The Collected Dashiell Hammett

The Joke on Eloise Morey

Brief Stories, Vol. 8, No. 4, June 1923

“But, good God, Eloise, I love you!”

“But, good God, Dudley, I hate you!”

The cold malevolence of her mimicry brought a quiver to his sensitive lips, as she had known it would, and his pale, tortured face went altogether bloodless. These not unfamiliar, and in this case anticipated, indications of pain infuriated her even as they pleased her. From her advantage of perhaps two inches in height she let her hard gray eyes — twin points of steel in a beautiful, selfish face — range with studied insult from the wave of chestnut brown hair that swept over his forehead to the toes of his small shoes, and then up again to his suffering red-brown eyes.

“What are you?” she asked with frigid bitterness. “You’re not a man; are you a child? or an insect? or what? You know I don’t want you — you’ll never be anything. I’ve certainly made that clear enough. And vet you won’t give me my liberty. I wish I never had seen you — that I’d never married you — that you were dead!”

Her voice — she usually took pains to keep it carefully modulated — rose high and shrill under the pressure of her wrath.

Her husband blenched, cringed under the lash of each acrid word, but said nothing. He could not say anything. His was far too sensitive, too delicate, a mechanism to permit of any of the answers he might have made. Where a cruder nature would have met the woman on her own ground, and hammered its way to victory, or at least an even distribution of the honors, he was helpless. As always, his silence, his helplessness, the evident fact that he did not know what to do or say, spurred her on to greater cruelties.

“An artist!” she derided, making the phrase heavy with contempt. “You were a genius; you were going to be famous and wealthy and God knows what all! And I fell for it and married you: a milk-and-water nincompoop who’ll never be anything. An artist! An artist who paints pictures that nobody will look at, much less buy. Pictures that arc supposed to be delicate. Delicate! Weak and wishy-washy daubs of color that arc like the fool who paints them. A silly fool smearing paint on canvas — too fine for commercial art — too fine for anything! Twelve years you’ve spent learning to paint and can’t turn out a picture anybody will look at twice! Great! You’re great now: a great big fool!”

She paused to consider the effect of her tirade. It was indeed worthy of her oratory. Dudley Morey’s knees shook, his head hung, his abject eyes were on the floor, and tears coursed down his pale checks.

“Get out!” she cried. “Get out of my room, before I kill you!”

He turned and stumbled blindly through the doorway.

Alone, she raged up and down the room with the lethal, cushioned step of some great forest cat. Her lips were drawn back, revealing small, even teeth; her fists were clenched; her eyes burned with an intensity more eloquent than the tears that never came to them could have been. For fifteen minutes she paced the room. Then she flung open a closet door, caught up the first coat that came to her hand, a hat, and left the room, the confines of which seemed too small to hold her anger.

The maid was in the hall, dusting the balustrade; she looked at her mistress’ passionate face with stupid surprise. Eloise passed her without a word, hardly seeing her, and descended the stairs. At the front door Eloise stopped suddenly. She remembered that when she had passed the library door she had seen a desk drawer standing open; and it had been the drawer in which Dudley’s revolver was kept. She went back to the library. The revolver was gone.

She bit her lip thoughtfully. Dudley must have taken the revolver. Would he really kill himself? He always had been morbidly sensitive, and he had courage enough, if it came down to that, even if he was such a failure — such a fool at puddling with his paints. His inability to encompass success of one sort or another was the result of inordinate sensitiveness rather than anything else; and, taunted sufficiently, that sensitiveness could easily drive him to self-destruction. Suppose he did? What then? Wouldn’t she— But, no! As likely as not he would bungle it somehow, as he had bungled everything else, and there would be a lot of unpleasant publicity, with her name displayed in not too flattering a light. Then, too, it would be hard upon her to think that she had driven him to it; though, of course, his failure with his work was more directly responsible. Still— She decided to go to his studio at once. That was the only thing to do. She couldn’t telephone; he had no telephone in the studio. If she arrived in time she would stop him; and perhaps his attempt, or the bare intent, could be made to win the divorce he had refused her. Lawyers were clever at twisting things like that around to their clients’ advantage. And if she arrived too late — well, she would have done her part. She knew her husband too well to doubt that she would find him in his studio.

She left the house and boarded a street car. The line ran past the building in which he had his studio, and she would get there sooner than if she called a taxicab.

She left the car at the corner above the studio and found herself running toward the building. The studio was on the fourth floor and there was not an elevator. She became excited as she climbed and her breath came with difficulty. The stairs seemed interminable. Finally she reached the top floor and turned down the corridor that led to Dudley’s room. She was trembling now, and moisture stood out on her face and in the palms of her hands. She tried not to think of what she might see when she opened her husband’s door. She came to the door and stopped, listening. No sound. Then she pushed the door open.

Her husband stood in the middle of the room, under the skylight with his back to the door. His right arm was raised in an awkward position: the elbow level with his shoulder, his forearm bent stiffly toward his head. Even as she divined the import of the pose, and screamed, “Dudley!” the air vibrated with the force of the explosion. Dudley Morey rocked slowly, once forward, once backward, and then crumpled face down upon the bare floor.

Eloise crossed the room slowly; she felt surprisingly calm now that it was all over. Beside her husband she stopped; but she did not bend to touch the body; it was too repulsive in death for that. A hole gaped in one temple — ringed by a dark, burnt area. The revolver had fallen over against the wall, under a window.

She turned away with a feeling of disgust: the sight sickened her. She went to a chair and sat down. It was all over now.

On the table before her she saw an envelope addressed to her in Dudley’s tiny handwriting. She tore it open and read the inclosed letter.

