 Section 4 OF FIVE CONTINENTAL OP STORIES by DASHELL HAMMET. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. IT. Now listen, Mr. Zoomvault, you're holding out on me and it won't do. If I'm going to work on this for you, I've got to have the whole story. He looked thoughtfully at me for a moment through screwed up blue eyes. Then he got up and went to the door of the outer office opening it. Next to him I could see the bookkeeper and the stenographer sitting at their desks. Zoomvault closed the door and returned to his desk, leaning across it to speak in a husky undertone. You're a right, I suppose, but what I am going to tell you must be held in the strictest confidence. I nodded, and he went on. About two months ago one of our clients, Stanley Gorham, turned one hundred thousand dollars' worth of liberty bonds over to us. He had to go to the Orient on business, and he had an idea that the bonds might go to par under his absence. So he left them with us to be sold if they did. Yesterday I had occasion to go to the safe deposit box where the bonds had been put, in the Golden Gate Trust Company's vault, and they were gone. Anybody except you and your partner have access to the box? No. When did you see the bonds last? They were in the box the Saturday before Dan left. And one of the men on duty in the vault told me that Dan was there the following Monday. All right, now let me see if I've got it all straight. Your partner, Daniel Rathbone, was supposed to leave for New York on the twenty-seventh of last month, Monday, to meet an RW DuPuay. But Rathbone came into the office that day with his baggage, and said that important personal affairs made it necessary for him to postpone his departure, that he had to be in San Francisco the following morning. But he didn't tell you what that personal business was. You and he had some words over the delay, as you thought it important that he keep the New York engagement on time. You weren't on the best of terms at the time, having quarreled a couple of days before that over a shady deal Rathbone had put over, and so you, don't misunderstand me," Zoomvault interrupted. Dan had done nothing dishonest. It was simply that he had engineered several transactions that, well, I thought he had sacrificed ethics to profits. I see. Anyhow, starting with your argument over his not leaving for New York that day, you and he wound up by dragging in all of your differences, and practically decided to dissolve partnership as soon as it could be done. The argument was concluded in your house out on Fourteenth Avenue, and as it was rather late by then, and he had checked out of his hotel before he had changed his mind about going to New York, he stayed there with you that night. That's right," Zoomvault explained. I have been living at a hotel since Mrs. Zoomvault has been away. But Dan and I went out to the house because it gave us the utmost privacy for our talk, and when we finished it was so late that we remained there. Then the next morning you and Rathbone came down to the office, and, no, he corrected me. That is, we didn't come down here together. I came here while Dan went to transact whatever it was that kept him in town. He came into the office a little after noon and said he was going east on the evening train. He sent Quimby the bookkeeper down to get his reservations and to check his baggage which he had left in the office here overnight. Then Dan and I went out to lunch together, came back to the office for a few minutes, he had some mail to sign, and then he left. I see. After that you didn't hear from or of him until about ten days later, when DePoy wired to find out why Rathbone had meant to see him. That's right. As soon as I got DePoy's wire I sent one to Dan's brother in Chicago thinking perhaps Dan had stopped over with him, but Tom wired back that he hadn't seen his brother. Since then I've had two more wires from DePoy. I was sore with Dan for keeping DePoy waiting, but still I didn't worry a lot. Dan isn't a very reliable person, and if he suddenly took an ocean to stop off somewhere between here and New York for a few days he'd do it. But yesterday, when I found that the bonds were gone from the safe deposit box and learned that Dan had been to the box the day before he left, I decided that I'd have to do something, but I didn't want the police brought into it if it can be avoided. I feel sure that if I can find Dan and talk to him we can straighten the mess out somehow without scandal. We had our differences, but Dan's too decent a man and I'd like him too well for all his occasional wildness to want to see him in jail. So I want him found with as much speed and as little noise as possible. Has he got a car? Not now. He had one but he sold it five or six months ago. Where'd he bank? I mean his personal account. At the Golden Gate Trust Company. Got any photos of him? Yes. He brought out two from a desk drawer. One full face and the other a three-quarter view. They showed a man in the middle of his life with shrewd eyes set together in a hatchet face under dark, thin hair, but the face was rather pleasant for all its craftiness. How about his relatives, friends and so on, particularly his feminine friends? His only relative is the brother in Chicago. As to his friends, he probably had as many as any man in San Francisco. He was a wonderful mixer. Recently he has been on very good terms with a Mrs. Earnshaw, the wife of a real estate agent. She lives on Pacific Street, I believe. I don't know just how intimate they were but he used to call her up on the phone frequently and she called him here nearly every day. Then there is a girl named Eva Duffy, a cabaret entertainer, who lives in the eleven-hundred block of Bush Street. There were probably others too, but I know of only those two. Do we look through his stuff here? Yes, but perhaps you'd like to look for yourself. He led me into Rathbone's private office, a small box of a room just large enough for a desk, a filing cabinet and two chairs, with doors leading into the corridor, the outer office and zoo vaults. While I'm looking around you might get me a list of the serial numbers of the missing bonds, I said. They probably won't help us right away, but we can get the Treasury Department to let us know when the coupons come in and from where. I didn't expect to find anything in Rathbone's office and I didn't. Before I left I questioned the stenographer and the bookkeeper. They already knew that Rathbone was missing but they didn't know that the bonds were gone too. The girl, Mildred Narbot, was her name, said that Rathbone had dictated a couple of letters to her on the twenty-eighth, the day he left for New York, both of which had to do with the partner's business, and told her to send Quimby to check his baggage and make his reservations. When she returned from lunch she had typed the two letters and taken them in for him to sign, catching him just as he was about to leave. John Quimby, the bookkeeper, described the baggage he had checked, two large pigskin bags and a cordovan Gladstone bag. Having a bookkeeper's mind he had remembered the numbers of the birth he had secured for Rathbone on the evening train, four, four, car, eight. Quimby had returned with the checks and tickets while the partners were out at luncheon, and had put them on Rathbone's desk. At Rathbone's hotel I was told that he had left on the morning of the twenty-seventh, giving up his room, but leaving his two trunks there, as he intended living there after his return