Both of them looked furtively over their shoulders, and they lowered their voices again, but not for long. The woman was apparently trying to persuade him to do something. He kept shaking his head. He put a hand on her arm. She pushed it away, and kept on whispering.
He said aloud, deliberately:
“Go ahead, if you want to be a fool. It’s your neck. I didn’t put the knife in him.”
She jumped away from him, her eyes black blazes in a white face. O’Gar and I moved softly toward them.
“You rat!” she spat at Richter, and spun to face us.
“I killed him!” she cried. “This thing in the chair tried to and—”
Richter swung the hickory stick.
I jumped for it—missed—crashed into the back of his chair. Hickory stick, Richter, chair, and I sprawled together on the floor. The corporal helped me up. He and I picked Richter up and put him on the davenport again.
The woman’s story poured out of her angry mouth:
“His name wasn’t Molloy. It was Lange, Sam Lange. I married him in Providence in 1913 and went to China with him—to Canton, where he had a position with a steamship line. We didn’t stay there long, because he got into some trouble through being mixed up in the revolution that year. After that we drifted around, mostly around Asia.
“We met this thing”—she pointed at the now sullenly quiet Richter—“in Singapore, in 1919, I think—right after the World War was over. His name is Holley, and Scotland Yard can tell you something about him. He had a proposition. He knew of a gem-bed in upper Burma, one of many that were hidden from the British when they took the country. He knew the natives who were working it, knew where they were hiding their gems.
“My husband went in with him, with two other men that were killed. They looted the natives’ cache, and got away with a whole sackful of sapphires, topazes and even a few rubies. The two other men were killed by the natives and my husband was badly wounded.
“We didn’t think he could live. We were hiding in a hut near the Yunnan border. Holley persuaded me to take the gems and run away with them. It looked as if Sam was done for, and if we stayed there long we’d be caught. I can’t say that I was crazy about Sam anyway; he wasn’t the kind you would be, after living with him for a while.
“So Holley and I took it and lit out. We had to use a lot of the stones to buy our way through Yunnan and Kwangsi and Kwangtung, but we made it. We got to San Francisco with enough to buy this house and the movie theater, and we’ve been here since. We’ve been honest since we came here, but I don’t suppose that means anything. We had enough money to keep us comfortable.
“Today Sam showed up. We hadn’t heard of him since we left him on his back in Burma. He said he’d been caught and jailed for three years. Then he’d got away, and had spent the other three hunting for us. He was that kind. He didn’t want me back, but he did want money. He wanted everything we had. Holley lost his nerve. Instead of bargaining with Sam, he lost his head and tried to shoot him.
“Sam took his gun away from him and shot him in the leg. In the scuffle Sam had dropped a knife—a kris, I think. I picked it up, but he grabbed me just as I got it. I don’t know how it happened. All I saw was Sam staggering back, holding his chest with both hands—and the kris shining red in my hand.
“Sam had dropped his gun. Holley got it and was all for shooting Sam, but I wouldn’t let him. It happened in this room. I don’t remember whether I gave Sam the sarong we used for a cover on the table or not. Anyway, he tried to stop the blood with it. He went away then, while I kept Holley from shooting him.
“I knew Sam wouldn’t go to the police, but I didn’t know what he’d do. And I knew he was hurt bad. If he dropped dead somewhere, the chances are he’d be traced here. I watched from a window as he went down the street, and nobody seemed to pay any attention to him, but he looked so conspicuously wounded to me that I thought everybody would be sure to remember him if it got into the papers that he had been found dead somewhere.
“Holley was even more scared than I. We couldn’t run away, because he had a shot leg. So we made up that Siamese story, and I went over to Oakland, and bought the table cover to take the place of the sarong. We had some guns and even a few oriental knives and swords here. I wrapped them up in paper, breaking the swords, and dropped them off the ferry when I went to Oakland.
“When the morning papers came out we read what had happened, and then we went ahead with what we had planned. We burned the suit Holley had worn when he was shot, and his garters—because the pants had a bullet-hole in them, and the bullet had cut one garter. We fixed a hole in his pajama-leg, unbandaged his leg,—I had fixed it as well as I could,—and washed away the clotted blood until it began to bleed again. Then I gave the alarm.”
