Creeping Siamese and Other Stories

by Dashiell Hammett

  Dick Foley came into my office while I was reading this news. When I had finished he gave me his contribution to the history of Tom-Tom Carey.

  “Tailed him out of here. To hotel. Arlie on corner. Eight o’clock, Carey out. Garage. Hire car without driver. Back hotel. Checked out. Two bags. Out through park. Arlie after him in flivver. My boat after Arlie. Down boulevard. Off cross-road. Dark. Lonely. Arlie steps on gas. Closes in. Bang! Carey stops. Two guns going. Exit Arlie. Carey back to city. Hotel Marquis. Registers George F. Danby, San Diego. Room 622.”

  “Did Tom-Tom frisk Arlie after he dropped him?”

  “No. Didn’t touch him.”

  “So? Take Mickey Linehan with you. Don’t let Carey get out of your sight. I’ll get somebody up to relieve you and Mickey late tonight, if I can, but he’s got to be shadowed twenty-four hours a day until—” I didn’t know what came after that so I stopped talking.

  I took Dick’s story into the Old Man’s office and told it to him, winding up:

  “Arlie shot first, according to Foley, so Carey gets a self-defense on it, but we’re getting action at last and I don’t want to do anything to slow it up. So I’d like to keep what we know about this shooting quiet for a couple of days. It won’t increase our friendship any with the county sheriff if he finds out what we’re doing, but I think it’s worth it.”

  “If you wish,” the Old Man agreed, reaching for his ringing phone.

  He spoke into the instrument and passed it on to me. Detective-sergeant Hunt was talking:

  “Flora Brace and Grace Cardigan crushed out just before daylight. The chances are they—”

  I wasn’t in a humor for details.

  “A clean sneak?” I asked.

  “Not a lead on ’em so far, but—”

  “I’ll get the details when I see you. Thanks,” and I hung up.

  “Angel Grace and Big Flora have escaped from the city prison,” I passed the news on to the Old Man.

  He smiled courteously, as if at something that didn’t especially concern him.

  “You were congratulating yourself on getting action,” he murmured.

  I turned my scowl to a grin, mumbled, “Well, maybe,” went back to my office and telephoned Franklin Ellert. The lisping attorney said he would be glad to see me, so I went over to his office.

  “And now, what progreth have you made?” he asked eagerly when I was seated beside his desk.

  “Some. A man named Barrows was also in Nogales when Newhall was killed, and also came to San Francisco right after. Carey followed Barrows up here. Did you read about the man found walking the streets naked, all cut up?”

  “Yeth.”

  “That was Barrows. Then another man comes into the game—a barber named Arlie. He was spying on Carey. Last night, in a lonely road south of here, Arlie shot at Carey. Carey killed him.”

  The old lawyer’s eyes came out another inch.

  “What road?” he gasped.

  “You want the exact location?”

  “Yeth!”

  I pulled his phone over, called the Agency, had Dick’s report read to me, gave the attorney the information he wanted.

  It had an effect on him. He hopped out of his chair. Sweat was shiny along the ridges wrinkles made in his face.

  “Mith Newhall ith down there alone! That plath ith only half a mile from her houth!”

  I frowned and beat my brains together, but I couldn’t make anything out of it.

  “Suppose I put a man down there to look after her?” I suggested.

  “Exthellent!” His worried face cleared until there weren’t more than fifty or sixty wrinkles in it. “The would prefer to thtay there during her firth grief over her fatherth death. You will thend a capable man?”

  “The Rock of Gibraltar is a leaf in the breeze beside him. Give me a note for him to take down. Andrew MacElroy is his name.”

  While the lawyer scribbled the note I used his phone again to call the Agency, to tell the operator to get hold of Andy and tell him I wanted him. I ate lunch before I returned to the Agency. Andy was waiting when I got there.

  Andy MacElroy was a big boulder of a man—not very tall, but thick and hard of head and body. A glum, grim man with no more imagination than an adding machine. I’m not even sure he could read. But I was sure that when Andy was told to do something, he did it and nothing else. He didn’t know enough not to.

