The Continental Op (Novelettes and short stories)

The Main Death

Originally appeared in The Black Mask, June 1927

The captain told me Hacken and Begg were handling the job. I caught them leaving the detectives’ assembly room. Begg was a freckled heavyweight, as friendly as a Saint Bernard puppy, but less intelligent. Lanky detective-sergeant Hacken, not so playful, carried the team’s brains behind his worried hatchet face.

“In a hurry?” I inquired.

“Always in a hurry when we’re quitting for the day,” Begg said, his freckles climbing up his face to make room for his grin.

“What do you want?” Hacken asked.

“I want the low-down on the Main doings — if any.”

“You going to work on it?”

“Yes,” I said, “for Main’s boss — Gungen.”

“Then you can tell us something. Why’d he have the twenty thou in cash?”

“Tell you in the morning,” I promised. “I haven’t seen Gungen yet. Got a date with him tonight.”

While we talked we had gone into the assembly room, with its school-room arrangement of desks and benches. Half a dozen police detectives were scattered among them, doing reports. We three sat around Hacken’s desk and the lanky detective-sergeant talked:

“Main got home from Los Angeles at eight, Sunday night, with twenty thousand in his wallet. He’d gone down there to sell something for Gungen. You find out why he had that much in cash. He told his wife he had driven up from L. A. with a friend — no name. She went to bed around ten-thirty, leaving him reading. He had the money — two hundred hundred-dollar bills — in a brown wallet.

“So far, so good. He’s in the living-room reading. She’s in the bedroom sleeping. Just the two of them in the apartment. A racket wakes her. She jumps out of bed, runs into the living-room. There’s Main wrestling with a couple of men. One’s tall and husky. The other’s little — kind of girlish built. Both have got black handkerchiefs over their mugs and caps pulled down.

“When Mrs. Main shows, the little one breaks away from Main and sticks her up. Puts a gun in Mrs. Main’s face and tells her to behave. Main and the other guy are still scuffling. Main has got his gun in his hand, but the thug has him by the wrist, trying to twist it. He makes it pretty soon — Main drops the rod. The thug flashes his own, holding Main off while he bends down to pick up the one that fell.

“When the man stoops, Main piles on him. He manages to knock the fellow’s gun out of his hand, but by that time the fellow had got the one on the floor — the one Main had dropped. They’re heaped up there for a couple of seconds. Mrs. Main can’t see what’s happening. Then bang! Main’s falling away, his vest burning where the shot had set fire to it, a bullet in his heart, his gun smoking in the masked guy’s fist. Mrs. Main passes out.

“When she comes to there’s nobody in the apartment but herself and her dead husband. His wallet’s gone, and so is his gun. She was unconscious for about half an hour. We know that, because other people heard the shot and could give us the time — even if they didn’t know where it come from.

“The Mains’ apartment is on the sixth floor. It’s an eight-story building. Next door to it, on the corner of Eighteenth Avenue, is a two-story building — grocery downstairs, grocer’s flat upstairs. Behind these buildings runs a narrow back street — an alley. All right.

“Kinney — the patrolman on that beat — was walking down Eighteenth Avenue. He heard the shot. It was clear to him, because the Mains’ apartment is on that side of the building — the side overlooking the grocer’s — but Kinney couldn’t place it right away. He wasted time scouting around up the street. By the time he got down as far as the alley in his hunting, the birds had flown. Kinney found signs of ’em though — they had dropped a gun in the alley — the gun they’d taken from Main and shot him with. But Kinney didn’t see ’em — didn’t see anybody who might have been them.

“Now, from a hall window of the apartment house’s third floor to the roof of the grocer’s building is easy going. Anybody but a cripple could make it — in or out — and the window’s never locked. From the grocer’s roof to the back street is almost as easy. There’s a cast iron pipe, a deep window, a door with heavy hinges sticking out — a regular ladder up and down that back wall. Begg and I did it without working up a sweat. The pair could have gone in that way. We know they left that way. On the grocer’s roof we found Main’s wallet — empty, of course — and a handkerchief. The wallet had metal corners. The handkerchief had caught on one of ’em, and went with it when the crooks tossed it away.”

“Main’s handkerchief?”

“A woman’s — with an E in one corner.”

“Mrs. Main’s?”

“Her name is Agnes,” Hacken said. “We showed her the wallet, the gun, and the handkerchief. She identified the first two as her husband’s, but the handkerchief was a new one on her. However, she could give us the name of the perfume on it — Dèsir du Cœur. And — with it for a guide — she said the smaller of the masked pair could have been a woman. She had already described him as kind of girlish built.”

“Any fingerprints, or the like?” I asked.

“No. Phels went over the apartment, the window, the roof, the wallet and the gun. Not a smear.”

“Mrs. Main identify ’em?”

“She says she’d know the little one. Maybe she would.”

“Got anything on the who?”

“Not yet,” the lanky detective-sergeant said as we moved toward the door.