from New York in three or four weeks. The hotel people could tell me little worth listening to except that he had left in a taxi cab. At the taxi stand outside I found the chauffeur who had carried Rathbone. Rathbone? Sure, I know him. He told me around a limp cigarette. Yeah, I guess it was about that date that I took him down to the Golden Gate Trust Company, got a couple of big yellow bags and a little brown one. He busted into the bank carrying the little one and right out again, looking like somebody had kicked him on his corns, had me take him to the Phelps Building. The offices of Rathbone and Zoomvault were in that building, and he didn't give me a jet over my fare. At the Golden Gate Trust Company I had to plead and talk a lot, but they finally gave me what I wanted. Rathbone had drawn out his account a little less than five thousand dollars on the twenty-sixth of the month, the Saturday before he left town. From the Trust Company I went down to the Ferry Building baggage rooms and cigarred myself in to a look at the records for the twenty-eighth. Only one lot of three bags had been checked to New York that day. I telegraphed the numbers and Rathbone's description to the agency's New York office, instructing them to find the bags and through them find him. Up in the Pullman Company's offices I was told that Car Eight was the through car, and they could let me know within a couple of hours whether Rathbone had occupied his birth all the way to New York. On my way up to the eleven hundred block of Bush Street I left one of Rathbone's photographs with a photographer, with a rush order for a dozen copies. I found Eva Duthey's apartment after about five minutes of searching vestibule directories and got her out of bed. She was an undersized blonde girl, of somewhere between nineteen and twenty-nine, depending upon whether you judged by her eyes or by the rest of her face. I haven't seen or heard from Mr. Rathbone for nearly a month, she said. I called him at his hotel the other night, had a party I wanted to ring him in on, but they told me he was out of town and wouldn't be back for a week or two. Then an answer to another question. Yes, we were pretty good friends, but not especially thick. You know what I mean? We had a lot of fun together, but neither of us met anything to the other outside of that. Dan is a good sport, and so am I. Mrs. Earnshaw wasn't so frank, but she had a husband, and that makes a difference. She was a tall, slender woman, as dark as a gypsy, with a haughty air and a nervous trick of chewing her lower lip. We sat in a stiffly furnished room, and she stalled me for about fifteen minutes until I came out flat-footed with her. It's like this, Mrs. Earnshaw, I told her. Mr. Rathbone has disappeared, and we are going to find him. You're not helping me, and you're not helping yourself. I came here to get what you know about him. I could have gone around asking a lot of questions among your friends, and if you don't tell me what I want to know, that's what I'll have to do. And while I'll be as careful as possible, still there's bound to be some curiosity aroused, some wild guesses, and some talk. I'm giving you a chance to avoid all that. It's up to you. You are assuming, she said coldly, that I have something to hide. I'm not assuming anything. I'm hunting for information about Daniel Rathbone. She bit her lip on that for a while, and then the story came out bit by bit with a lot in it that wasn't any too true, but straight enough in the long run. Stripped of the stuff that wouldn't hold water, it went like this. She and Rathbone had planned a runaway together. She had left San Francisco on the twenty-sixth, going directly to New Orleans. He was to leave the next day, apparently for New York, but he was to change trains somewhere in the middle west and meet her in New Orleans. From there they were to go by boat to Central America. She pretended ignorance of his designs upon the bonds, if she hadn't known. Anyhow, she had carried out her part of the plan, but Rathbone had failed to show up in New Orleans. She hadn't shown much care in covering her trail, and private detectives employed by her husband had soon found her. Her husband had arrived in New Orleans, and apparently not knowing that there was another man in the deal had persuaded her to return home. She wasn't a woman to take kindly to the jolting, Rathbone had handed her, so she hadn't tried to get in touch with him or to learn what had kept him from joining her. Her story rang true enough, but just to play safe I put out a few feelers in the neighborhood, and what I learned seemed to verify what she had told me. I gathered that a few of the neighbors had made guesses that weren't a million miles away from the fax. I got the Pullman Company on the telephone and was told that lower four, car eight, leaving for New York on the twenty-eighth, hadn't been occupied at all. Zoomvault was dressing for dinner when I went up to his room at the hotel where he was staying. I told him all that I had learned that day and what I thought of it. Everything makes sense up until Rathbone left the Golden Gate Trust Company vault on the twenty-seventh, and after that nothing does. He had planned to grab the bonds in a lope with Mrs. Earnshaw, and he had already drawn out of the bank all his own money. He had called orderly. But why should he have gone back to the office? Why should he have stayed in town that night? What was the important business that held him? Why should he have ditched Mrs. Earnshaw? Why didn't he use his reservations at least part of the way across the country as he had planned? False trail, maybe, but a rotten one. There's nothing to do, Mr. Zoomvault, but to call in the police and the newspapers and see what publicity in a nationwide search will do for us. But that means jail for Dan with no chance to quietly straighten the matter up, he protested. It does, but it can't be helped. And remember, you've got to protect yourself. You're his partner. While not criminally responsible, you are financially responsible for his actions. You've got to put yourself in the clear. He nodded, reluctant agreement, and I grabbed the telephone. For two hours I was busy giving all the dope we had to the police and as much as we wanted published to the newspapers, who luckily had photographs of Rathbone, taken a year before when he had been named as correspondent in a divorce suit. I sent off three telegrams, one to New York, asking that Rathbone's baggage be opened as soon as the necessary authority could be secured. If he hadn't gone to New York, the baggage should be waiting at the station. One to Chicago, asking that Rathbone's brother be interviewed and then shadowed for a few days. And one to New Orleans to have the city searched for him. Then I headed for home and dead. News was scarce, and the papers the next day had Rathbone spread out all over the front pages, with photographs and descriptions and wild guesses and wilder clues that had materialized somehow within the short space between the time the newspapers got the story and the time they went to press. I spent the morning preparing circulars and plans for having the country covered, and arranging to have steamship records searched. Just before noon a telegram came from New York, itemizing the things found in Rathbone's baggage. The contents of the two large bags didn't mean anything, they might have been packed for use or for a stall. But the things in the Gladstone bag, which had been found unlocked, were