkle. The shotgun cars are out after the coupe, and I reckon when the papers get out we’ll be hearing from more people who saw things, but you know how they are.”

I did indeed. One of the most lamentable features of criminal detection is the amount of time and energy wasted investigating information supplied by people who, through sheer perversity, stupidity, or excessive imagination, insist on connecting everything they have chanced to see with whatever crime happens to be most prominent in the day’s news.

Sergeant Hooley, whatever the defects of his humour, was an excellent actor: his face was bland and guileless and his voice did not vary in the least from the casual as he said, “Unless Mr. Thin has some more questions, you folks might as well run along. I have your address and can get hold of you if I need you again.”

I hesitated, but the fundamental principle that Papa had instilled in me during the ten years of my service under him – the necessity of never taking anything for granted – impelled me to say, “Just a moment,” and to lead Sergeant Hooley out of the others’ hearing.

“You have made your arrangements, Sergeant Hooley?”

“What arrangements?”

I smiled, realising that the police detectives were trying to conceal their knowledge from me. My immediate temptation was, naturally enough, to reciprocate in kind; but whatever the advantages of working independently on any one operation, in the long run a private detective is wiser in cooperating with the police than in competing with them.

“Really,” I said, “you must harbour a poor opinion of my ability if you think I have not also taken cognizance of the fact that if Glenn were standing where he said he was standing, and if, as he says, the bandit did not turn his head, then he could not have seen the scar on the bandit’s left cheek.”

Despite his evident discomfiture, Sergeant Hooley acknowledged defeat without resentment.

“I might of known you’d tumble to that,” he admitted, rubbing his chin with a reflective thumb. “Well, I reckon we might as well take him along now as later, unless you’ve got some other notion in your head.”

Consulting my watch, I saw that it was now twenty-four minutes past noon: my investigation had thus far, thanks to the police detectives’ having assembled all the witnesses, consumed only ten or twelve minutes.

“If Glenn were stationed at Powell Street to mislead us,” I suggested, “then isn’t it quite likely that the bandit did not escape in that direction at all? It occurs to me that there is a barber shop two doors from here in the opposite direction – toward Stockton Street. That barber shop, which I assume has a door opening into the Bulwer Building, as barber shops similarly located invariably do, may have served as a passageway through which the bandit could have got quickly off the street. In any event, I consider it a possibility that we should investigate.”

“The barber shop it is!” Sergeant Hooley spoke to his colleague, “Wait here with these folks till we’re back, Strong. We won’t be long.”

“Right,” Detective Strong replied.

In the street we found fewer curious spectators than before.

“Might as well go inside, Tim,” Sergeant Hooley said to the policeman in front as we passed him on our way to the barber shop.

The barber shop was about the same size as the jewellery store. Five of its six chairs were filled when we went in, the vacant one being that nearest the front window. Behind it stood a short swarthy man who smiled at us and said, “Next,” as is the custom of barbers.

Approaching, I tendered him one of my cards, from perusal of which he looked up at me with bright interest that faded at once into rather infantile disappointment. I was not unfamiliar with this phenomenon: there are a surprising number of people who, on learning that my name is Thin, are disappointed in not finding me an emaciated skeleton or, what would doubtless be even more pleasing, grossly fat.

“You know, I assume, that Barnable’s store has been robbed?”

“Sure! It’s getting tough the way those babies knock ‘em over in broad daylight!”

“Did you by any chance hear the report of the pistol?”

“Sure! I was shaving a fellow, Mr. Thorne, the real estate man. He always waits for me no matter how many of the other barbers are loafing. He says – Anyhow, I heard the shot and went to the door to look up there, but I couldn’t keep Mr. Thorne waiting, you understand, so I didn’t go up there myself.”

“Did you see anyone who might have been the bandit?”

“No. Those fellows move quick, and at lunchtime, when the street’s full of people, I guess he wouldn’t have much trouble losing himself. It’s funny the way -“

In view of the necessity of economising on time, I risked the imputation of discourtesy by interrupting the barber’s not very pertinent comments.

“Did any man pass through here, going from the street into the Bulwer Building, immediately after you heard the shot?”

“Not that I remember, though lots of men use this shop as a kind of short cut from their offices to the street.”

“But you remember no one passing through shortly after you heard the shot?”

“Not going in. Going out, maybe, because it was just about lunchtime.”

I considered the men the barbers were working on in the five occupied chairs. Only two of these men wore blue trousers. Of the two, one had a dark moustache between an extremely outstanding nose and chin; the other’s face, pink from the shaving it had just undergone, was neither conspicuously thin nor noticeably plump, nor was his profile remarkable for either ugliness or beauty. He was a man of about thirty-five years, with fair hair and, as I saw when he smiled at something his barber said, teeth that were quite attractive in their smooth whiteness.

“When did the man in the third chair” – the one I have just described – “come in?”

“If I ain’t mistaken, just before the hold-up. He was just taking off his collar when I heard the shot. I’m pretty sure of it.”

“Thank you,” I said, turning away.

“A tough break,” Sergeant Hooley muttered in my ear.

I looked sharply at him.

“You forget or, rather, you think I have forgotten, Knight’s gloves.”

Sergeant Hooley laughed shortly. “I forgot ‘em for a fact. I must be getting absent-minded or something.”

“I know of nothing to be gained by dissembling, Sergeant Hooley. The barber will be through with our man presently.” Indeed, the man rose from the chair as I spoke. “I suggest that we simply ask him to accompany us to the jeweller’s.”

“Fair enough,” the sergeant agreed.

We waited until our man had put on his collar and tie, his blue jacket, gray coat, and gray hat. Then, exhibiting his badge, Sergeant Hooley introduced himself to the man.

“I’m Sergeant Hooley. I want you to come up the street with me.”

“What?”

The man’s surprise was apparently real, as it may well have been.

Word for word, the sergeant repeated his statement.

“What for?”

I answered the man’s question in as few words as possible.

“You are under arrest for robbing Barnable’s jewellery store.”

The man protested somewhat truculently that his name was Brennan, that he was well-known in Oakland, that someone would pay for this insult, and so on. For a minute it seemed that force would be necessary to convey our prisoner to Barnable’s, and Sergeant Hooley had already taken a grip on the man’s wrist when Brennan finally submitted, agreeing to accompany us quietly.

Glenn’s face whitened and a pronounced tremor disturbed his legs as we brought Brennan into the jewellery store, where Mrs. Dolan and Messrs. Barnable, Julius, Knight, and Strong came eagerly to group themselves around us. The uniformed man the Sergeant had called Tim remained just within the street door.

“Suppose you make the speeches,” Sergeant Hooley said, offering me the centre of the stage.

“Is this your bandit, Mr. Barnable?” I began.

The jeweller’s brown eyes achieved astonishing width.

“No, Mr. Thin!”

I turned to the prisoner.

“Remove your hat and coat, if you please. Sergeant Hooley, have you the cap that the bandit dropped? Thank you, Sergeant Hooley.” To the prisoner, “Kindly put this cap on.”

“I’m damned if I will!” he roared at me.

Sergeant Hooley held a hand out toward me.

“Give it to me. Here, Strong, take a hold on this baby while I cap him.”

Brennan subsided. “All right! All right! I’ll put it on!”

The cap was patently too large for him, but, experimenting, I found it could be adjusted in such a manner that its lack of fit was not too conspicuous, while its size served to conceal his hair and alter the contours of his head.

“Now will you please,” I said, stepping back to look at him, “take out your teeth?”

This request precipitated an extraordinary amount of turmoil. The man Knight hurled himself on Detective Strong, while Glenn dashed toward the front door, and Brennan struck Sergeant Hooley viciously with his fist. Hastening to the front door to take the place of the policeman who had left it to struggle with Glenn, I saw that Mrs. Dolan had taken refuge in the corner, while Barnable and Julius avoided being drawn into the conflict only by exercising considerable agility.

Order was at length restored, with Detective Strong and the policeman handcuffing Knight and Glenn together, while Sergeant Hooley, sitting astride Brennan, waved aloft the false teeth he had taken from his mouth.

Beckoning to the policeman to resume his place at the door, I joined Sergeant Hooley, and we assisted Brennan to his feet, restoring the cap to his head. He presented a villainous appearance: his mouth, unfilled by teeth, sank in, thinning and aging his face, causing his nose to lengthen limply and flatly.

“Is this your baby?” Sergeant Hooley asked, shaking the prisoner at the jeweller.

“It is! It is! It’s the same fellow!” Triumph merged with puzzlement on the jeweller’s face. “Except he’s got no scar,” he added slowly.

“I think we shall find his scar in his pocket.”

We did – in the form of a brown-stained handkerchief still damp and smelling of alcohol. Besides the handkerchief, there were in his pockets a ring of keys, two cigars, some matches, a pocket-knife, $36, and a fountain pen.

The man submitted to our search, his face expressionless until Mr. Barnable exclaimed, “But the stones? Where are my stones?”

Brennan sneered nastily. “I hope you hold your breath till you find ‘em,” he said.

“Mr. Strong, will you kindly search the two men you have handcuffed together?” I requested.

He did so, finding, as I expected, nothing of importance on their persons.

“Thank you, Mr. Strong,” I said, crossing to the corner in which Mrs. Dolan was standing. “Will you please permit me to examine your shopping-bag?”

Mrs. Dolan’s humorous brown eyes went blank.

“Will you please permit me to examine your shopping-bag?” I repeated, extending a hand toward it.

She made a little smothered laughing sound in her throat, and handed me the bag, which I carried to a flat-topped showcase on the other side of the room. The bag’s contents were the celery and lettuce I have already mentioned, a package of sliced bacon, a box of soap chips, and a paper sack of spinach, among the green leaves of which glowed, when I emptied them out on the showcase, the hard crystal facets of unset diamonds. Less conspicuous among the leaves were some banknotes.

Mrs. Dolan was, I have said, a woman who impressed me as being capable, and that adjective seemed especially apt now: she behaved herself, I must say, in the manner of one who would be capable of anything. Fortunately, Detective Strong had followed her across the store; he was now in a position to seize her arms from behind, and thus incapacitate her, except vocally – a remaining freedom of which she availed herself to the utmost, indulging in a stream of vituperation which it is by no means necessary for me to repeat.

It was a few minutes past two o’clock when I returned to our offices.

“Well, what?” Papa ceased dictating his mail to Miss Queenan to challenge me. “I’ve been waiting for you to phone!”

“It was not necessary,” I said, not without some satisfaction. “The operation has been successfully concluded.”

“Cleaned up?”

“Yes, sir. The thieves, three men and a woman, are in the city prison, and the stolen property has been completely recovered. In the detective bureau we were able to identify two of the men, ‘Reader’ Keely, who seems to have been the principal, and a Harry McMeehan, who seems to be well-known to the police in the East. The other man and the woman, who gave their names as George Glenn and Mrs. Mary Dolan, will doubtless be identified later.”

Papa bit the end off a cigar and blew the end across the office.

“What do you think of our little sleuth, Florence?” he fairly beamed on her, for all the world as if I were a child of three who had done something precocious.

“Spiffy!” Miss Queenan replied. “I think we’ll do something with the lad yet.”

“Sit down, Robin, and tell us about it,” Papa invited. “The mail can wait.”

“The woman secured a position as manager of a small apartment house on Ellis Street,” I explained, though without sitting down. “She used that as reference to open an account with Barnable, buying a watch, for which she paid in small weekly instalments. Keely, whose teeth were no doubt drawn while he was serving his last sentence in Walla Walla, removed his false teeth, painted a scar on his cheek, put on an ill-fitting cap, and, threatening Barnable and his assistant with a pistol, took the unset stones and money that were in the safe.

“As he left the store he collided with Mrs. Dolan, dropping the plunder into a bag of spinach which, with other groceries, was in her shopping-bag. McMeehan, pretending to come to the woman’s assistance, handed Keely a hat and coat, and perhaps his false teeth and a handkerchief with which to wipe off the scar, and took Keely’s pistol.

“Keely, now scarless, and with his appearance altered by teeth and hat, hurried to a barber shop two doors away, while McMeehan, after firing a shot indoors to discourage curiosity on the part of Barnable, dropped the pistol beside the cap and pretended to chase the bandit up toward Powell Street. At Powell Street another accomplice was stationed to pretend he had seen the bandit drive away in an automobile. These three confederates attempted to mislead us further by adding fictitious details to Barnable’s description of the robber.”

“Neat!” Papa’s appreciation was, I need hardly point out, purely academic – a professional interest in the cunning the thieves had shown and not in any way an approval of their dishonest plan as a whole. “How’d you knock it off?”

“That man on the corner couldn’t have seen the scar unless the bandit had turned his head, which the man denied. McMeehan wore gloves to avoid leaving prints on the pistol when he fired it, and his hands are quite sunburned, as if he does not ordinarily wear gloves. Both men and the woman told stories that fitted together in every detail, which, as you know, would be little less than a miracle in the case of honest witnesses. But since I knew Glenn, the man on the corner, had prevaricated, it was obvious that if the others’ stories agreed with his, then they too were deviating from the truth.”

I thought it best not to mention to Papa that immediately prior to going to Barnable’s, and perhaps subconsciously during my investigation, my mind had been occupied with finding another couplet to replace the one the editor of The Jongleur had disliked; incongruity, therefore, being uppermost in my brain, Mrs. Dolan’s shopping-bag had seemed a quite plausible hiding place for the diamonds and money.

“Good shooting!” Papa was saying. “Pull it by yourself?”

“I cooperated with Detectives Hooley and Strong. I am sure the subterfuge was as obvious to them as to me.”

But even as I spoke a doubt arose in my mind. There was, it seemed to me, a possibility, however slight, that the police detectives had not seen the solution as clearly as I had. At the time I had assumed that Sergeant Hooley was attempting to conceal his knowledge from me; but now, viewing the situation in retrospect, I suspected that what the sergeant had been concealing was his lack of knowledge.

However, that was not important. What was important was that, in the image of jewels among vegetables, I had found a figure of incongruity for my sonnet.