In the street I left the police sleuths and set out for Bruno Gungen’s home in Westwood Park.

The dealer in rare and antique jewelry was a little bit of a man and a fancy one. His dinner jacket was corset-tight around his waist, padded high and sharp at the shoulders. Hair, mustache and spade-shaped goatee were dyed black and greased until they were as shiny as his pointed pink finger-nails. I wouldn’t bet a cent that the color in his fifty-year-old cheeks wasn’t rouge.

He came out of the depths of a leather library chair to give me a soft, warm hand that was no larger than a child’s, bowing and smiling at me with his head tilted to one side.

Then he introduced me to his wife, who bowed without getting up from her seat at the table. Apparently she was a little more than a third of his age. She couldn’t have been a day over nineteen, and she looked more like sixteen. She was as small as he, with a dimpled olive-skinned face, round brown eyes, a plump painted mouth and the general air of an expensive doll in a toy-store window.

Bruno Gungen explained to her at some length that I was connected with the Continental Detective Agency, and that he had employed me to help the police find Jeffrey Main’s murderers and recover the stolen twenty thousand dollars.

She murmured, “Oh, yes!” in a tone that said she was not the least bit interested, and stood up, saying, “Then I’ll leave you to—”

“No, no, my dear!” Her husband was waving his pink fingers at her. “I would have no secrets from you.”

His ridiculous little face jerked around to me, cocked itself sidewise, and he asked, with a little giggle:

“Is not that so? That between husband and wife there should be no secrets?”

I pretended I agreed with him.

“You, I know, my dear,” he addressed his wife, who had sat down again, “are as much interested in this as I, for did we not have an equal affection for dear Jeffrey? Is it not so?”

She repeated, “Oh, yes!” with the same lack of interest.

Her husband turned to me and said, “Now?” encouragingly.

“I’ve seen the police,” I told him. “Is there anything you can add to their story? Anything new? Anything you didn’t tell them?”

He whisked his face around toward his wife.

“Is there, Enid, dear?”

“I know of nothing,” she replied.

He giggled and made a delighted face at me.

“That is it,” he said. “We know of nothing.”

“He came back to San Francisco eight o’clock Sunday night — three hours before he was killed and robbed — with twenty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. What was he doing with it?”

“It was the proceeds of a sale to a customer,” Bruno Gungen explained. “Mr. Nathaniel Ogilvie, of Los Angeles.”

“But why cash?”

The little man’s painted face screwed itself up into a shrewd leer.

“A bit of hanky-panky,” he confessed complacently, “a trick of the trade, as one says. You know the genus collector? Ah, there is a study for you! Observe. I obtain a golden tiara of early Grecian workmanship, or let me be correct — purporting to be of early Grecian workmanship, purporting also to have been found in Southern Russia, near Odessa. Whether there is any truth in either of these suppositions I do not know, but certainly the tiara is a thing of beauty.”

He giggled.

“Now I have a client, a Mr. Nathaniel Ogilvie, of Los Angeles, who has an appetite for curios of the sort — a very devil of a cacoethes carpendi. The value of these items, you will comprehend, is exactly what one can get for them — no more, little less. This tiara — now ten thousand dollars is the least I could have expected for it, if sold as one sells an ordinary article of the sort. But can one call a golden cap made long ago for some forgotten Scythian king an ordinary article of any sort? No! No! So, swaddled in cotton, intricately packed, Jeffrey carries this tiara to Los Angeles to show our Mr. Ogilvie.

“In what manner the tiara came into our hands Jeffrey will not say. But he will hint at devious intrigues, smuggling, a little of violence and lawlessness here and there, the necessity for secrecy. For your true collector, there is the bait! Nothing is anything to him except as it is difficultly come by. Jeffrey will not lie. No! Mon Dieu, that would be dishonest, despicable! But he will suggest much, and he will refuse, oh, so emphatically! to take a check for the tiara. No check, my dear sir! Nothing which may be traced! Cash moneys!

“Hanky-panky, as you see. But where is the harm? Mr. Ogilvie is certainly going to buy the tiara, and our little deceit simply heightens his pleasure in his purchase. He will enjoy its possession so much the more. Besides, who is to say that this tiara is not authentic? If it is, then these things Jeffrey suggests are indubitably true. Mr. Ogilvie does buy it, for twenty thousand dollars, and that is why poor Jeffrey had in his possession so much cash money.”

He flourished a pink hand at me, nodded his dyed head vigorously, and finished with:

“Voilà! That is it!”

“Did you hear from Main after he got back?” I asked.

The dealer smiled as if my question tickled him, turning his head so that the smile was directed at his wife.

“Did we, Enid, darling?” he passed on the question.

She pouted and shrugged her shoulders indifferently.

“The first we knew he had returned,” Gungen interpreted these gestures to me, “was Monday morning, when we heard of his death. Is it not so, my dove?”

His dove murmured, “Yes,” and left her chair, saying, “You’ll excuse me? I have a letter to write.”

