Red Harvest

by Dashiell Hammett

  1229A was the upper flat in a two-story building almost directly opposite Dinah’s house. 1229 was divided into two flats, with a private entrance for each. I rang the bell at the one I wanted.

  The door was opened by a thin girl of eighteen or nineteen with dark eyes set close together in a shiny yellowish face under short-cut brown hair that looked damp.

  She opened the door, made a choked, frightened sound in her throat, and backed away from me, holding both hands to her mouth.

  “Miss Helen Albury?” I asked.

  She shook her head violently from side to side. There was no truthfulness in it. Her eyes were crazy.

  I said:

  “I’d like to come in and talk to you a few minutes,” going in as I spoke, closing the door behind me.

  She didn’t say anything. She went up the steps in front of me, her head twisted around so she could watch me with her scary eyes.

  We went into a scantily furnished living room. Dinah’s house could be seen from its windows.

  The girl stood in the center of the floor, her hands still to her mouth.

  I wasted time and words trying to convince her that I was harmless. It was no good. Everything I said seemed to increase her panic. It was a damned nuisance. I quit trying, and got down to business.

  “You are Robert Albury’s sister?” I asked.

  No reply, nothing but the senseless look of utter fear.

  I said:

  “After he was arrested for killing Donald Willsson you took this flat so you could watch her. What for?”

  Not a word from her. I had to supply my own answer:

  “Revenge. You blamed Dinah Brand for your brothers trouble. You watched for your chance. It came the night before last. You sneaked into her house, found her drunk, stabbed her with the ice pick you found there.”

  She didn’t say anything. I hadn’t succeeded in jolting the blankness out of her frightened face. I said:

  “Dawn helped you, engineered it for you. He wanted Elihu Willsson’s letters. Who was the man he sent to get them, the man who did the actual killing? Who was he?”

  That got me nothing. No change in her expression, or lack of expression. No word. I thought I would like to spank her. I said:

  “I’ve given you your chance to talk. I’m willing to listen to your side of the story. But suit yourself.”

  She suited herself by keeping quiet, I gave it up. I was afraid of her, afraid she would do something even crazier than her silence if I pressed her further. I went out of the flat not sure that she had understood a single word I had said.

  At the corner I told Dick Foley:

  “There’s a girl in there, Helen Albury, eighteen, five six, skinny, not more than a hundred, if that, eyes close together, brown, yellow skin, brown short hair, straight, got on a gray suit now. Tail her. If she cuts up on you throw her in the can. Be careful—she’s crazy as a bedbug.”

  I set out for Peak Murry’s dump, to locate Reno and see what he wanted. Half a block from my destination I stepped into an office building doorway to look the situation over.

  A police patrol wagon stood in front of Murry’s. Men were being led, dragged, carried, from pool room to wagon. The leaders, draggers, and carriers, did not look like regular coppers. They were, I supposed, Pete the Finn’s crew, now special officers. Pete, with McGraw’s help, apparently was making good his threat to give Whisper and Reno all the war they wanted.

  While I watched, an ambulance arrived, was loaded, and drove away. I was too far away to recognize anybody or any bodies. When the height of the excitement seemed past I circled a couple of blocks and returned to my hotel.

  Mickey Linehan was there with information about Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn.

  “He’s the guy that the joke was wrote about: ‘Is he a criminal lawyer?’ ‘Yes, very.’ This fellow Albury that you nailed, some of his family hired this bird Dawn to defend him. Albury wouldn’t have anything to do with him when Dawn came to see him. This three-named shyster nearly went over himself last year, on a blackmail rap, something to do with a person named Hill, but squirmed out of it. Got some property out on Libert Street, wherever that is. Want me to keep digging?”

  “That’ll do. We’ll stick around till we hear from Dick.”

  Mickey yawned and said that was all right with him, never being one that had to run around a lot to keep his blood circulating, and asked if I knew we were getting nationally famous.

  I asked him what he meant by that.

