Marcia looked at her brother and Lewis Friel tasted his drink and said, “Haven’t seen him since this morning. You remember we told you about that. I haven’t, anyhow. Maybe Marcia has.”
“No,” she said thoughtfully; and to MacBride, “but what’s the matter, what’s wrong?”
“Steamboat Hodge was killed, murdered, at a quarter to three today.”
Lewis Friel said, “Oh-oh,” and set down his glass very carefully.
Marcia Friel began to shake. “But Fitz didn’t do it! He promised me—”
“He told me he did,” MacBride said.
Lewis Friel looked puzzled. “But if he told you—I mean I thought you were looking for him.”
“I am,” grunted the skipper. “He got away.”
Marcia sat down, unnerved. “Is this a blow,” she murmured.
Lewis Friel seemed exasperated. “Damn Fitz!” he exclaimed. “I told him, I begged him to let the police handle everything. He’s crazy. He’s—oh, I don’t know—he’s crazy. He must be!”
“Be quiet, Lewis,” Marcia said.
“Oh, yes, be quiet!” he flung back at her. “I spend weeks and months arranging for our business deal—corporation papers and everything—fees—day and night work—I’m no millionaire. I can’t afford—”
“Do be quiet,” Marcia said in a muffled voice.
MacBride said, “Is Fitz here?”
Marcia started. “No—no.” She looked around the room. She looked at Lewis. “Here? No, I haven’t seen him since early this morning.”
Kennedy had wandered to the far end of the room and was standing in front of a console scattered with cigarette boxes, glasses, and several decanters of liquor. He turned and cut aimlessly across the room and sat down.
MacBride said, “I’ll have to look.”
“Oh, don’t be foolish,” Lewis Friel said. “Fitz is not here.”
The skipper was stubborn. He visited the dining-room, the kitchen, two bathrooms, and two bedrooms. Returning to the living-room, he said:
“Has he been here since noon?”
Marcia was on the point of tears. “Oh, no—no!” she cried.
“I want the truth,” the skipper blared, pointing. “You’re close to him, both of you, and I want the truth. I want to know where he is. I want to get him personally. If I don’t, if I have to send out a general alarm for him, he’ll be killed. He threatened to shoot it out and he will—and he’ll be riddled!”
Lewis Friel ground fist into palm and said, “The fool, the fool! The utter fool!”
Kennedy said, “Could I, by the way, have a drink?”
Marcia rose out of pure nervousness and said, “I’ll get it for you.”
“Just straight, please.”
She crossed the room to the console, picked up a glass and one of the decanters. Then suddenly she dropped both, staggered, and caught hold of the edge of the table. The decanter hit the floor, its glass stopper popped out and its contents flowed out. Lewis Friel strode across the room, his eyes dark with concern, and took hold of her.
“Marcia!” he said.
“Have her lay down,” the skipper said. “This business probably got her down. Come on, Kennedy; let’s blow.”
Marcia suddenly screamed hysterically. Lewis put his hand over her mouth and cried, “Marcia, get hold of yourself!”
But she screamed again, half laughing, through his fingers. MacBride crossed to her saying, “Come, now, Miss Friel. I didn’t mean to upset you….” He took hold of her arm and shook her and it was at about this time that Mularkey came into the room with his left hand in his pocket and in his right hand a gun.
“Quit it, Steve,” he growled.
MacBride turned on his heel and looked at him, unbuttoning his coat as he did so.
“Watch your hand, Steve,” Mularkey said wearily. He looked worn and haggard and the fine dignity with which he used to carry himself was gone. He looked like a sick man, his face drained and its muscles sagging. Only in his eyes was there life—a chill blue glare, unwavering.
He demanded, “Why didn’t you turn in a general alarm on me? I gave you the chance. I tell you I won’t be taken alive!” His breath pounded hoarsely. “You don’t have to go soft about old friendships. I’m not asking for a break.”
Marcia had covered her face with her hands.