Excusing myself, I left Papa’s office for my own, where, with rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, and carbon copy on my desk again, I lost myself in the business of clothing my new simile with suitable words, thankful indeed that the sonnet had been written in the Shakespearean rather than the Italian form, so that a change in the rhyme of the last two lines would not necessitate similar alterations in other lines.

Time passed, and then I was leaning back in my chair, experiencing that unique satisfaction that Papa felt when he had apprehended some especially elusive criminal. I could not help smiling when I reread my new concluding couplet.

And shining there, no less inaptly shone

Than diamonds in a spinach garden sown.

That, I fancied, would satisfy the editor of The Jongleur.

THE FIRST THIN MAN

Hammett wrote these ten chapters in 1930, some three years before he wrote and published The Thin Man. Although the story line of these chapters bears clear similarities to that of the novel, when published the latter was a completely rewritten work. The style in this roughly first fifth of a novel is much more akin to the hard-edged work Hammett published in Black Mask. And Nick and Nora Charles do not appear here.

One

The train went north among the mountains. The dark man crossed tracks to the ticket-window and said: “Can you tell me how to get to Mr. Wynant’s place? Mr. Walter Irving Wynant’s.”

The man within stopped writing on a printed form. His eyes became brightly inquisitive behind tight rimless spectacles. His voice was eager. “Are you a newspaper reporter?”

“Why?” The dark man’s eyes were very blue. They looked idly at the other. “Does it make any difference?”

“Then you ain’t,” the ticket-agent said. He was disappointed. He looked at a clock on the wall. “Hell, I ought to’ve known that. You wouldn’t’ve had time to get here.” He picked up the pencil he had put down.

“Know where his place is?”

“Sure. Up there on the hill.” The ticket-agent waved his pencil vaguely westward. “All the taxi drivers know it, but if it’s Wynant you want to see you’re out of luck.”

“Why?”

The ticket-agent’s mien brightened. He put his forearms on the counter, hunching his shoulders, and said: “Because the fact is he went and murdered everybody on the place and jumped in the river not more than an hour ago.”

The dark man exclaimed, “No!” softly.

The ticket-agent smacked his lips. “Uh-huh – killed all three of them – the whole shooting match – chopped them up in pieces with an axe and then tied a weight around his own neck and jumped in the river.”

The dark man asked solemnly: “What’d he do that for?”

A telephone bell began to ring behind the ticket-agent. “You don’t know him or you wouldn’t have to ask,” he replied as he reached for the telephone. “Crazy as they make them and always was. The only wonder is he didn’t do it long before this.” He said, ‘Hello,’ into the telephone.

The dark man went through the waiting-room and downstairs to the street. The half a dozen automobiles parked near the station were apparently private cars. A large red and white sign in the next block said TAXI. The dark man walked under the sign into a small, grimy office where a bald fat man was reading a newspaper.

“Can I get a taxi?” the dark man asked.

“All out now, brother, but I’m expecting one of them back any minute. In a hurry?”

“A little bit.”

The bald man brought his chair down on all its legs and lowered his newspaper. “Where do you want to go?”

“Wynant’s.”

The bald man dropped his newspaper and stood up, saying heartily: “Well, I’ll run you up there myself.” He covered his baldness with a sweat-stained brown hat.

They left the office and – after the fat man had paused at the real-estate office next door to yell, “Take care of my phone if it rings, Toby” – got into a dark sedan, took the left turn at the first crossing, and rode uphill toward the west.

When they had ridden some three hundred yards the fat man said in a tone whose casualness was belied by the shine in his eyes: “That must be a hell of a mess up there and no fooling.”

The dark man was lighting a cigarette. “What happened?” he asked.

The fat man looked sharply sidewise at him. “Didn’t you hear?”

“Only what the ticket-agent told me just now” – the dark man leaned forward to return the lighter to its hole in the dashboard – “that Wynant had killed three people with an axe and then drowned himself.”

The fat man laughed scornfully. “Christ, you can’t beat Lew,” he said. “If you sprained your ankle he could get a broken back out of it. Wynant didn’t kill but two of them – the Hopkins woman got away because it was her that phoned – and he choked them to death and then shot himself. I bet you if you’d go back there right now Lew’d tell you there was a cool half a dozen of them killed and likely as not with dynamite.”

The dark man took his cigarette from his mouth. “Then he wasn’t right about Wynant being crazy?”

“Yes,” the fat man said reluctantly, “but nobody could go wrong on that.”

“No?”

“Nope. Holy hell! Didn’t he used to come down to town in his pyjamas last summer? And then when people didn’t like it and got Ray to say something to him about it didn’t he get mad and stop coming in at all? Don’t he make as much fuss about people trespassing on his place as if he had a gold mine there? Didn’t I see him with my own eyes heave a rock at a car that had gone past him raising dust once?”

The dark man smiled meagrely. “I don’t know any of the answers,” he said. “I didn’t know him.”

Beside a painted warning against trespass they left their gravelled road for an uneven, narrow crooked one of dark earth running more steeply uphill to the right. Protruding undergrowth brushed the sedan’s sides and now and then an overhanging tree-branch its top. Their speed made their ride rougher than it need have been.

“This is his place,” the fat man said. He sat stiffly at the wheel fighting the road’s unevenness. His eyes were shiny, expectant.

The house they presently came to was a rambling structure of gray native stone and wood needing gray paint under low Dutch roofs. Five cars stood in the clearing in front of the house. The man who sat at the wheel of one of them, and the two men standing beside it, stopped talking and watched the sedan draw up.

“Here we are,” the fat man said and got out. His manner had suddenly become important. He put importance in the nod he gave the three men.

The dark man, leaving the other side of the sedan, went toward the house. The fat man hurried to walk beside him.

A man came out of the house before they reached it. He was a middle-aged giant in baggy, worn clothes. His hair was gray, his eyes small, and he chewed gum. He said, “Howdy, Fern,” to the fat man and, looking steadily at the dark man, stood in the path confronting them squarely.

Fern said, “Hello, Nick,” and then told the dark man: “This is Sheriff Petersen.” He narrowed one eye shrewdly and addressed the sheriff again: “He came up to see Wynant.”

Sheriff Nick Petersen stopped chewing. “What’s the name?” he asked.

The dark man said: “John Guild.”

The sheriff said: “So. Now what were you wanting to see Wynant about?”

The man who had said his name was John Guild smiled. “Does it make any difference now he’s dead?”

The sheriff asked, “What?” with considerable force.

“Now that he’s dead,” Guild repeated patiently. He put a fresh cigarette between his lips.

“How do you know he’s dead?” The sheriff emphasized “you.”

Guild looked with curious blue eyes at the giant. “They told me in the village,” he said carelessly. He moved his cigarette an inch to indicate the fat man. “He told me.”

The sheriff frowned sceptically, but when he spoke it was to utter a vague “Oh.” He chewed his gum. “Well, what was it you were wanting to see him about?”

Guild said: “Look here: is he dead or isn’t he?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Fine,” Guild said, his eyes lighting up. “Where is he?”

“I’d like to know,” the sheriff replied gloomily. “Now what is it you want with him?”

“I’m from his bank. I want to see him on business.” Guild’s eyes became drowsy. “It’s confidential business.”

“So?” Sheriff Petersen’s frown seemed to hold more discomfort than annoyance. “Well, none of his business is confidential from me any more. I got a right to know anything and everything that anybody knows about him.”

Guild’s eyes narrowed a little. He blew smoke out.

“I have,” the sheriff insisted in a tone of complaint. “Listen, Guild, you haven’t got any right to hide any of his business from me. He’s a murderer and I’m responsible for law and order in this county.”

Guild pursed his lips. “Who’d he kill?”

“This here Columbia Forrest,” Petersen said, jerking a thumb at the house, “shot her stone dead and lit out for God only knows where.”

“Didn’t kill anybody else?”

“My God,” the sheriff asked peevishly, “ain’t that enough?”

“Enough for me, but down in the village they’ve got it all very plural.” Guild stared thoughtfully at the sheriff. “Got away clean?”

“So far,” Petersen grumbled, “but we’re phoning descriptions of him and his car around.” He sighed, moved his big shoulders uncomfortably. “Well, come on now, let’s have it. What’s your business with him?” But when Guild would have replied the giant said: “Wait a minute. We might as well go in and get hold of Boyer and Ray and get it over with at one crack.”

Leaving the fat man, Guild and the sheriff went indoors, into a pleasantly furnished tan room in the front of the house, where they were soon joined by two more men. One of these was nearly as tall as the sheriff, a raw-boned blond man in his early thirties, hard of jaw and mouth, sombre of eye. One was younger, shorter, with boyishly rosy cheeks, quick dark eyes, and smoothed dark hair. When the sheriff introduced them to Guild he said the taller one was Ray Callaghan, a deputy sheriff, the other District Attorney Bruce Boyer. He told them John Guild was a fellow who wanted to see Wynant.

The youthful district attorney, standing close to Guild, smiled ingratiatingly and asked: “What business are you in, Mr. Guild?”

“I came up to see Wynant about his bank account,” the dark man replied slowly.

“What bank?”

“Seaman’s National of San Francisco.”

“I see. Now what did you want to see him about? I mean, what was there about his account that you had to come up here to see him about?”

“Call it an overdraft,” Guild said with deliberate evasiveness.

The district attorney’s eyes became anxious.

Guild made a small gesture with the brown hand holding his cigarette. “Look here, Boyer,” he said, “if you want me to go all the way with you you ought to go all the way with me.”

Boyer looked at Petersen. The sheriff met his gaze with noncommittal eyes. Boyer turned back to Guild. “We’re not hiding anything from you,” he said earnestly. “We’ve nothing to hide.”

Guild nodded. “Swell. What happened here?”

“Wynant caught the Forrest girl getting ready to leave him and he shot her and jumped in his car and drove away,” he said quickly. “That’s all there is to it.”

“Who’s the Forrest girl?”

“His secretary.”

Guild pursed his lips, asked: “Only that?”

The raw-boned deputy sheriff said, “None of that, now!” in a strained croaking voice. His pale eyes were bloodshot and glaring.

The sheriff growled, “Take it easy there, Ray,” avoiding his deputy’s eyes.

The district attorney glanced impatiently at the deputy sheriff. Guild stared gravely, attentively at him.

The deputy sheriff’s face flushed a little and he shifted his feet. He spoke to the dark man again, in the same croaking voice: “She’s dead and you might just as well talk decently about her.”

Guild moved his shoulders a little. “I didn’t know her,” he said coldly. “I’m trying to find out what happened.” He stared for a moment longer at the raw-boned man and then shifted his gaze to Boyer. “What was she leaving him for?”

“To get married. She told him when he caught her packing after she came back from town and – and they had a fight and when she wouldn’t change her mind he shot her.”

Guild’s blue eyes moved sidewise to focus on the raw-boned deputy sheriff’s face. “She was living with Wynant, wasn’t she?” he asked bluntly.

“You son of a bitch!” the deputy sheriff cried hoarsely and struck with his right fist at Guild’s face.

Guild avoided the fist by stepping back with no appearance of haste. He had begun to step back before the fist started toward his face. His eyes gravely watched the fist go past his face.

Big Petersen lurched against his deputy, wrapping his arms around him. “Cut it out, Ray,” he grumbled. “Why don’t you behave yourself? This is no time to be losing your head.”

The deputy sheriff did not struggle against him.

“What’s the matter with him?” Guild asked the district attorney. There was no resentment in his manner. “In love with her or something?”

Boyer nodded furtively, then frowned and shook his head in a warning gesture.

“That’s all right,” Guild said. “Where’d you get your information about what happened?”

“From the Hopkinses. They look after the place for Wynant. They were in the kitchen and heard the whole fight. They ran upstairs when they heard the shots and he stood them off with the gun and told them he’d come back and kill them if they told anybody before he’d an hour’s start, but they phoned Ray as soon as he’d gone.”

Guild tossed the stub of his cigarette into the fireplace and lit a fresh one.

Then he took a card from a brown case brought from an inner pocket and gave the card to Boyer.

JOHN GUILD

ASSOCIATED DETECTIVE BUREAUS,

INC.

FROST BUILDING, SAN FRANCISCO

“Last week Wynant deposited a ten-thousand-dollar New York check in his account at the Seaman’s National Bank,” Guild said. “Yesterday the bank learned the check had been raised from one thousand to ten. The bank’s nicked for six thousand on the deal.”

“But in the case of an altered check,” Boyer said, “I understand -“

“I know,” Guild agreed, “the bank’s not responsible – theoretically – but there are usually loopholes and it’s – Well, we’re working for the insurance company that covers the Seaman’s and it’s good business to go after him and recover as much as we can.”

“I’m glad that’s the way you feel about it,” the district attorney said with enthusiasm. “I’m mighty glad you’re going to work with us.” He held out his hand.

“Thanks,” Guild said as he took the hand. “Let’s look at the Hopkinses and the body.”

Two

Columbia Forrest had been a long-limbed, smoothly slender young woman. Her body, even as it lay dead in a blue sport suit, seemed supple. Her short hair was a faintly reddish brown. Her features were small and regular, appealing in their lack of strength. There were three bullet-holes in her left temple. Two of them touched. The third was down beside the eye. Guild put the tip of his dark forefinger lightly on the edge of the lower hole. “A thirty-two,” he said. “He made sure: any of the three would have done it.” He turned his back on the corpse. “Let’s see the Hopkinses.”

“They’re in the dining-room, I think,” the district attorney said. He hesitated, cleared his throat. His young face was worried. He touched Guild’s elbow with the back of one hand and said: “Go easy with Ray, will you? He was a little bit – or a lot, I guess – in love with her and it’s tough on him.”

“The deputy?”

“Yes, Ray Callaghan.”

“That’s all right if he doesn’t get in the way,” Guild said carelessly. “What sort of person is this sheriff?”

“Oh, Petersen’s all right.”

Guild seemed to consider this statement critically. Then he said: “But he’s not what you’d call a feverish manhunter?”