  I gave him the lawyer’s note to Miss Newhall, told him where to go and what to do, and Miss Newhall’s troubles were off my mind.

  Three times that afternoon I heard from Dick Foley and Mickey Linehan. Tom-Tom Carey wasn’t doing anything very exciting, though he had bought two boxes of .44 cartridges in a Market Street sporting goods establishment.

  The afternoon papers carried photographs of Big Flora Brace and Angel Grace Cardigan, with a story of their escape. The story was as far from the probable facts as newspaper stories generally are. On another page was an account of the discovery of the dead barber in the lonely road. He had been shot in the head and in the chest, four times in all. The county officials’ opinion was that he had been killed resisting a stick-up, and that the bandits had fled without robbing him.

  At five o’clock Tommy Howd came to my door.

  “That guy Carey wants to see you again,” the freckle-faced boy said.

  “Shoot him in.”

  The swarthy man sauntered in, said “Howdy,” sat down, and made a brown cigarette.

  “Got anything special on for tonight?” he asked when he was smoking.

  “Nothing I can’t put aside for something better. Giving a party?”

  “Uh-huh. I had thought of it. A kind of surprise party for Papadoodle. Want to go along?”

  It was my turn to say, “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ll pick you up at eleven—Van Ness and Geary,” he drawled. “But this has got to be a kind of tight party—just you and me—and him.”

  “No. There’s one more who’ll have to be in on it. I’ll bring him along.”

  “I don’t like that.” Tom-Tom Carey shook his head slowly, frowning amiably over his cigarette. “You sleuths oughtn’t out-number me. It ought to be one and one.”

  “You won’t be out-numbered,” I explained. “This jobbie I’m bringing won’t be on my side more than yours. And it’ll pay you to keep as sharp an eye on him as I do—and to see he don’t get behind either of us if we can help it.”

  “Then what do you want to lug him along for?”

  “Wheels within wheels,” I grinned.

  The swarthy man frowned again, less amiably now.

  “The hundred and six thousand reward money—I’m not figuring on sharing that with anybody.”

  “Right enough,” I agreed. “Nobody I bring along will declare themselves in on it.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” He stood up. “And we’ve got to watch this hombre, huh?”

  “If we want everything to go all right.”

  “Suppose he gets in the way—cuts up on us. Can we put it to him, or do we just say, ‘Naughty! Naughty!’?”

  “He’ll have to take his own chances.”

  “Fair enough.” His hard face was good-natured again as he moved toward the door. “Eleven o’clock at Van Ness and Geary.”

  VIII

  I went back into the operatives’ room, where Jack Counihan was slumped down in a chair reading a magazine.

  “I hope you’ve thought up something for me to do,” he greeted me. “I’m getting bed-sores from sitting around.”

  “Patience, son, patience—that’s what you’ve got to learn if you’re ever going to be a detective. Why when I was a child of your age, just starting in with the Agency, I was lucky—”

  “Don’t start that,” he begged. Then his good-looking young face got earnest. “I don’t see why you kee
p me cooped up here. I’m the only one besides you who really got a good look at Nancy Regan. I should think you would have me out hunting for her.”

  “I told the Old Man the same thing,” I sympathized. “But he is afraid to risk something happening to you. He says in all his fifty years of gum-shoeing he’s never seen such a handsome op, besides being a fashion plate and a social butterfly and the heir to millions. His idea is we ought to keep you as a sort of show piece, and not let you—”

  “Go to hell!” Jack said, all red in the face.

  “But I persuaded him to let me take the cotton packing off you tonight,” I continued. “So meet me at Van Ness and Geary before eleven o’clock.”

  “Action?” He was all eagerness.

  “Maybe.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Bring your little pop-gun along.” An idea came into my head and I worded it. “You’d better be all dressed up—evening duds.”

  “Dinner coat?”

  “No—the limit—everything but the high hat. Now for your behavior: you’re not supposed to be an op. I’m not sure just what you’re supposed to be, but it doesn’t make any difference. Tom-Tom Carey will be along. You act as if you were neither my friend nor his—as if you didn’t trust either of us. We’ll be cagey with you. If anything is asked that you don’t know the answer to—you fall back on hostility. But don’t crowd Carey too far. Got it?”

