“Thomas, for goodness sakes don’t stand there dreaming,” she snapped at her husband, who to all appearances was still the same mild old man who had given me an excellent cigar. “Tie up this Chinaman! I don’t trust him an inch, and I won’t feel easy until he’s tied up.”
I got up from my seat on the side of the bed, and moved cautiously to a spot that I thought would be out of the line of fire if the thing I expected happened.
Tai had dropped the gun that had been in his hand, but he hadn’t been searched. The Chinese are a thorough people; if one of them carries a gun at all, he usually carries two or three or more. One gun had been taken from Tai, and if they tried to truss him up without frisking him, there was likely to be fireworks. So I moved to one side.
Fat Thomas Quarre went phlegmatically up to the Chinese to carry out his wife’s orders—and bungled the job perfectly.
He put his bulk between Tai and the old woman’s gun.
Tai’s hands moved. An automatic was in each.
Once more Tai ran true to racial form. When a Chinese shoots, he keeps on until his gun is empty.
When I yanked Tai over backward by his fat throat, and slammed him to the floor, his guns were still barking metal; and they clicked empty as I got a knee on one of his arms. I didn’t take any chances. I worked on his throat until his eyes and tongue told me that he was out of things for a while. Then I looked around.
Thomas Quarre was against the bed, plainly dead, with three round holes in his starched white vest.
Across the room, Mrs. Quarre lay on her back. Her clothes had somehow settled in place around her fragile body, and death had given her once more the gentle friendly look she had worn when I first saw her.
The red-haired girl Elvira was gone.
Presently Tai stirred, and after taking another gun from his clothes, I helped him sit up. He stroked his bruised throat with one fat hand, and looked coolly around the room.
“Where’s Elvira?” he asked.
“Got away—for the time being.”
He shrugged. “Well, you can call it a decidedly successful operation. The Quarres and Hook dead; the bonds and I in your hands.”
“Not so bad,” I admitted, “but will you do me a favor?”
“If I may.”
“Tell me what the hell this is all about!”
“All about?” he asked.
“Exactly! From what you people have let me overhear, I gather that you pulled some sort of job in Los Angeles that netted you a hundred-thousand-dollars’ worth of bonds; but I can’t remember any recent job of that size down there.”
“Why, that’s preposterous!” he said with what, for him, was almost wild-eyed amazement. “Preposterous! Of course you know all about it!”
“I do not! I was trying to find a young fellow named Fisher who left his Tacoma home in anger a week or two ago. His father wants him found on the quiet, so that he can come down and try to talk him into going home again. I was told that I might find Fisher in this block of Turk Street, and that’s what brought me here.”
He didn’t believe me. He never believed me. He went to the gallows thinking me a liar.
When I got out into the street again (and Turk Street was a lovely place when I came free into it after my evening in that house!) I bought a newspaper that told me most of what I wanted to know.
A boy of twenty—a messenger in the employ of a Los Angeles stock and bond house—had disappeared two days before, while on his way to a bank with a wad of bonds. That same night this boy and a slender girl with bobbed red hair had registered at a hotel in Fresno as J. M. Riordan and wife. The next morning the boy had been found in his room—murdered. The girl was gone. The bonds were gone.
That much the paper told me. During the next few days, digging up a little here and a little there, I succeeded in piecing together most of the story.
The Chinese—whose full name was Tai Choon Tau—had been the brains of the mob. Their game had been a variation of the always-reliable badger game. Tai would pick out some youth who was messenger or runner for a banker or broker—one who carried either cash or negotiable securities in large quantities.
The girl Elvira would then make this lad, get him all fussed up over her—which shouldn’t have been very hard for her—and then lead him gently around to running away with her and whatever he could grab in the way of his employer’s bonds or currency.
Wherever they spent the first night of their flight, there Hook would appear—foaming at the mouth and loaded for bear. The girl would plead and tear her hair and so forth, trying to keep Hook—in his rôle of irate husband—from butchering the youth. Finally she would succeed, and in the end the youth would find himself without either girl or the fruits of his thievery.
Sometimes he had surrendered to the police. Two we found had committed suicide. The Los Angeles lad had been built of tougher stuff than the others. He had put up a fight, and Hook had had to kill him. You can measure the girl’s skill in her end of the game by the fact that not one of the half dozen youths who had been trimmed had said the least thing to implicate her; and some of them had gone to great trouble to keep her out of it.
The house in Turk Street had been the mob’s retreat, and, that it might be always a safe one, they had not worked their game in San Francisco. Hook and the girl were supposed by the neighbors to be the Quarres’ son and daughter—and Tai was the Chinese cook. The Quarres’ benign and respectable appearances had also come in handy when the mob had securities to be disposed of.
* * *
—
The Chinese went to the gallows. We threw out the widest and finest-meshed of dragnets for the red-haired girl; and we turned up girls with bobbed red hair by the scores. But the girl Elvira was not among them.