“Certainly, my dear,” Gungen told her as he and I stood up.

She passed close to him on her way to the door. His small nose twitched over his dyed mustache and he rolled his eyes in a caricature of ecstasy.

“What a delightful scent, my precious!” he exclaimed. “What a heavenly odor! What a song to the nostrils! Has it a name, my love?”

“Yes,” she said, pausing in the doorway, not looking back.

“And it is?”

“Dèsir du Cœur,” she replied over her shoulder as she left us.

Bruno Gungen looked at me and giggled.

I sat down again and asked him what he knew about Jeffrey Main.

“Everything, no less,” he assured me. “For a dozen years, since he was a boy of eighteen he has been my right eye, my right hand.”

“Well, what sort of man was he?”

Bruno Gungen showed me his pink palms side by side.

“What sort is any man?” he asked over them.

That didn’t mean anything to me, so I kept quiet, waiting.

“I shall tell you,” the little man began presently. “Jeffrey had the eye and the taste for this traffic of mine. No man living save myself alone has a judgment in these matters which I would prefer to Jeffrey’s. And, honest, mind you! Let nothing I say mislead you on that point. Never a lock have I to which Jeffrey had not also the key, and might have it forever, if he had lived so long.

“But there is a but. In his private life, rascal is a word that only does him justice. He drank, he gambled, he loved, he spent — dear God, how he spent! He was, in this drinking and gaming and loving and spending, a most promiscuous fellow, beyond doubt. With moderation he had nothing to do. Of the moneys he got by inheritance, of the fifty thousand dollars or more his wife had when they were married, there is no remainder. Fortunately, he was well insured — else his wife would have been left penniless. Oh, he was a true Heliogabalus, that fellow!”

Bruno Gungen went down to the front door with me when I left. I said, “Good night,” and walked down the gravel path to where I had left my car. The night was clear, dark, moonless. High hedges were black walls on both sides of the Gungen place. To the left there was a barely noticeable hole in the blackness — a dark-gray hole — oval — the size of a face.

I got into my car, stirred up the engine and drove away. Into the first cross-street I turned, parked the machine, and started back toward Gungen’s afoot. I was curious about that face-size oval.

When I reached the corner, I saw a woman coming toward me from the direction of Gungen’s. I was in the shadow of a wall. Cautiously, I backed away from the corner until I came to a gate with brick buttresses sticking out. I made myself flat between them.

The woman crossed the street, went on up the driveway, toward the car line. I couldn’t make out anything about her, except that she was a woman. Maybe she was coming from Gungen’s grounds, maybe not. Maybe it was her face I had seen against the hedge, maybe not. It was a heads or tails proposition. I guessed yes and tailed her up the drive.

Her destination was a drugstore on the car line. Her business there was with the telephone. She spent ten minutes at it. I didn’t go into the store to try for an earful, but stayed on the other side of the street, contenting myself with a good look at her.

She was a girl of about twenty-five, medium in height, chunky in build, with pale gray eyes that had little pouches under them, a thick nose and a prominent lower lip. She had no hat over her brown hair. Her body was wrapped in a long blue cape.

From the drug store I shadowed her back to the Gungen house. She went in the back door. A servant, probably, but not the maid who had opened the door for me earlier in the evening.

I returned to my car, drove back to town, to the office.

“Is Dick Foley working on anything?” I asked Fiske, who sits on the Continental Detective Agency’s affairs at night.

“No. Did you ever hear the story about the fellow who had his neck operated on?”

With the slightest encouragement, Fiske is good for a dozen stories without a stop, so I said:

“Yes. Get hold of Dick and tell him I’ve got a shadow job out Westwood Park way for him to start on in the morning.”

I gave Fiske — to be passed on to Dick — Gungen’s address and a description of the girl who had done the phoning from the drugstore. Then I assured the night man that I had also heard the story about the pickaninny named Opium, and likewise the one about what the old man said to his wife on their golden wedding anniversary. Before he could try me with another, I escaped to my own office, where I composed and coded a telegram to our Los Angeles branch, asking that Main’s recent visit to that city be dug into.

The next morning Hacken and Begg dropped in to see me and I gave them Gungen’s version of why the twenty thousand had been in cash. The police detectives told me a stool-pigeon had brought them word that Bunky Dahl — a local guerrilla who did a moderate business in hijacking — had been flashing a roll since about the time of Main’s death.

“We haven’t picked him up yet,” Hacken said. “Haven’t been able to place him, but we’ve got a line on his girl. Course, he might have got his dough somewhere else.”

At ten o’clock that morning I had to go over to Oakland to testify against a couple of flimflammers who had sold bushels of stock in a sleight-of-hand rubber manufacturing business. When I got back to the Agency, at six that evening, I found a wire from Los Angeles on my desk.

