The Dashiell Hammett Megapack: 20 Classic Stories

by Dashiell Hammett

  Just at the wrong minute Henderson decided to look over his shoulder at us—an unevenness in the road twisted his wheels—his machine swayed—skidded—went over on its side. Almost immediately, from the heart of the tangle, came a flash and a bullet moaned past my ear. Another. And then, while I was still hunting for something to shoot at in the pile of junk we were drawing down upon, McClump’s ancient and battered revolver roared in my other ear.

  Henderson was dead when we got to him—McClump’s bullet had taken him over one eye.

  McClump spoke to me over the body.

  “I ain’t an inquisitive sort of fellow, but I hope you don’t mind telling me why I shot this lad.”

  “Because he was—Thornburgh.”

  He didn’t say anything for about five minutes. Then: “I reckon that’s right. How’d you know it?”

  We were sitting beside the wreckage now, waiting for the police that we had sent our commandeered chauffeur to phone for.

  “He had to be,” I said, “when you think it all over. Funny we didn’t hit on it before! All that stuff we were told about Thornburgh had a fishy sound. Whiskers and an unknown profession, immaculate and working on a mysterious invention, very secretive and born in San Francisco—where the fire wiped out all the old records—just the sort of fake that could be cooked up easily.

  “Now, consider Henderson. You had told me he came to Sacramento sometime early this summer—and the dates you got tonight show that he didn’t come until after Thornburgh had bought his house. All right! Now compare Henderson with the descriptions we got of Thornburgh.

  “Both are about the same size and age, and with the same color hair. The differences are all things that can be manufactured—clothes, a little sunburn, and a month’s growth of beard, along with a little acting, would do the trick. Tonight I went out to Tavender and took a look at the last batch of laundry—and there wasn’t any that didn’t fit the Coonses! And none of the bills all the way back were large enough for Thornburgh to have been as careful about his clothes as we were told he was.”

  “It must be great to be a detective!” McClump grinned as the police ambulance came up and began disgorging policemen. “I reckon somebody must have tipped Henderson off that I was asking about him this evening.” And then, regretfully: “So we ain’t going to hang them folks for murder after all.”

  “No, but we oughtn’t have any trouble convicting them of arson plus conspiracy to defraud, and anything else that the Prosecuting Attorney can think up.”

  THE NEW RACKET

  Also published as “The Judge Laughed Last”

  “The trouble with this country,” Old Man Covey unexpectedly exploded, emphasizing his words with repeated beats of a gnarled forefinger on the newspaper he had been reading, “is that the courts have got a stranglehold on it! Law? There ain’t no law! There’s courts and there’s judges, and this thing you call the law is a weapon they use to choke human enterprise—to discourage originality and progress!” The portion of the morning paper upon which the old man’s assault was concentrated, I saw with difficulty, held the report of a decision of the Supreme Court in connection with some labor difficulties in the West. Old Man Covey, I knew, couldn’t be personally interested in either side of the dispute. He had as little to do with capital as with labor, which was very little. For eight years now—since the day when a street preacher had turned “Big-dog” Covey from the ways of crime, to become plain John Covey and, later, Old Man Covey—he had subsisted upon the benevolence of a son-in-law.

  His interest in this case was, then, purely academic. But his attitude was undoubtedly tinged by his earlier experience with the criminal courts, which had been more than superficial, and I suspected that some especially bitter memory had engendered this outburst.

  So I rolled another cigarette and led him gently along the road of argumentation—the most direct path, I had learned, to the interior of his contrary old mind.

  “Being a beak,” I said, using the vernacular term for judge in an attempt to do all I could to stir up the portions of his remembrance that had to do with his days of youth and lawlessness, “is a tough job. Laws are complicated and puzzling, and it isn’t easy to straighten them out so that they fit particular cases. Most of the beaks do very well, I think.”

  “You think so, do you?” the old scoundrel snarled at me. “Well, let me tell you, sonny, you don’t know a damned thing about it! I could tell you stories about beaks and their ways that would knock your eye out!”