She raised both hands in a gesture of finality and made a clucking sound with her tongue.
“And there you are,” she said.
“You got anything to say?” I asked Holley, who was staring at his bandaged leg.
“To my lawyer,” he said without looking up.
O’Gar spoke to the corporal.
“The wagon, Flynn.”
Ten minutes later we were in the street, helping Holley and the woman into a police car.
Around the corner on the other side of the street came three brown-skinned men, apparently Malay sailors. The one in the middle seemed to be drunk, and the other two were supporting him. One of them had a package that could have held a bottle under his arm.
O’Gar looked from them to me and laughed.
“We wouldn’t be doing a thing to those babies right now if we had fallen for that yarn, would we?” he whispered.
“Shut up, you, you big heap!” I growled back, nodding at Holley, who was in the car by now. “If that bird sees them he’ll identify ’em as his Siamese, and God knows what a jury would make of it!”
We made the puzzled driver twist the car six blocks out of his way to be sure we’d miss the brown men. It was worth it, because nothing interfered with the twenty years apiece that Holley and Mrs. Lange drew.
THE BIG KNOCK-OVER
Black Mask, February 1927
Before they actually do it, one is inclined to say it isn’t done. But the gang warfare in Illinois, the big mail-truck holdup in Jersey found bandits using airplanes, bombs and machine guns. And now Mr. Hammett pictures a daring action that is almost stunning in its scope and effectiveness—yet can anyone be sure that it isn’t likely to occur?
I
I found Paddy the Mex in Jean Larrouy’s dive.
Paddy—an amiable con man who looked like the King of Spain—showed me his big white teeth in a smile, pushed a chair out for me with one foot, and told the girl who shared his table:
“Nellie, meet the biggest-hearted dick in San Francisco. This little fat guy will do anything for anybody, if only he can send ’em over for life in the end.” He turned to me, waving his cigar at the girl: “Nellie Wade, and you can’t get anything on her. She don’t have to work—her old man’s a bootlegger.”
She was a slim girl in blue—white skin, long green eyes, short chestnut hair. Her sullen face livened into beauty when she put a hand across the table to me, and we both laughed at Paddy.
“Five years?” she asked.
“Six,” I corrected.
“Damn!” said Paddy, grinning and hailing a waiter. “Some day I’m going to fool a sleuth.”
So far he had fooled all of them—he had never slept in a hoosegow.
I looked at the girl again. Six years before, this Angel Grace Cardigan had buncoed half a dozen Philadelphia boys out of plenty. Dan Morey and I had nailed her, but none of her victims would go to the bat against her, so she had been turned loose. She was a kid of nineteen then, but already a smooth grifter.
In the middle of the floor one of Larrouy’s girls began to sing Tell Me What You
Want and I’ll Tell You What You Get. Paddy the Mex tipped a gin bottle over the glasses of gingerale the waiter had brought. We drank and I gave Paddy a piece of paper with a name and address penciled on it.
“Itchy Maker asked me to slip you that,” I explained. “I saw him in the Folsom big house yesterday. It’s his mother, he says, and he wants you to look her up and see if she wants anything. What he means, I suppose, is that you’re to give her his cut from the last trick you and he turned.”
“You hurt my feelings,” Paddy said, pocketing the paper and bringing out the gin again.
I downed the second gin-gingerale and gathered in my feet, preparing to rise and trot along home. At that moment four of Larrouy’s clients came in from the street. Recognition of one of them kept me in my chair. He was tall and slender and all dolled up in what the well-dressed man should wear. Sharp-eyed, sharp-faced, with lips thin as knife-edges under a small pointed mustache—Bluepoint Vance. I wondered what he was doing three thousand miles away from his New York hunting-grounds.
While I wondered I put the back of my head to him, pretending interest in the singer, who was now giving the customers I Want to Be a Bum. Beyond her, back in a corner, I spotted another familiar face that belonged in another city—Happy Jim Hacker, round and rosy Detroit gunman, twice sentenced to death and twice pardoned.