puzzling. Here's the list. Two suits, silk pajamas, four silk shirts, eight linen collars, four suits underwear, six neckties, six pairs socks, eighteen handkerchiefs, one pair military brushes, one comb, one safety razor, one tube shaving cream, one shaving brush, one toothbrush, one tube toothpaste, one can talcum powder, one bottle hair-tonic, one cigar case holding twelve cigars, one thirty-two colts revolver, one map of Honduras, one Spanish-English dictionary, two books postage stamps, one pint scotch whiskey, and one manicure set. Zoomvault, his bookkeeper and his stenographer, were watching two men from headquarters search Rathbone's office when I arrived there. After I showed them the telegram, the detectives went back to their examination. "'What's the significance of that list?' Zoomvault asked. It shows there's no sense to the thing the way it now stands, I said. That Gladstone bag was packed to be carried. Checking it was all wrong. It wasn't even locked. And nobody ever checks Gladstone bags filled with toilet articles, so checking it for a stall would have been the bunk. Maybe he checked it as an afterthought to get rid of it when he found he wasn't going to need it, but what could have it made it unnecessary to him? Don't forget that it's apparently the same bag he carried into the Golden Gate Trust Company vault when he went for the bronze. "'Damn, if I can dope it, here's something else for you to dope,' one of the city detectives said, getting up from his examination of the desk and holding out a sheet of paper. I found it behind one of the drawers where it had slipped down. It was a letter, written with blue ink and a firm angular and unmistakably feminine hand on heavy white note-paper. Dear Danny Boy, if it isn't too late I've changed my mind about going. If you can wait another day until Tuesday I'll go. Call me up as soon as you get this, and if you still want me, I'll pick you up in the roadster at the Shattuck Avenue station Tuesday afternoon. More than ever yours, boots.' It was dated the 26th, the Sunday before Rathbone had disappeared. That's the thing that made him lay over another day and made him change his plans,' one of the police detectives said. I guess we'd better run over to Berkeley and see what we can find at the Shattuck Avenue station. Mr. Zoomvault, I said when he and I were alone in his office, how about this stenog of yours?' He bounced up from his chair and his face turned red. What about her? Is she—how friendly was she with Rathbone? Miss Narbit, he said heavily, deliberately, as if to be sure that I caught every syllable, is to be married to me as soon as my wife gets heard of wars. That is why I canceled the order to sell my house. Now would you mind telling me just why you asked? Just a random guess, I lied, trying to sue them. I don't want to overlook any bets. But now that's out of the way. It is,' he was still talking deliberately, and it seems to me that most of your guesses have been random ones. If you will have your office send me a bill for your services to date, I think I can dispense with your help. Just as you say, but you'll have to pay for a full day to day, so if you don't mind I'll keep on working at it till night. Very well. But I am busy, and you needn't bother about coming in with any reports. All right,' I said and bowed myself out of the office, but not out of the job. That letter from Boots had not been in the desk when I searched it. I had taken every drawer out and even tilted the desk to look under it. The letter was a plant. And then again, maybe Zumwald had given me the air because he was dissatisfied with the work I had done and peeved at my question about the girl, and maybe not. Suppose, I thought walking up Market Street, bumping shoulders and stepping on people's feet, the two partners were in this thing together. One of them would have to be the goat, and that part had fallen to Rathbone. Zumwald's manner and actions since his partner's disappearance fit that theory well enough. Employing a private detective before calling in the police was a good play. In the first place it gave him the appearance of innocence. Then the private sleuth would tell him everything he learned every step he took, giving Zumwald an opportunity to correct any mistakes or oversights in the partner's plans before the police came into it, and if the private detective got on dangerous ground he could be called off. And suppose Rathbone was found in some city where he was unknown, and that would be where he'd go, Zumwald would volunteer to go forward to identify him. He would look at him and say, no, that's not him. One would be turned loose, and that would be the end of that trail. This theory left the sudden change in Rathbone's plans unaccounted for, but it made his return to the office on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh more plausible. He had come back to confer with his partner over that unknown necessity for the change, and they had decided to leave Mrs. Earnshaw out of it. Then they had gone to Zumwald's house. For what? And why had Zumwald decided not to sell a house? And why had he taken the trouble to give me an explanation? Could they have cashed the blondes there? A look at the house wouldn't be a bad idea. I tell the phone Bennett at the Oakland Police Department. Do me a favor, Frank. Call Zumwald on the phone. Tell him you've picked up a man who answers Rathbone's description to a T, and ask him to come over and take a look at him. When he gets there, stall him as long as you can, pretending the man is being fingerprinted and measured or something like that, and then tell him you've found the man isn't Rathbone, and that you're sorry to have brought him over there and so on. If you only hold him for half or three-quarters of an hour, it will be enough. It will take him more than half an hour traveling each way. Thanks. I stopped in at the office, stuck a flashlight in my pocket, and headed for Fourteenth Avenue. Zumwald's house was a two-story semi-detached one, and the lock on the front door held me up about four minutes. Burglar would have gone through it without checking his stride. This breaking into the house wasn't exactly according to the rules, but on the other hand I was legally Zumwald's agent until I discontinued work that night, so this crashing in wouldn't be considered illegal. I started at the top floor and worked down. Bureaus, dressers, tables, desks, chairs, walls, woodwork, pictures, carpets, plumbing. I looked at everything that was thick enough to hold paper. I didn't take things apart, but it's surprising how speedily and how thoroughly you can go through a house when you're in training. I found nothing in the house itself, so I went down into the cellar. It was a large cellar and divided in two. The front part was paid with cement and held a full coal bin, some furniture, some canned goods, and a lot of odds and ends of housekeeping accessories. The rear division behind a plaster partition where the steps ran down from the kitchen was without windows and illuminated only by one swinging electric light which I turned on. A pile of lumber filled half the space. On the other side barrels and boxes were piled up to the ceiling, two sacks of cement lay beside them, and in another corner was a tangle of broken furniture. The floor was of hard dirt. I turned to the lumber pile first. I wasn't in love with the job ahead of me, moving the pile away and then back again, but I needn't have worried. A board rattled behind me, and I wheeled