Arson Plus and Other Stories

by Dashiell Hammett

  “That’s going to make it lovely for your daughter. But, aside from what it’ll do to her, it’s the wrong play. Fifty thousand isn’t a whole lot to you, and paying it over will give us two chances that we haven’t got now. One when the payment is made—a chance to either nab whoever comes for it or get a line on them. And the other when your daughter is returned. No matter how careful they are it’s a cinch that she’ll be able to tell us something that will help us grab them.”

  He shook his head angrily, and I was tired of arguing with him. So I left him, hoping that he’d see the wisdom of the course I had advised before too late.

  At the Gatewood residence I found butlers, second men, chauffeurs, cooks, maids, upstairs girls, downstairs girls, and a raft of miscellaneous flunkies—he had enough servants to run a hotel.

  What they told me amounted to this: The girl had not received a phone call, note by messenger, or telegram—the time-honored devices for luring a victim out to a murder or abduction—before she left the house. She had told her maid that she would be back within an hour or two; but the maid had not been alarmed when her mistress failed to return all that night.

  Audrey was the only child, and since her mother’s death she had come and gone to suit herself. She and her father didn’t hit it off very well together—their natures were too much alike, I gathered—and he never knew where she was; and there was nothing unusual about her remaining away all night, as she seldom bothered to leave word when she was going to stay overnight with friends.

  She was nineteen years old, but looked several years older; about five feet five inches tall, and slender. She had blue eyes, brown hair,—very thick and long,—was pale and very nervous. Her photographs, of which I took a handful, showed that her eyes were large, her nose small and regular, and her chin obstinately pointed.

  She was not beautiful, but in the one photograph where a smile had wiped off the sullenness of her mouth, she was at least pretty.

  When she left the house she had worn a light tweed skirt and jacket with a London tailor’s labels in them, a buff silk shirtwaist with stripes a shade darker, brown wool stockings, low-heeled brown oxfords, and an untrimmed grey felt hat.

  I went up to her rooms—she had three on the third floor—and looked through all her stuff. I found nearly a bushel of photographs of men, boys, and girls; and a great stack of letters of varying degrees of intimacy, signed with a wide assortment of names and nicknames. I made notes of all the addresses I found.

  Nothing there seemed to have any bearing on her abduction, but there was a chance that one of the names and addresses might be of someone who had served as a decoy. Also, some of her friends might be able to tell us something of value.

  I dropped in at the Agency and distributed the names and addresses among the three operatives who were idle, sending them out to see what they could dig up.

  Then I reached the police detectives who were working on the case—O’Gar and Thode—by telephone, and went down to the Hall of Justice to meet them. Lusk, a post office inspector, was also there. We turned the job around and around, looking at it from every angle, but not getting very far. We were all agreed, however, that we couldn’t take a chance on any publicity, or work in the open, until the girl was safe.

  They had had a worse time with Gatewood than I—he had wanted to put the whole thing in the newspapers, with the offer of a reward, photographs and all. Of course, Gatewood was right in claiming that this was the most effective way of catching the kidnappers—but it would have been tough on his daughter if her captors happened to be persons of sufficiently hardened character. And kidnappers as a rule aren’t lambs.

  I looked at the letter they had sent. It was printed with pencil on ruled paper of the kind that is sold in pads by every stationery dealer in the world. The envelope was just as common, also addressed in pencil, and post-marked “San Francisco, September 20, 9 P.M.” That was the night she had been seized.

  The letter reads:

  SIR:

  WE HAVE YOUR CHARMING DAUGHTER AND PLACE A VALUE OF $50,000 UPON HER. YOU WILL GET THE MONEY READY IN $100 BILLS AT ONCE SO THERE WILL BE NO DELAY WHEN WE TELL YOU HOW IT IS TO BE PAID OVER TO US.