“Well, no, that’s not – you know – a sheriff has other things to do most of the time, but even if he’d just as lief have somebody else do the work he won’t interfere.” Boyer moistened his lips and leaned close to the dark man. His face was boyishly alight. “I wish you’d – I’m glad you’re going to work with me on this, Guild,” he said in a low, earnest voice. “I – this is my first murder and I’d like to – well – show them” – he blushed – “that I’m not as young as some of them said.”

“Fair enough. Let’s see the Hopkinses – in here.”

The district attorney studied Guild’s dark face uneasily for a moment, started to say something, changed his mind, and left the room.

A man and a woman came with him when he returned. The man was probably fifty years old, of medium stature, with thin, graying hair above a round, phlegmatic face. He wore tan trousers held up by new blue suspenders and a faded blue shirt open at the neck. The woman was of about the same age, rather short, plump, and dressed neatly in gray. She wore gold-rimmed spectacles. Her eyes were round and pale and bright.

The district attorney shut the door and said: “This is Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins, Mr. Guild.” He addressed them: “Mr. Guild is working with me. Please give him all the assistance you can.”

The Hopkinses nodded in unison.

Guild asked: “How’d this happen?” He indicated with a small backward jerk of his head the dead young woman.

Hopkins said, “I always knew he’d do something like that some time,” while his wife was saying: “It was right in this room and they were talking so loud you could hear it all over the place.”

Guild shook his cigarette at them. “One at a time.” He spoke to the man: “How’d you know he was going to do it?”

The woman replied quickly: “Oh, he was crazy – jealous of her all the time – if she got out of his sight for a minute – and when she came back from the city and told him she was going to leave to get married he -“

Again Guild used his cigarette to interrupt her. “What do you think? Is he really crazy?”

“He was then, sir,” she said. “Why, when we ran in here when we heard the shooting and he told us to keep our mouths shut he was – his eyes – you never saw anything like them in your life – nor his voice either and he was shaking and jerking like he was going to fall apart.”

“I don’t mean that,” Guild explained. “I mean, is he crazy?” Before the woman could reply he put another question to her. “How long have you been with him?”

“Going on about ten months, ain’t it, Willie?” she asked her husband.

“Yes,” he agreed, “since last fall.”

“That’s right,” she told Guild. “It was last November.”

“Then you ought to know whether he’s crazy. Is he?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” she said slowly, wrinkling her forehead. “He was certainly the most peculiar person you ever heard tell of, but I guess geniuses are like that and I wouldn’t want to say he was out and out crazy except about her.” She looked at her husband.

He said tolerantly: “Sure, all geniuses are like that. It’s – it’s eccentric.”

“So you think he was a genius,” Guild said. “Did you read the things he wrote?”

“No, sir,” Mrs. Hopkins said, squirming, “though I did try sometimes, but it was too – I couldn’t make heads or tails of it -much – but I ain’t an educated woman and -“

“Who was she going to marry?” Guild asked.

Mrs. Hopkins shook her head vigorously. “I don’t know. I didn’t catch the name if she said it. It was him that was talking so loud.”

“What’d she go to town for?”

Mrs. Hopkins shook her head again. “I don’t know that either. She used to go in every couple of weeks and he always got mad about it.”

“She drive in?”

“Mostly she did, but she didn’t yesterday, but she drove out in that new blue car out there.”

Guild looked questioningly at the district attorney, who said: “We’re trying to trace it now. It’s apparently a new one, but we ought to know whose it is soon.”

Guild nodded and returned his attention to the Hopkinses. “She went to San Francisco by train yesterday and came back in this new car at what time today?”

“Yes, sir. At about three o’clock, I guess it was, and she started packing.” She pointed at the travelling bags and clothing scattered around the room. “And he came in and the fuss started. I could hear them downstairs and I went to the window and beckoned at Willie – Mr. Hopkins, that is – and we stood at the foot of the stairs, there by the dining-room door and listened to them.”

Guild turned aside to mash his cigarette in a bronze tray on a table. “She usually stay overnight when she went to the city?”

“Mostly always.”

“You must have some idea of what she went to the city for,” Guild insisted.

“No, I haven’t,” the woman said earnestly. “We never did know, did we, Willie? Jealous like he was, I guess if she was going in to see some fellow she wouldn’t be likely to tell anybody that might tell him, though the Lord knows I can keep my mouth shut as tight as anybody. I’ve seen the -“

Guild stopped lighting a fresh cigarette to ask: “How about her mail? You must’ve seen that sometimes.”

“No, Mr. Gould, we never did, and that’s a funny thing, because all the time we’ve been here I never saw any mail for her except magazines and never knew her to write any.”

Guild frowned. “How long had she been here?”

“She was here when we came. I don’t know how long she’d been here, but it must’ve been a long time.”

Boyer said: “Three years. She came here in March three years ago.”

“How about her relatives, friends?”

The Hopkinses shook their heads. Boyer shook his head.

“His?”

Mrs. Hopkins shook her head again. “He didn’t have any. That’s what he would always say, that he didn’t have a relative or a friend in the world.”

“Who’s his lawyer?”

Mrs. Hopkins looked blank. “If he’s got one I don’t know it, Mr. Gould. Maybe you could find something like that in his letters and things.”

“That’ll do,” Guild said abruptly around the cigarette in his mouth, and opened the door for the Hopkinses. They left the room.

He shut the door behind them and with his back against it looked around the room, at the blanketed dead figure on the bed, at the clothing scattered here and there, at the three travelling bags, and finally at the bloodstained centre of the light blue rug.

Boyer watched him expectantly.

Staring at the bloodstain, Guild asked: “You’ve notified the police in San Francisco?”

“Oh, yes, we’ve sent his description and the description and license number of his car all over – from Los Angeles to Seattle and as far east as Salt Lake.”

“What is the number?” Guild took a pencil and an envelope from his pockets.

Boyer told him, adding: “It’s a Buick coupe, last year’s.”

“What does he look like?”

“I’ve never seen him, but he’s very tall – well over six feet – and thin. Won’t weigh more than a hundred and thirty, they say. You know, he’s tubercular: that’s how he happened to come up here. He’s about forty-five years old, sunburned, but sallow, with brown eyes and very dark brown hair and whiskers. He’s got whiskers – maybe five or six inches long – thick and shaggy, and his eyebrows are thick and shaggy. There’s a lot of pictures of him in his room. You can help yourself to them. He had on a baggy gray tweed suit and a soft gray hat and heavy brown shoes. His shoulders are high and straight and he walks on the balls of his feet with long steps. He doesn’t smoke or drink and he has a habit of talking to himself.”

Guild put away his pencil and envelope. “Had your fingerprint people go over the place yet?”

“No, I -“

“It might help in case he’s picked up somewhere and we’re doubtful. I suppose we can get specimens of his handwriting. Anyway we’ll be able to get them from the bank. We’ll try to -“

Someone knocked on the door.

“Come in,” Boyer called.

The door opened to admit a man’s head. He said: “They want you on the phone.”

The district attorney followed the man downstairs. During his absence Guild smoked and looked sombrely around the room.

The district attorney came back saying: “The car belongs to a Charles Fremont, on Guerrero Street, in San Francisco.”

“What number?” Guild brought out his pencil and envelope again. Boyer told him the number and he wrote it down. “I think I’ll trot back right now and see him.”

The district attorney looked at his watch. “I wonder – if I couldn’t manage to get away to go with you,” he said.

Guild pursed his lips. “I don’t think you ought to. One of us ought to be here looking through his stuff, gathering up the loose ends. I haven’t seen anybody else we ought to trust with it.”

Though Boyer seemed disappointed he said, “Righto,” readily enough. “You’ll keep in touch with me?”

“Sure. Let me have that card I gave you and I’ll put my home address and phone number on it.” Guild’s eyes became drowsy. “What do you say I drive Fremont’s car in?”

The district attorney wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It might – Oh, sure, if you want. You’ll phone me as soon as you’ve seen him – let me know what’s what?”

“Um-hmm.”

Three

A red-haired girl in white opened the door.

Guild said: “I want to see Mr. Charles Fremont.”

“Yes, sir,” the girl said amiably in a resonant throaty voice. “Come in.”

She took him into a comfortably furnished living-room to the right of the entrance. “Sit down. I’ll call my brother.” She went through another doorway and her voice could be heard singing: “Charley, a gentleman to see you.”

Upstairs a hard, masculine voice replied: “Be right down.”

The red-haired girl came back to the room where Guild was. “He’ll be down in a minute,” she said.

Guild thanked her.

“Do sit down,” she said, sitting on an end of the sofa. Her legs were remarkably beautiful.

He sat in a large chair facing her across the room, but got up again immediately to offer her a cigarette and to hold his lighter to hers. “What I wanted to see your brother about,” he said as he sat down again, “was to ask if he knows a Miss Columbia Forrest.”

The girl laughed. “He probably does,” she said. “She’s – They’re going to be married tomorrow.”

Guild said: “Well, that’s – “ He stopped when he heard footsteps running downstairs from the second floor.

A man came into the room. He was a man of perhaps thirty-five years, a little above medium height, trimly built, rather gaily dressed in gray with lavender shirt, tie, and protruding pocket-handkerchief. His face was lean and good-looking in a shrewd, tight-lipped fashion.

“This is my brother,” the girl said.

Guild stood up. “I’m trying to get some information about Miss Columbia Forrest,” he said, and gave Charles Fremont one of his cards.

The curiosity that had come into Fremont’s face with Guild’s words became frowning amazement when he had read Guild’s card. “What -?”

Guild was saying: “There’s been some trouble up at Hell Bend.”

Fremont’s eyes widened in his paling face. “Wynant has -?”

Guild nodded. “He shot Miss Forrest this afternoon.”

The Fremonts stared at each other’s blank, horrified faces. She said through the fingers of one hand, trembling so she stuttered: “I t – t – told you, Charley!”

Charles Fremont turned savagely on Guild. “How bad is she hurt? Tell me!”

The dark man said: “She’s dead.”

Fremont sobbed and sat down with his face in his hands. His sister knelt beside him with her arms around him. Guild stood watching them.

Presently Fremont raised his head. “Wynant?” he asked.

“Gone.”

Fremont let his breath out in a low groan. He sat up straight, patting one of his sister’s hands, freeing himself from her arms. “I’m going up there now,” he told her, rising.

Guild had finished lighting a cigarette. He said: “That’s all right, but you’ll do most good by telling me some things before you go.”

“Anything I can,” Fremont promised readily.

“You were to be married tomorrow?”

“Yes. She was down here last night and stayed with us and I persuaded her. We were going to leave here tomorrow morning and drive up to Portland – where we wouldn’t have to wait three days for the license – and then go up to Banff. I’ve just wired the hotel there for reservations. So she took the car – the new one we were going in – to go up to Hell Bend and get her things. I asked her not to – we both tried to persuade her – because we knew Wynant would make trouble, but – but we never thought he would do anything like this.”

“You know him pretty well?”

“No, I’ve only seen him once – about three weeks ago – when he came to see me.”

“What’d he come to see you for?”

“To quarrel with me about her – to tell me to stay away from her.”

Guild seemed about to smile. “What’d you say to that?”

Fremont drew his thin lips back tight against his teeth. “Do I look like I’d tell him anything except to go to hell?” he demanded.

The dark man nodded. “All right. What do you know about him?”

“Nothing.”

Guild frowned. “You must know something. She’d’ve talked about him.”

Anger went out of Fremont’s lean face, leaving it gloomy. “I didn’t like her to,” he said, “so she didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Jesus!” Fremont exclaimed. “She was living up there. I was nuts about her. I knew he was. What the hell?” He bit his lip. “Do you think that was something I liked to talk about?”

Guild stared thoughtfully at the other man for a moment and then addressed the girl: “What’d she tell you?”

“Not anything. She didn’t like to talk about him any more than Charley liked to have her.”

Guild drew his brows together. “What’d she stay with him for, then?”

Fremont said painfully: “She was going to leave. That’s why he killed her.”

The dark man put his hands in his pockets and walked down the room to the front windows and back, squinting a little in the smoke rising from his cigarette. “You don’t know where he’s likely to go? Who he’s likely to connect with? How we’re likely to find him?”

Fremont shook his head. “Don’t you think I’d tell you if I knew?” he asked bitterly.

Guild did not reply to that. He asked: “Where are her people?”

“I don’t know. I think she’s got a father still alive in Texas somewhere. I know she’s an only child and her mother’s dead.”

“How long have you known her?”

“Four – nearly five months.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

“In a speakeasy on Powell Street, a couple of blocks beyond the Fairmont. She was in a party with some people I know – Helen Robier – I think she lives at the Cathedral – and a fellow named MacWilliams.”

Guild walked to the windows again and back. “I don’t like this,” he said aloud, but apparently not to the Fremonts. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s – Look here.” He halted in front of them and took some photographs from his pocket. “Are these good pictures – of her?” He spread three out fanwise. “I’ve only seen her dead.”

The Fremonts looked and nodded together. “The middle one especially,” the girl said. “You have one of those, Charley.”

Guild put the dead girl’s photographs away and displayed two of a bearded man. “Are they good of him?”

The girl said, “I’ve never seen him,” but her brother nodded and said: “They look like him.”

Guild seemed dissatisfied with the answers he had been given. He put the photographs in his pocket again. “Then it’s not that,” he said, “but there’s something funny somewhere.” He scowled at the floor, looked up quickly. “You people aren’t putting up some kind of game on me, are you?”

Charles Fremont said: “Don’t be a sap.”

“All right, but there’s something wrong somewhere.”

The girl spoke: “What? Maybe if you’d tell us what you think is wrong -“

Guild shook his head. “If I knew what was wrong I could find out for myself what made it wrong. Never mind, I’ll get it. I want the names and addresses of all the friends she had, the people she knew that you know of.”

“I’ve told you Helen Robier lives – I’m pretty sure – at the Cathedral,” Fremont said. “MacWilliams works in the Russ Building, for a stockbroker, I think. That’s all I know about him and I don’t believe Columbia knows” – he swallowed – “knew him very well. They’re the only ones I know.”