Jeffrey Main, the wire told me, had finished his business with Ogilvie Saturday afternoon, had checked out of his hotel immediately, and had left on the Owl that evening, which would have put him in San Francisco early Sunday morning. The hundred-dollar bills with which Ogilvie had paid for the tiara had been new ones, consecutively numbered, and Ogilvie’s bank had given the Los Angeles operative the numbers.

Before I quit for the day, I phoned Hacken, gave him these numbers, as well as the other dope in the telegram.

“Haven’t found Dahl yet,” he told me.

Dick Foley’s report came in the next morning. The girl had left the Gungen house at 9:15 the previous night, had gone to the corner of Miramar Avenue and Southwood Drive, where a man was waiting for her in a Buick coupe. Dick described him: Age about 30; height about five feet ten; slender, weight about 140; medium complexion; brown hair and eyes; long, thin face with pointed chin; brown hat, suit and shoes and gray overcoat.

The girl got into the car with him and they drove out to the beach, along the Great Highway for a little while, and then back to Miramar and Southwood, where the girl got out. She seemed to be going back to the house, so Dick let her go and tailed the man in the Buick down to the Futurity Apartments in Mason Street.

The man stayed in there for half an hour or so and then came out with another man and two women. This second man was of about the same age as the first, about five feet eight inches tall, would weigh about a hundred and seventy pounds, had brown hair and eyes, a dark complexion, a flat, broad face with high cheek bones, and wore a blue suit, gray hat, tan overcoat, black shoes, and a pear-shaped pearl tie-pin.

One of the women was about twenty-two years old, small, slender and blonde. The other was probably three or four years older, red-haired, medium in height and build, with a turned-up nose.

The quartet had got in the car and gone to the Algerian Café, where they had stayed until a little after one in the morning. Then they had returned to the Futurity Apartments. At half-past three the two men had left, driving the Buick to a garage in Post Street, and then walking to the Mars Hotel.

When I had finished reading this I called Mickey Linehan in from the operatives’ room, gave him the report and instructions:

“Find out who these folks are.”

Mickey went out. My phone rang.

Bruno Gungen: “Good morning. May you have something to tell me today?”

“Maybe,” I said. “You’re downtown?”

“Yes, in my shop. I shall be here until four.”

“Right. I’ll be in to see you this afternoon.”

At noon Mickey Linehan returned. “The first bloke,” he reported, “the one Dick saw with the girl, is named Benjamin Weel. He owns the Buick and lives in the Mars — room 410. He’s a salesman, though it’s not known what of. The other man is a friend of his who has been staying with him for a couple of days. I couldn’t get anything on him. He’s not registered. The two women in the Futurity are a couple of hustlers. They live in apartment 303. The larger one goes by the name of Mrs. Effie Roberts. The little blonde is Violet Evarts.”

“Wait,” I told Mickey, and went back into the file room, to the index-card drawers.

I ran through the W’s — Weel, Benjamin, alias Coughing Ben, 36,312W.

The contents of folder No. 36,312W told me that Coughing Ben Weel had been arrested in Amador County in 1916 on a highgrading charge and had been sent to San Quentin for three years. In 1922 he had been picked up again in Los Angeles and charged with trying to blackmail a movie actress, but the case had fallen through. His description fit the one Dick had given of the man in the Buick. His photograph — a copy of the one taken by the Los Angeles police in ’22 — showed a sharp-featured young man with a chin like a wedge.

I took the photo back to my office and showed it to Mickey.

“This is Weel five years ago. Follow him around a while.”

When the operative had gone I called the police detective bureau. Neither Hacken nor Begg was in. I got hold of Lewis, in the identification department.

“What does Bunky Dahl look like?” I asked him.

“Wait a minute,” Lewis said, and then: “32, 67½, 174, medium, brown, brown, broad flat face with prominent cheek-bones, gold bridge work in lower left jaw, brown mole under right ear, deformed little toe on right foot.”

“Have you a picture of him to spare?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks, I’ll send a boy down for it.”

I told Tommy Howd to go down and get it, and then went out for some food. After luncheon I went up to Gungen’s establishment in Post Street. The little dealer was gaudier than ever this afternoon in a black coat that was even more padded in the shoulders and tighter in the waist than his dinner coat had been the other night, striped gray pants, a vest that leaned toward magenta, and a billowy satin tie wonderfully embroidered with gold thread.

We went back through his store, up a narrow flight of stairs to a small cube of an office on the mezzanine floor.

“And now you have to tell me?” he asked when we were seated, with the door closed.

“I’ve got more to ask than tell. First, who is the girl with the thick nose, the thick lower lip, and the pouches under grey eyes, who lives in your house?”

“That is one Rose Rubury.” His little painted face was wrinkled in a satisfied smile. “She is my dear wife’s maid.”

“She goes riding with an ex-convict.”

“She does?” He stroked his dyed goatee with a pink hand, highly pleased. “Well, she is my dear wife’s maid, that she is.”

“Main didn’t drive up from Los Angeles with a friend, as he told his wife. He came up on the train Saturday night — so he was in town twelve hours before he showed up at home.”