  “I just ran into Tommy Robins,” he said. “The Consolidated Press sent him here to cover the doings. He tells me some of the other press associations and a big-city paper or two are sending in special correspondents, beginning to play our troubles up.”

  I was making one of my favorite complaints—that newspapers were good for nothing except to hash things up so nobody could unhash them—when I heard a boy chanting my name. For a dime he told me I was wanted on the phone.

  Dick Foley:

  “She showed right away. To 310 Green Street. Full of coppers. Mouthpiece named Dawn killed. Police took her to the Hall.”

  “She still there?”

  “Yes, in the chief’s office.”

  “Stick, and get anything you pick up to me quick.”

  I went back to Mickey Linehan and gave him my room key and instructions:

  “Camp in my room. Take anything that comes for me and pass it on. I’ll be at the Shannon around the corner, registered as J. W. Clark. Tell Dick and nobody.”

  Mickey asked, “What the hell?” got no answer, and moved his loose-jointed bulk toward the elevators.

  24

  WANTED

  I went around to the Shannon Hotel, registered my alias, paid my day’s rent, and was taken to room 321.

  An hour passed before the phone rang.

  Dick Foley said he was coming up to see me.

  He arrived within five minutes. His thin worried face was not friendly. Neither was his voice. He said:

  “Warrants out for you. Murder. Two counts—Brand and Dawn. I phoned. Mickey said he’d stick. Told me you were here. Police got him. Grilling him now.”

  “Yeah, I expected that.”

  “So did I,” he said sharply.

  I said, making myself drawl the words:

  “You think I killed them, don’t you, Dick?”

  “If you didn’t, it’s a good time to say so.”

  “Going to put the finger on me?” I asked.

  He pulled his lips back over his teeth. His face changed from tan to buff.

  I said:

  “Go back to San Francisco, Dick. I’ve got enough to do without having to watch you.”

  He put his hat on very carefully and very carefully closed the door behind him when he went out.

  At four o’clock, I had some lunch, cigarettes, and an Evening Herald sent up to me.

  Dinah Brand’s murder, and the newer murder of Charles Proctor Dawn, divided the front page of the Herald, with Helen Albury connecting them.

  Helen Albury was, I read, Robert Albury’s sister, and she was, in spite of his confession, thoroughly convinced that her brother was not guilty of murder, but the victim of a plot. She had retained Charles Proctor Dawn to defend him. (I could guess that the late Charles Proctor had hunted her up, and not she him.) The brother refused to have Dawn or any other lawyer, but the girl (properly encouraged by Dawn, no doubt) had not given up the fight.

  Finding a vacant flat across the street of Dinah Brand’s house, Helen Albury had rented it, and had installed herself therein with a pair of field glasses and one idea—to prove that Dinah and her associates were guilty of Donald Willsson’s murder.

  I, it seems, was one of the “associates.” The Herald called me “a man supposed to be a private detective from San Francisco, who has been in the city for several days, apparently on intimate terms with Max (‘Whisper’) Thaler, Daniel Rolff, Oliver (‘Reno’) Starkey, and Dinah Brand.” We were the plotters who had framed Robert Albury.<
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  The night that Dinah had been killed, Helen Albury, peeping through her window, had seen things that were, according to the Herald, extremely significant when considered in connection with the subsequent finding of Dinah’s dead body. As soon as the girl heard of the murder, she took her important knowledge to Charles Proctor Dawn. He, the police learned from his clerks, immediately sent for me, and had been closeted with me that afternoon. He had later told his clerks that I was to return the next—this—morning at ten. This morning I had not appeared to keep my appointment. At twenty-five minutes past ten, the janitor of the Rutledge Block had found Charles Proctor Dawn’s body in a corner behind the staircase, murdered. It was believed that valuable papers had been taken from the dead man’s pockets.