to see Zoombault rising from behind a barrel and scowling at me over a black automatic pistol. Put your hands up, he said. I put them up. I didn't have a pistol with me, not being in the habit of carrying one except when I thought I was going to need it. But it would have been all the same if I'd had a pocket full of them. I don't mind taking chances, but there's no chance when you're looking into the muzzle of a gun that a determined man is holding on you. So I put my hands up, and one of them brushed against the swinging light glow. I drove my knuckles into it. As the cellar went black I threw myself backward into one side. Zoombault's gun streaked fire. Nothing happened for a while. I found that I had fallen across the doorway that gave to the stairs and front cellar. I figured that I couldn't move without making a noise that it would draw lead so I lay still. Then began a game that made up in tenseness what it lacked in action. The part of the cellar where we were was about twenty by twenty feet and blacker than a new shoe. There were two doors, one on the opposite side opened to the yard and was, I suppose, locked. I was lying on my back across the other, waiting for a pair of legs to grab. Zoombault, with a gun out of which only one bullet had been spent, was somewhere in the blackness, and aware from his silence that I was still alive. I figured I had the edge on him. I was closest to the only practical exit. He didn't know that I was unarmed. He didn't know whether I had help close by or not. Time was valuable to him, but not necessarily so to me, so I waited. Time passed. How much? I don't know. Maybe half an hour. The floor was damp and hard and thoroughly uncomfortable. The electric light had cut my hand where I broke it, and I couldn't determine how badly I was bleeding. I thought of Tad's blind man in a dark room hunting for a black hat that wasn't there, and knew how he felt. A boxer barrel fell over the crash, knocked over by Zoombault, no doubt, moving out from the hiding-place wherein he had awaited my arrival. Silence for a while. And then I could hear him moving cautiously off to one side. Without warning, two streaks from his pistol sent bullets into the partition somewhere above my feet. I wasn't the only one who was feeling the strain. Silence again. And I found that I was wet and dripping with perspiration. Then I could hear his breathing, but I couldn't determine whether he was nearer or was breathing more heavily. A soft sliding dragging across the dirt floor. I pictured him crawling awkwardly on his knees in one hand, the other hand holding the pistol out ahead of him, the pistol that would spit fire as soon as its muzzle touched something soft. And I became uneasily aware of my bulk. I am thick through the waist, and there in the dark it seemed to me that my punch must extend almost to the ceiling, a target that no bullet could miss. I stretched my hands out toward him and held them there. If they touched him first I'd have a chance. He was panting harshly now, and I was breathing through a mouth that was stretched as wide as it would go, so there would be no rasping of the large quantities of air I was taking in and letting out. Finally he came. Hair brushed the fingers of my left hand. I closed them about it, pulling the head I couldn't see viciously toward me, driving my right fist beneath it. You may know that I put everything I had on that smack when I tell you that not until later, when I found that one of my cheeks was scorched, did I know that his gun had gone off. He wiggled, and I hit him again. Then I was sitting astride him, my flashlight hunting for his pistol. I found it and yanked him to his feet. As soon as his head cleared I herded him into the front cellar and got a globe to replace the one I had smashed. Now, dig it up! I ordered. That was a safe way of putting it. I wasn't sure what I wanted or where it would be, except that his selecting this part of the cellar to wait for me in made it look as if this was the right place. You'll do your own digging! He growled. Maybe, I said, but I'm going to do it now, and I haven't time to tie you up, so if I've got to do the digging I'm going to crown you first, so you'll sleep peacefully until it's all over. All smeared with blood and dirt and sweat I must have looked capable of anything, for when I took a step toward him he gave in. From behind the lumber pile he brought a spade, moved some of the barrels to one side, and started turning up the dirt. When a hand, a man's hand, dead yellow where the damp dirt didn't stick to it, came into sight I stopped him. I had found it, and I had no stomach for looking at it, after three weeks of lying in the wet ground. Note. In court Lester Zumbalt's plea was that he had killed his partner in self-defense. Zumbalt testified that he had taken the Gorham Bonds in a feudal attempt to recover losses in the stock market, and that when Rathbone, who had intended taking them and going to Central America with Mrs. Earnshaw, had visited the safe deposit box and found them gone he had returned to the office and charged Zumbalt with the theft. Zumbalt at that time had not suspected his partner's own dishonest plans and had promised to restore the bonds. They had gone to Zumbalt's house to discuss the matter, and Rathbone, dissatisfied with his partner's plan of restitution, had attacked Zumbalt and had been killed in the ensuing struggle. Then Zumbalt had told Mildred Narbit, his stenographer, the entire story, and had persuaded her to help him. Between them they had made it appear that Rathbone had been in the office for a while the next day, the twenty-eighth, and had left for New York. However, the jury seemed to think that Zumbalt had lured his partner out to the Fourteenth Avenue House for the purpose of killing him, so Zumbalt was found guilty of murder in the first degree. The first jury before which Mildred Narbit was tried disagreed. The second jury acquitted her, holding that there was nothing to show that she had taken part in either the theft of the bonds or the murder, or that she had had any knowledge of either crime until afterward, and that her later complicity was, in view of her love for Zumbalt, not altogether blameworthy. End of IT. FIVE CONTENTAL OP STORIES by Dashel Hammett This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Bodies piled up. The Montgomery Hotel's regular detective had taken his last week's rake-off from the Hotel Bootlegger in merchandise instead of cash, had drunk it down, had fallen asleep in the lobby, and been fired. I happen to be the only idle operative in the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco branch at the time, and thus it came about that I had three days of hotel-coppering while a man was being found to take the job permanently. The Montgomery is a quiet hotel of the better sort, and so I had a very rustful time of it, until the third and last day. Then things changed. I came down into the lobby that afternoon to find Stacey, the assistant manager on duty at the time, hunting for me. One of the maids just phoned that there's something wrong up in 906, he said. We went up to that room together. The door was open, and the center of the floor stood a maid staring goggle-eyed at the closed door of the clothes-press. For under it, extending perhaps a foot across the floor toward us, was a snake-shaped ribbon of blood. I stepped past the maid and tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it. Slowly, rigidly, a man pitched out into my arms, pitched