Bruno Gungen giggled, cocking his delighted face to one side.

“Ah!” he tittered. “We progress! We progress! Is it not so?”

“Maybe. Do you remember if this Rose Rubury was in the house on Sunday night — say from eleven to twelve?”

“I do remember. She was. I know it certainly. My dear wife was not feeling well that night. My darling had gone out early that Sunday morning, saying she was going to drive out into the country with some friends — what friends I do not know. But she came home at eight o’clock that night complaining of a distressing headache. I was quite frightened by her appearance, so that I went often to see how she was, and thus it happens that I know her maid was in the house all of that night, until one o’clock, at least.”

“Did the police show you the handkerchief they found with Main’s wallet?”

“Yes.” He squirmed on the edge of his chair, his face like the face of a kid looking at a Christmas tree.

“You’re sure it’s your wife’s?”

His giggle interfered with his speech, so he said, “Yes,” by shaking his head up and down until the goatee seemed to be a black whiskbroom brushing his tie.

“She could have left it at the Mains’ some time when she was visiting Mrs. Main,” I suggested.

“That is not possible,” he corrected me eagerly. “My darling and Mrs. Main are not acquainted.”

“But your wife and Main were acquainted?”

He giggled and brushed his tie with his whisker again.

“How well acquainted?”

He shrugged his padded shoulders up to his ears.

“I know not,” he said merrily. “I employ a detective.”

“Yeah?” I scowled at him. “You employ this one to find out who killed and robbed Main — and for nothing else. If you think you’re employing him to dig up your family secrets, you’re as wrong as Prohibition.”

“But why? But why?” He was flustered. “Have I not the right to know? There will be no trouble over it, no scandal, no divorce suing, of that be assured. Even Jeffrey is dead, so it is what one calls ancient history. While he lived I knew nothing, was blind. After he died I saw certain things. For my own satisfaction — that is all, I beg you to believe — I should like to know with certainty.”

“You won’t get it out of me,” I said bluntly. “I don’t know anything about it except what you’ve told me, and you can’t hire me to go further into it. Besides, if you’re not going to do anything about it, why don’t you keep your hands off — let it sleep?”

“No, no, my friend.” He had recovered his bright-eyed cheerfulness. “I am not an old man, but I am fifty-two. My dear wife is eighteen, and a truly lovely person.” He giggled. “This thing happened. May it not happen again? And would it not be the part of husbandly wisdom to have — shall I say — a hold on her? A rein? A check? Or if it never happen again, still might not one’s dear wife be the more docile for certain information which her husband possesses?”

“It’s your business.” I stood up, laughing. “But I don’t want any part of it.”

“Ah, do not let us quarrel!” He jumped up and took one of my hands in his. “If you will not, you will not. But there remains the criminal aspect of the situation — the aspect that has engaged you thus far. You will not forsake that? You will fulfil your engagement there? Surely?”

“Suppose — just suppose — it should turn out that your wife had a hand in Main’s death. What then?”

“That” — he shrugged, holding his hands out, palms up — “would be a matter for the law.”

“Good enough. I’ll stick — if you understand that you’re entitled to no information except what touches your ‘criminal aspect.’”

“Excellent! And if it so happens you cannot separate my darling from that—”

I nodded. He grabbed my hand again, patting it. I took it away from him and returned to the Agency.

A memorandum on my desk asked me to phone detective-sergeant Hacken. I did.

“Bunky Dahl wasn’t in on the Main job,” the hatchet-faced man told me. “He and a pal named Coughing Ben Weel were putting on a party in a roadhouse near Vallejo that night. They were there from around ten until they were thrown out after two in the morning for starting a row. It’s on the up-and-up. The guy that gave it to me is right — and I got a check-up on it from two others.”

I thanked Hacken and phoned Gungen’s residence, asking for Mrs. Gungen, asking her if she would see me if I came out there.

“Oh, yes,” she said. It seemed to be her favorite expression, though the way she said it didn’t express anything.

Putting the photos of Dahl and Weel in my pocket, I got a taxi and set out for Westwood Park. Using Fatima-smoke on my brains while I rode, I concocted a wonderful series of lies to be told my client’s wife — a series that I thought would get me the information I wanted.

A hundred and fifty yards or so up the drive from the house I saw Dick Foley’s car standing.

A thin, pasty-faced maid opened the Gungens’ door and took me into a sitting room on the second floor, where Mrs. Gungen put down a copy of The Sun Also Rises and waved a cigarette at a nearby chair. She was very much the expensive doll this afternoon in a Persian orange dress, sitting with one foot tucked under her in a brocaded chair.

Looking at her while I lighted a cigarette, remembering my first interview with her and her husband, and my second one with him, I decided to chuck the tale-of-woe I had spent my ride building.

“You’ve a maid — Rose Rubury,” I began. “I don’t want her to hear what’s said.”

She said, “Very well,” without the least sign of surprise, added, “Excuse me a moment,” and left her chair and the room.

