Creeping Siamese and Other Stories

by Dashiell Hammett

  I had no luck on the second floor, but the third knob I cautiously tried on the third floor turned in my hand and let its door edge back from the frame. In front of this crack I waited a moment, listening to nothing but a throbbing snore somewhere far down the hallway. I put a palm against the door and eased it open another foot. No sound. The room was black as an honest politician’s prospects. I slid my hand across the frame, across a few inches of wallpaper, found a light button, pressed it. Two globes in the center of the room threw their weak yellow light on the shabby room and on the young Armenian who lay dead across the bed.

  I went into the room, closed the door and stepped over to the bed. The boy’s eyes were wide and bulging. One of his temples was bruised. His throat gaped with a red slit that ran actually from ear to ear. Around the slit, in the few spots not washed red, his thin neck showed dark bruises. The skull-cracker had dropped the boy with a poke in the temple and had choked him until he thought him dead. But the kid had revived enough to scream—not enough to keep from screaming. The skull-cracker had returned to finish the job with a knife. Three streaks on the bed-clothes showed where the knife had been cleaned.

  The lining of the boy’s pockets stuck out. The skull-cracker had turned them out. I went through his clothes, but with no better luck than I expected—the killer had taken everything. The room gave me nothing—a few clothes, but not a thing out of which information could be squeezed.

  My prying done, I stood in the center of the floor scratching my chin and considering. In the hall a floor-board creaked. Three backward steps on my rubber heels put me in the musty closet, dragging the door all but half an inch shut behind me.

  Knuckles rattled on the room door as I slid my gun off my hip. The knuckles rattled again and a feminine voice said, “Kid, oh, Kid!” Neither knuckles nor voice was loud. The lock clicked as the knob was turned. The door opened and framed the shifty-eyed girl who had been called Sylvia Yount by Angel Grace.

  Her eyes lost their shiftiness for surprise when they settled on the boy.

  “Holy hell!” she gasped, and was gone.

  I was half out of the closet when I heard her tip-toeing back. In my hole again, I waited, my eye to the crack. She came in swiftly, closed the door silently, and went to lean over the dead boy. Her hands moved over him, exploring the pockets whose linings I had put back in place.

  “Damn such luck!” she said aloud when the unprofitable frisking was over, and went out of the house.

  I gave her time to reach the sidewalk. She was headed toward Kearny Street when I left the house. I shadowed her down Kearny to Broadway, up Broadway to Larrouy’s. Larrouy’s was busy, especially near the door, with customers going and coming. I was within five feet of the girl when she stopped a waiter and asked, in a whisper that was excited enough to carry, “Is Red here?”

  The waiter shook his head.

  “Ain’t been in tonight.”

  The girl went out of the dive, hurrying along on clicking heels to a hotel in Stockton Street.

  While I looked through the glass front, she went to the desk and spoke to the clerk. He shook his head. She spoke again and he gave her paper and envelope, on which she scribbled with the pen beside the register. Before I had to leave for a safer position from which to cover her exit, I saw which pigeon-hole the note went into.

  From the hotel the girl went by street-car to Market and Powell Streets, and then walked up Powell to O’Farrell, where a fat-faced young man in gray overcoat and gray hat left the curb to link arms with her and lead her to a taxi stand up O’Farrell Street. I let them go, making a note of the taxi number—the fat-faced man looked more like a customer than a pal.

  It was a little shy of two in the morning when I turned back into Market Street and went up to the office. Fiske, who holds down the Agency at night, said Jack Counihan had not reported, nothing else had come in. I told him to rouse me an operative, and in ten or fifteen minutes he succeeded in getting Mickey Linehan out of bed and on the wire.

  “Listen, Mickey,” I said, “I’ve got the nicest corner picked out for you to stand on the rest of the night. So pin on your diapers and toddle down there, will you?”

  In between his grumbling and cursing I gave him the name and number of the Stockton Street hotel, described Red O’Leary, and told him which pigeon-hole the note had been put in.