out backward, and there was a six-inch slit down the back of his coat, and the coat was wet and sticky. That wasn't altogether a surprise. The blood on the floor had prepared me for something of the sort, but when another followed him, facing me, this one, with a dark distorted face, I dropped the one I had caught and jumped back. And as I jumped, a third man came tumbling out after the others. From behind me came a scream and a thud as the maid fainted. I wasn't feeling any too steady myself. I'm no sensitive plant, and I've looked at a lot of unlovely sights in my time, but for weeks afterward I could see those three dead men coming out of that clothes-press to pile up at my feet, coming out slowly, almost deliberately, in a ghastly game of follow your leader. Seeing them, you couldn't doubt that they were really dead. Every detail of their falling, every detail of the heap in which they now lay, had a horrible certainty of lifelessness in it. I turned to Stacey, who deathly white himself was keeping on his feet only by clinging to the foot of the brass bed. Get the woman out! Get doctors! Police! I pulled the three dead bodies apart, laying them out in a grim row faces up. Then I made a hasty examination of the room. A soft hat, which fitted one of the dead men, lay in the center of the unruffled bed. The room key was in the door, on the inside. There was no blood in the room except what had leaked out of the clothes-press, and the room showed no signs of having been the scene of a struggle. The door to the bathroom was open. In the bottom of the bathtub was a shattered gin bottle, which from the strength of the odor and the dampness of the tub had been nearly full when broken. In one corner of the bathroom I found a small whiskey glass, and another under the tub. Both were dry, clean, and odorless. The inside of the clothes-press door was stained with blood from the height of my shoulder to the floor, and two hats lay in the puddle of blood on the closet floor. Each of the hats fitted one of the dead men. That was all. Three dead men, a broken gin bottle, blood. Stacey returned presently with a doctor, and while the doctor was examining the dead men, the police detectives arrived. The doctor's work was soon done. "'This man,' he said, pointing to one of them, was struck on the back of the head with a small blunt instrument, and then strangled. This one, pointing to another, was simply strangled, and the third was stabbed in the back with a blade perhaps five inches long. They have been dead for about two hours since noon or a little after.' The assistant manager identified two of the bodies. The man who had been stabbed, the first to fall out of the clothes-press, had arrived at the hotel three days before, registering as Tudor Ingram of Washington, D.C., and it occupied room 915, three doors away. The last man to fall out, the one who had been simply choked, was the occupant of this room. His name was Vincent Devlin. He was insurance broker, and had made the hotel his home since his wife's death some four years before. The third man had been seen in Devlin's company frequently, and one of the clerks remembered that they had come into the hotel together about five minutes after twelve this day. Cards and letters in his pockets told us that he was Homer Ansley, a member of the law firm of Lancashire and Ansley, whose offices were in the Miles Building, next door to Devlin's office, in fact. Devlin's pockets held between $150 and $200. Ansley's wallet contained more than $100. Ingram's pockets yielded nearly $300, and in a money belt around his waist we found $2,200 and two medium-sized, unset diamonds. All three had watches, Devlin's was a valuable one, in their pockets, and Ingram wore two rings, both of which were expensive ones. Ingram's room key was in his pocket. Beyond this money, whose presence would seem to indicate that robbery hadn't been the motive behind the three killings, we found nothing on any of their persons to throw the slightest light on the crime, nor did the most thorough examination of both Ingram's and Devlin's rooms teach us anything. In Ingram's room we found a dozen or more packs of carefully marked cards, some crooked dice, and an immense amount of data on race-horses. Also we found that he had a wife who lived on East Delavan Avenue in Buffalo, and a brother on Cruncher Street in Dallas, as well as a list of names and addresses that we carried off to investigate later, but nothing in either room pointed even indirectly at murder. Fels, the police-department-bertilian man, found a number of fingerprints in Devlin's room, but we couldn't tell whether they would be of any value or not until he had worked them up. Though Devlin and Ansley had apparently been strangled by hands, Fels was unable to get prints from either their necks or their collars. The maid who discovered the blood said that she had straightened up Devlin's room between ten and eleven that morning but had not put fresh towels in the bathroom. It was for this purpose that she had gone to the room in the afternoon. She had found the door unlocked, with a key on the inside, and as soon as she entered had seen the blood and telephone Stacey. She had seen no one in the corridor nearby as she entered the room. She had straightened up Ingram's room, she said, at a few minutes after one. She had gone there earlier between ten twenty and ten forty-five for that purpose, but Ingram had not then left it. The elevator man who had carried Ansley and Devlin up from the lobby at a few minutes after twelve remembered that they had been laughingly discussing their golf scores of the previous day during the ride. No one had seen anything suspicious in the hotel around the time in which the doctor had placed the murders, but that was to be expected. The murderer could have left the room, closing the door behind him, and walked away, secure in the knowledge that at noon a man in the quarters of the Montgomery would attract little attention. If he was staying at the hotel he would simply have gone to his room. If not he would have either walked all the way down to the street or down a floor or two and then caught an elevator. None of the hotel employees had ever seen Ingram and Devlin together. There was nothing to show that they had even the slightest acquaintance. Ingram habitually stayed in his room until noon and did not return to it until very late at night. Nothing was known of his affairs. At the Miles Building, we, that is, Marty O'Hara and George Dean of Police Department Homicide Detail, and I, questioned Ansley's partner and Devlin's employees. Both Devlin and Ansley had seen were ordinary men who lived ordinary lives, lives that held neither dark spots nor queer kinks. Ansley was married and had two children. He lived on Lake Street. Both men had a sprinkling of relatives and friends scattered here and there through the country, and so far as we could learn their affairs were in perfect order. They had left their offices this day to go to luncheon together, intending to visit Devlin's room first for a drink of peace from a bottle of gin someone coming from Australia had smuggled into him. Well, O'Hara said when we were on the street again, this much is clear. If they went up to Devlin's room for a drink, it seems that they were killed almost as soon as they got in the room. Those whiskey glasses you found were dry and clear. Whoever turned the trick must have been waiting for them. I wonder about this fellow Ingram. I'm wondering too, I said, figuring