I promised myself that some day…
Woman in the Dark
DASHIELL HAMMETT
THE STORY
Original publication: Liberty, April 8, April 15, and April 22, 1933; first collected in Woman in the Dark (New York, Lawrence E. Spivak, 1951)
CARROLL JOHN DALY (1889–1958) wrote the first hard-boiled private eye story, inventing the form nearly a century ago with a story titled “The False Burton Combs” featuring private investigator Terry Mack. It appeared in the December 1922 issue of Black Mask and served as the prototype for all the tough, wise-cracking private dicks who followed.
Samuel Dashiell Hammett’s (1894–1961) first Continental Op story, “Arson Plus,” followed almost immediately in the October 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask, and the American detective story was changed forever. While Daly was essentially a hack, Hammett brought literary texture and depth to the genre, influencing every hard-boiled writer who ever attempted to work in that quintessentially American literary form.
Born in Maryland, Hammett dropped out of school and, after various jobs, took a position with the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Baltimore and worked in several bureaus, notably San Francisco, and called extensively on his experiences to provide plots and authenticity to his fiction.
His first stories (published under the pseudonym Peter Collinson) appeared in The Smart Set and a year later he began to write prolifically for the top pulp magazines, mainly Black Mask; he was one of the three most popular and best paid of the pulp writers for the next decade (along with Daly and Erle Stanley Gardner).
He wrote his only five novels in a seven-year stretch, the first four being serialized in Black Mask: Red Harvest (1927–1928), The Dain Curse (1928–1929), The Maltese Falcon (1929–1930), and The Glass Key (1930); The Thin Man was first published in Redbook in 1933 and in book form in 1934.
Frail for all of his adult life, his poor health and decades-long alcoholism contributed to a dramatically reduced literary output after his final novel, though he is known to have contributed extensively to the work of his longtime, on-and-off lover,
Lillian Hellman.
THE FILM
Title: Woman in the Dark, 1934
Studio: RKO Radio Pictures
Director: Phil Rosen
Screenwriter: Sada Cowan
Producer: Burt Kelly
THE CAST
• Fay Wray (Louise Loring)
• Ralph Bellamy (John Bradley)
• Melvyn Douglas (Tony Robson)
As lucky as Hammett was with the superb film adaptations of The Maltese Falcon (1931) and The Glass Key (1935), as well as the outstanding film version of The Thin Man (1934)—although the rather dark novel was made as a comedy—that’s how unlucky he got with Woman in the Dark, which managed to turn an outstanding story into an utterly pedestrian B movie in spite of the good cast.
Apart from attempting to add a character mainly in a (failed and misguided) attempt to provide humor, the story line is a very faithful adaptation of the novella, which is a mystery story without a detective.
Louise Loring, the unhappy mistress of the fabulously wealthy Tony Robson, escapes from his abuse in the night and seeks refuge in the cabin of John Bradley, who has just served a prison term for manslaughter. When Robson and his hired man try to take Loring back, Bradley stops them, apparently badly injuring the hired man. Bradley and Loring flee but Robson tracks them down and has them arrested but, when it is learned that the hired man was beaten by Robson, the truth sets them free.
Hammett received credit above the title.
The film was also released as Woman in the Shadows.
The 1952 motion picture titled Woman in the Dark has no connection to Hammett or his original story.
WOMAN IN THE DARK
Dashiell Hammett
ONE: THE FLIGHT
Her right ankle turned under her and she fell. The wind blowing downhill from the south, whipping the trees beside the road, made a whisper of her exclamation and snatched her scarf away into the darkness. She sat up slowly, palms on the gravel pushing her up, and twisted her body sidewise to release the leg bent beneath her.
Her right slipper lay in the road close to her feet. When she put it on she found its heel was missing. She peered around, then began to hunt for the heel, hunting on hands and knees uphill into the wind, wincing a little when her right knee touched the road. Presently she gave it up and tried to break the heel off her left slipper, but could not. She replaced the slipper and rose with her back to the wind, leaning back against the wind’s violence and the road’s steep sloping. Her gown clung to her back, flew fluttering out before her. Hair lashed her cheeks. Walking high on the ball of her right foot to make up for the missing heel, she hobbled on down the hill.
At the bottom of the hill there was a wooden bridge, and, a hundred yards beyond, a sign that could not be read in the darkness marked a fork in the road. She halted there, not looking at the sign but around her, shivering now, though the wind had less force than it had had on the hill. Foliage to her left moved to show and hide yellow light. She took the left-hand fork.
In a little while she came to a gap in the bushes beside the road and sufficient light to show a path running off the road through the gap. The light came from the thinly curtained window of a house at the other end of the path.
She went up the path to the door and knocked. When there was no answer she knocked again.
A hoarse, unemotional masculine voice said: “Come in.”
She put her hand on the latch; hesitated. No sound came from within the house. Outside, the wind was noisy everywhere. She knocked once more, gently.
The voice said, exactly as before: “Come in.”
She opened the door. The wind blew it in sharply, her hold on the latch dragging her with it so that she had to cling to the door with both hands to keep from falling. The wind went past her into the room, to balloon curtains and scatter the sheets of a newspaper that had been on a table. She forced the door shut and, still leaning against it, said: “I am sorry.” She took pains with her words to make them clear notwithstanding her accent.