  WE BEG TO ASSURE YOU THAT THINGS WILL GO BADLY WITH YOUR DAUGHTER SHOULD YOU NOT DO AS YOU ARE TOLD, OR SHOULD YOU BRING THE POLICE INTO THIS MATTER, OR SHOULD YOU DO ANYTHING FOOLISH.

  $50,000 IS ONLY A SMALL FRACTION OF WHAT YOU STOLE WHILE WE WERE LIVING IN MUD AND BLOOD IN FRANCE FOR YOU, AND WE MEAN TO GET THAT MUCH OR …… !

  THREE.

  A peculiar note in several ways. They are usually written with a great pretense of partial illiterateness. Almost always there’s an attempt to lead suspicion astray. Perhaps the ex-service stuff was there for that purpose … or perhaps not.

  Then there was a postscript:

  WE KNOW A CHINAMAN WHO WILL BUY HER EVEN AFTER WE ARE THROUGH WITH HER—IN CASE YOU WON’T LISTEN TO REASON.

  The letter from the girl was written jerkily on the same kind of paper, apparently with the same pencil.

  Daddy—

  Please do as they ask! I am so afraid—

  Audrey

  A door at the other end of the room opened, and a head came through.

  “O’Gar! Thode! Gatewood just called up. Get up to his office right away!”

  The four of us tumbled out of the Hall of Justice and into a machine.

  Gatewood was pacing his office like a maniac when we pushed aside enough hirelings to get to him. His face was hot with blood and his eyes had an insane glare in them.

  “She just phoned me!” he cried thickly, when he saw us.

  It took a minute or two to get him calm enough to tell us about it.

  “She called me on the phone. Said, ‘Oh, daddy! Do something! I can’t stand this—they’re killing me!’ I asked her if she knew where she was, and she said, ‘No, but I can see Twin Peaks from here. There’s three men and a woman, and—’ And then I heard a man curse, and a sound as if he had struck her, and the phone went dead. I tried to get central to give me the number, but she couldn’t! It’s a damned outrage the way the telephone system is run. We pay enough for service, God knows, and we …”

  O’Gar scratched his head and turned away from Gatewood.

  “In sight of Twin Peaks! There are hundreds of houses that are!”

  Gatewood meanwhile had finished denouncing the telephone company and was pounding on his desk with a paperweight to attract our attention.

  “Have you people done anything at all?” he demanded.

  I answered him with another question: “Have you got the money ready?”

  “No,” he said, “I won’t be held up by anybody!”

  But he said it mechanically, without his usual conviction—the talk with his daughter had shaken him out of some of his stubbornness. He was thinking of her safety a little now instead of altogether of his own fighting spirit.

  We went at him hammer and tongs for a few minutes, and after a while he sent a clerk out for the money.

  We split up the field then. Thode was to take some men from headquarters and see what he could find in the Twin Peaks end of town; but we weren’t very optimistic over the prospects there—the territory was too large.

  Lusk and O’Gar were to carefully mark the bills that the clerk brought from the bank, and then stick as close to Gatewood as they could without attracting attention. I was to go out to Gatewood’s house and stay there.

  The abductors had plainly instructed Gatewood to get the money ready immediately so that they could arrange to get it on short notice—not giving him time to communicate with anyone or make any plans.

  Gatewood was to get hold of the newspapers, give them the whole story, with the $10,000 reward he was offering for the abductors’ capture, to be published as soon as the girl was safe—so that we would get the help of publicity at the earl
iest moment possible without jeopardizing the girl.

  The police in all the neighboring towns had already been notified—that had been done before the girl’s phone message had assured us that she was held in San Francisco.

  Nothing happened at the Gatewood residence all that evening. Harvey Gatewood came home early; and after dinner he paced his library floor and drank whiskey until bedtime, demanding every few minutes that we, the detectives in the case, do something besides sit around like a lot of damned mummies. O’Gar, Lusk and Thode were out in the street, keeping an eye on the house and neighborhood.

  At midnight Harvey Gatewood went to bed. I declined a bed in favor of the library couch, which I dragged over beside the telephone, an extension of which was in Gatewood’s bedroom.