it out from the positions I found them in when I opened the closet door, Ingram sizes up as the key to this whole thing. Devlin was back against the wall with Ansley in front of him, both facing the door. Ingram was facing them with his back to the door. This clothes-press was just large enough for them to be packed in it, too small for any of them to slip down while the door was closed. Then there was no blood in the room except what had come from the clothes-press. Ingram, with that gaping slit in his back, couldn't have been stabbed until he was inside the closet, or he'd have bled elsewhere. He was standing close to the other men when he was knifed, and whoever knifed him closed the door quickly afterward. Now why should he have been standing in such a position? Do you dope it out that he and another killed two friends, and that while he was stowing their bodies in the closet his accomplice finished him off? Maybe, Dean said, and that maybe was still as far as we had gone three days later. We had sent and received bails of telegrams, having relatives and acquaintances of the dead man interviewed, and we'd found nothing that seemed to have any bearing upon their deaths. Nor had we found the slightest connecting link between Ingram and the other two. We had traced those other two back step by step almost to their cradles. We had accounted for every minute of their time since Ingram had arrived in San Francisco, thoroughly enough to convince us that neither of them had met Ingram. Ingram we'd learned was a bookmaker, and all around crooked gambler. His wife and he had separated, but were on good terms. Some fifteen years before he had been convicted of assault with intent to kill in Newark, New Jersey, and had served two years in the state prison. But the man he had assaulted, one John Pellow, had died of pneumonia in Omaha in 1914. Ingram had come to San Francisco for the purpose of opening a gambling club, and all our investigations had tended to show that his activities while in the city had been toward that and alone. The fingerprints fell as it secured, had all turned out to belong to Stacey, the maid, the police detectives, or myself. In short, we had found nothing. So much were our attempts to learn the motive behind the three murders. We now dropped that angle and settled down to the detailed studying, patient's taxing grind of picking up the murderer's trail. From any crime to its author, there is a trail. It may be, as in this case, obscure. But since matter cannot move without disturbing other matter along its path, there always is, there must be, a trail of some sort. And finding and following such trails is what a detective is paid to do. In the case of a murder, it is possible sometimes to take a shortcut to the end of the trail by first finding the motive. A knowledge of the motive often reduces the field of possibilities, sometimes points directly to the guilty one. It is on this account that murderers are, as a rule, more easily apprehended than any other class of criminals. But a knowledge of the motive isn't indispensable. Quite a few murder mysteries are solved without its help. And in a fair proportion, say, 10 to 20 percent of cases where men are convicted justly of murder, the motive isn't clearly shown even at the last, and sometimes it's hardly guessed at. So far all we knew about the motive in the particular case we were dealing with was that it hadn't been robbery, unless something we didn't know about had been stolen, something of sufficient value to make the murderer score in the money in his victim's pockets. We hadn't altogether neglected the search for the murderer's trail, of course, but being human we had devoted most of our attention to trying to find a shortcut. Now we set out to find our man, or men, regardless of what had urged him or them to commit the crimes. Of the people who had been registered at the hotel on the day of the killing, there were nine men of whose innocence we hadn't found a reasonable amount of proof. Four of these were still at the hotel, and only one of that four interested us very strongly. That one, a big rob-owned man of forty-five or fifty, who had registered as J. J. Cooper of Anaconda, Montana, wasn't, we had definitely established, really, a mining man, as he pretended to be. And our telegraphic communications with Anaconda failed to show that he was known there. Therefore we were having him shadowed, with few results. Five men of the nine had departed since the murders, three of them leaving forwarding addresses with a mail clerk. Gilbert Jockmart had occupied room nine forty-six and had ordered his mail forwarded to him at a Los Angeles hotel. W. F. Salway, who had occupied room ten-twenty-two, had given instructions that his mail be readdressed to a number on Clark Street in Chicago. Ross Oret, room six-o-nine, had asked to have his mail sent to him care of general delivery at the local post office. Jockmart had arrived at the hotel two days before and had left on the afternoon of the murders. Salway had arrived the day before the murders and had left the day after them. Oret had arrived on the day of the murders and had left the following day. Sending telegrams to have the first two found and investigated, I went after Oret myself. A musical comedy named What For, as being widely advertised just then with gaily printed plum-colored hand-bills, I got one of them and at a stationary store an envelope to match and mailed it to Oret at the Montgomery Hotel. There are concerns that make a practice of securing the names of arrivals at the principal hotels and mailing them advertisements. I trusted that Oret, knowing this, wouldn't be suspicious when my gaudy envelope forwarded from the hotel reached him through the general delivery window. Dick Foley, the agency's shadow specialist, planted himself in the post office to loiter about with an eye on the O window until he saw my plum-colored envelope passed out and then to shadow the receiver. I spent the next day trying to solve the mysterious J. J. Cooper's game, but he was still a puzzle when I knocked off that night. At a little before five the following morning, Dick Foley dropped into my room on his way home to wake me up and tell me what he had done for himself. This Oret, baby, is our meat, he said, picked him up when he got his mail yesterday afternoon, got another letter beside yours, got an apartment on Van Ness Avenue, took it the day after the killing under the name of B. T. Quinn, packing a gun under his left arm. There's that sort of bulge there. Just went home to bed, being visiting all the dives in North Beach. Who do you think he's hunting for? Who? Guy Kudner. That was news. This Guy Kudner, alias the Dark Man, was the most dangerous bird on the coast, if not in the country. He had only been nailed once, but if he had been convicted of all the crimes that everybody knew he had committed, he'd have needed half a dozen lives to crowd his sentences into, besides another half dozen to carry to the gallows. However, he had decidedly the right sort of backing, enough to buy him everything he needed in the way of witnesses, alibis, even juries, and so the talk went, an occasional judge. I don't know what went wrong with his support that one time he was convicted up north and sent over for a one-to-fourteen-year hitch, but it adjusted itself promptly, for the ink was hardly dry on the press notices of his conviction before he was loose again on parole. Is Kudner in town? No, no, Dick said, but this Orit, or