“I don’t believe they’re all you know,” Guild said.

“Please, Mr. Guild,” the girl said, coming around to his side, “don’t be unfair to Charley. He’s trying to help you – we’re both trying-but -“ She stamped her foot and cried angrily, tearfully: “Can’t you have some consideration for him now?”

Guild said: “Oh, all right.” He reached for his hat. “I drove your car down,” he told Fremont. “It’s out front now.”

“Thank you, Guild.”

Something struck one of the front windows, knocking a triangle of glass from its lower left-hand corner in on the floor. Charles Fremont, facing the window, yelled inarticulately and threw himself down on the floor. A pistol was fired through the gap in the pane. The bullet went over Fremont’s head and made a small hole in the green plastered wall there.

Guild was moving toward the street door by the time the bullet-hole appeared in the wall. A black pistol came into his right hand. Outside, that block of Guerrero Street was deserted. Guild went swiftly, though with many backward glances, to the nearest corner. From there he began to retrace his steps slowly, stopping to peer into shadowy doorways and the dark basement entrances under the high front steps.

Charles Fremont came out to join him. Windows were being raised along the street and people were looking out.

“Get inside,” Guild said curtly to Fremont. “You’re the one he’s gunning for. Get inside and phone the police.”

“Elsa’s doing that now. He’s shaved his whiskers off, Guild.”

“That’d be the first thing he did. Go back in the house.”

Fremont said, “No,” and went with Guild as he searched the block. They were still at it when the police arrived. They did not find Wynant. Around a corner two blocks from the Fremonts’ house they found a year-old Buick coupe bearing the license numbers Boyer had given Guild-Wynant’s car.

Four

After dinner, which Guild ate alone at Solari’s in Maiden Lane, he went to an apartment in Hyde Street. He was admitted by a young woman whose pale, tired face lighted up as she said: “Hello, John. We’ve been wondering what had become of you.”

“Been away. Is Chris home?”

“I’d let you in anyhow,” she said as she pushed the door farther open.

They went back to a square, bookish room where a thick-set man with rumpled sandy hair was half buried in an immense shabby chair. He put his book down, reached for the tall glass of beer at his elbow, and said jovially: “Enter the sleuth. Get some more beer, Kay. I’ve been wanting to see you, John. What do you say you do some detective-story reviews for my page – you know – ‘The Detective Looks at Detective Fiction’?”

“You asked me that before,” Guild said. “Nuts.”

“It’s a good idea, though,” the thick-set man said cheerfully. “And I’ve got another one. I was going to save it till I got around to writing a detective story, but you might be able to use it in your work sometime, so I’ll give it to you free.”

Guild took the glass of beer Kay held out to him, said, “Thanks,” to her and then to the man: “Do I have to listen to it?”

“Yes. You see, this fellow’s suspected of a murder that requires quite a bit of courage. All the evidence points right at him – that kind of thing. But he’s a great lover of Sam Johnson – got his books all over the place – so you know he didn’t do it, because only timid men – the kind that say, ‘Yes, sir,’ to their wives and, ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ to the policemen – love Johnson. You see, he’s only loved for his boorishness and the boldness of his rudeness and bad manners and that’s the kind of thing that appeals to -“

“So I look for a fellow named Sam Johnson and he’s guilty?” the dark man said.

Kay said: “Chris has one of his nights.”

Chris said: “Sneer at me and be damned to you, but there’s a piece of psychology that might come in handy some day. Remember it. It’s a law. Love of Doctor Johnson is the mark of the pathologically meek.”

Guild made a face. “God knows I’m earning me beer,” he said and drank. “If you’ve got to talk, talk about Walter Irving Wynant. That’ll do me some good maybe.”

“Why?” Chris asked. “How?”

“I’m hunting for him. He slaughtered his secretary this afternoon and lit out for parts unknown.”

Kay exclaimed: “Not really!”

Chris said: “The hell he did!”

Guild nodded and drank more beer. “He only paused long enough to take a shot at the fellow his secretary was supposed to marry tomorrow.”

Chris and Kay looked at each other with delighted eyes.

Chris lay back in his chair. “Can you beat that? But, you know, I’m not nearly as surprised as I ought to be. The last time I saw him I thought there was something wrong there, though he always was a bit on the goofy side. Remember I said something to you about it, Kay? And it’s a cinch this magazine stuff he’s been doing lately is woozy. Even parts of his last book – No, I’m being smart-alecky now. I’ll stick to what I wrote about his book when it came out: in spite of occasional flaws his ‘departmentalization’ comes nearer to supplying an answer to Pontius Pilate’s question than anything ever offered by anybody else.”

“What kind of writing does he do?” Guild asked.

“This sort of thing.” Chris rose grunting, went to one of his bookcases, picked out a bulky black volume entitled, in large gold letters, Knowledge and Belief, opened it at random, and read:

“’Science is concerned with percepts. A percept is a defined, that is, a limited, difference. The scientific datum that white occurs means that white is the difference between a certain perceptual field and the rest of the perceiver. If you look at an unbroken expanse of white you perceive white because your perception of it is limited to your visual field: the surrounding, contrasting, extra-visual area of non-white gives you your percept of white. These are not scientific definitions. They cannot be. Science cannot define, cannot limit, itself. Definitions of science must be philosophical definitions. Science cannot know what it cannot know. Science cannot know there is anything it does not know. Science deals with percepts and not with non-percepts. Thus, Einstein’s theory of relativity – that the phenomena of nature will be the same, that is, not different, to two observers who move with any uniform velocity whatever relative to one another – is a philosophical, and not a scientific, hypothesis.

“’Philosophy, like science, cannot define, cannot limit, itself. Definitions of philosophy must be made from a viewpoint that will bear somewhat the same relation to philosophy that the philosophical viewpoint bears to science. These definitions may be -‘”

“That’ll be enough of that,” Guild said.

Chris shut the book with a bang. “That’s the kind of stuff he writes,” he said cheerfully and went back to his chair and beer.

“What do you know about him?” Guild asked. “I mean outside his writing. Don’t start that again. I want to know if he was only crazy with jealousy or has blown his top altogether -and how to catch up with him either way.”

“I haven’t seen him for six or seven months or maybe longer,” Chris said. “He always was a little cracked and unsociable as hell. Maybe just erratic, maybe worse than that.”

“What do you know about him?”

“What everybody knows,” Chris said depreciatively. “Born somewhere in Devonshire. Went to Oxford. Went native in India and came out with a book on economics – a pretty good book, but visionary. Married an actress named Hana Drix – or something like that – in Paris and lived with her there for three or four years and came out of it with his second book. I think they had a couple of children. After she divorced him he went to Africa and later, I believe, to South America. Anyway he did a lot of travelling and then settled down in Berlin long enough to write his Speculative Anthropology and to do some lecturing. I don’t know where he was during the war. He popped up over here a couple of years later with a two-volume piece of metaphysics called Consciousness Drifting. He’s been in America ever since – the last five or six years up in the mountains here doing that Knowledge and Belief.”

“How about relatives, friends?”

Chris shook his tousled head. “Maybe his publishers would know – Dale and Dale.”

“And as a critic you think -“

“I’m no critic,” Chris said. “I’m a reviewer.”

“Well, as whatever you are, you think his stuff is sane?” Chris moved his thick shoulders in a lazy shrug. “Parts of his books I know are damned fine. Other parts – maybe they’re over my head. Even that’s possible. But the magazine stuff he’s been doing lately – since Knowledge and Belief – I know is tripe and worse. The paper sent a kid up to get an interview out of him a couple of weeks ago – when everybody was making the fuss over that Russian anthropologist – and he came back with something awful. We wouldn’t have run it if it hadn’t been for the weight Wynant’s name carries and the kid’s oaths that he had written it exactly as it was given to him. I’d say it was likely enough his mind’s cracked up.”

“Thanks,” Guild said, and reached for his hat, but both the others began questioning him then, so they sat there and talked and smoked and drank beer until midnight was past.

In his hotel room Guild had his coat off when the telephone bell rang. He went to the telephone. “Hello… Yes… Yes…” He waited. “Yes?… Yes, Boyer… He showed up at Fremont’s and took a shot at him… No, no harm done except that he made a clean sneak… Yes, but we found his car… Where?… Yes, I know where it is… What time?… Yes, I see… Tomorrow? What time?… Fine. Suppose you pick me up here at my hotel… Right.”

He left the telephone, started to unbutton his vest, stopped, looked at the watch on his wrist, put his coat on again, picked up his hat, and went out.

At California Street he boarded an eastbound cable car and rode over the top of the hill and down it to Chinatown, leaving the car at Grant Avenue. Rain nearly as fine as mist was beginning to blow down from the north. Guild went out beyond the curb to avoid a noisy drunken group coming out of a Chinese restaurant, walked a block, and halted across the street from another restaurant. This was a red-brick building that tried to seem oriental by means of much gilding and coloured lighting, obviously pasted-on corbelled cornices and three-armed brackets marking its stories – some carrying posts above in the shape of half-pillars – and a tent-shaped terra-cotta roof surmounted by a mast bearing nine aluminised rings. There was a huge electric sign – MANCHU.

He stood looking at this gaudy building until he had a lit a cigarette. Then he went over to it. The girl in the cloakroom would not take his hat. “We close at one,” she said.

He looked at the people getting into an elevator, at her again. “They’re coming in.”

“That’s upstairs. Have you a card?”

He smiled. “Of course I have. I left it in my other suit.”

She looked severely blank.

He said, “Oh, all right, sister,” gave her a silver dollar, took his hat-check, and squeezed himself into the crowded elevator.

At the fourth floor he left the elevator with the others and went into a large, shabby, oblong room where, running out from a small stage, an oblong dance-floor was a peninsula among tables waited on by Chinese in dinner clothes. There were forty or fifty people in the place. Some of them were dancing to music furnished by a piano, a violin, and a French horn.

Guild was given a small table near a shuttered window. He ordered a sandwich and coffee.

The dance ended and a woman with a middle-aged harpy’s face and beautiful satin-skinned body sang a modified version of Christopher Colombo. There was another dance after that. Then Elsa Fremont came out to the centre of the dance-floor and sang Hollywood Papa. Her low-cut green gown set off the red of her hair and brought out the greenness of her narrowly lanceolate eyes. Guild smoked, sipped coffee, and watched her. When she was through he applauded with the others.

She came straight to his table, smiling, and said: “What are you doing here?” She sat down facing him.

He sat down again. “I didn’t know you worked here.”

“No?” Her smile was merry, her eyes sceptical.

“No,” he said, “but maybe I should have known it. A man named Lane, who lives near Wynant in Hell Bend, saw him coming in this place this evening.”

“That would be downstairs,” the girl said. “We don’t open up here till midnight.”

“Lane didn’t know about the murder till he got home late tonight. Then he phoned the district attorney and told him he’d seen Wynant and the D.A. phoned me. I thought I’d drop in just on the off-chance that I might pick up something.”

Frowning a little, she asked: “Well?”

“Well, I found you here.”

“But I wasn’t downstairs earlier this evening,” she said. “What time was it?”

“Half an hour before he took his shot at your brother.”

“You see” – triumphantly – “you know I was home then talking to you.”

“I know that one,” Guild said.

Five

At ten o’clock next morning Guild went into the Seaman’s National Bank, to a desk marked M R. COLER, ASSISTANT CASHIER. The sunburned blond man who sat there greeted Guild eagerly.

Guild sat down and said: “Saw the papers this morning, I suppose.”

“Yes. Thank the Lord for insurance.”

“We ought to get him in time to get some of it back,” Guild said. “I’d like to get a look at his account and whatever cancelled checks are on hand.”

“Surely.” Coler got up from his desk and went away. When he came back he was carrying a thin pack of checks in one hand, a sheet of typed paper in the other. Sitting down, he looked at the sheet and said: “This is what happened: on the second of the month Wynant deposited that ten-thousand-dollar check on -“

“Bring it in himself?”

“No. He always mailed his deposits. It was a Modern Publishing Company check on the Madison Trust Company of New York. He had a balance of eleven hundred sixty-two dollars and fifty-five cents: the check brought it up to eleven thousand and so on. On the fifth a check” – he took one from the thin pack – “for nine thousand dollars to the order of Laura Porter came through the clearing house.” He looked at the check. “Dated the third, the day after he deposited his check.” He turned the check over. “It was deposited in the Golden Gate Trust Company.” He passed it across the desk to Guild. “Well, that left him with a balance of twenty-one hundred sixty-two dollars and fifty-five cents. Yesterday we received a wire telling us the New York check had been raised from one thousand to ten.”

“Do you let your customers draw against out-of-town checks like that before they’ve had time to go through?”

Coler raised his eyebrows. “Old accounts of the standing of Mr. Wynant – yes.”

“He’s got a swell standing now,” Guild said. “What other checks are there in there?”

Coler looked through them. His eyes brightened. He said: “There are two more Laura Porter ones – a thousand and a seven hundred and fifty. The rest seem to be simply salaries and household expenses.” He passed them to Guild.

Guild examined the checks slowly one by one. Then he said: “See if you can find out how long this has been going on and how much of it.”

Coler willingly rose and went away. He was gone half an hour. When he returned he said: “As near as I can learn, she’s been getting checks for several months at least and has been getting about all he deposited, with not much more than enough left over to cover his ordinary expenses.”

Guild said, “Thanks,” softly through cigarette smoke.

From the Seaman’s National Bank, Guild went to the Golden Gate Trust Company in Montgomery Street. A girl stopped typewriting to carry his card into the cashier’s office and presently ushered him into the office. There he shook hands with a round, white-haired man who said: “Glad to see you, Mr. Guild. Which of us criminals are you looking for now?”

“I don’t know whether I’m looking for any this time. You’ve got a depositer named Laura Porter. I’d like to get her address.”

The cashier’s smile set. “Now, now, I’m always willing to do all I can to help you chaps, but -“

Guild said: “She may have had something to do with gypping the Seaman’s National out of eight thou.”

Curiosity took some of the stiffness from the cashier’s smile.