Presently she was back, sitting down with both feet tucked under her now.

“She will be away for at least half an hour.”

“That will be long enough. This Rose is friendly with an ex-convict named Weel.”

The doll face frowned, and the plump painted lips pressed themselves together. I waited, giving her time to say something. She didn’t say it. I took Weel’s and Dahl’s pictures out and held them out to her.

“The thin-faced one is your Rose’s friend. The other’s a pal of his — also a crook.”

She took the photographs with a tiny hand that was as steady as mine, and looked at them carefully. Her mouth became smaller and tighter, her brown eyes darker. Then, slowly, her face cleared, she murmured, “Oh, yes,” and returned the pictures to me.

“When I told your husband about it” — I spoke deliberately — “he said, ‘She’s my wife’s maid,’ and laughed.”

Enid Gungen said nothing.

“Well?” I asked. “What did he mean by that?”

“How should I know?” she sighed.

“You know your handkerchief was found with Main’s empty wallet.” I dropped this in a by-the-way tone, pretending to be chiefly occupied putting cigarette ash in a jasper tray that was carved in the form of a lidless coffin.

“Oh, yes,” she said wearily, “I’ve been told that.”

“How do you think it happened?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“I can,” I said, “but I’d rather know positively. Mrs. Gungen, it would save a lot of time if we could talk plain language.”

“Why not?” she asked listlessly. “You are in my husband’s confidence, have his permission to question me. If it happens to be humiliating to me — well, after all, I am only his wife. And it is hardly likely that any new indignities either of you can devise will be worse than those to which I have already submitted.”

I grunted at this theatrical speech and went ahead.

“Mrs. Gungen, I’m only interested in learning who robbed and killed Main. Anything that points in that direction is valuable to me, but only in so far as it points in that direction. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Certainly,” she said. “I understand you are in my husband’s employ.”

That got us nowhere. I tried again:

“What impression do you suppose I got the other evening, when I was here?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Please try.”

“Doubtless” — she smiled faintly — “you got the impression that my husband thought I had been Jeffrey’s mistress.”

“Well?”

“Are you” — her dimples showed; she seemed amused — “asking me if I really was his mistress?”

“No — though of course I’d like to know.”

“Naturally you would,” she said pleasantly.

“What impression did you get that evening?” I asked.

“I?” She wrinkled her forehead. “Oh, that my husband had hired you to prove that I had been Jeffrey’s mistress.” She repeated the word mistress as if she liked the shape of it in her mouth.

“You were wrong.”

“Knowing my husband, I find that hard to believe.”

“Knowing myself, I’m sure of it,” I insisted. “There’s no uncertainty about it between your husband and me, Mrs. Gungen. It is understood that my job is to find who stole and killed — nothing else.”

“Really?” It was a polite ending of an argument of which she had grown tired.

“You’re tying my hands,” I complained, standing up, pretending I wasn’t watching her carefully. “I can’t do anything now but grab this Rose Rubury and the two men and see what I can squeeze out of them. You said the girl would be back in half an hour?”

She looked at me steadily with her round brown eyes.

“She should be back in a few minutes. You’re going to question her?”

“But not here,” I informed her. “I’ll take her down to the Hall of Justice and have the men picked up. Can I use your phone?”

“Certainly. It’s in the next room.” She crossed to open the door for me.

I called Davenport 20 and asked for the detective bureau.

Mrs. Gungen, standing in the sitting room, said, so softly I could barely hear it:

“Wait.”

Holding the phone, I turned to look through the door at her. She was pinching her red mouth between thumb and finger, frowning. I didn’t put down the phone until she took the hand from her mouth and held it out toward me. Then I went back into the sitting-room.

I was on top. I kept my mouth shut. It was up to her to make the plunge. She studied my face for a minute or more before she began:

“I won’t pretend I trust you.” She spoke hesitantly, half as if to herself. “You’re working for my husband, and even the money would not interest him so much as whatever I had done. It’s a choice of evils — certain on the one hand, more than probable on the other.”

She stopped talking and rubbed her hands together. Her round eyes were becoming indecisive. If she wasn’t helped along she was going to balk.

“There’s only the two of us,” I urged her. “You can deny everything afterward. It’s my word against yours. If you don’t tell me — I know now I can get it from the others. Your calling me from the phone lets me know that. You think I’ll tell your husband everything. Well, if I have to fry it out of the others, he’ll probably read it all in the papers. Your one chance is to trust me. It’s not as slim a chance as you think. Anyway, it’s up to you.”

A half-minute of silence.

“Suppose,” she whispered, “I should pay you to—”

“What for? If I’m going to tell your husband, I could take your money and still tell him, couldn’t I?”

Her red mouth curved, her dimples appeared and her eyes brightened.

“That is reassuring,” she said. “I shall tell you. Jeffrey came back from Los Angeles early so we could have the day together in a little apartment we kept. In the afternoon two men came in — with a key. They had revolvers. They robbed Jeffrey of the money. That was what they had come for. They seemed to know all about it and about us. They called us by name, and taunted us with threats of the story they would tell if we had them arrested.