When I faced front again, Bluepoint Vance and his three companions had come to rest two tables away. His back was to us. I sized up his playmates.
Facing Vance sat a wide-shouldered young giant with red hair, blue eyes and a ruddy face that was good-looking in a tough, savage way. On his left was a shifty-eyed dark girl in a floppy hat. She was talking to Vance. The red-haired giant’s attention was all taken by the fourth member of the party, on his right. She deserved it.
She was neither tall nor short, thin nor plump. She wore a black Russian tunic affair, green-trimmed and hung with silver dinguses. A black fur coat was spread over the chair behind her. She was probably twenty. Her eyes were blue, her mouth red, her teeth white, the hair-ends showing under her black-green-and-silver turban were brown, and she had a nose. Without getting steamed up over the details, she was nice. I said so. Paddy the Mex agreed with a “That’s what,” and Angel Grace suggested that I go over and tell Red O’Leary I thought her nice.
“Red O’Leary the big bird?” I asked, sliding down in my seat so I could stretch a foot under the table between Paddy and Angel Grace. “Who’s his nice girl friend?”
“Nancy Regan, and the other one’s Sylvia Yount.”
“And the slicker with his back to us?” I probed.
Paddy’s foot, hunting the girl’s under the table, bumped mine.
“Don’t kick me, Paddy,” I pleaded. “I’ll be good. Anyway, I’m not going to stay here to be bruised. I’m going home.”
I swapped so-longs with them and moved toward the street, keeping my back to Bluepoint Vance.
At the door I had to step aside to let two men come in. Both knew me, but neither gave me a tumble—Sheeny Holmes (not the old-timer who staged the Moose Jaw looting back in the buggy-riding days) and Denny Burke, Baltimore’s King of Frog Island. A good pair—neither of them would think of taking a life unless assured of profit and political protection.
Outside, I turned down toward Kearny Street, strolling along, thinking that Larrouy’s joint had been full of crooks this one night, and that there seemed to be more than a sprinkling of prominent visitors in our midst. A shadow in a doorway interrupted my brain-work.
The shadow said, “Ps-s-s-s! Ps-s-s-s!”
Stopping, I examined the shadow until I saw it was Beno, a hophead newsie who had given me a tip now and then in the past—some good, some phoney.
“I’m sleepy,” I growled as I joined Beno and his arm-load of newspapers in the doorway, “and I’ve heard the story about the Mormon who stuttered, so if that’s what’s on your mind, say so, and I’ll keep going.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about no Mormons,” he protested, “but I know somethin’ else.”
“Well?”
“’S all right for you to say ‘Well,’ but what I want to know is, what am I gonna get out of it?”
“Flop in the nice doorway and go shut-eye,” I advised him, moving toward the street again. “You’ll be all right when you wake up.”
“Hey! Listen, I got somethin’ for you. Hones’ to Gawd!”
“Well?”
“Listen!” He came close, whispering. “There’s a caper rigged for the Seaman’s National. I don’t know what’s the racket, but it’s real. Hones’ to Gawd! I ain’t stringin’ you. I can’t give you no monickers. You know I would if I knowed ’em. Hones’ to Gawd! Gimme ten bucks. It’s worth that to you, ain’t it? This is straight dope—hones’ to Gawd!”
“Yeah, straight from the nose-candy!”
“No! Hones’ to Gawd! I—”
“What is the caper, then?”
“I don’t know. All I got was that the Seaman’s is gonna be nicked. Hones’ to—”
“Where’d you get it?”
Beno shook his head. I put a silver dollar in his hand.
“Get another shot and think up the rest of it,” I told him, “and if it’s amusing enough I’ll give you the other nine bucks.”
I walked on down to the corner, screwing up my forehead over Beno’s tale. By itself, it sounded like what it probably was—a yarn designed to get a dollar out of a trusting gum-shoe. But it wasn’t altogether by itself. Larrouy’s—just one drum in a city that had a number—had been heavy with grifters who were threats against life and property. It was worth a look-see, especially since the insurance company covering the Seaman’s National Bank was a Continental Detective Agency client.