Guild said: “I don’t know that she had a finger in it, but it’s because I think she might that I’m here. All I want’s her address – now – and I won’t want anything else unless I’m sure.”

The cashier rubbed his lips together, frowned, cleared his throat, finally said: “Well, if I give it to you you’ll understand it’s -“

“Strictly confidential,” Guild said, “just like the information that the Seaman’s has been nicked.”

Five minutes later he was leaving the Golden Gate Trust Company carrying, in a pocket, a slip of paper on which was written Laura Porter, 1157 Leavenworth.

He caught a cable car and rode up California Street. When his car passed the Cathedral Apartments he stood up suddenly and he left the car at the next corner, walking back to the apartment building.

At the desk he said: “Miss Helen Robier.”

The man on the other side of the counter shook his head. “We’ve nobody by that name – unless she’s visiting someone.”

“Can you tell me if she lived here – say – five months ago?”

“I’ll try.” He went back and spoke to another man. The other man came over to Guild. “Yes,” he said, “Miss Robier did live here, but she’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“She was killed in an automobile accident the Fourth of July.”

Guild pursed his lips. “Have you had a MacWilliams here?”

“No.”

“Ever have one?” –

“I don’t think so. I’ll look it up.” When he came back he was positive. “No.”

Outside the Cathedral, Guild looked at his watch. It was a quarter to twelve. He walked over to his hotel. Boyer rose from a chair in the lobby and came to meet him, saying: “Good morning. How are you? Anything new?”

Guild shrugged. “Some things that might mean something. Let’s do our talking over a lunch-table.” He turned beside the district attorney and guided him into the hotel grill.

When they were seated and had given their orders he told Boyer about his conversation with the Fremonts, the shot that had interrupted them, and their search for Wynant that had resulted in their finding his car; about his conversation with Chris – “Christopher Maxim,” he said, “book critic on the Dispatch”; about his visit to the Manchu and his meeting Elsa Fremont there; and about his visits that morning to the two banks and the apartment house. He spoke rapidly, wasting few words, missing no salient point.

“Do you suppose Wynant went to that Chinese restaurant, knowing the girl worked there, to find out where she and her brother lived?” Boyer asked when Guild had finished.

“Not if he’d been at Fremont’s house raising hell a couple of weeks ago.”

Boyer’s face flushed. “That’s right. Well, do you -?”

“Let me know what’s doing on your end,” Guild said, “and maybe we can do our supposing together. Wait till this waiter gets out of the way.”

When their food had been put in front of them and they were alone again the district attorney said: “I told you about Lane seeing Wynant going in this Chinese place.”

Guild said, “Yes. How about the fingerprints?” and put some food in his mouth.

“I had the place gone over and we took the prints of everybody we knew had been there, but the matching-up hadn’t been done when I left early this morning.”

“Didn’t forget to take the dead girl’s?”

“Oh, no. And you were in there: you can send us yours.”

“All right, though I made a point of not touching anything. Any reports from the general alarm?”

“None.”

“Anyway, we know he came to San Francisco. How about the circulars?”

“They’re being printed now – photo, description, handwriting specimens. We’ll get out a new batch when we’ve got his fingerprints: I wanted to get something out quick.”

“Fine. I asked the police here to get us some of his prints off the car. What else happened on your end?”

“That’s about all.”

“Didn’t get anything out of his papers?”

“Nothing. Outside of what seemed to be notes for his work there wasn’t a handful of papers. You can look at them yourself when you come up.”

Guild, eating, nodded as if he were thoroughly satisfied. “We’ll go up for a look at Miss Porter first thing this afternoon,” he said, “and maybe something’ll come of that.”

“Do you suppose she was blackmailing him?”

“People have blackmailed people,” Guild admitted.

“I’m just talking at random,” the district attorney said a bit sheepishly, “letting whatever pops into my mind come out.”

“Keep it up,” Guild said encouragingly.

“Do you suppose she could be a daughter he had by that actress wife in Paris?”

“We can try to find out what happened to her and the children. Maybe Columbia Forrest was his daughter.”

“But you know what the situation was up there,” Boyer protested. “That would be incest.”

“It’s happened before,” Guild said gravely. “That’s why they’ve got a name for it.”

Guild pushed the button beside Laura Porter’s name in the vestibule of a small brownstone apartment building at 1157 Leavenworth Street. Boyer, breathing heavily, stood beside him. There was no response. There was no response the second and third times he pushed the button, but when he touched the one labelled MANAGER the door-lock buzzed.

They opened the door and went into a dim lobby. A door straight ahead of them opened and a woman said: “Yes? What is it?” She was small and sharp-featured, gray-haired, hook-nosed, bright-eyed.

Guild advanced toward her saying, “We wanted to see Miss Laura Porter – 310 – but she doesn’t answer the bell.”

“I don’t think she’s in,” the gray-haired woman said. “She’s not in much. Can I take a message?”

“When do you expect her back?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure.”

“Do you know when she went out?”

“No, sir. Sometimes I see my people when they come in and go out and sometimes I don’t. I don’t watch them and Miss Porter I see less than any.”

“Oh, she’s not here most of the time?”

“I don’t know, mister. So long as they pay their rent and don’t make too much noise I don’t bother them.”

“Them? Does she live with somebody?”

“No. I meant them – all my people here.”

Guild turned to the district attorney. “Here. One of your cards.”

Boyer fumbled for his cards, got one of them out, and handed it to Guild, who gave it to the woman.

“We want a little information about her,” the dark man said in a low, confidential voice while she was squinting at the card in the dim light. “She’s all right as far as we know, but -“

The woman’s eyes, when she raised them, were wide and inquisitive. “What is it?” she asked.

Guild leaned down toward her impressively. “How long has she been here?” he asked in a stage whisper.

“Almost six months,” she replied. “It is six months.”

“Does she have many visitors?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember ever seeing any, but I don’t pay much attention and when I see people coming in here I don’t know what apartment they’re going to.”

Guild straightened, put his left hand out, and pressed an electric-light button, illuminating the lobby. He put his right hand to his inner coat-pocket and brought out pictures of Wynant and his dead secretary. He gave them to the woman. “Ever see either of these?”

She looked at the man’s picture and shook her head. “No,” she said, “and that ain’t a man I’d ever forget if I’d once seen him.” She looked at Columbia Forrest’s picture. “That!” she cried. “That is Miss Porter!”

Six

Boyer looked round-eyed at Guild.

The dark man, after a little pause, spoke to the woman. “That’s Columbia Forrest,” he said, “the girl who was killed up in Hell Bend yesterday.”

The woman’s eyes became round as the district attorney’s. “Well!” she exclaimed, looking at the photograph again, “I never would’ve thought she was a thief. Why, she was such a pleasant, mild-looking little thing -“

“A thief?” Boyer asked incredulously.

“Why, yes.” She raised puzzled eyes from the photograph. “At least that’s what the paper says, about her going -“

“What paper?”

“The afternoon paper.” Her face became bright, eager. “Didn’t you see it?”

“No. Have you -?”

“Yes. I’ll show you.” She turned quickly and went through the doorway open behind her.

Guild, pursing his lips a little, raising his eyebrows, looked at Boyer.

The district attorney whispered loudly: “She wasn’t blackmailing him? She was stealing from him?”

Guild shook his head. “We don’t know anything yet,” he said.

The woman hurried back to them carrying a newspaper. She turned the newspaper around and thrust it into Guild’s hand, leaning over it, tapping the paper with a forefinger. “There it is.” Her voice was metallic with excitement. “That’s it. You read that.”

Boyer went around behind the dark man to his other side, where he stood close to him, almost hanging on his arm, craning for a better view of the paper.

They read:

MURDERED SECRETARY KNOWN TO

N.Y. POLICE

NEW YORK, Sept. 8 (A.P.) – Columbia Forrest, in connection with whose murder at Hell Bend, Calif., yesterday the police are now searching for Walter Irving Wynant, famous scientist, philosopher and author, was convicted of shoplifting in New York City three years ago, according to former police magistrate Erie Gardner.

Ex-magistrate Gardner stated that the girl pleaded guilty to a charge brought against her by two department stores and was given a six-month sentence by him, but that the sentence was suspended due to the intervention of Walter Irving Wynant, who offered to reimburse the stores and to give her employment as his secretary. The girl had formerly been a typist in the employ of a Wall St. brokerage firm.

Boyer began to speak, but Guild forestalled him by addressing the woman crisply: “That’s interesting. Thanks a lot. Now we’d like a look at her room.”

The woman, chattering with the utmost animation, took them upstairs and unlocked the door of apartment 310. She went into the apartment ahead of them, but the dark man, holding the corridor door open, said pointedly: “We’ll see you again before we leave.” She went away reluctantly and Guild shut the door.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Boyer said.

“Maybe we are,” Guild agreed.

Words ran swiftly from the district attorney’s mouth. “Do you suppose she handled the details of his banking and forged those Laura Porter checks and juggled his books to cover them? The chances are he didn’t spend much and thought he had a fat balance. Then when she had his account drained she raised the last check, drew against it, and was running away?”

“Maybe, but -“ Guild stared thoughtfully at the district attorney’s feet.

“But what?”

Guild raised his eyes. “Why didn’t she run away while she was away instead of driving back there in another man’s car to tell him she was going away with another man?”

Boyer had a ready answer. “Thieves are funny and women are funny and when you get a woman thief there’s no telling what she’ll do or why. She could’ve had a quarrel with him and wanted to rub it in that she was going. She could have forgotten something up there. She might’ve had some idea of throwing suspicion away from the bank-account juggling for a while. She could’ve had any number of reasons, they need not’ve been sensible ones. She could’ve -“

Guild smiled politely. “Let’s see what the place’ll tell us.”

On a table in the living-room they found a flat brass key that unlocked the corridor door. Nothing else they found anywhere except in the bathroom seemed to interest them. In the bathroom, on a table, they found an obviously new razor holding a blade freshly spotted with rust, an open tube of shaving-cream from which very little had been squeezed, a new shaving-brush that had been used and not rinsed, and a pair of scissors. Hanging over the edge of the tub beside the table was a face-towel on which smears of lather had dried.

Guild blew cigarette smoke at these things and said: “Looks like our thin man came here to get rid of his whiskers.”

Boyer, frowning in perplexity, asked: “But how would he know?”

“Maybe he got it out of her before he killed her and let himself in with the key on the table – hers.” Guild pointed his cigarette at the scissors. “They make it look like him and not – well – Fremont for instance. He’d need them for the whiskers, and the things are new, as if he’d bought them on his way here.” He bent over to examine the table, the inside of the tub, the floor. “Though I don’t see any hairs.”

“What does it mean, then – his coming here?” the district attorney asked anxiously.

The dark man smiled a little. “Something or other, maybe,” he said. He straightened up from his examination of the floor. “He could’ve been careful not to drop any of his whiskers when he hacked them off, though God knows why he’d try.” He looked thoughtfully at the shaving-tools on the table. “We ought to do some more talking to her boyfriend.”

Downstairs they found the manager waiting in the lobby for them. She stood in front of them using a bright smile to invite speech.

Guild said: “Thanks a lot. How far ahead is her rent paid?”

“Up to the fifteenth of the month it’s paid.”

“Then it won’t cost you anything to let nobody in there till then. Don’t, and if you go in don’t touch anything. There’ll be some policemen up. Sure you didn’t see a man in there early last night?”

“Yes, sir, I’m sure I didn’t see anybody go in there or come out of there, though the Lord knows they could if they had a key without me -“

“How many keys did she have?”

“I only gave her one, but she could’ve had them made, all she wanted to, and likely enough did if she was – What’d she do, mister?”

“I don’t know. She get much mail?”

“Well, not so very much and most of that looked like ads and things.”

“Remember where any of it was from?”

The woman’s face coloured. “That I don’t. I don’t look at my people’s mail like that. I was always one to mind my own business as long as they paid their rent and don’t make so much noise that other people -“

“That’s right,” Guild said. “Thanks a lot.” He gave her one of his cards. “I’ll probably be back, but if anything happens – anything that looks like it might have anything to do with her – will you call me up? If I’m not there leave the message.”

“Yes, sir, I certainly will,” she promised. “Is there -?”

“Thanks a lot,” Guild said once more, and he and the district attorney went out.

They were sitting in the district attorney’s automobile when Boyer asked: “What do you suppose Wynant left the key there for, if it was hers and he used it?”

“Why not? He only went there to shave and maybe frisk the place. He wouldn’t take a chance oh going there again and leaving it there was easier than throwing it away.”

Boyer nodded dubiously and put the automobile in motion. Guild directed him to the vicinity of the Golden Gate Trust Company, where they parked the automobile. After a few minutes’ wait they were shown into the white-haired cashier’s office.

He rose from his chair as they entered. Neither his smile nor his bantering “You are shadowing me” concealed his uneasy curiosity.

Guild said: “Mr. Bliss, this is Mr. Boyer, district attorney of Whitfield County.”

Boyer and Bliss shook hands. The cashier motioned his visitors into chairs.

Guild said: “Our Laura Porter is the Columbia Forrest that was murdered up at Hell Bend yesterday.”

Bliss’s face reddened. There was something akin to indignation in the voice with which he said: “That’s preposterous, Guild.”

The dark man’s smile was small with malice. “You mean as soon as anybody becomes one of your depositors they’re sure of a long and happy life?”

The cashier smiled then. “No, but -“ He stopped smiling. “Did she have any part in the Seaman’s National swindle?”

“She did,” Guild replied, and added, still with smiling malice, “unless you’re sure none of your clients could possibly touch anybody else’s nickels.”

The cashier, paying no attention to the latter part of Guild’s speech, squirmed in his chair and looked uneasily at the door.

The dark man said: “We’d like to get a transcript of her account and I want to send a handwriting man down for a look at her checks, but we’re in a hurry now. We’d like to know when she opened her account, what references she gave, and how much she’s got in it.”

Bliss pressed one of the burtons on his desk, but before anyone came into the room he rose with a muttered, “Excuse me,” and went out.