“We couldn’t do anything after they had gone. It was a ridiculously hopeless plight they had put us in. There wasn’t anything we could do — since we couldn’t possibly replace the money. Jeffrey couldn’t even pretend he had lost it or had been robbed of it while he was alone. His secret early return to San Francisco would have been sure to throw suspicion on him. Jeffrey lost his head. He wanted me to run away with him. Then he wanted to go to my husband and tell him the truth. I wouldn’t permit either course — they were equally foolish.

“We left the apartment, separating, a little after seven. We weren’t, the truth is, on the best of terms by then. He wasn’t — now that we were in trouble — as— No, I shouldn’t say that.”

She stopped and stood looking at me with a placid doll’s face that seemed to have got rid of all its troubles by simply passing them to me.

“The pictures I showed you are the two men?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“This maid of yours knew about you and Main? Knew about the apartment? Knew about his trip to Los Angeles and his plan to return early with the cash?”

“I can’t say she did. But she certainly could have learned most of it by spying and eavesdropping and looking through my — I had a note from Jeffrey telling me about the Los Angeles trip, making the appointment for Sunday morning. Perhaps she could have seen it. I’m careless.”

“I’m going now,” I said. “Sit tight till you hear from me. And don’t scare up the maid.”

“Remember, I’ve told you nothing,” she reminded me as she followed me to the sitting-room door.

From the Gungen house I went direct to the Mars Hotel. Mickey Linehan was sitting behind a newspaper in a corner of the lobby.

“They in?” I asked him.

“Yep.”

“Let’s go up and see them.”

Mickey rattled his knuckles on door number 410. A metallic voice asked: “Who’s there?”

“Package,” Mickey replied in what was meant for a boy’s voice.

A slender man with a pointed chin opened the door. I gave him a card. He didn’t invite us into the room, but he didn’t try to keep us out when we walked in.

“You’re Weel?” I addressed him while Mickey closed the door behind us, and then, not waiting for him to say yes, I turned to the broad-faced man sitting on the bed. “And you’re Dahl?”

Weel spoke to Dahl, in a casual, metallic voice:

“A couple of gum-shoes.”

The man on the bed looked at us and grinned.

I was in a hurry.

“I want the dough you took from Main,” I announced.

They sneered together, as if they had been practicing.

I brought out my gun.

Weel laughed harshly.

“Get your hat, Bunky,” he chuckled. “We’re being taken into custody.”

“You’ve got the wrong idea,” I explained. “This isn’t a pinch. It’s a stick-up. Up go the hands!”

Dahl’s hands went up quick. Weel hesitated until Mickey prodded him in the ribs with the nose of a .38-special.

“Frisk ’em,” I ordered Mickey.

He went through Weel’s clothes, taking a gun, some papers, some loose money, and a money-belt that was fat. Then he did the same for Dahl.

“Count it,” I told him.

Mickey emptied the belts, spit on his fingers and went to work.

“Nineteen thousand, one hundred and twenty-six dollars and sixty-two cents,” he reported when he was through.

With the hand that didn’t hold my gun, I felt in my pocket for the slip on which I had written the numbers of the hundred-dollar bills Main had got from Ogilvie. I held the slip out to Mickey.

“See if the hundreds check against this.”

He took the slip, looked, said, “They do.”

“Good — pouch the money and the guns and see if you can turn up any more in the room.”

Coughing Ben Weel had got his breath by now.

“Look here!” he protested. “You can’t pull this, fellow! Where do you think you are? You can’t get away with this!”

“I can try,” I assured him. “I suppose you’re going to yell, Police! Like hell you are! The only squawk you’ve got coming is at your own dumbness in thinking because your squeeze on the woman was tight enough to keep her from having you copped, you didn’t have to worry about anything. I’m playing the same game you played with her and Main — only mine’s better, because you can’t get tough afterward without facing stir. Now shut up!”

“No more jack,” Mickey said. “Nothing but four postage stamps.”

“Take ’em along,” I told him. “That’s practically eight cents. Now we’ll go.”

“Hey, leave us a couple of bucks,” Weel begged.

“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” I snarled at him, backing to the door, which Mickey was opening.

The hall was empty. Mickey stood in it, holding his gun on Weel and Dahl while I backed out of the room and switched the key from the inside to the outside. Then I slammed the door, twisted the key, pocketed it, and we went downstairs and out of the hotel.

Mickey’s car was around the corner. In it, we transferred our spoils — except the guns — from his pockets to mine. Then he got out and went back to the Agency. I turned the car toward the building in which Jeffrey Main had been killed.

Mrs. Main was a tall girl of less than twenty-five, with curled brown hair, heavily-lashed gray-blue eyes, and a warm, full-featured face. Her ample body was dressed in black from throat to feet.