Quinn, or whatever his name is, is surely hunting for him in Rick's place, at Wap Healy's and at Pogotties. Porky Grout tipped me off, says Orit doesn't know Kudner by sight, but is trying to find him. Porky didn't know what he wants with him. This Porky Grout was a dirty little rat that would sell out his family, if he ever had one, for the price of a flop. But with these lads who play both sides of the game, it's always a question of which side they're playing when you think they're playing yours. Think Porky was coming clean? I asked. Chances are, but you can't gamble on him. Is Orit acquainted here? Doesn't seem to be. Knows where he wants to go, but has to ask how to get there. Hasn't spoken to anybody that seemed to know him. What's he like? Not the kind of egg you want to tangle with off-hand, if you ask me. He and Kudner would make a good pair. They don't look alike. This egg is tall and slim, but he's built right. Those fast, smooth muscles. Face is sharp without being thin, if you get me. I mean all the lines in it are straight. No curves. Chin, nose, mouth, eyes, all straight, sharp lines and angles. Looks like the kind of egg we know Kudner is. Make a good pair. Dresses well and doesn't look like a rowdy, but harder than hell. A big game hunter. Our meat, I bet you. It doesn't look bad, I agreed. He came to the hotel the morning of the day the men were killed and checked out the morning. He packs a rod and changed his name after he left, and now he's paired off with a dark man. It doesn't look bad at all. I'm telling you, Dick said. This fellow looks like three killings wouldn't disturb his rest any. I wonder where Kudner fits in. I can't guess, but if he and Oren haven't connected yet then Kudner wasn't in on the murders. But he may give us the answer. Then I jumped out of bed. I'm going to gamble on Porky's dope being on the level. How would you describe Kudner? You know him better than I do. Yes, but how would you describe him to me if I didn't know him? A little fat guy with a red fork scar and his left cheek. What's the idea? It's a good one, I admitted. That scar makes all the difference in the world. If he didn't have it and you were to describe him you'd go into all the details of his appearance. But he has it, so you simply say, a little fat guy with a red forked scar on his left cheek. It's a ten to one that that's just how he's been described to Oren. I don't look like Kudner, but I'm his size and build and with a scar on my face Oren will fall for me. What then? There's no talent, but I ought to be able to learn a lot if I can get Oren talking to me as Kudner. It's worth a try anyway. You can't get away with it. Not in San Francisco. Kudner's too well known. What difference does that make, Dick? Oren is the only one I want to fool. If he takes me for Kudner, well and good. If he doesn't, still well and good. I won't force myself on him. How are you going to fake the scar? Easy. We have pictures of Kudner showing the scar in the criminal gallery. I'll get some collodion. He's sold in drug stores under several trade names for putting on cuts and scratches, color it, and imitate Kudner's scar on my cheek. It dries with a shiny surface and put on thick will stand out just enough to look like an old scar. It was a little after eleven the following night when Dick telephoned me that Oren was in Pagati's place on Pacific Street and apparently settled there for some little while. My scar already painted on. I jumped into a taxi and with a few minutes was talking to Dick around the corner from Pagati's. He's sitting at the last table back on the left side and he was alone when I came out. You can't miss him. He's the only egg in the joint with a clean collar. You better stick outside, half a block or so away with the taxi, I told Dick. Maybe brother Oren and I will leave together and I'd just as leave have you standing by in case things break wrong. Pagati's place is a long, narrow, low-ceiling cellar, always dim with smoke. Down the middle runs a narrow strip of bare floor for dancing. The rest of the floor is covered with closely packed tables whose claws are always soiled and the management hasn't yet verified the rumour that the country has gone dry. Most of the tables were occupied when I came in and half a dozen couples were dancing. Few of the faces to be seen were strangers to the morning lineup and police headquarters. Peering through the smoke I saw Oret at once seated alone in a far corner looking at the dancers with a set blank face of one who masks an all-seeing watchfulness. I walked down the other side of the room and crossed the strip of dance floor directly under a light so that the scar might be clearly visible to him. Then I selected a vacant table not far from his and sat down facing him. Ten minutes passed while he pretended an interest in the dancers and I affected a thoughtful stare at the dirty cloth on my table, but neither of us missed so much as a flicker of the other's lids. His eyes, grey eyes that were pale without being shallow, with black needle-point pupils, met mine after a while in a cold, steady, inscrutable stare, and very slowly he got to his feet. One hand, his right, in a side pocket of his dark coat, he walked straight across to my table and sat down opposite me. Cudder, looking for me, I hear, I replied, trying to match the icy smoothness of his voice as I was mashing the steadiness of his gaze. He had sat down with his left side turned slightly toward me, which put his right arm in not too cramped a position for straight shooting from the pocket that still held his hand. You were looking for me, too. I didn't know what the correct answer to that would be so I just grinned. But the grin didn't come from my heart. I had, I realized, made a mistake, one that might cost me something before we were done. This bird wasn't hunting for Cudner as a friend, as I had carelessly assumed, but was on the warpath. I saw those three dead men falling out of the closet in room 906. My gun was inside the waistband of my trousers where I could get it quickly, but his was in his hand. So I was careful to keep my own hands motionless on the edge of the table while I widened my grin. His eyes were changing now, and the more I looked at them the less I liked them. The gray in them had darkened and grown duller and the pupils were larger and white crescents were showing beneath the gray. Twice before I had looked into eyes such as these, and I hadn't forgotten what they meant, the eyes of the congenital killer. Suppose you speak your peace, I suggested after a while. But he wasn't to be beguiled into conversation. He shook his head a mere fraction of an inch, and the corners of his compressed mouth dropped down a trifle. The white crescents of eyeballs were growing broader, pushing the gray circles up under the upper lids. It was coming, and there was no use waiting for it. I drove afoot at his shins under the table, and at the same time pushed the table into his lap and threw myself across it. The bullet from his gun went off to one side. Another bullet, not from his gun, thudded into the table that was up-ended between us. I had him by the shoulders when the second shot from behind took him in the left arm, just below my hand. I let go, then, and fell away, rolling over against the wall and twisting around to face the direction from which the bullets were coming. I twisted around just in time to see, jerking out of sight behind a corner of the passage that gave to a small dining-room, Guy Kudner's scarred