Mularkey ground on, “You can’t pick on Marcia. I won’t let you do it. Marcia, go in your bedroom. Lewis, you take her in and close the door. Take her in, I tell you!”
From the depths of the chair in which Kennedy lounged he said, “Wait.”
Mularkey roared, “Pay no attention to him!”
“Wait,” said Kennedy. He rose, looking slightly foggy and unsteady on his feet. “Mr. Friel…”
Lewis Friel looked at him across Marcia’s shoulder.
“Now listen, Kennedy,” MacBride said, “don’t show off.”
Ignoring the skipper, Kennedy said, “Mr. Friel—”
The ringing of the telephone bell interrupted him. Lewis Friel went over to answer it. He turned and said to Kennedy:
“It’s for you.”
Kennedy crossed the room and picked up the instrument. “Yes, this is Kennedy…I see….Well, thank you so much, my friend.”
He hung up, scratched his head, then said, “Oh, yes…Mr. Friel. When I stopped by your office today for a little chat about your proposed partnership with Fitz, I remarked that you looked like a pretty strong fellow. Then I said that I’d never been able to gain any and that that was funny, because my old man was a big strapping fellow and so was my mother pretty large. You said it was not unusual in your case, though you didn’t think you were particularly heavy—not as heavy as your late father, who you said was over six feet. Do you remember that?”
Friel chuckled. “Why, of course.”
“Kennedy,” barked Mularkey, “you keep your mouth shut and—”
“Miss Friel,” said Kennedy, “in that little chat we had today when we met on the corner of Belmont and Grove I said jokingly that I’d like to take you dancing sometime but that I was too short. Offhand I asked you if you took after your father or mother. You said your mother. You said your father was short.”
Mularkey came towards him threateningly, while still keeping an eye on MacBride.
Kennedy held his ground and said quietly to Mularkey, “He said his father was tall and she said her father was short. So what? So they aren’t sister and brother. Steamboat’s .45 never killed Torgensen. Torgensen was killed by a .38. That phone call I just had was from Headquarters. They’ve got the gun over there. I found it in a dump heap across the way from the station. Haims at Headquarters says it checks with slugs found in Torgensen. A dealer down in Beaumont Street told me he sold it to Lewis Friel.”
Friel shouted, “That’s a lie!”
“You can’t prove it’s a lie.”
“Oh, can’t I?” snapped Friel. He pulled a gun from his pocket and said, “There’s my gun and I’ll face that dealer and make him prove he sold me the gun you’re talking about.”
Kennedy said, “Steve, take a look at his gun.”
MacBride strode across towards Friel. Something snapped in Friel’s eyes and he jumped back. “Hold on there!” he said.
MacBride scowled. “Don’t point that gun at me.”
“I’m pointing it at you.”
Marcia said, “I’ve got ’em from this side, Lewis.”
Kennedy turned. Marcia Friel was holding a very small automatic.
Lewis Friel said to Kennedy. “You almost trapped me, smart boy.”
“What do you mean, almost?” Kennedy drawled.
Mularkey was now the most dazed man in the room. His mouth hung open and his eyes gaped, the gun in his hand drooped.
“Nobody moves,” Lewis Friel said; and to Marcia, “Get your hat and coat and my hat and that cash out of the bureau. Pick up all pictures, too.”
She moved with alacrity, going into the bedroom and returning in a moment with her hat and coat on. She gave Lewis his hat, said:
“All right, I have the money.”
Friel said: “Drop your gun, Fitz.”
Mularkey dropped it, still in a daze.
“If you make one pass at yours, MacBride,” Friel said, “I’ll drill you. That goes for you too, Kennedy.”
MacBride’s face was wooden. “Get going,” he muttered.
“We intend to. Come on, Marcia.”