  “It mightn’t be Red’s home, but the chance is worth covering,” I wound up. “If you pick him up, try not to lose him before I can get somebody down there to take him off your hands.”

  I hung up during the outburst of profanity this insult brought.

  The Hall of Justice was busy when I reached it, though nobody had tried to shake the upstairs prison loose yet. Fresh lots of suspicious characters were being brought in every few minutes. Policemen in and out of uniform were everywhere. The detective bureau was a bee-hive.

  Trading information with the police detectives, I told them about the Armenian boy. We were making up a party to visit the remains when the captain’s door opened and Lieutenant Duff came into the assembly room.

  “Allez! Oop!” he said, pointing a thick finger at O’Gar, Tully, Reeder, Hunt and me. “There’s a thing worth looking at in Fillmore.”

  We followed him out to an automobile.

  VI

  A gray frame house in Fillmore Street was our destination. A lot of people stood in the street looking at the house. A police-wagon stood in front of it, and police uniforms were indoors and out.

  A red-mustached corporal saluted Duff and led us into the house, explaining as we went, “’Twas the neighbors give us the rumble, complaining of the fighting, and when we got here, faith, there weren’t no fight left in nobody.”

  All the house held was fourteen dead men.

  Eleven of them had been poisoned—over-doses of knockout drops in their booze, the doctors said. The other three had been shot, at intervals along the hall. From the looks of the remains, they had drunk a toast—a loaded one—and those who hadn’t drunk, whether because of temperance or suspicious natures, had been gunned as they tried to get away.

  The identity of the bodies gave us an idea of what their toast had been. They were all thieves—they had drunk their poison to the day’s looting.

  We didn’t know all the dead men then, but all of us knew some of them, and the records told us who the others were later. The completed list read like Who’s Who in Crookdom.

  There was the Dis-and-Dat Kid, who had crushed out of Leavenworth only two months before; Sheeny Holmes; Snohomish Whitey, supposed to have died a hero in France in 1919; L. A. Slim, from Denver, sockless and under-wearless as usual, with a thousand-dollar bill sewed in each shoulder of his coat; Spider Girrucci wearing a steel-mesh vest under his shirt and a scar from crown to chin where his brother had carved him years ago; Old Pete Best, once a congressman; Nigger Vojan, who once won $175,000 in a Chicago crap-game—Abacadbra tattooed on him in three places; Alphabet Shorty McCoy; Tom Brooks, Alphabet Shorty’s brother-in-law, who invented the Richmond razzle-dazzle, and bought three hotels with the profits; Red Cudahy, who stuck up a Union Pacific train in 1924; Denny Burke; Bull McGonickle, still pale from fifteen years in Joliet; Toby the Lugs, Bull’s running-mate, who used to brag about picking President Wilson’s pocket in a Washington vaudeville theater; and Paddy the Mex.

  Duff looked them over and whistled.

  “A few more tricks like this,” he said, “and we’ll all be out of jobs. There won’t be any grifters left to protect the taxpayers from.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” I told him. “Me—I’d hate like hell to be a San Francisco copper the next few days.”

  “Why especially?”

  “Look at this—one grand piece of double-crossing. This village of ours is full of mean lads who are waiting right now for these stiffs to bring ’em their cut of the stick-up. What do you think’s going to happen when
the word gets out that there’s not going to be any gravy for the mob? There are going to be a hundred and more stranded thugs busy raising getaway dough. There’ll be three burglaries to a block and a stick-up to every corner until the carfare’s raised. God bless you, my son, you’re going to sweat for your wages!”

  Duff shrugged his thick shoulders and stepped over bodies to get to the telephone. When he was through I called the Agency.

  “Jack Counihan called a couple of minutes ago,” Fiske told me, and gave me an Army Street address. “He says he put his man in there, with company.”

  I phoned for a taxi, and then told Duff, “I’m going to run out for a while. I’ll give you a ring here if there’s anything to the angle, or if there isn’t. You’ll wait?”

  “If you’re not too long.”