  At two-thirty the bell rang. I listened in while Gatewood talked from his bed.

  A man’s voice, crisp and curt: “Gatewood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Got the dough?”

  “Yes.”

  Gatewood’s voice was thick and blurred—I could imagine the boiling that was going on inside him.

  “Good!” came the brisk voice. “Put a piece of paper around it, and leave the house with it, right away! Walk down Clay street, keeping on the same side as your house. Don’t walk too fast and keep walking. If everything’s all right, and there’s no elbows tagging along, somebody’ll come up to you between your house and the water-front. They’ll have a handkerchief up to their face for a second, and then they’ll let it fall to the ground.

  “When you see that, you’ll lay the money on the pavement, turn around and walk back to your house. If the money isn’t marked, and you don’t try any fancy tricks, you’ll get your daughter back in an hour or two. If you try to pull anything—remember what we wrote you about the Chink! Got it straight?”

  Gatewood sputtered something that was meant for an affirmative, and the telephone clicked silent.

  I didn’t waste any of my precious time tracing the call—it would be from a public telephone, I knew—but yelled up the stairs to Gatewood:

  “You do as you were told, and don’t try any foolishness!”

  Then I ran out into the early morning air to find the police detectives and the post office inspector.

  They had been joined by two plainclothes men, and had two automobiles waiting. I told them what the situation was, and we laid hurried plans.

  O’Gar was to drive in one of the machines down Sacramento street, and Thode, in the other, down Washington street. These streets parallel Clay, one on each side. They were to drive slowly, keeping pace with Gatewood, and stopping at each cross street to see that he passed.

  When he failed to cross within a reasonable time they were to turn up to Clay street—and their actions from then on would have to be guided by chance and their own wits.

  Lusk was to wander along a block or two ahead of Gatewood, on the opposite side of the street, pretending to be mildly intoxicated, and keeping his eyes and ears open.

  I was to shadow Gatewood down the street, with one of the plainclothes men behind me. The other plainclothes man was to turn in a call at headquarters for every available man to be sent to Clay street. They would arrive too late, of course, and as likely as not it would take them some time to find us; but we had no way of knowing what was going to turn up before the night was over.

  Our plan was sketchy enough, but it was the best we could do—we were afraid to grab whoever got the money from Gatewood. The girl’s talk with her father that afternoon had sounded too much as if her captors were desperate for us to take any chances on going after them rough-shod until she was out of their hands.

  We had hardly finished our plans when Gatewood, wearing a heavy overcoat, left his house and turned down the street.

  Farther down, Lusk, weaving along, talking to himself, was almost invisible in the shadows. There was no one else in sight. That meant that I had to give Gatewood at least two blocks’ lead, so that the man who came for the money wouldn’t tumble to me. One of the plainclothes men was half a block behind me, on the other side of the street.

  Two blocks down we walked, and then a little chunky man in a derby hat came into sight. He passed Gatewood, passed me, went on.

  Three blocks more.

  A touring-car, large, black, powerfully engined, and with lowered curtains, came from the rear, passed us, went on. Possibly a scout! I scrawled its license number down on my pad without taking my hand out of my overcoat pocket.

  Another three blocks.

  A policeman passed, strolling along in ignorance of the game being played under his nose; and then a taxicab with a single male passenger. I wrote down its license number.

  Four blocks with no one in sight ahead of me but Gatewood—I couldn’t see Lusk any more.

  Just ahead of Gatewood a man stepped out of a black doorway—turned around—called up to a window for someone to come down and open the door for him.

  We went on.

  Coming from nowhere, a woman stood on the sidewalk fifty feet ahead of Gatewood, a handkerchief to her face. It fluttered to the pavement.

  Gatewood stopped, standing stiff-legged. I could see his right hand come up, lifting the side of the overcoat in which it was pocketed—and I knew the hand was gripped around a pistol.