She read my card, nodded at my explanation that Gungen had employed me to look into her husband’s death, and took me into a gray and white living room.

“This is the room?” I asked.

“Yes.” She had a pleasant, slightly husky voice.

I crossed to the window and looked down on the grocer’s roof, and on the half of the back street that was visible. I was still in a hurry.

“Mrs. Main,” I said as I turned, trying to soften the abruptness of my words by keeping my voice low, “after your husband was dead, you threw the gun out the window. Then you stuck the handkerchief to the corner of the wallet and threw that. Being lighter than the gun, it didn’t go all the way to the alley, but fell on the roof. Why did you put the handkerchief—?”

Without a sound she fainted.

I caught her before she reached the floor, carried her to a sofa, found Cologne and smelling salts, applied them.

“Do you know whose handkerchief it was?” I asked when she was awake and sitting up.

She shook her head from left to right.

“Then why did you take that trouble?”

“It was in his pocket. I didn’t know what else to do with it. I thought the police would ask about it. I didn’t want anything to start them asking questions.”

“Why did you tell the robbery story?”

No answer.

“The insurance?” I suggested.

She jerked up her head, cried defiantly:

“Yes! He had gone through his own money and mine. And then he had to — to do a thing like that. He—”

I interrupted her complaint:

“He left a note, I hope — something that will be evidence.” Evidence that she hadn’t killed him, I meant.

“Yes.” She fumbled in the bosom of her black dress.

“Good,” I said, standing. “The first thing in the morning, take that note down to your lawyer and tell him the whole story.”

I mumbled something sympathetic and made my escape.

Night was coming down when I rang the Gungens’ bell for the second time that day. The pasty-faced maid who opened the door told me Mr. Gungen was at home. She led me upstairs.

Rose Rubury was coming down the stairs. She stopped on the landing to let us pass. I halted in front of her while my guide went on toward the library.

“You’re done, Rose,” I told the girl on the landing. “I’ll give you ten minutes to clear out. No word to anybody. If you don’t like that — you’ll get a chance to see if you like the inside of the can.”

“Well — the idea!”

“The racket’s flopped.” I put a hand into a pocket and showed her one wad of the money I had got at the Mars Hotel. “I’ve just come from visiting Coughing Ben and Bunky.”

That impressed her. She turned and scurried up the stairs.

Bruno Gungen came to the library door, searching for me. He looked curiously from the girl — now running up the steps to the third story — to me. A question was twisting the little man’s lips, but I headed it off with a statement:

“It’s done.”

“Bravo!” he exclaimed as we went into the library. “You hear that, my darling? It is done!”

His darling, sitting by the table, where she had sat the other night, smiled with no expression in her doll’s face, and murmured, “Oh, yes,” with no expression in her words.

I went to the table and emptied my pockets of money.

“Nineteen thousand, one hundred and twenty-six dollars and seventy cents, including the stamps,” I announced. “The other eight hundred and seventy-three dollars and thirty cents is gone.”

“Ah!” Bruno Gungen stroked his spade-shaped black beard with a trembling pink hand and pried into my face with hard bright eyes. “And where did you find it? By all means sit down and tell us the tale. We are famished with eagerness for it, eh, my love?”

His love yawned, “Oh, yes!”

“There isn’t much story,” I said. “To recover the money I had to make a bargain, promising silence. Main was robbed Sunday afternoon. But it happens that we couldn’t convict the robbers if we had them. The only person who could identify them — won’t.”

“But who killed Jeffrey?” The little man was pawing my chest with both pink hands. “Who killed him that night?”

“Suicide. Despair at being robbed under circumstances he couldn’t explain.”

“Preposterous!” My client didn’t like the suicide.

“Mrs. Main was awakened by the shot. Suicide would have canceled his insurance — would have left her penniless. She threw the gun and wallet out the window, hid the note he left, and framed the robber story.”

“But the handkerchief!” Gungen screamed. He was all worked up.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” I assured him solemnly, “except that Main — you said he was promiscuous — had probably been fooling with your wife’s maid, and that she — like a lot of maids — helped herself to your wife’s belongings.”

He puffed up his rouged cheeks, and stamped his feet, fairly dancing. His indignation was as funny as the statement that caused it.

“We shall see!” He spun on his heel and ran out of the room, repeating over and over, “We shall see!”

Enid Gungen held a hand out to me. Her doll face was all curves and dimples.

“I thank you,” she whispered.

“I don’t know what for,” I growled, not taking the hand. “I’ve got it jumbled so anything like proof is out of the question. But he can’t help knowing — didn’t I practically tell him?”

“Oh, that!” She put it behind her with a toss of her small head. “I’m quite able to look out for myself so long as he has no definite proof.”

I believed her.

Bruno Gungen came fluttering back into the library, frothing at the mouth, tearing his dyed goatee, raging that Rose Rubury was not to be found in the house.

The next morning Dick Foley told me the maid had joined Weel and Dahl and had left for Portland with them.