Guild smiled after him. “He’ll be ten pounds lighter before he learns whether he’s been gypped or not and twenty if he finds he has.”

When the cashier returned he shut the door, leaned back against it, and spoke as if he had rehearsed the words. “Miss Porter’s account shows a balance of thirty-eight dollars and fifty cents. She drew out twelve thousand dollars in cash yesterday morning.”

“Herself?”

“Yes.”

Guild addressed Boyer: “We’ll show the teller her photo on the way out just to be doubly sure.” He turned to the cashier again: “And about the date she opened it and the references she gave?”

The white-haired man consulted a card in his hand. “She opened her account on November the eighth, last year,” he said. “The references she gave were Francis X. Kearny, proprietor of the Manchu Restaurant on Grant Avenue, and Walter Irving Wynant.”

Seven

“The Manchu’s only five or six blocks from here,” Guild told Boyer as they left the Golden Gate Trust Company. “We might as well stop in now and see what we can get out of Francis Xavier Kearny.”

“Do you know him?”

“Uh-uh, except by rep. He’s in solid with the police here and is supposed to be plenty tough.”

The district attorney nodded. He chewed his lips in frowning silence until they reached his automobile. Then he said: “What we’ve learned today seems to tie him, her, the Fremonts, and Wynant all up together.”

“Yes,” Guild agreed, “it seems to.”

“Or do you suppose she could have given Wynant’s name because she knew, being his secretary, she could catch the bank’s letter of inquiry and answer it without his knowing anything about it?”

“That sounds reasonable enough,” the dark man said, “but there’s Wynant’s visit to the Manchu yesterday.”

The district attorney’s frown deepened. “What do you suppose Wynant was up to – if he was in it with them?”

“I don’t know. I know somebody’s got the twelve thousand she drew out yesterday. I know I want six of it for the Seaman’s National. Turn left at the next corner.”

They went into the Manchu Restaurant together. A smiling Chinese waiter told them Mr. Kearny was not in, was not expected until nine o’clock that night. They could not learn where he might be found before nine o’clock. They left the restaurant and got into Boyer’s automobile again.

“Guerrero Street,” Guild said, “though we ought to stop first at a booth where I can phone the police about the Leavenworth Street place and the office to pick up cancelled checks from both banks, so we’ll know if any of them are forgeries.” He cupped his hands around the cigarette he was lighting. “This’ll do. Pull in here.”

The district attorney turned the automobile in at the Mark Hopkins.

Guild, saying, “I’ll hurry,” jumped out and went indoors. When he came out ten minutes later his face was thoughtful. “The police didn’t find any fingerprints on Wynant’s car,” he said. “I wonder why.”

“He could’ve taken the trouble to -“

“Uh-huh,” the dark man agreed, “but I’m wondering why he did. Well, on to Guerrero Street. If Fremont’s not back from Hell Bend we’ll see what we can shake the girl down for. She ought to know where Kearny hangs out in the daytime.”

A Filipino maid opened the Fremonts’ door.

“Is Mr. Charles Fremont in?” Guild asked.

“No, sir.”

“Miss Fremont?”

“I’ll see if she’s up yet.”

The maid took them into the living-room and went upstairs.

Guild pointed at the broken window-pane. “That’s where the shot was taken at him.” He pointed at the hole in the green wall. “That’s where it hit.” He took a misshapen bullet from his vest-pocket and showed it to Boyer. “It.”

Boyer’s face had become animated. He moved close to Guild and began to talk in a low, excited voice. “Do you suppose they could all have been in some game together and Wynant discovered that his secretary was double-crossing him besides getting ready to go off with -“

Guild jerked his head at the hall-door. “Sh-h-h.”

Light footsteps ran down the stairs and Elsa Fremont in a brightly figured blue haori coat over light-green silk pyjamas entered the room. “Good morning,” she said, holding a hand out to Guild. “It is for me anyway.” She used her other hand to partly cover a yawn. “We didn’t close the joint till nearly eight this morning.”

Guild introduced the district attorney to her, then asked: “Your brother go up to Hell Bend?”

“Yes. He was leaving when I got home.” She dropped down on the sofa with a foot drawn up under her. Her feet were stockingless in blue embroidered slippers. “Do sit down.”

The district attorney sat in a chair facing her. The dark man went over to the sofa to sit beside her. “We’ve just come from the Manchu,” he said.

Her lanceolate eyes became a little narrower. “Have a nice lunch?” she asked.

Guild smiled and said: “We didn’t go there for that.”

She said: “Oh.” Her eyes were clear and unwary now.

Guild said: “We went to see Frank Kearny.”

“Did you?”

“See him? No.”

“There’s not much chance of finding him there during the day,” she said carelessly, “but he’s there every night.”

“So we were told.” Guild took cigarettes from his pocket and held them out to her. “Where do you think we could find him now?”

The girl shook her red head as she took a cigarette. ‘You can search me. He used to live in Sea Cliff, but I don’t know where he moved to.” She leaned forward as Guild held his lighter to her cigarette. “Won’t whatever you want to see him about wait till night?” she asked when her cigarette was burning.

Guild offered his cigarettes to the district attorney, who shook his head and murmured: “No, thanks.”

The dark man put a cigarette between his lips and set fire to it before he answered the girl’s question. Then he said: “We wanted to find out what he knows about Columbia Forrest.”

Elsa Fremont said evenly: “I don’t think Frank knew her at all.”

“Yes, he did, at least as Laura Porter.”

Her surprise seemed genuine. She leaned toward Guild. “Say that again.”

“Columbia Forrest,” Guild said in a deliberately monotonous voice, “had an apartment on Leavenworth Street where she was known as Laura Porter and Frank Kearny knew her.”

The girl, frowning, said earnestly: “If you didn’t seem to know what you’re talking about I wouldn’t believe it.”

“But you do believe it?”

She hesitated, finally said: “Well, knowing Frank, I’ll say it’s possible.”

“You didn’t know about the Leavenworth Street place?”

She shook her head, meeting his gaze with candid eyes. “I didn’t.”

“Did you know she’d ever gone as Laura Porter?”

”No.”

“Ever hear of Laura Porter?”

“No.”

Guild drew smoke in and breathed it out. “I think I believe you,” he said in a casual tone. “But your brother must have known about it.”

She frowned at the cigarette in her hand, at the foot she was not sitting on, and then at Guild’s dark face. “You don’t have to believe me,” she said slowly, “but I honestly don’t think he did.”

Guild smiled politely. “I can believe you and still think you’re wrong,” he said.

“I wish,” she said naively, “you’d believe me and think I’m right.”

Guild moved his cigarette in a vague gesture. “What does your brother do, Miss Fremont?” he asked. “For a living, I mean?”

“He’s managing a couple of fighters now,” she said, “only one of them isn’t. The other’s Sammy Deep.”

Guild nodded. “The Chinese bantam.”

“Yes. Charley thinks he’s got a champ in him.”

“He’s a good boy. Who’s the other?”

“A stumble-bum named Terry Moore. If you go to fights much you’re sure to’ve seen him knocked out.”

Boyer spoke for the first time since he had declined a cigarette. “Miss Fremont, where were you born?”

“Right here in San Francisco, up on Pacific Avenue.”

Boyer seemed disappointed. He asked: “And your brother?”

“Here in San Francisco too.”

Disappointment deepened in the district attorney’s young face and there was little hopefulness in his voice asking: “Was your mother also an actress, an entertainer?”

The girl shook her head with emphasis. “She was a school-teacher. Why?”

Boyer’s explanation was given more directly to Guild. “I was thinking of Wynant’s marriage in Paris.”

The dark man nodded. “Fremont’s too old. He’s only ten or twelve years younger than Wynant.” He smiled guilelessly. “Want another idea to play with? Fremont and the dead girl have the same initials – C.F.”

Elsa Fremont laughed. “More than that,” she said, “they had the same birthdays – May twenty-seventh – though of course Charley is older.”

Guild smiled carelessly at this information while the district attorney’s eyes took on a troubled stare.

The dark man looked at his watch. “Did your brother say how long he was going to stay in Hell Bend?” he asked.

“No.”

Guild spoke to Boyer. “Why don’t you call up and see if he’s there. If he is, ask him to wait for us. If he’s left, we’ll wait here for him.”

The district attorney rose from his chair, but before he could speak the girl was asking anxiously: “Is there anything special you want to see Charley about? Anything I could tell you?”

“You said you didn’t know,” Guild said. “It’s the Laura Porter angle we want to find out about.”

“Oh.” Some of her anxiety went away.

“Your brother knows Frank Kearny, doesn’t he?” Guild asked.

“Oh, yes. That’s how I happened to go to work here.”

“Is there a phone here we can use?”

“Certainly.” She jumped up and, saying, “Back here,” opened a door into an adjoining room. When the district attorney had passed through she shut the door behind him and returned to her place on the sofa beside Guild. “Have you learned anything else?” she asked. “Anything besides about her being known as Laura Porter and having the apartment?”

“Some odds and ends,” he said, “but it’s too early to say what they’ll add up to when they’re sorted. I didn’t ask you whether Kearny and Wynant know each other, did I?”

She shook her head from side to side. “If they do I don’t know it. I don’t. I’m telling you the truth, Mr. Guild.”

“All right, but Wynant was seen going into the Manchu.”

“I know, but -“ She finished the sentence with a jerk of her shoulders. She moved closer to Guild on the sofa. “You don’t think Charley has done anything he oughtn’t’ve done, do you?”

Guild’s face was placid. “I won’t lie to you,” he said. “I think everybody connected with the job has done things they oughtn’t’ve done.”

She made an impatient grimace. “I believe you’re just trying to make things confusing, to make work for yourself,” she said, “so you’ll be looking like you’re doing something even if you can’t find Wynant. Why don’t you find him?” Her voice was rising. “That’s all you’ve got to do. Why don’t you find him instead of trying to make trouble for everybody else? He’s the only one that did anything. He killed her and tried to kill Charley and he’s the one you want – not Charley, not me, not Frank. Wynant’s the one you want.”

Guild laughed indulgently. “You make it sound simple as hell,” he told her. “I wish you were right.”

Her indignation faded. She put a hand on his hand. Her eyes held a frightened gleam. “There isn’t anything else, is there?” she asked, “something we don’t know about?”

Guild put his other hand over to pat the back of hers. “There is,” he assured her pleasantly. “There’s a lot none of us knows and what we do know don’t make sense.”

“Then -“

The district attorney opened the door and stood in the doorway. He was pale and he was sweating. “Fremont isn’t up there,” he said blankly. “He didn’t go up there.”

Elsa Fremont said, “Jesus Christ!” under her breath.

Eight

Night was settling between the mountains when Guild and Boyer arrived at Hell Bend. The district attorney drove into the village, saying: “We’ll go to Ray’s. We can come back to Wynant’s later if you want to.”

“All right,” Guild said, “unless Fremont might be there.”

“He won’t if he came up to see the body. She’s at Schumach’s funeral parlour.”

“Inquest tomorrow?”

“Yes, unless there’s some reason for putting it off.”

“There’s none that I know of,” Guild said. He looked sidewise at Boyer. “You’ll see that as little as possible comes out at the inquest?”

“Oh, yes!”

They were in Hell Bend now, running between irregularly spaced cottages toward lights that glittered up along the railroad, but before they reached the railroad they turned off to the right and stopped before a small square house where softer lights burned behind yellow blinds.

Callaghan, the raw-boned blond deputy sheriff, opened the door for them. He said, “Hello, Bruce,” to the district attorney and nodded politely if without warmth at Guild.

They went indoors, into an inexpensively furnished room where three men sat at a table playing stud poker and a huge German sheep dog lay attentive in a corner. Boyer spoke to the three men and introduced Guild while the deputy sheriff sat down at the table and picked up his cards.

One of the men – thin, bent, old, white-haired, white-moustached – was Callaghan’s father. Another – stocky, broad-browed over wide-spaced clear eyes, sunburned almost as dark as Guild – was Ross Lane. The third-small, pale, painfully neat – was Schumach, the undertaker.

Boyer turned from the introductions to Callaghan. “You’re sure Fremont didn’t show up?”

The deputy sheriff replied without looking up from his cards. “He didn’t show up at Wynant’s place. King’s been there all day. And he didn’t show up at Ben’s to – to see her. Where else’d he go if he came up here?” He pushed a chip out on the table. “I’ll crack it.” He had two kings in his hand.

Schumach pushed a clip out and said: “No, sir, he didn’t show up to look at the corpus delicti.”

Lane dropped his cards face-down on the table. The elder Callaghan put in a chip and picked up the rest of the deck.

His son said, “Three cards,” and then to Boyer: “You can phone King if you want.” He moved his head to indicate the telephone by the door.

Boyer looked questioningly at Guild, who said: “Might as well.”

Guild addressed a question to Lane while the other three men at the table were making their bets and Boyer was using the telephone. “You’re the man who saw Wynant going into the Manchu?”

“Yes.” Lane’s voice was a quiet bass.

“Was anybody with him?”

Lane said, “No,” with certainty, then hesitated thoughtfully and added: “unless they went in ahead of him. I don’t think so, but it’s possible. He was just going in when I saw him and it could’ve happened that he’d stopped to shut his car-door or take his key out or something and whoever was with him had gone on ahead.”

“Did you see enough of him to make sure it was him?”

“I couldn’t go wrong on that, even if I did see only his back. My place being next to his, I guess I’ve seen a lot more of him than most people around here, and then, tall and skinny, with those high shoulders and that funny walk, you couldn’t miss him. Besides, his car was there.”

“Had he cut his whiskers off, or was he still wearing them?”

Lane opened his eyes wide and laughed. “By God, I don’t know,” he said. “I heard he shaved them, but I never thought of that. You’ve got me there. His back was to me and I wouldn’t’ve seen them unless they happened to be sticking out sideways or I got a slanting look at him. I don’t remember seeing them, yet I might’ve and thought nothing of it. If I’d seen his face without them it’s a cinch I’d’ve noticed, but – You’ve got me there, brother.”

“Know him pretty well?”