  For perhaps half a minute he stood like a statue. Then his left hand came out of his pocket, and the bundle of money fell to the sidewalk in front of him, where it made a bright blur in the darkness. Gatewood turned abruptly, and began to retrace his steps homeward.

  The woman had recovered her handkerchief. Now she ran to the bundle, picked it up, and scuttled to the black mouth of an alley, a few feet distant—a rather tall woman, bent, and in dark clothes from head to feet.

  In the black mouth of the alley she vanished.

  I had been compelled to slow up while Gatewood and the woman stood facing each other, and I was more than a block away now. As soon as the woman disappeared I took a chance, and started pounding my rubber soles against the pavement.

  The alley was empty when I reached it.

  It ran all the way through to the next street, but I knew that the woman couldn’t have reached the other end before I got to this one. I carry a lot of weight these days, but I can still step a block or two in good time. Along both sides of the alley were the rears of apartment buildings, each with its back door looking blankly, secretively at me.

  The plainclothes man who had been trailing behind me came up, then O’Gar and Thode in their machines, and soon, Lusk. O’Gar and Thode rode off immediately to wind through the neighboring streets, hunting for the woman. Lusk and the plainclothes man each planted himself on a corner from which two of the streets enclosing the block could be watched.

  I went through the alley, hunting vainly for an unlocked door, an open window, a fire-escape that would show recent use—any of the signs that a hurried departure from the alley might leave.

  Nothing!

  O’Gar came back shortly with some reinforcements from headquarters that he had picked up, and Gatewood.

  Gatewood was burning.

  “Bungled the damn thing again! I won’t pay your agency a nickel, and I’ll see that some of these so-called detectives get put back in a uniform and set to walking beats!”

  “What’d the woman look like?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know! I thought you were hanging around to take care of her! She was old and bent, kind of, I guess, but I couldn’t see her face for her veil. I don’t know! What the hell were you men doing? It’s a damned outrage the way …”

  I finally got him quieted down and took him home, leaving the city men to keep the neighborhood under surveillance. There was fourteen or fifteen of them on the job now, and every shadow held at least one.

  The girl would naturally head for home as soon as she was released and I wanted
to be there to pump her. There was an excellent chance of catching her abductors before they got very far if she could tell us anything at all about them.

  Home, Gatewood went up against the whiskey bottle again, while I kept one ear cocked at the telephone and the other at the front door. O’Gar or Thode phoned every half hour or so to ask if we’d heard from the girl. They had still found nothing.

  At nine o’clock they, with Lusk, arrived at the house. The woman in black had turned out to be a man, and had gotten away.

  In the rear of one of the apartment buildings that touched the alley—just a foot or so within the back-door—they found a woman’s skirt, long coat, hat and veil—all black. Investigating the occupants of the house, they had learned that an apartment had been rented to a young man named Leighton three days before.

  Leighton was not at home when they went up to his apartment. His rooms held a lot of cold cigarette butts, and an empty bottle, and nothing else that had not been there when he rented it.

  The inference was clear: he had rented the apartment so that he might have access to the building. Wearing woman’s clothes over his own, he had gone out of the back door—leaving it unlatched behind him—to meet Gatewood.

  Then he had run back into the building, discarded his disguise, and hurried through the building, out the front door, and away before we had our feeble net around the block; perhaps dodging into dark doorways here and there to avoid O’Gar and Thode in their automobiles.

  Leighton, it seemed, was a man of about thirty, slender, about five feet eight or nine inches tall, with dark hair and eyes; rather good-looking, and well-dressed, on the two occasions when people living in the building had seen him, in a brown suit and a light brown felt hat.

  There was no possibility, according to the opinions of both of the detectives and the post office inspector, that the girl might have been held, even temporarily, in Leighton’s apartment.

  Ten o’clock came, and no word from the girl.

  Gatewood had lost his domineering bull-headedness by now and was breaking up. The suspense was getting him, and the liquor he had put away wasn’t helping him. I didn’t like him either personally or by reputation, but at that I felt sorry for him this morning.