  I put all the skepticism I could summon into a smile, confident now that I had him. “You look at things from your own side,” I replied, “and in those days you were on the wrong side. Now I don’t say that judges don’t make mistakes now and then. They do. They’re only human. But I never heard of a case where you could say that a judge had positively twisted the law around to—”

  That turned the trick. He cursed and snorted and glared at me, and I grinned my insincere doubts, and the story finally came out.

  “Me and ‘Flogger’ Rork was on the road together some years ago, with a gun apiece and a couple big handkerchiefs to hide our mugs behind when we needed to. All-night grease-joints was our meat, and we done ourselves pretty well. We’d knock over a couple a night some nights. We’d drift into them separate at three or four in the morning, not letting on we knew each other, and stall over coffee and sinkers until we was alone with the guy behind the counter. Then we’d flash the rods on him, take what was in the damper, and slide on. No big hauls, you understand, but a steady, reliable income.

  “We work that way for a few months, and then I get an idea for a new racket—and it’s a darb! Flogger—he’s an unimaginative sort of jobbie—can’t see it at first. But I keep jawing at him until he gives in and agrees to take a whirl at it.

  “You never seen Flogger Rork, did you? I thought not. Well, he’s a good guy—what ‘Limey’ Pine used to call a ‘bene cove’—but he ain’t no flower to look at. I seen a cartoon of a burglar once in a newspaper during one of these crime waves, and that’s the only time I ever seen a face like Flogger’s. A good guy—but we had to be careful how we moved around, because bulls had a habit of picking us up just on account of his face. Me—nobody hadn’t ever took me for a lamb, myself; though alongside of Flogger I look pretty sweet.

  “These mugs of ours had been handicaps to us so far, but now under my new scheme we’re going to cash in on them.

  “We was in the Middle West at the time. We blow into the next burg on our list, look the main drag over, and go to work. Our guns are ditched down under a pile of rocks near the jungle.

  “We make a drugstore. There’s two nice little boys in it. I plant myself in front of one of them, with one hand in my coat pocket, and Flogger does the same with the other.” ‘Come through,’ we tells ’em.

  “Without a squawk, one of ’em pushes down the ‘No Sale’ key of the damper, scoops out every nickel that’s in it, and passes it over to Flogger.

  “‘Lay down behind the counter and don’t be too much in a hurry about getting up,’ we tell them next.

  “They do as they’re told, and me and Flogger go on out and about our business.

  “The next day we push over two more stores and move on to the next town. Every town we hit we give our new racket a couple of whirls, and it goes nice. Having an ace up our sleeves, we can take chances that otherwise would have been foolish—we can pull a couple or even three jobs a day without waiting for the rumpus from the first one to die down. “Pickings were pretty them days!

  “Then, one afternoon in a fresh burg, we push over a garage, a pawnshop and a shoe store, and we get picked up.

  “The bulls that nabbed us was loaded for bear, but—outside of running until we saw it was no use—we went along with them as nice as you please. When they frisked us they found the money from that day’s jobs, but that
was all. The rest was cached where we knew it would be when we wanted it. And our guns was still under that pile of stones three. States away. We didn’t have no use for them any more.

  “The guys we had stuck up that afternoon came in to look us over, and they all identified us right away. As one of ’em said there was no forgettin’ our faces. But we sat tight and said nothing. We knew where we stood and we were satisfied.

  “After a couple days they let us have a mouthpiece. We picked out a kid whose diploma hadn’t been with him long enough to collect any dust yet, but he looked like he wouldn’t throw us down; and he didn’t have to know much law for us. Then we laid around and took jail life easy.

  “A few days of that, and they yank us into court. We let things run along for a while without fightin’ back, until the right time came. Then our kid mouthpiece gets up and springs our little joker on them.

  “His clients, he says, meaning me and Flogger, are perfectly willing to plead guilty to begging. But there is nothing to hold them for robbery on. They were in need of funds, and they went into three business establishments and asked for money. They had no weapons. The evidence doesn’t show that they made any threats. Whatever motives may have prompted the persons in the stores to hand over the contents of the various cash registers to oblige them—the kid says—has no bearing on the matter. The evidence is plain. His clients asked for money and it was given to them. Begging, certainly—and so his clients are liable to sentences of 30 days or so in the county jail for vagrancy. But robbery—no!