Lane picked up the cards the younger Callaghan dealt him and smiled. “Well, I don’t guess anybody could say they know him pretty well.” He spread his cards apart to look at them.

“Did you know the Forrest girl pretty well?”

The deputy sheriff’s face began to redden. He said somewhat sharply to the undertaker: “Can you do it?”

The undertaker rapped the table with his knuckles to say he could not.

Lane had a pair of sixes and a pair of fours. He said, “I’ll do it,” pushed out a chip, and replied to the dark man’s question: “I don’t know just what you mean by that. I knew her. She used to come over sometimes and watch me work the dogs when I had them over in the field near their place.”

Boyer had finished telephoning and had come to stand beside Guild. He explained: “Ross raises and trains police dogs.”

The elder Callaghan said: “I hope she didn’t have you going around talking to yourself like she had Ray.” His voice was a nasal whine.

His son slammed his cards down on the table. His face was red and swollen. In a loud, accusing tone he began: “I guess I ought to go around chasing after -“

“Ray! Ray!” A stringy white-haired woman in faded blue had come a step in from the next room. Her voice was chiding. “You oughtn’t to -“

“Well, make him stop jawing about her, then,” the deputy sheriff said. “She was as good as anybody else and a lot better than most I know.” He glowered at the table in front of him.

In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Boyer said: “Good evening, Mrs. Callaghan. How are you?”

“Just fine,” she said. “How’s Lucy?”

“She’s always well, thanks. This is Mr. Guild, Mrs. Callaghan.”

Guild bowed, murmuring something polite. The woman ducked her head at him and took a backward step. “If you can’t play cards without rowing I wish you’d stop,” she told her son and husband as she withdrew.

Boyer addressed Guild: “King, the deputy stationed at Wynant’s place, says he hasn’t seen anything of Fremont all day.”

Guild looked at his watch. “He’s had eleven hours to make it in,” he said. He smiled pleasantly. “Or eleven hours’ start if he headed in another direction.”

The undertaker leaned over the table. “You think -?”

“I don’t know,” Guild said. “I don’t know anything. That’s the hell of it. We don’t know anything.”

“There’s nothing to know,” the deputy sheriff said querulously, “except that Wynant was jealous and killed her and ran away and you haven’t been able to find him.”

Guild, staring bleakly at the younger Callaghan, said nothing.

Boyer cleared his throat. “Well, Ray,” he began, “Mr. Guild and I have found quite a bit of confusing evidence in the -“

The elder Callaghan prodded his son with a gnarled forefinger. “Did you tell them about that Smoot boy?”

The deputy sheriff pulled irritably away from his father’s finger. “That don’t amount to nothing,” he said, “and, besides, what chance’ve I got to tell anything with all the talking you’ve been doing?”

“What was it?” Boyer asked eagerly.

“It don’t amount to nothing. Just that this kid – maybe you know him, Pete Smoot’s boy – had a telegram for Wynant and took it up to his house. He got there at five minutes after two. He wrote down the time because nobody answered the door and he had to poke the telegram under the door.”

“This was yesterday afternoon?” Guild asked.

“Yes,” the deputy sheriff said gruffly. “Well, the kid says the blue car, the one she drove out from the city in, was there then, and Wynant’s wasn’t.”

“He knew Wynant’s car?” Guild asked.

Pointedly ignoring Guild, the deputy sheriff said: “He says there wasn’t any other car there, either in the shed or outside. He’d’ve seen it if there was. So he put the telegram under the door, got on his bike, and rode back to the telegraph office. Coming back along the road he says he saw the Hopkinses cutting across the field. They’d been down at Hooper’s buying Hopkins a suit. The kid says they didn’t see him and they were too far from the road for him to holler at them about the telegram.” The deputy sheriff’s face began to redden again. “So if that’s right, and I guess it is, they’d’ve got back to the house, I reckon, around twenty past two – not before that, anyway.” He picked up the cards and began to shuffle them, though he had dealt the last hand. “Yon see, that -well – it don’t mean anything or help us any.”

Guild had finished lighting a cigarette. He asked Callaghan, before Boyer could speak: “What do you figure? She was alone in the house and didn’t answer the kid’s knock because she was hurrying to get her packing done before Wynant came home? Or because she was already dead?”

Boyer began in a tone of complete amazement: “But the Hopkinses said -“

Guild said: “Wait. Let Callaghan answer.”

Callaghan said in a voice hoarse with anger: “Let Callaghan answer if he wants to, but he don’t happen to want to, and what do you think of that?” He glared at Guild. “I got nothing to do with you.” He glared at Boyer. “You got nothing to do with me. I’m a deputy sheriff and Petersen’s my boss. Go to him for anything you want. Understand that?”

Guild’s dark face was impassive. His voice was even. “You’re not the first deputy sheriff that ever tried to make a name for himself by holding back information.” He started to put his cigarette in his mouth, lowered it, and said: “You got the Hopkinses’ call. You were first on the scene, weren’t you? What’d you find there that you’ve kept to yourself?”

Callaghan stood up. Lane and the undertaker rose hastily from their places at the table.

Boyer said: “Now, wait, gentlemen, there’s no use of our quarrelling.”

Guild, smiling, addressed the deputy sheriff blandly: “You’re not in such a pretty spot, Callaghan. You had a yen for the girl. You were likely to be just as jealous as Wynant when you heard she was going off with Fremont. You’ve got a childish sort of hot temper. Where were you around two o’clock yesterday afternoon?”

Callaghan, snarling unintelligible curses, lunged at Guild.

Lane and the undertaker sprang between the two men, struggling with the deputy sheriff. Lane turned his head to give the growling dog in the corner a quieting command. The elder Callaghan did not get up, but leaned over the table whining remonstrances at his son’s back. Mrs. Callaghan came in and began to scold her son.

Boyer said nervously to Guild: “I think we’d better go.”

Guild shrugged. “Whatever you say, though I would like to know where he spent the early part of yesterday afternoon.” He glanced calmly around the room and followed Boyer to the front door.

Outside, the district attorney exclaimed: “Good God! You don’t think Ray killed her!”

“Why not?” Guild snapped the remainder of his cigarette to the middle of the roadbed in a long red arc. “I don’t know. Somebody did and I’ll tell you a secret. I’m damned if I think Wynant did.”

Nine

Hopkins and a tall younger man with a reddish moustache came out of Wynant’s house when Boyer stopped his automobile in front of it.

The district attorney got down on the ground, saying: “Good evening, gentlemen.” Indicating the red-moustached man, he said to Guild: “This is deputy sheriff King, Mr. Guild. Mr. Guild,” he explained, “is working with me.”

The deputy sheriff nodded, looking the dark man up and down. “Yes,” he said, “I been hearing about him. Howdy, Mr. Guild.”

Guild’s nod included Hopkins and King,

“No sign of Fremont yet?” Boyer asked.

“No.”

Guild spoke: “Is Mrs. Hopkins still up?”

“Yes, sir,” her husband said, “she’s doing some sewing.”

The four men went indoors.

Mrs. Hopkins, sitting in a rocking-chair hemming an unbleached linen handkerchief, started to rise, but sank back in her chair with a “How do you do” when Boyer said: “Don’t get up. We’ll find chairs.”

Guild did not sit down. Standing by the door, he lit a cigarette while the others were finding seats. Then he addressed the Hopkinses: “You told us it was around three o’clock yesterday afternoon that Columbia Forrest got back from the city.”

“Oh, no, sir!” The woman dropped her sewing on her knees. “Or at least we never meant to say anything like that. We meant to say it was around three o’clock when we heard them – him – quarrelling. You can ask Mr. Callaghan what time it was when I called him up and -“

“I’m asking you,” Guild said in a pleasant tone. “Was she here when you got back from the village – from buying the suit – at two-twenty?”

The woman peered nervously through her spectacles at him. “Well, yes, sir, she was, if that’s what time it was. I thought it was later, Mr. Gould, but if you say that’s what time it was I guess you know, but she’d only just got home.”

“How do you know that?”

“She said so. She called downstairs to know if it was us coming in and she said she’d just that minute got home.”

“Was there a telegram under the door when you came in?”

The Hopkinses looked at each other in surprise and shook their heads. “No, there was not,” the man said.

“Was he here?”

“Mr. Wynant?”

“Yes. Was he here when you got home?”

“Yes. I – I think he was.”

“Do you know?”

“Well, it” – she looked appealingly at her husband – “he was here when we heard them fighting not much after that, so he must’ve been -“

“Or did he come in after you got back?”

“No – we didn’t see him come in.”

“Hear him?”

She shook her head certainly. “No, sir.”

“Was his car here when you got back?”

The woman started to say yes, stopped midway, and looked questioningly at her husband. His round face was uncomfortably confused. “We -we didn’t notice,” she stammered.

“Would you have heard him if he’d driven up while you were here?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Gould. I think – I don’t know. If I was in the kitchen with the water running and Willie – Mr. Hopkins that is – don’t hear any too good anyway. Maybe we -“

Guild turned his back to her and addressed the district attorney. “There’s no sense to their story. If I were you I’d throw them in the can and charge them with the murder.”

Boyer gaped. Hopkins’s face went yellow. His wife leaned over her sewing and began to cry. King stared at the dark man as at some curio seen for the first time.

The district attorney was the first to speak. “But – but why?”

“You don’t believe them, do you?” Guild asked in an amused tone.

“I don’t know. I -“

“If it was up to me I’d do it,” Guild said good-naturedly, “but if you want to wait till we locate Wynant, all right. I want to get some more specimens of Wynant’s and the girl’s handwriting.” He turned back to the Hopkinses and asked casually: “Who was Laura Porter?”

The name seemed to mean nothing to them. Hopkins shook his head dumbly. His wife did not stop crying.

“I didn’t think you knew,” Guild said. “Let’s go up and get those scratch samples, Boyer.”

The district attorney’s face, as he went upstairs with Guild, was a theatre where anxiety played. He stared at the dark man with troubled, pleading eyes. “I – I wish you’d tell me why you think Wynant didn’t do it,” he said in a wheedling voice, “and why you think Ray and the Hopkinses are mixed up in it.” He made a despairing gesture with his hands. “What do you really think, Guild? Do you really suspect these people or are you -?” His face flushed under the dark man’s steady, unreadable gaze and he lowered his eyes.

“I suspect everybody,” Guild said in a voice that was devoid of feeling. “Where were you between two and three o’clock yesterday afternoon?”

Boyer jumped and a look of fear came into his young face. Then he laughed sheepishly and said: “Well, I suppose you’re right. I want you to understand, Guild, that I keep asking you things not because I think you’re off on the wrong track, but because I think you know so much more about this kind of thing than I do.”

Guild was in San Francisco by two o’clock in the morning. He went straight to the Manchu.

Elsa Fremont was singing when he stepped out of the elevator. She was wearing a taffeta gown – snug of bodice, billowy of skirt – whereon great red roses were printed against a chalky blue background, with two rhinestone buckles holding a puffy sash in place. The song she sang had a recurring line, ‘Boom, chisel, chisel!’

When she finished her second encore she started toward Guild’s table, but two men and a woman at an intervening table stopped her, and it was then ten minutes or more before she joined him. Her eyes were dark, her face and voice nervous. “Did you find Charley?”

Guild, on his feet, said: “No. He didn’t go up to Hell Bend.”

She sat down twisting her wrist-scarf, nibbling her lip, frowning.

The dark man sat down, asking: “Did you think he’d gone there?”

She jerked her head up indignantly. “I told you I did. Don’t you ever believe anything that anybody tells you?”

“Sometimes I do and am wrong,” Guild said. He tapped a cigarette on the table. “Wherever he’s gone, he’s got a new car and an all-day start.”

She put her hands on the table suddenly, palms up in a suppliant gesture. “But why should he want to go anywhere else?”

Guild was looking at her hands. “I don’t know, but he did.” He bent his head further over her hands as if studying their lines. “Is Frank Kearny here now and can I talk to him?”

She uttered a brief throaty laugh. “Yes.” Letting her hands lie as they were on the table, she turned her head and caught a passing waiter’s attention. “Lee, ask Frank to come here.” She looked at the dark man again, somewhat curiously. “I told him you wanted to see him. Was that all right?”

He was still studying her palms. “Oh, yes, sure,” he said good-naturedly. “That would give him time to think.”

She laughed again and took her hands off the table.

A man came to the table. He was a full six feet tall, but the width of his shoulders made him seem less than that. His face was broad and flat, his eyes small, his lips wide and thick, and when he smiled he displayed crooked teeth set apart. His age could have been anything between thirty-five and forty-five.

“Frank, this is Mr. Guild,” Elsa Fremont said.

Kearny threw his right hand out with practiced heartiness. “Glad to know you, Guild.”

They shook hands and Kearny sat down with them. The orchestra was playing Love Is Like That for dancers.

“Do you know Laura Porter?” Guild asked Kearny.

The proprietor shook his ugly head. “Never heard of her. Elsa asked me.”

“Did you know Columbia Forrest?”

“No. All I know is she’s the girl that got clipped up there in Whitfield County and I only know that from the papers and from Elsa.”

“Know Wynant?”

“No, and if somebody saw him coming in here all I got to say is that if lots of people I don’t know didn’t come in here I couldn’t stay in business.”

“That’s all right,” Guild said pleasantly, “but here’s the thing: when Columbia Forrest opened a bank-account seven months ago under the name of Laura Porter you were one of the references she gave the bank.”

Kearny’s grin was undisturbed. “That might be, right enough,” he said, “but that still don’t mean I know her.” He put out a long arm and stopped a waiter. “Tell Sing to give you that bottle and bring ginger ale set-ups.” He turned his attention to Guild again. “Look it, Guild. I’m running a joint. Suppose some guy from the Hall or the Municipal Building that can do me good or bad, or some guy that spends with me, comes to me and says he’s got a friend – or a broad – that’s hunting a job or wants to open some kind of account or get a bond, and can they use my name? Well, what the hell! It happens all the time.”

Guild nodded. “Sure. Well, who asked you to O.K. Laura Porter?”