  I got rid of my taxicab two blocks from the address Fiske had given me, and walked down Army Street to find Jack Counihan planted on a dark corner.

  “I got a bad break,” was what he welcomed me with. “While I was phoning from the lunch-room up the street some of my people ran out on me.”

  “Yeah? What’s the dope?”

  “Well, after that apey chap left the Green Street house he trolleyed to a house in Fillmore Street, and—”

  “What number?”

  The number Jack gave was that of the death-house I had just left.

  “In the next ten or fifteen minutes just about that many other chaps went into the same house. Most of them came afoot, singly or in pairs. Then two cars came up together, with nine men in them—I counted them. They went into the house, leaving their machines in front. A taxi came past a little later, and I stopped it, in case my chap should motor away.

  “Nothing happened for at least half an hour after the nine chaps went in. Then everybody in the house seemed to become demonstrative—there was a quantity of yelling and shooting. It lasted long enough to awaken the whole neighborhood. When it stopped, ten men—I counted them—ran out of the house, got into the two cars, and drove away. My man was one of them.

  “My faithful taxi and I cried Yoicks after them, and they brought us here, going into that house down the street in front of which one of their motors still stands. After half an hour or so I thought I’d better report, so, leaving my taxi around the corner—where it’s still running up expenses—I went up to yon all-night caravansary and phoned Fiske. And when I came back, one of the cars was gone—and I, woe is me!—don’t know who went with it. Am I rotten?”

  “Sure! You should have taken their cars along to the phone with you. Watch the one that’s left while I collect a strong-arm squad.”

  I went up to the lunch-room and phoned Duff, telling him where I was, and:

  “If you bring your gang along maybe there’ll be profit in it. A couple of carloads of folks who were in Fillmore Street and didn’t stay there came here, and part of ’em may still be here, if you make it sudden.”

  Duff brought his four detectives and a dozen uniformed men with him. We hit the house front and back. No time was wasted ringing the bell. We simply tore down the doors and went in. Everything inside was black until flashlights lit it up. There was no resistance. Ordinarily the six men we found in there would have damned near ruined us in spite of our outnumbering them. But they were too dead for that.

  We looked at one another sort of open-mouthed.

  “This is getting monotonous,” Duff complained, biting off a hunk of tobacco. “Everybody’s work is pretty much the same thing over and over, but I’m tired of walking into roomfuls of butchered crooks.”

  The catalog here had fewer names than the other, but they were bigger names. The Shivering Kid was here—nobody would collect all the reward money piled up on him now; Darby M’Laughlin, his horn-rimmed glasses crooked on his nose, ten thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds on fingers and tie; Happy Jim Hacker; Donkey Marr, the last of the bow-legged Marrs, killers all, father and five sons; Toots Salda, the strongest man in crookdom, who had once picked up and run away with two Savannah coppers to whom he was handcuffed; and Rumdum Smith, who killed Lefty Read in Chi in 1916—a rosary wrapped around his left wrist.

  No gentlemanly poisoning here—these boys had been mowed down with a .30-30 rifle fitted with a clumsy but effective home-made silencer. The rifle lay on the kitchen table. A door connected the kitchen with the dining-room. Directly opposite that door, double doors—wide open—opened into the room in which the dead thieves lay. They were all close to the front wall, lying as if they had been lined up against the wall to be knocked off.

  The gray-papered wall was spattered with blood, punctured with holes where a couple of bullets had gone all the way through. Jack Counihan’s young eyes picked out a stain on the paper that wasn’t accidental. It was close to the floor, beside the Shivering Kid, and the Kid’s right hand was stained with blood. He had written on the wall before he died—with fingers dipped in his own and Toots Salda’s blood. The letters in the words showed breaks and gaps where his fingers had run dry, and the letters were crooked and straggly, because he must have written them in the dark.

  By filling in the gaps, allowing for the kinks, and guessing where there weren’t any indications to guide us, we got two words: Big Flora.

  “They don’t mean anything to me,” Duff said, “but it’s a name and most of the names we have belong to dead men now, so it’s time we were adding to our list.”