  “Well, son, it was a riot! I thought the beak was going to bust something. He’s a big bloated hick with a red face and a pair of nose-pinchers. His face turns purple now, and the cheaters slide down his nose three times in five minutes. The district attorney does a proper war dance with the whoops and all. But we had ’em!”

  The old man stopped with an air of finality. I waited a while, but he didn’t resume the story, if there were, indeed, any more to it; so I prodded him.

  “I don’t see where that proves your contention,” I said. “There’s no using of the law as a weapon there.”

  “Wait, sonny, wait,” he promised. “You’ll see before I’m through… They put their witnesses back on the stand again, then. But there was nothing to it. None of ’em had seen any weapons, and none of ’em couldn’t say we had threatened ’em. They said things about our looks, but it ain’t a crime to be ugly.

  “They shut up shop for the day, then, and chased me and Flogger back to the jail. And we went back as happy a pair as you ever seen. We had the world by the tail with a downhill pull, and we liked it. Thirty days, or even sixty, in the county jail on a vag charge didn’t mean nothing to us. We’d had that happen to us before, and got over it.

  “We were happy—but that came from the ignorance of our trustin’ natures. We thought maybe a court was a place where justice was done after all; where right was right; and where things went accordin’ to the law. We’d been in trouble with the law before, plenty, but this was different—we had the law on our side this time; and we counted on it stickin’ with us. But—”

  “Well, anyway, they take us back over to court after a few more days. And as soon as I get a slant at the beak and the district attorney I get sort of a chill up my back. They got mean lights in their eyes, like a coupla kids that had put tacks on a chair and was a-waiting for somebody to sit on them. Maybe, I think, they’ve rigged things up so’s they can slip us two or three, or even six, months on vag charges. But I didn’t suspect half of it!

  “Say, you’ve heard this chatter about how slow the courts are, haven’t you? Well, let me tell you, nothing in the world ever moved any faster than that court that morning. Before we had got fixed in our chairs, almost, things was humming.

  “Our kid mouthpiece is bouncing up and down continuous, trying to get a word in. But not a chance! Every time he opens his mouth the beak cracks down on him and shuts him up; even threatening to throw him out and fine him in the bargain if he don’t keep quiet. “The man we’d gone up against in the garage was the proprietor, but the ones in the hock shop and the shoe store were just hirelings. So they leave the garage man out of the game. But they put the other two in the dock, charged with grand larceny, have ’em plead guilty, sentence ’em to five years apiece, and suspend the sentences before you could shift a chew from one cheek to the other. “‘If,’ the beak says in answer to our mouthpiece’s squawk, ‘your clients simply asked for the money and these men gave it to them, then these two men are guilty of theft, since the money belonged to their employers. There is nothing for the court to do, therefore but to find them guilty of grand larceny and sentence them to five years each in the state prison. But the evidence tends to show that these men were actuated simply by an overwhelming desire to help two of their fellow men; that they were induced to steal the money simply by an ungovernable impulse to charity. And the court, therefore, feels that it is justified in exercising its legal privilege of leniency, and suspending their sentences.’

  “Me and Flogger don’t understand what’s being done to us right away, but our mouthpiece does, and as soon as I get a look at him I know it’s pretty bad. He’s sort of gasping.

  “The rest of the dirty work takes longer, but there’s no stopping it. This old buzzard of a judge has our charges changed to ‘receiving stolen property’—a felony in that state; we are convicted on two counts, and he slips us ten years in the big house on each, the hitches to run end to end.

  “And does that old buzzard feel that the court should exercise its legal privilege of leniency and suspend our sentences? Fat chance! Me and Flogger goes over!”

  BODIES PILED UP

  Also published as “House Dick”

  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 had been fired. I happened 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 restful 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, 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. In the center of the floor stood a maid, staring goggle-eyed at the closed door of the clothes-press. From 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 clothespress 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 clothespress, 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 whisky glass and another under the tub. Both were dry, clean, and odorless.

  The inside of the clothespress 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 clothespress—had arrived at the hotel three days before, registering as Tudor Ingraham of Washington, D.C., and had occupied room 915, three doors away.