She read it through twice, her face flushing with chagrin. How like Dudley to leave this note to brand her as the cause of his death! Why could he not have shown some thought, some consideration of her position? It was fortunate that she had found it: what an idea it would have given anyone else! And then it would have got into the newspapers. As if she were responsible for his death!

She went to the little iron stove in the corner, in which a feeble coal fire burned, and thrust the letter in. Then she remembered the envelope and consigned it to the flames, too.

Several men and an old woman — apparently a charwoman — were at the door, turning curious glances from the man on the floor to the woman beyond. They edged into the room, grew bolder, and crowded around Dudley’s body. Some of them mentioned his name as if recognizing him. A man whom Eloise knew — Marker, an illustrator and a friend of her husband’s — came in, savagely routed the group around the dead man, and knelt beside him. Marker looked up and saw

Eloise for the first time. He got to his feet, took her by the arm with gentle force, and led her to his studio, on the floor below. He made her lie on the couch, spread a blanket over her, and left her. He returned in a few minutes and sat silently in a chair across the room, sucking at a great calabash pipe, and staring at the floor. She sat up, but he would not let her talk about her husband, for which she was grateful. She sat on the edge of the couch looking with cold, inscrutable eyes at her hands clasped about a handkerchief in her lap.

Some one knocked on the door and Harker called, “Come in.”

A heavy, middle-aged man with a florid face and a bellicose black mustache came in. He did not seem to think it necessary to remove his hat, but his manner was polite enough, in a stolid way. He introduced himself as detective-sergeant Murray, and questioned Eloise.

She told him that her husband had been worrying over his lack of success with his painting; that he had seemed especially distraught that morning; that after he had gone she found his revolver was missing; that, fearing the worst, she had come to his studio, arriving just as he shot himself.

The detective asked further questions in his callous, albeit not unkindly, tone. She answered truthfully on the whole, though she told rather less than the complete truth here and there. Murray made no comment, and then turned his attention to Harker.

Harker had heard the shot, but was too engrossed with his work to pay immediate attention to it. Then the thought had intruded that the noise, which might have been made by something falling, had come from the vicinity of Morey’s studio, and he had gone up to investigate. I le said that Morey had seemed increasingly worried of late, but had never talked of himself or his affairs.

Murray left the room and returned after a few minutes accompanied by a man whom lie introduced as “Byerly of the bureau.”

“You’ll have to go down to headquarters, Mrs. Morey,” Murray said with a deprecatory gesture. “Byerly’ll show you what to do. Just red tape. Only take a few minutes.”

Eloise left the building with Byerly. As he turned toward the corner past which the street-car line ran she suggested a taxicab. He telephoned from the corner drug store; and a few minutes later they were climbing the gray steps of the City Hall. Byerly led her through a door marked “Pawn-Shop Detail” and gave her a chair.

“Just wait a couple minutes here,” he said. “I’ll see if I can hurry things up.”

Time dragged past. Half an hour. An hour. Two hours.

The door opened and Murray came in, followed by Byerly and a little fat man with a sparse handful of white hair spread over a broad pink scalp. Byerly called the fat man “Chief” when he pulled up a chair for him. The fat man and Byerly sat on chairs facing Eloise. Murray sat on a desk.

“Have you got anything to say?” Murray asked carelessly.

Her eyebrows went up. “I beg your pardon?”

“All right,” Murray said without emotion. “Eloise Morey, you’re arrested for the murder of your husband, and anything you say may be used against you.”

“Murder!” she exclaimed, startled out of her poise.

“Exactly,” Murray said.

Some measure of her assurance came back to her. She wanted to laugh, but instead she said haughtily, “Why, that’s ridiculous!”

Murray leaned forward. “Is it?” he asked imperturbably. “Now listen. You and your husband ain’t been on good terms for some time. This morning you had a peach of a battle. You said you wished he was dead, and you threatened him. Your servant girl heard you. Then after he left she saw you rush out, all worked up, and she saw you go to the drawer where the gun was kept. And she looked in the drawer after you was gone and the gun was gone, too. Two people saw you going up toward your husband’s studio looking pretty wild, and they heard a womans voice — an angry voice — just before the shot. And you admit yourself that you were in the room when your husband died. How is that? Still ridiculous?”

She had the sensation of a heavy net, sinuous, clammy, inescapable, closing about her.

“But people don’t kill each other every time they have a little family quarrel — even if all you say were true. Murder is Supposed to require a stronger urge than that, isn’t it? And I told you about finding the revolver gone, and trying to get to his studio in time to save him, didn’t I?”

Murray shook his head.

“Oh, I’ve got the ‘strong urge’ all right, Mrs. Eloise Morey. I found a batch of hot love letters, signed Joe, in your room, and some of ’em arc dated as recent as yesterday. And I find that your husband was a Catholic, the same as I am, and I guess maybe just as set against divorces. And I also find that he’s got a tidy bit of life insurance and an income of three or four thousand a year that you’d come into. I got enough motive all right.”

Eloise struggled to keep her face composed — everything appeared to hinge upon that — but the threatening net seemed closer, and now it was not so much a net as a great smothering blanket. She closed her eyes for an instant, but it was not to be escaped that way. Rage burned within her. She stood up and her eyes glared into the three alert, impassionately complacent faces before her.

“You fools!” she cried, “You—”

She remembered the letter Dudley had left behind; the letter that would have told the truth unmistakably; the letter that would have cleared her in a twinkling, the letter she had burned in the little iron stove.

She swayed, tears of despair came to the hard grey eyes. Detective-sergeant Murray left his scat and caught her as she fell.