  At the very moment that the janitor was finding the dead lawyer, I, it seems, was in Helen Albury’s flat, having forced an entrance, and was threatening her. After she succeeded in throwing me out, she hurried to Dawn’s offices, arriving while the police were there, telling them her story. Police sent to my hotel had not found me there, but in my room they had found one Michael Linehan, who also represented himself to be a San Francisco private detective. Michael Linehan was still being questioned by the police. Whisper, Reno, Rolff and I were being hunted by the police, charged with murder. Important developments were expected.

  Page two held an interesting half-column. Detectives Shepp and Vanaman, the discoverers of Dinah Brand’s body, had mysteriously vanished. Foul play on the part of us “associates” was feared.

  There was nothing in the paper about last night’s hijacking, nothing about the raid on Peak Murry’s joint.

  I went out after dark. I wanted to get in touch with Reno.

  From a drug store I phoned Peak Murry’s pool room.

  “Is Peak there?” I asked.

  “This is Peak,” said a voice that didn’t sound anything at all like his. “Who’s talking?”

  I said disgustedly, “This is Lillian Gish,” hung up the receiver, and removed myself from the neighborhood.

  I gave up the idea of finding Reno and decided to go calling on my client, old Elihu, and try to blackjack him into good behavior with the love letters he had written Dinah Brand, and which I had stolen from Dawn’s remains.

  I walked, keeping to the darker side of the darkest streets. It was a fairly long walk for a man who sneers at exercise. By the time I reached Willsson’s block I was in bad enough humor to be in good shape for the sort of interviews he and I usually had. But I wasn’t to see him for a little while yet.

  I was two pavements from my destination when somebody S-s-s-s-s’d at me.

  I probably didn’t jump twenty feet.

  “’S all right,” a voice whispered.

  It was dark there. Peeping out under my bush—I was on my hands and knees in somebody’s front yard—I could make out the form of a man crouching close to a hedge, on my side of it.

  My gun was in my hand now. There was no special reason why I shouldn’t take his word for it that it was all right.

  I got up off my knees and went to him. When I got close enough I recognized him as one of the men who had let me into the Ronney Street house the day before.

  I sat on my heels beside him and asked:

  “Where’ll I find Reno? Hank O’Marra said he wanted to see me.”

  “He does that. Know where Kid McLeod’s place is at?”

  “No.”

  “It’s on Martin Street above King, corner the alley. Ask for the Kid. Go back that-away three blocks, and then down. You can’t miss it.”

  I said I’d try not to, and left him crouching behind his hedge, watching my client’s place, waiting, I guessed, for a shot at Pete the Finn, Whisper, or any of Reno’s other un-friends who might happen to call on old Elihu.

  Following directions, I came to a soft drink and rummy establishment with red and yellow paint all over it. Inside I asked for Kid McLeod. I was taken into a back room, where a fat man with a dirty collar, a lot of gold teeth, and only one ear, admitted he was McLeod.

  “Reno sent for me,” I said, “Where’ll I find him?”

  “And who does that make you?” he asked.

  I told him who I was. He went out without saying anything. I waited ten minutes. He brought a boy back with him, a kid of fifteen or so with a vacant expression on a pimply red face.

  “Go with Sonny,” Kid McLeod told me.

  I followed the boy out a side door, down two blocks of back street, across a sandy lot, through a ragged gate, and up to the back door of a frame house.

  The boy knocked on the door and was asked who he was.

  “Sonny, with a guy the Kid sent,” he replied.

  The door was opened by long-legged O’Marra. Sonny went away. I went into a kitchen where Reno Starkey and four other men sat around a table that had a lot of beer on it. I noticed that two automatic pistols hung on nails over the top of the door through which I had come. They would be handy if any of the house’s occupants opened the door, found an enemy with a gun there, and were told to put up their hands.

  Reno poured me a glass of beer and led me through the dining room into a front room. A man lay on his belly there, with one eye to the crack between the drawn blind and the bottom of the window, watching the street.

  “Go back and get yourself some beer,” Reno told him.

  He got up and went away. We made ourselves comfortable in adjoining chairs.

  “When I fixed up that Tanner alibi for you,” Reno said, “I told you I was doing it because I needed all the friends I could get.”