face, and as it disappeared, a bullet from Oret's gun splattered the plaster from the wall where it had been. I grinned at the thought of what must be going on in Oret's head as he lay sprawled out on the floor confronted by two Kudner's, but he took a shot at me just then, and I stopped grinning. Luckily he had to twist around a fire at me, putting his weight on his wounded arm, and the pain made him wince, spoiling his aim. Before he had adjusted himself more comfortably, I had scrambled on hands and knees to Picotti's kitchen door only a few feet away and had myself safely tucked out of range behind an angle in the wall, all but my eyes and the top of my head, which I risked now so that I might see what went on. Oret was now ten or twelve feet from me, lying flat on the floor, facing Kudner with a gun in his hand and another on the floor beside him. Across the room perhaps thirty feet away, Kudner was showing himself around his protecting corner at brief intervals to exchange shots with a man on the floor, occasionally sending one my way. We had the place to ourselves. There were four exits and the rest of Picotti's customers had used them all. I had my gun out, but I was playing a waiting game. Kudner, I figured, had been tipped off to Oret's search for him, and had arrived on the scene with no mistaken idea of the other's attitude. Just what there was between them and what bearing it had on the Montgomery murders was a mystery to me, but I didn't try to solve it now. I kept away from the bullets that were flying around as best I could and waited. They were firing in unison. Kudner would show around his corner, both men's weapons would spit, and he would duck out of sight again. Oret was bleeding about the head now, and one of his legs sprawled crookedly behind him. I couldn't determine whether Kudner had been hit or not. Each had fired eight or perhaps nine shots. When Kudner suddenly jumped out into full view, pumping his gun in his left hand as fast as its mechanism would go, the gun in his right hand hanging at his side. Oret had changed guns and was on his knees now, his fresh weapon keeping pace with his enemies. That couldn't last. Kudner dropped his left hand gun, and as he raised the other he sagged forward and went down on one knee. Oret stopped firing abruptly and fell over on his back, spread out full length. Kudner fired once more, wildly, into the ceiling, and pitched down on his face. I sprang to Oret's side and kicked both of his guns away. He was lying still, but his eyes were open. Are you, Kudner? Oh, is he? He. Good, he said, and closed his eyes. I crossed away where Kudner lay and turned him over on his back. His chest was literally shot in pieces. His thick lips worked, and I put my ear down to them. I got him. Yes, I lied. He's already cold. His dying face twisted into a triumphant grin. Sorry. Three in hotel. He gasped torsely. Mistake. Wrong room. Got one. Had two. Other two. Protect myself. I— He shuddered and died. A week later the hospital people let me talk to Oret. I told him what Kudner had said before he died. That's the way I adoped it out, Oret said from another depth of the bandages in which he was swad. That's why I moved and changed my name the next day. I suppose you've got it nearly figured out by now, he said after a while. No, I confessed. I haven't. I have an idea what it was all about, but I could stand having a few details cleared up. I'm sorry I can't clear them up for you, but I got to cover myself up. I'll tell you a story, though, and it may help you. Once upon a time there was a high-class crook what the newspapers call a mastermind. Came a day when he found he had accumulated enough money to give up the game and settle down as an honest man. But he had two lieutenants, one in New York and one in San Francisco, and they were the only men in the world who knew he was a crook. And besides that he was afraid of both of them, so he thought he'd rest easier if they were out of the way. And it happened that neither of these lieutenants had ever seen the other. So this mastermind convinced each of them that the other was double-crossing him and would have to be bumped off for the safety of all concerned, and both of them fell for it. The New Yorker went to San Francisco to get the other, and the San Franciscan was told that the New Yorker would arrive on such and such a day and would stay at such and such a hotel. The mastermind figured out there was an even chance of both men passing out when they met, and it was nearly right at that. But he was sure that one would die, and then, even if the other missed hanging, there would be only one man left for him to dispose of later. There weren't as many details in this story as I would like to have, but it explained a lot. How do you figure out Kudner's getting into the wrong room? I asked. That was funny. Maybe it happened like this. My room was 609, and the killing was done in 906. Suppose Kudner went to the hotel on the day he knew I was due and took a quick slant at the register. He wouldn't want to be seen looking at it if he could avoid it, and so he didn't turn it around, but flashed a look at it as it lay, facing the desk. When you read numbers of three figures upside down, you have to transpose them in your head to get them straight, like one, two, three. You'd get that three, two, one, and then turn them around in your head. That's what Kudner did with mine. He was keyed up, of course, thinking of the job ahead of him, and he all looked at the fact that 609 upside down still reads 609 just the same. So he turned it around and made it 906. Devlin's room. That's how I doped it, I said, and I reckon it's about right. And then he looked at the key rack and saw that 906 wasn't there, so he thought he might just as well get his job done right then, when he could roam the hotel corridors without attracting attention. Of course he may have gone up to the room before Ansley and Devlin came in and waited for them, but I doubt it. I think it more likely that he simply happened to arrive at the hotel a few minutes after they had come in. Ansley was probably alone in the room when Kudner opened the unlocked door and came in, Devlin being in the bathroom getting the glasses. Ansley was about your size and age, and close enough in appearance to fit her off description of you. Kudner went for him and then Devlin, hearing a scuffle, dropped the bottle and glasses and rushed out and got his. Kudner, being the sword he was, would figure that two murders were no worse than one and he wouldn't want to leave any witnesses around. Then that is probably how Ingram got into it. He was passing on his way from his room to the elevator and perhaps heard the racket and investigated, and Kudner put a gun in his face and made him stow the two bodies in the clothes-press, and then he stuck his knife in Ingram's back and slammed the door on him. That's about the—an indignant nurse descended on me from behind and ordered me out of the room, accusing me of getting her patient excited. Or it stopped me as I turned to go. Keep your eye on the New York dispatches, he said, and maybe you'll get the rest of the story. It's not over yet. Nobody has anything on me out here. The shooting in Pagodes was self-defense, as far as I'm concerned, and as soon as I'm on my feet again and could get back east, there's going to be a mastermind holding a lot of lead. That's a promise. I believed him. End of Bodies Piled Up End of Five Continental Upstories by Dashel Hammett Read by Winston Tharp