The man cleaning a pipe at the hearth said: “It’s all right.” His copperish eyes were as impersonal as his hoarse voice. “I’ll be through in a minute.” He did not rise from his chair. The edge of the knife in his hand rasped inside the brier bowl of his pipe.
She left the door and came forward, limping, examining him with perplexed eyes under brows drawn a little together. She was a tall woman and carried herself proudly, for all she was lame and the wind had tousled her hair and the gravel of the road had cut and dirtied her hands and bare arms and the red crepe of her gown.
She said, still taking pains with her words: “I must go to the railroad. I have hurt my ankle on the road. Eh?”
He looked up from his work then. His sallow, heavily featured face, under coarse hair nearly the color of his eyes, was not definitely hostile or friendly. He looked at the woman’s face, at her torn skirt. He did not turn his head to call: “Hey, Evelyn.”
A girl—slim maturing body in tan sport clothes, slender sunburned face with dark bright eyes and dark short hair—came into the room through a doorway behind him.
The man did not look around at her. He nodded at the woman in red and said: “This—”
The woman interrupted him: “My name is Luise Fischer.”
The man said: “She’s got a bum leg.”
Evelyn’s dark prying eyes shifted their focus from the woman to the man—she could not see his face—and to the woman again. She smiled, speaking hurriedly: “I’m just leaving. I can drop you at Mile Valley on my way home.”
The woman seemed about to smile. Under her curious gaze Evelyn suddenly blushed, and her face became defiant while it reddened. The girl was pretty. Facing her, the woman had become beautiful; her eyes were long, heavily lashed, set well apart under a smooth broad brow, her mouth was not small but sensitively carved and mobile, and in the light from the open fire the surfaces of her face were as clearly defined as sculptured planes.
The man blew through his pipe, forcing out a small cloud of black powder. “No use hurrying,” he said. “There’s no train till six.” He looked up at the clock on the mantelpiece. It said ten-thirty-three. “Why don’t you help her with her leg?”
The woman said: “No, it is not necessary. I—” She put her weight on her injured leg and flinched, steadying herself with a hand on the back of a chair.
The girl hurried to her, stammering contritely: “I—I didn’t think. Forgive me.” She put an arm around the woman and helped her into the chair.
The man stood up to put his pipe on the mantelpiece, beside the clock. He was of medium height, but his sturdiness made him look shorter. His neck, rising from the V of a gray sweater, was short, powerfully muscled. Below the sweater he wore loose gray trousers and heavy brown shoes. He clicked his knife shut and put it in his pocket before turning to look at Luise Fischer.
Evelyn was on her knees in front of the woman, pulling off her right stocking, making sympathetic clucking noises, chattering nervously: “You’ve cut your knee too. Tch-tch-tch! And look how your ankle’s swelling. You shouldn’t’ve tried to walk all that distance in these slippers.” Her body hid the woman’s bare leg from the man. “Now, sit still and I’ll fix it up in a minute.” She pulled the torn red skirt down over the bare leg.
The woman’s smile was polite. She said carefully: “You are very kind.”
The girl ran out of the room.
The man had a paper package of cigarettes in his hand. He shook it until three cigarettes protruded half an inch and held them out to her. “Smoke?”
“Thank you.” She took a cigarette, put it between her lips, and looked at his hand when he held a match to it. His hand was thick-boned, muscular, but not a laborer’s. She looked through her lashes at his face while he was lighting his cigarette. He was young
er than he had seemed at first glance—perhaps no older than thirty-two or -three—and his features, in the flare of his match, seemed less stolid than disciplined.
“Bang it up much?” His tone was merely conversational.
“I hope I have not.” She drew up her skirt to look first at her ankle, then at her knee. The ankle was perceptibly though not greatly swollen; the knee was cut once deeply, twice less seriously. She touched the edges of the cuts gently with a forefinger. “I do not like pain,” she said very earnestly.
Evelyn came in with a basin of steaming water, cloths, a roll of bandage, salve. Her dark eyes widened at the man and woman, but were hidden by lowered lids by the time their faces had turned toward her. “I’ll fix it now. I’ll have it all fixed in a minute.” She knelt in front of the woman again, nervous hand sloshing water on the floor, body between Luise Fischer’s leg and the man.
He went to the door and looked out, holding the door half a foot open against the wind.
The woman asked the girl bathing her ankle: “There is not a train before it is morning?” She pursed her lips thoughtfully.
“No.”
The man shut the door and said: “It’ll be raining in an hour.” He put more wood on the fire, then stood—legs apart, hands in pockets, cigarette dangling from one side of his mouth—watching Evelyn attend to the woman’s leg. His face was placid.
The girl dried the ankle and began to wind a bandage around it, working with increasing speed, breathing more rapidly now. Once more the woman seemed about to smile at the girl, but instead she said, “You are very kind.”
The girl murmured: “It’s nothing.”
Three sharp knocks sounded on the door.
Luise Fischer started, dropped her cigarette, looked swiftly around the room with frightened eyes. The girl did not raise her head from her work. The man, with nothing in his face or manner to show he had noticed the woman’s fright, turned his face toward the door and called in his hoarse, matter-of-fact voice: “All right. Come in.”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 212