  “You got one.”

  “Crack the alibi yet?” he asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “It’ll hold,” he assured me, “unless they got too damned much on you. Think they have?”

  I did think so. I said:

  “No. McGraw’s just feeling playful. That’ll take care of itself. How’s your end holding up?”

  He emptied his glass, wiped his mouth on the back of a hand, and said:

  “I’ll make out. But that’s what I wanted to see you about. Here’s how she stacks up. Pete’s throwed in with McGraw. That lines coppers and beer mob up against me and Whisper. But hell! Me and Whisper are busier trying to put the chive in each other than bucking the combine. That’s a sour racket. While we’re tangling, them bums will eat us up.”

  I said I had been thinking the same thing. He went on:

  “Whisper’ll listen to you. Find him, will you? Put it to him. Here’s the proposish: he means to get me for knocking off Jerry Hooper, and I mean to get him first. Let’s forget that for a couple of days. Nobody won’t have to trust nobody else. Whisper don’t ever show in any of his jobs anyways. He just sends the boys. I’ll do the same this time. We’ll just put the mobs together to swing the caper. We run them together, rub out the damned Finn, and then we’ll have plenty of time to go gunning among ourselves.

  “Put it to him cold. I don’t want him to get any ideas that I’m dodging a rumpus with him or any other guy. Tell him I say if we put Pete out of the way we’ll have more room to do our own scrapping in. Pete’s holed-up down in Whiskeytown. I ain’t got enough men to go down there and pull him out. Neither has Whisper. The two of us together has. Put it to him.”

  “Whisper,” I said, “is dead.”

  Reno said, “Is that so?” as if he thought it wasn’t.

  “Dan Rolff killed him yesterday morning, down in the old Redman warehouse, stuck him with the ice pick Whisper had used on the girl.”

  Reno asked:

  “You know this? You’re not just running off at the head?”

  “I know it.”

  “Damned funny none of his mob act like he was gone,” he said, but he was beginning to believe me.

  “They don’t know it. He was hiding out, with Ted Wright the only one in on the where. Ted knew it. He cashed in on it. He told me he got a hundred or a hundred and fifty from you, through Peak Murry.”

  “I’d have given the b
ig umpchay twice that for the straight dope,” Reno grumbled. He rubbed his chin and said: “Well, that settles the Whisper end.”

  I said: “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “If his mob don’t know where he is,” I suggested, “let’s tell them. They blasted him out of the can when Noonan copped him. Think they’d try it again if the news got around that McGraw had picked him up on the quiet?”

  “Keep talking,” Reno said.

  “If his friends try to crack the hoosegow again, thinking he’s in it, that’ll give the department, including Pete’s specials, something to do. While they’re doing it, you could try your luck in Whiskeytown.”

  “Maybe,” he said slowly, “maybe we’ll try just that thing.”

  “It ought to work,” I encouraged him, standing up. “I’ll see you—”

  “Stick around. This is as good a spot as any while there’s a reader out for you. And we’ll need a good guy like you on the party.”

  I didn’t like that so much. I knew enough not to say so. I sat down again.

  Reno got busy arranging the rumor. The telephone was worked overtime. The kitchen door was worked as hard, letting men in and out. More came in than went out. The house filled with men, smoke, tension.

  25

  WHISKEYTOWN

  At half-past one Reno turned from answering a phone call to say:

  “Let’s take a ride.”

  He went upstairs. When he came down he carried a black valise. Most of the men had gone out the kitchen door by then.

  Reno gave me the black valise, saying:

  “Don’t wrastle it around too much.”

  It was heavy.

  The seven of us left in the house went out the front door and got into a curtained touring car that O’Marra had just driven up to the curb. Reno sat beside O’Marra. I was squeezed in between men in the back seat, with the valise squeezed between my legs.

  Another car came out of the first cross street to run ahead of us. A third followed us. Our speed hung around forty, fast enough to get us somewhere, not fast enough to get us a lot of attention.