  “I—I think so.” He spoke slowly, screwing up his forehead. “I’m to act as if I was going along on the same business as you, but that outside of that we weren’t friends. As if I wasn’t willing to trust you. That it?”

  “Very much. Watch yourself. You’ll be swimming in nitroglycerine all the way.”

  “What is up? Be a good chap and give me some idea.”

  I grinned up at him. He was a lot taller than I.

  “I could,” I admitted, “but I’m afraid it would scare you off. So I’d better tell you nothing. Be happy while you can. Eat a good dinner. Lots of condemned folks seem to eat hearty breakfasts of ham and eggs just before they parade out to the rope. Maybe you wouldn’t want ’em for dinner, but—”

  At five minutes to eleven that night, Tom-Tom Carey brought a black touring car to the corner where Jack and I stood waiting in a fog that was like a damp fur coat.

  “Climb in,” he ordered as we came to the curb.

  I opened the front door and motioned Jack in. He rang up the curtain on his little act, looking coldly at me and opening the rear door.

  “I’m going to sit back here,” he said bluntly.

  “Not a bad idea,” and I climbed in beside him.

  Carey twisted around in his seat and he and Jack stared at each other for a while. I said nothing, did not introduce them. When the swarthy man had finished sizing the youngster up, he looked from the boy’s collar and tie—all of his evening clothes not hidden by his overcoat—to me, grinned, and drawled:

  “Your friend’s a waiter, huh?”

  I laughed, because the indignation that darkened the boy’s face and popped his mouth open was natural, not part of his acting. I pushed my foot against his. He closed his mouth, said nothing, looked at Tom-Tom Carey and me as if we were specimens of some lower form of animal life.

  I grinned back at Carey and asked, “Are we waiting for anything?”

  He said we weren’t, left off staring at Jack, and put the machine in motion. He drove us out through the park, down the boulevard. Traffic going our way and the other loomed out of and faded into the fog-thick night. Presently we left the city behind, and ran out of the fog into clear moonlight. I didn’t look at any of the machines running behind us, but I knew that in one of them Dick Foley and Mickey Linehan should be riding.

  Tom-Tom Carey swung our car off the boulevard, into a road that was smooth and well made, but not much traveled.

  “Wasn’t a man killed down along here somewhere last night?” I asked.

  Carey nodded his head without turning it, and, when we had gone another quarter-mile, said: “Right here.”

  We rode a little slower now, and Carey turned off his lights. In the road that was half moon-silver, half shadow-gray, the machine barely crept along for perhaps a mile. We stopped in the shade of tall shrubs that darkened a spot of the road.

  “All ashore that’s going ashore,” Tom-Tom Carey said, and got out of the car.

  Jack and I followed him. Carey took off his overcoat and threw it into the machine.

  “The place is just around the bend, back from the road,” he told us. “Damn this moon! I was counting on fog.”

  I said nothing, nor did Jack. The boy’s face was white and excited.

  “We’ll bee-line it,” Carey said, leading the way across the road to a high wire fence.

  He went over the fence first, then Jack, then—the sound of someone coming along the road from ahead stopped me. Signalling silence to the two men on the other side of the fence, I made myself small beside a bush. The coming steps were light, quick, feminine.

  A girl came into the moonlight just ahead. She was a girl of twenty-something, neither tall nor short, thin nor plump. She was short-skirted, bare-haired, sweatered. Terror was in her white face, in the carriage of her hurrying figure—but something else was there too—more beauty than a middle-aged sleuth was used to seeing.

  When she saw Carey’s automobile bulking in the shadow, she stopped abruptly, with a gasp that was almost a cry.

  I walked forward, saying:

  “Hello, Nancy Regan.”

  This time the gasp was a cry.

  “Oh! Oh!” Then, unless the moonlight was playing tricks, she recognized me and terror began to go away from her. She put both hands out to me, with relief in the gesture.