Around the corner, twenty feet or so along Kearny Street, I stopped.
From the street I had just quit came two bangs—the reports of a heavy pistol. I went back the way I had come. As I rounded the corner I saw men gathering in a group up the street. A young Armenian—a dapper boy of nineteen or twenty—passed me, going the other way, sauntering along, hands in pockets, softly whistling Broken-hearted Sue.
I joined the group—now becoming a crowd—around Beno. Beno was dead, blood from two holes in his chest staining the crumpled newspapers under him.
I went up to Larrouy’s and looked in. Red O’Leary, Bluepoint Vance, Nancy Regan, Sylvia Yount, Paddy the Mex, Angel Grace, Denny Burke, Sheeny Holmes, Happy Jim Hacker—not one of them was there.
Returning to Beno’s vicinity, I loitered with my back to a wall while the police arrived, asked questions, learned nothing, found no witnesses, and departed, taking what was left of the newsie with them.
I went home and to bed.
II
In the morning I spent on hour in the Agency file-room, digging through the gallery and records. We didn’t have anything on Red O’Leary, Denny Burke, Nancy Regan, Sylvia Yount, and only some guesses on Paddy the Mex. Nor were there any open jobs definitely chalked against Angel Grace, Bluepoint Vance, Sheeny Holmes and Happy Jim Hacker, but their photos were there. At ten o’clock—bank opening time—I set out for the Seaman’s National, carrying these photos and Beno’s tip.
The Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco office is located in a Market Street office building. The Seaman’s National Bank occupies the ground floor of a tall gray building in Montgomery Street, San Francisco’s financial center. Ordinarily, since I don’t like even seven blocks of unnecessary walking, I would have taken a street car. But there was some sort of traffic jam on Market Street, so I set out afoot, turning off along Grant Avenue.
A few blocks of walking, and I began to see that something was wrong with the part of town I was heading for. Noises for one thing—roaring, rattling, explosive noises. At Sutter Street a man passed me, holding his face with both hands and groaning as he tried to push a dislocated j
aw back in place. His cheek was scraped red.
I went down Sutter Street. Traffic was in a tangle that reached to Montgomery Street. Excited, bare-headed men were running around. The explosive noises were clearer. An automobile full of policemen went down past me, going as fast as traffic would let it. An ambulance came up the street, clanging its gong, taking to the sidewalks where the traffic tangle was worst.
I crossed Kearny Street on the trot. Down the other side of the street two patrolmen were running. One had his gun out. The explosive noises were a drumming chorus ahead.
Rounding into Montgomery Street, I found few sightseers ahead of me. The middle of the street was filled with trucks, touring cars, taxis—deserted there. Up in the next block—between Bush and Pine Streets—hell was on a holiday.
The holiday spirit was gayest in the middle of the block, where the Seaman’s National Bank and the Golden Gate Trust Company faced each other across the street.
For the next six hours I was busier than a flea on a fat woman.
III
Late that afternoon I took a recess from bloodhounding and went up to the office for a pow-wow with the Old Man. He was leaning back in his chair, staring out the window, tapping on his desk with the customary long yellow pencil.
A tall, plump man in his seventies, this boss of mine, with a white-mustached, baby-pink grandfatherly face, mild blue eyes behind rimless spectacles, and no more warmth in him than a hangman’s rope. Fifty years of crook-hunting for the Continental had emptied him of everything except brains and a soft-spoken, gently smiling shell of politeness that was the same whether things went good or bad—and meant as little at one time as another. We who worked under him were proud of his cold-bloodedness. We used to boast that he could spit icicles in July, and we called him Pontius Pilate among ourselves, because he smiled politely when he sent us out to be crucified on suicidal jobs.
He turned from the window as I came in, nodded me to a chair, and smoothed his mustache with the pencil. On his desk the afternoon papers screamed the news of the Seaman’s National Bank and Golden Gate Trust Company double-looting in five colors.
Creeping Siamese and Other Stories Page 4