A box or barrel fell over with a crash—knocked over by Zumwalt, 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 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 and 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 paunch 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 that there would be no rasping of the large quantities of air I was taking in and letting out.
Abruptly 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 in 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 Zumwalt’s plea was that he had killed his partner in self-defense. Zumwalt testified that he had taken the Gorham bonds in a futile 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 Zumwalt with the theft.
Zumwalt at that time had not suspected his partner’s own dishonest plans, and had promised to restore the bonds. They had gone to Zumwalt’s house to discuss the matter; and, Rathbone, dissatisfied with his partner’s plan of restitution, had attacked Zumwalt, and had been killed in the ensuing struggle.
Then Zumwalt had told Mildred Narbett, his stenographer, the whole 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 Zumwalt had lured his partner out to the Fourteenth Avenue house for the purpose of killing him; so Zumwalt was found guilty of murder in the first degree.
The first jury before which Mildred Narbett 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 any knowledge of either crime until afterward; and that her later complicity was, in view of her love for Zumwalt, not altogether blameworthy.
BODIES PILED UP
Black Mask, 1 December 1923
One of our best detectives is this nameless sleuth of Mr. Hammett’s. He’s deductive, practical, and maybe a little unromantic. Probably that’s why he runs into such wild adventures and takes such horrible chances. In this story he walks into a whirlwind of death. Go to it.
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 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. In the center of the floor stood a maid, staring goggle-eyed at the closed door of the clothespress. 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 bath tub 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 t
he 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.
The last man to fall out—the one who had been simply choked—was the occupant of this room. His name was Vincent Develyn. He was an 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 Develyn’s company frequently, and one of the clerks remembered that they had come into the hotel together at 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 Lankershim and Ansley, whose offices were in the Miles Building—next door to Develyn’s office, in fact.
Develyn’s pockets held between $150 and $200; Ansley’s wallet contained more than $100; Ingraham’s pockets yielded nearly $300, and in a money belt around his waist we found $2200 and two medium-sized unset diamonds. All three had watches—Develyn’s was a valuable one—in their pockets, and Ingraham wore two rings, both of which were expensive ones. Ingraham’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 Ingraham’s and Develyn’s rooms teach us anything.
In Ingraham’s room we found a dozen or more packs of carefully marked cards, some crooked dice, and an immense amount of data on racehorses. Also we found that he had a wife who lived on East Delavan Avenue in Buffalo, and a brother on Crutcher 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.
Phels, the police department Bertillon man, found a number of fingerprints in Develyn’s room, but we couldn’t tell whether they would be of any value or not until he had worked them up. Though Develyn and Ansley had apparently been strangled by hands, Phels was unable to get prints from either their necks or their collars.
The maid who had discovered the blood said that she had straightened up Develyn’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 the key on the inside, and, as soon as she entered, had seen the blood and telephoned Stacey. She had seen no one in the corridor nearby as she entered the room.
She had straightened up Ingraham’s room, she said, at a few minutes after one. She had gone there earlier—between 10:20 and 10:45—for that purpose, but Ingraham had not then left it.
The elevator man who had carried Ansley and Develyn 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 at 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 corridors 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 Ingraham and Develyn together. There was nothing to show that they had even the slightest acquaintance. Ingraham 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 the police department homicide detail, and I—questioned Ansley’s partner and Develyn’s employees. Both Develyn and Ansley, it seemed, were ordinary men who led 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 Develyn’s room first for a drink apiece from a bottle of gin someone coming from Australia had smuggled in to him.
“Well,” O’Hara said, when we were on the street again, “this much is clear. If they went up to Develyn’s room for a drink, it’s a cinch that they were killed almost as soon as they got in the room. Those whisky glasses you found were dry and clean. Whoever turned the trick must have been waiting for them. I wonder about this fellow Ingraham.”
“I’m wondering, too,” I said. “Figuring it out from the positions I found them in when I opened the closet door, Ingraham sizes up as the key to the whole thing. Develyn was back against the wall, with Ansley in front of him, both facing the door. Ingraham was facing them, with his back to the door. The clothespress 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 clothespress. Ingraham, 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 the 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 bales of telegrams, having relatives and acquaintances of the dead men interviewed; and we had found nothing that seemed to have any bearing upon their deaths. Nor had we found the slightest connecting link between Ingraham 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 Ingraham had arrived in San Francisco—thoroughly enough to convince us that neither of them had met Ingraham.
Ingraham, we had learned, was a book-maker 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, N. J., 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.
Ingraham 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 end alone.
The fingerprints Phels had secured had all turned out to belong to Stacey, the maid, the police detectives, or myself. In short, we had found nothing!
So much for our attempts to learn the motive behind the three murders.
We now dropped that angle and settled down to the detail-studying, patience-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 short-cut 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, ten to twenty per cent—of cases where men are convicted justly of murder, the motive isn’t clearly shown even at the last, and sometimes is 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 scorn the money in his victims’ 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 short-cut. 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 rawboned 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 the mail clerk. Gilbert Jacquemart had occupied room 946 and had ordered his mail forwarded to him at a Los Angeles hotel. W. F. Salway, who had occupied room 1022, had given instructions that his mail be readdressed to a number on Clark Street in Chicago. Ross Orrett, room 609, had asked to have his mail sent to him care of General Delivery at the local post office.
The Assistant Murderer and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett Page 4