  “Well?” A bearish grumble came from the big boulder of a man who had appeared out of the darkness behind her. “What’s all this?”

  “Hello, Andy,” I greeted the boulder.

  “Hullo,” MacElroy echoed and stood still.

  Andy always did what he was told to do. He had been told to take care of Miss Newhall. I looked at the girl and then at him again.

  “Is this Miss Newhall?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he rumbled. “I came down like you said, but she told me she didn’t want me—wouldn’t let me in the house. But you hadn’t said anything about coming back. So I just camped outside, moseying around, keeping my eyes on things. And when I seen her shinnying out a window a little while ago, I just went on along behind her to take care of her, like you said I was to do.”

  Tom-Tom Carey and Jack Counihan came back into the road, crossed it to us. The swarthy man had an automatic in one hand. The girl’s eyes were glued on mine. She paid no attention to the others.

  “What is it all about?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she babbled, her hands holding on to mine, her face close to mine. “Yes, I’m Ann Newhall. I didn’t know. I thought it was fun. And then when I found out it wasn’t I couldn’t get out of it.”

  Tom-Tom Carey grunted and stirred impatiently. Jack Counihan was staring down the road. Andy MacElroy stood stolid in the road, waiting to be told what to do next. The girl never once looked from me to any of these others.

  “How did you get in with them?” I demanded. “Talk fast.”

  IX

  I had told the girl to talk fast. She did. For twenty minutes she stood there and turned out words in a chattering stream that had no breaks except where I cut in to keep her from straying from the path I wanted her to follow. It was jumbled, almost incoherent in spots, and not always plausible, but the notion stayed with me throughout that she was trying to tell the truth—most of the time.

  And not for a fraction of a second did she turn her gaze from my eyes. It was as if she was afraid to look anywhere else.

  This millionaire’s daughter had, tw
o months before, been one of a party of four young people returning late at night from some sort of social affair down the coast. Somebody suggested that they stop at a roadhouse along their way—a particularly tough joint. Its toughness was its attraction, of course—toughness was more or less of a novelty to them. They got a first-hand view of it that night, for, nobody knew just how, they found themselves taking part in a row before they had been ten minutes in the dump.

  The girl’s escort had shamed her by showing an unreasonable amount of cowardice. He had let Red O’Leary turn him over his knee and spank him—and had done nothing about it afterward. The other youth in the party had been not much braver. The girl, insulted by this meekness, had walked across to the red-haired giant who had wrecked her escort, and she had spoken to him loud enough for everybody to hear:

  “Will you please take me home?”

  Red O’Leary was glad to do it. She left him a block or two from her city house. She told him her name was Nancy Regan. He probably doubted it, but he never asked her any questions, pried into her affairs. In spite of the difference in their worlds, a genuine companionship had grown up between them. She liked him. He was so gloriously a roughneck that she saw him as a romantic figure. He was in love with her, knew she was miles above him, and so she had no trouble making him behave so far as she was concerned.

  They met often. He took her to all the rowdy holes in the bay district, introduced her to yeggs, gunmen, swindlers, told her wild tales of criminal adventuring. She knew he was a crook, knew he was tied up in the Seamen’s National and Golden Gate Trust jobs when they broke. But she saw it all as a sort of theatrical spectacle. She didn’t see it as it was.

  She woke up the night they were in Larrouy’s and were jumped by the crooks that Red had helped Papadopoulos and the others double-cross. But it was too late then for her to wriggle clear. She was blown along with Red to Papadopoulos’ hangout after I had shot the big lad. She saw then what her romantic figures really were—what she had mixed herself with.

  When Papadopoulos escaped, taking her with him, she was wide awake, cured, through forever with her dangerous trifling with outlaws. So she thought. She thought Papadopoulos was the little, scary old man he seemed to be—Flora’s slave, a harmless old duffer too near the grave to have any evil in him. He had been whining and terrified. He begged her not to forsake him, pleaded with her while tears ran down his withered cheeks, begging her to hide him from Flora. She took him to her country house and let him fool around in the garden, safe from prying eyes. She had no idea that he had known who she was all along, had guided her into suggesting this arrangement.