“Seven months ago?” Kearny scoffed. “A swell chance I got of remembering! Maybe I didn’t even hear her name then.”

“Maybe you did. Try to remember.”

“No good,” Kearny insisted. “I tried when Elsa first told me about you wanting to see me.”

Guild said: “The other name she gave was Wynant’s. Does that help?”

“No. I don’t know him, don’t know anybody that knows him.”

“Charley Fremont knows him.”

Kearny moved his wide shoulders carelessly. “I didn’t know that,” he said.

The waiter came, gave the proprietor a dark quart bottle, put glasses of cracked ice on the table, and began to open bottles of ginger ale.

Elsa Fremont said: “I told you I didn’t think Frank knew anything about any of them.”

“You did,” the dark man said, “and now he’s told me.” He made his face solemnly thoughtful. “I’m glad he didn’t contradict you.”

Elsa stared at him while Kearny put whisky and the waiter ginger ale into the glasses.

The proprietor, patting the stopper into the bottle again, asked: “Is it your idea this fellow Wynant’s still hanging around San Francisco?”

Elsa said in a low, hoarse voice: “I’m scared! He tried to shoot Charley before. Where” – she put a hand on the dark man’s wrist – “where is Charley?”

Before Guild could reply Kearny was saying to her: “It might help if you’d do some singing now and then for all that dough you’re getting.” He watched her walk out on the dance-floor and said to Guild: “The kid’s worried. Think anything happened to Charley? Or did he have reasons to scrarn?”

“You people should ask me things,” Guild said and drank.

The proprietor picked up his glass. “People can waste a lot of time,” he said reflectively, “once they get the idea that people that don’t know anything do.” He tilted his glass abruptly, emptying most of its contents into his throat, set the glass down, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You sent a friend of mine over a couple of months ago – Deep Ying.”

“I remember,” Guild said. “He was the fattest of the three boo how day who tried to spread their tong war out to include sticking up a Japanese bank.”

“There was likely a tong angle to it, guns stashed there or something.”

The dark man said, “Maybe,” indifferently and drank again.

Kearny said: “His brother’s here now.”

Some of Guild’s indifference went away. “Was he in on the job too?”

The proprietor laughed. “No,” he said, “but you never can tell how close brothers are and I thought you’d like to know.”

The dark man seemed to weigh this statement carefully. Then he said: “In that case maybe you ought to point him out to me.”

“Sure.” Kearny stood up grinning, raised a hand, and sat down.

Elsa Fremont was singing Kitty From Kansas City.

A plump Chinese with a round, smooth, merry face came between tables to their table. He was perhaps forty years old, of less than medium stature, and though his gray suit was of good quality it did not fit him. He halted beside Kearny and said: “How you do, Frank.”

The proprietor said: “Mr. Guild, I want you to meet a friend of mine, Deep Kee.”

“I’m your friend, you bet you.” The Chinese, smiling broadly, ducked his head vigorously at both men.

Guild said: “Kearny tells me you’re Deep Ying’s brother.”

“You bet you.” Deep Kee’s eyes twinkled merrily. “I hear about you, Mr. Guild. Number-one detective. You catch ‘em my brother. You play trick on ‘em. You bet you.”

Guild nodded and said solemnly: “No play trick on ‘em, no catch ‘em. You bet you.”

The Chinese laughed heartily.

Kearny said: “Sit down and have a drink.”

Deep Kee sat down beaming on Guild, who was lighting a cigarette, while the proprietor brought his bottle from beneath the table.

A woman at the next table, behind Guild, was saying oratorically: “I can always tell when I’m getting swacked because the skin gets tight across my forehead, but it don’t ever do me any good because by that time I’m too swacked to care whether I’m getting swacked or not.”

Elsa Fremont was finishing her song.

Guild asked Deep Kee: “You know Wynant?”

“Please, no.”

“A thin man, tall, used to have whiskers before he cut them off,” Guild went on. “Killed a woman up at Hell Bend.”

The Chinese, smiling, shook his head from side to side.

“Ever been in Hell Bend?”

The smiling Chinese head continued to move from side to side.

Kearny said humorously: “He’s a high-class murderer, Guild. He wouldn’t take a job in the country.”

Deep Kee laughed delightedly.

Elsa Fremont came to the table and sat down. She seemed tired and drank thirstily from her glass.

The Chinese, smiling, bowing, leaving his drink barely tasted, went away. Kearny, looking after him, told Guild: “That’s a good guy to have liking you.”

“Tong gunman?”

“I don’t know. I know him pretty well, but I don’t know that. You know how they are.”

“I don’t know,” Guild said.

A quarrel had started in the other end of the room. Two men were standing cursing each other over a table. Kearny screwed himself around in his chair to stare at them for a moment. Then, grumbling, “Where do these bums think they are?” he got up and went over to them.

Elsa Fremont stared moodily at her glass. Guild watched Kearny go to the table where the two men were cursing, quiet them, and sit down with them.

The woman who had talked about the skin tightening on her forehead was now saying in the same tone: “Character actress – that’s the old stall. She’s just exactly the same kind of character actress I was. She’s doing bits – when she can get them.”

Elsa Fremont, still staring at her glass, whispered: “I’m scared.”

“Of what?” Guild asked as if only moderately interested.

“Of Wynant, of what he might – “ She raised her eyes, dark and harried. “Has he done anything to Charley, Mr. Guild?”

“I don’t know.”

She put a tight fist on the table and cried angrily: “Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you find Wynant? Why don’t you find Charley? Haven’t you got any blood, any heart, any guts? Can’t you do anything but sit there like a -“ She broke off with a sob. Anger went out of her face and the fingers that had been clenched opened in appeal. “I – I’m sorry. I didn’t mean – But, oh, Mr. Guild, I’m so -“ She put her head down and bit her lower lip.

Guild, impassive, said: “That’s all right.”

A man rose drunkenly from a nearby table and came up behind Elsa’s chair. He put a fat hand on her shoulder and said: “There, there, darling.” He said to Guild: “You cannot annoy this girl in this way. You cannot. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, a man of your complexion.” He leaned forward sharply, peering into Guild’s face. “By Jesus, I believe you’re a mulatto. I really do.”

Elsa, squirming from under the fat drunken hand, flung a “Let me alone” up at the man. Guild said nothing. The fat man looked uncertainly from one to the other of them until a hardly less drunken man, mumbling unintelligible apologies, came and led him away.

Elsa looked humbly at the dark man. “I’m going to tell Frank I’m going,” she said in a small tired voice. “Will you take me home?”

“Sure.”

They rose and moved toward the door. Kearny was standing by the elevator.

“I don’t feel like working tonight, Frank,” the girl told him. “I’m going to knock off.”

“Oke,” he said. “Give yourself a hot drink and some aspirin.” He held his hand out to Guild. “Glad I met you. Drop in any time. Anything I can ever do for you, let me know. You going to take the kid home? Swell! Be good.”

Ten

Elsa Fremont was a dusky figure beside Guild in a taxicab riding west up Nob Hill. Her eyes glittered in a splash of light from a street-lamp. She drew breath in and asked: “You think Charley’s run away, don’t you?”

“It’s likely,” Guild said, “but maybe he’ll be home when we get there.”

“I hope so,” she said earnestly. “I do hope so, but – I’m afraid.”

He looked obliquely at her. “You’ve said that before. Mean you’re afraid something’s happened to him or will happen to you?”

She shivered. “I don’t know. I’m just afraid.” She put a hand in his, asking plaintively: “Aren’t you ever going to catch Wynant?”

“Your hand’s cold,” he said.

She pulled her hand away. Her voice was not loud: intensity made it shrill. “Aren’t you ever human?” she demanded. “Are you always like this? Or is it a pose?” She drew herself far back in a corner of the taxicab. “Are you a damned corpse?”

“I don’t know,” the dark man said. He seemed mildly puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean.”

She did not speak again, but sulked in her corner until they reached her house. Guild sat at ease and smoked until the taxicab stopped. Then he got out, saying: “I’ll stop long enough to see if he’s home.”

The girl crossed the sidewalk and unlocked the door while he was paying the chauffeur. She had gone indoors leaving the door open when he mounted the front steps. He followed her in. She had turned on ground-floor lights and was calling upstairs: “Charley!” There was no answer.

She uttered an impatient exclamation and ran upstairs. When she came down again she moved wearily. “He’s not in,” she said. “He hasn’t come.”

Guild nodded without apparent disappointment. “I’ll give you a ring when I wake up,” he said, stepping back toward the street door, “or if I get any news of him.”

She said quickly: “Don’t go yet, please, unless you have to. I don’t – I wish you’d stay a little while.”

He said, “Sure,” and they went into the living-room.

When she had taken off her coat she left him for a few minutes, going into the kitchen, returning with Scotch whisky, ice, lemons, glasses, and a siphon of water. They sat on the sofa with drinks in their hands.

Presently, looking inquisitively at him, she said: “I really meant what I said in the cab. Aren’t you actually human? Isn’t there any way anybody can get to you, get to the real inside you? I think you’re the most” – she frowned, selecting words – “most untouchable, unreal person I’ve ever known. Trying to – to really come in contact with you is just like trying to hold a handful of smoke.”

Guild, who had listened attentively, now nodded. “I think I know what you’re trying to say. It’s an advantage when I’m working.”

“I didn’t ask you that,” she protested, moving the glass in her hand impatiently. “I asked you if that’s the way you really are or if you just do it.”

He smiled and shook his head noncommittally.

“That isn’t a smile,” she said. “It’s painted on.” She leaned to him swiftly and kissed him, holding her mouth to his mouth for an appreciable time. When she took her mouth from his her narrow green eyes examined his face carefully. She made a moue. “You’re not even a corpse – you’re a ghost.”

Guild said pleasantly, “I’m working,” and drank from his glass.

Her face flushed. “Do you think I’m trying to make you?” she asked hotly.

He laughed at her. “I’d like it if you were, but I didn’t mean it that way.”

“You wouldn’t like it,” she said. “You’d be scared.”

“Uh-uh,” he explained blandly. “I’m working. It’d make you easier for me to handle.”

Nothing in her face responded to his bantering. She said, with patient earnestness: “If you’d only listen to me and believe me when I tell you I don’t know any more what it’s all about than you do, if that much. You’re just wasting your time when you ought to be finding Wynant. I don’t know anything. Charley doesn’t. We’d both tell you if we did. We’ve both already told you all we know. Why can’t you believe me when I tell you that?”

“Sorry,” Guild said lightly. “It don’t make sense.” He looked at his watch. “It’s after five. I’d better run along.”

She put a hand out to detain him, but instead of speaking she stared thoughtfully at her dangling wrist-scarf and worked her lips together.

Guild lit another cigarette and waited with no appearance of impatience.

Presently she shrugged her bare shoulders and said: “It doesn’t make any difference.” She turned her head to look uneasily behind her. “But will you – will you do something for me before you go? Go through the house and see that everything is all right. I’m – I’m nervous, upset.”

“Sure,” he said readily, and then, suggestively: “If you’ve got anything to tell me, the sooner the better for both of us.”

“No, no, there’s nothing,” she said. “I’ve told you everything.”

“All right. Have you got a flashlight?”

She nodded and brought him one from the next room.

When Guild returned to the living-room Elsa Fremont was standing where he had left her. She looked at his face and anxiety went out of her eyes. “It was silly of me,” she said, “but I do thank you.”

He put the flashlight on the table and felt for his cigarettes. “Why’d you ask me to look?”

She smiled in embarrassment and murmured: “It was a silly notion.”

“Why’d you bring me home with you?” he asked.

She stared at him with eyes in which fear was awakening. “Wh – what do you mean? Is there -?”

He nodded.

“What is it?” she cried. “What did you find?”

He said: “I found something wrong down in the cellar.”

Her hand went to her mouth.

“Your brother,” he said.

She screamed: “What?”

“Dead.”

The hand over her mouth muffled her voice: “K – killed?”

He nodded. “Suicide, from the looks of it. The gun could be the one the girl was killed with. The -“ He broke off and caught her arm as she tried to run past him toward the door. “Wait. There’s plenty of time for you to look at him. I want to talk to you.”

She stood motionless, staring at him with open, blank eyes.

He said: “And I want you to talk to me.”

She did not show she had heard him.

He said: “Your brother did kill Columbia Forrest, didn’t he?”

Her eyes held their blank stare. Her lips barely moved. “You fool, you fool,” she muttered in a tired, flat voice.

He was still holding her arm. He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips and asked in a low, persuasive tone: “How do you know he didn’t?”

She began to tremble. “He couldn’t’ve,” she cried. Life had come back to her voice and face now. “He couldn’t’ve.”

“Why?”

She jerked her arm out of his hand and thrust her face up toward his. “He couldn’t’ve, you idiot. He wasn’t there. You can find out where he was easily enough. You’d’ve found out long before this if you’d had any brains. He was at a meeting of the Boxing Commission that afternoon, seeing about a permit or something for Sammy. They’ll tell you that. They’ll have a record of it.”

The dark man did not seem surprised. His blue eyes were meditative under brows drawn a little together. “He didn’t kill her, but he committed suicide,” he said slowly and with an air of listening to himself say it. “That don’t make sense too.”

The End

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The book has been a long time in making its way to publication, and much is owed to the kindness and encouragement of friends and colleagues: Glenn Lord, Walker Martin, Robert Weinberg, Gordon R. Dickson, David Drake, T. E. D. Klein, Judy Zelazny, Isidore Haiblum, Richard Layman, Otto Penzler, Larry Segriff, William F. Nolan, and Kay McCauley.

We are also grateful to our good and patient agents, Kassandra Duane and Joy Harris; and to New York bookseller Jon White for his knowledgeable assistance in locating individual stories in rare old magazines and books.

We are indebted as well to Martin Asher of Vintage Books and Sonny Mehta of Alfred A. Knopf for their continued support of this book over the rather lengthy period of time from agreement to publication. Edward Kastenmeier gave the best kind of editing one could ask for: exacting, insightful, and replete with good critiques and suggestions.