They backed up swiftly to the far end of the room, glanced at the door through which they must go into the foyer. The skipper stood motionless, his hands raised, his right hand dropping imperceptibly, the fingers already formed to grip a gun’s butt. The girl and the man must have realized that their greatest danger lay at the doorway. MacBride realized this too. His eyes were sharp and hard and narrowed down.
Mularkey came out of his daze. It seemed as though all at once he put two and two together. Chagrin, humiliation, an awful sadness—all these grew up and out of his eyes. He swallowed hard. He looked at MacBride. He was so near that he could see the slight lowering of the skipper’s right hand, the tilt of his shoulder, the hawklike expression on his face.
A great dignity came back to Mularkey. He laughed. It was a rich, round laugh, and it boomed in the room. He swept down towards the gun which he had discarded. It was practical suicide. Lewis Friel fired and Mularkey laughed as he was hit and tried in a vague, fuddled way to get his fingers around the gun. The skipper’s body seemed to weave and out of its weaving came his gun. The gun cleared and exploded simultaneously.
Lewis Friel jerked against the wall. Marcia fired. Cold-faced, hot-eyed, she held her gun up and fired again. The second one stabbed MacBride in the leg. She held her gun trained on him for a third shot. There was a twitch on his lip as he fired and a gagged feeling in his throat as he saw her drop her gun.
Mularkey was down on his hands and knees and sagging lower. He was laughing quietly, reflectively, and still trying to pick up the gun. Kennedy, who was unarmed, took it away from him. Ducked as two explosions banged in the room. One of those was MacBride’s. Lewis Friel’s smoking gun came up again. MacBride pressed his own trigger. It clicked. Kennedy fired and Lewis Friel turned away and fell through the doorway into the foyer. They could still see his feet. The feet did not move.
The skipper stood licking his dry lips. He moved his leg and felt the warm blood trickling. He limped across to where Mularkey was now sitting on the floor. Kennedy was telephoning for an ambulance. MacBride sat down on the floor beside Mularkey.
“How you feeling, Fitz?”
“I dunno,” Mularkey said. A dreamy smile was on his face. “Funny, ain’t it? Funny….” He laughed brokenly. “When I was feeling mixed up and lousy all day today, I kinda felt like seeing Dolly Ireland. Funny, huh?”
CHAPTER X
MacBride, lying in a hospital bed, said, “Talk to me, Kennedy.”
“Well,” said Kennedy, “they weren’t brother and sister. She was going to marry Fitz for his dough. Lewis was going to manage the dough. She talked plenty in order to clear herself of the murder of Steamboat. Lewis killed Steamboat. It seems Steamboat raided her apartment one night and found some letters buried in an old trunk. Love letters, from Lewis to Marcia while she was in Boston, before she came here. In one of them Lewis wrote of meeting Fitz and about Fitz yearning to meet a real high-class gal. Lewis suggested that she come down and pose as his sister. Well, Steamboat wrote her a letter the other day—we saw part of it in the impressions on that pad we found in Steamboat’s room. He gave her hell and, the part we didn’t see, he told her he had no intention of telling Fitz if she’d clear out. She phoned him and told him she’d like to see him.
“Well, he wouldn’t go to her place and she wouldn’t go to his, so he said he’d take a room at the Shane. But she didn’t go. She sent Lewis. Steamboat was drunk. He told Lewis he had letters that would prove they weren’t brother and sister. He waved them at Lewis. Lewis conked him with the bottle and took the letters and ran back to tell Marcia what he’d done. Marcia, to save him, went to Fitz and told Fitz that she’d killed Steamboat because Steamboat had attacked her because she wouldn’t promise to leave Fitz. She also told Fitz that Steamboat’d told her he killed Tiny. Fitz sent her home. He reached the hotel an hour after Steamboat had been killed. He wiped everything clean of fingerprints, then smashed some furniture around and walked out, to make it seem, by the noise, that the killing happened an hour later than it actually did.”
“Where does Dolly fit in?”