  “What do you make of it?” asked bullet-headed O’Gar, detective-sergeant in the Homicide Detail, looking at the bodies. “Their pals got the drop on them, lined them against the wall, and the sharpshooter in the kitchen shot ’em down—bing-bing-bing-bing-bing-bing?”

  “It reads that way,” the rest of us agreed.

  “Ten of ’em came here from Fillmore Street,” I said. “Six stayed here. Four went to another house—where part of ’em are now cutting down the other part. All that’s necessary is to trail the corpses from house to house until there’s only one man left—and he’s bound to play it through by croaking himself, leaving the loot to be recovered in the original packages. I hope you folks don’t have to stay up all night to find the remains of that last thug. Come on, Jack, let’s go home for some sleep.”

  VII

  It was exactly 5 a.m. when I separated the sheets and crawled into my bed. I was asleep before the last draw of smoke from my good-night Fatima was out of my lungs. The telephone woke me at 5:15.

  Fiske was talking: “Mickey Linehan just phoned that your Red O’Leary came home to roost half an hour ago.”

  “Have him booked,” I said, and was asleep again by 5:17.

  With the help of the alarm clock I rolled out of bed at nine, breakfasted, and went down to the detective bureau to see how the police had made out with the red-head. Not so good.

  “He’s got us stopped,” the captain told me. “He’s got alibis for the time of the looting and for last night’s doings. And we can’t even vag the son-of-a-gun. He’s got means of support. He’s salesman for Humperdickel’s Universal Encyclopædiac Dictionary of Useful and Valuable Knowledge, or something like it. He started peddling these pamphlets the day before the knock-over, and at the time it was happening he was ringing doorbells and asking folks to buy his durned books. Anyway, he’s got three witnesses that say so. Last night, he was in a hotel from eleven to four-thirty this morning, playing cards, and he’s got witnesses. We didn’t find a durned thing on him or in his room.”

  I borrowed the captain’s phone to call Jack Counihan’s house.

  “Could you identify any of the men you saw in the cars last night?” I asked when he had been stirred out of bed.

  “No. It was dark and they moved too fast. I could barely make sure of my chap.”

  “Can’t, huh?” the captain said. “Well, I can hold him twenty-four hours without laying charges, and I’ll do that, but I’ll have to spring him then unless you can dig up som
ething.”

  “Suppose you turn him loose now,” I suggested after thinking through my cigarette for a few minutes. “He’s got himself all alibied up, so there’s no reason why he should hide out on us. We’ll let him alone all day—give him time to make sure he isn’t being tailed—and then we’ll get behind him tonight and stay behind him. Any dope on Big Flora?”

  “No. That kid that was killed in Green Street was Bernie Bernheimer, alias the Motsa Kid. I guess he was a dip—he ran with dips—but he wasn’t very—”

  The buzz of the phone interrupted him. He said, “Hello, yes,” and “Just a minute,” into the instrument, and slid it across the desk to me.

  A feminine voice: “This is Grace Cardigan. I called your Agency and they told me where to get you. I’ve got to see you. Can you meet me now?”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the telephone station on Powell Street.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I said.

  Calling the Agency, I got hold of Dick Foley and asked him to meet me at Ellis and Market right away. Then I gave the captain back his phone, said “See you later,” and went uptown to keep my dates.

  Dick Foley was on his corner when I got there. He was a swarthy little Canadian who stood nearly five feet in his high-heeled shoes, weighed a hundred pounds minus, talked like a Scotchman’s telegram, and could have shadowed a drop of salt water from the Golden Gate to Hongkong without ever losing sight of it.

  “You know Angel Grace Cardigan?” I asked him.

  He saved a word by shaking his head, no.

  “I’m going to meet her in the telephone station. When I’m through, stay behind her. She’s smart, and she’ll be looking for you, so it won’t be duck soup, but do what you can.”

  Dick’s mouth went down at the corners and one of his rare long-winded streaks hit him.

  “Harder they look, easier they are,” he said.