“I’d been wondering about Lewis and Marcia. They didn’t look like sister and brother. Just on an off chance I asked first one and then the other about their father. Then I crashed her apartment and found that all her clothes had Boston labels. I swiped a small photograph of her and went to Dolly Ireland. Things began to connect. Torgensen came from Boston. Marcia’s clothes came from Boston. I gave Dolly the photograph, which had the photographer’s name on it, and told her to go to Boston, to the photographer’s, and see what name the picture was registered under. Whatever name she got, she was to go to the names of the dress shops I’d got out of Marcia’s clothes and check up there. You crabbed that by having the state cops drag her back.”
“Why did Marcia faint that time, or almost?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure about anything, so when you had Dolly in the office I opened her bag because I knew she had Marcia’s picture in it. I slipped it out. At the apartment, I put it back where I’d stolen it from—on the console. They’d missed it, and then when they saw it again—”
“I catch on. But what about that gun you had Haims examine?”
“I did find it where I said I found it, down near the station. Some jumpy guy must have tossed it away. So when Haims told me over the wire that it didn’t check, I told Lewis that it did just as a gag. He pulled his gun and I meant to have you take that and check it.”
“So they came from Boston?”
Kennedy nodded. “They both knew Tiny Torgensen and they knew that Torgensen knew them as Frank Lewis and Marcy Corson, a couple of high-class, college-bred confidence workers. They had to kill Torgensen. With over a million at stake, they had to stop him from accidentally meeting them some day.”
MacBride sighed. “Poor Fitz…poor old Fitz. He’d have died for that dame.”
“Well, now he’s living for Dolly Ireland. She’s up with him now.”
“Great!” grunted MacBride.
Kennedy stood up. “Well, I’ve got to get along.”
“Stay sober, boy. Well, part sober anyhow….Say, did you ever find out how you got that Saint Bernard?”
“Oh, sure. I traded a sheep dog for it.”
“Sheep dog? Where’d you get the sheep dog?”
“That’s something I haven’t been able to check up on.”
The House in Turk Street
DASHIELL HAMMETT
THE STORY
Original publication: Black Mask, April 15, 1924; first collected in Hammett Homicides (New York, Lawrence E. Spivak, 1946)
THE ARGUMENT COULD BE MADE that Samuel Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) was the most important writer in the history of the private eye novel, the most significant twentieth-century author of American detective fiction, and, ultimately, the most influential American author of the twentieth century. As writers turned from the orotund style of Henry James and his Victorian predecessors to lean and swift prose, scholars have pointed to the undeniably profound force of Ernest Hemingway, but it would not be difficult to make the case that it was Hammett who influenced the great Papa to develop that style.
Publ
ishing dates are hard facts, not esoteric theories. Hammett’s first Continental Op story appeared in Black Mask on October 1, 1923. The quintessential hard-boiled private eye appeared frequently in the ensuing years. Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, was published in Paris in a limited edition in 1924 and then issued with a tiny print run of 1,335 copies in the United States in October 1925, by which time Hammett was already well established and a highly popular regular contributor to the most important pulp magazine of its time, while Hemingway had only a tiny coterie of readers.
The Continental Op, the relentless private eye in “The House in Turk Street,” was a bald, overweight, middle-aged, but very tough private eye who worked for San Francisco’s Continental Detective Agency and remained nameless in all the works about him, including most of Hammett’s short stories and novellas, as well as his first two novels, Red Harvest (1929) and The Dain Curse (1929).
The Op had a lot of Hammett in him and many of his cases were based on Hammett’s experiences as a Pinkerton detective, but the prime model for the tough dick was James Wright, assistant superintendent of Pinkerton’s Baltimore office and Hammett’s former boss.
In addition to the nameless operative of the Continental Detective Agency, Hammett created Sam Spade, the hero of the most famous American detective novel ever written or filmed, The Maltese Falcon (1930), which had been serialized in Black Mask, as were all of his novels excepting the last, The Thin Man (1934).
THE FILM
Title: No Good Deed, 2002
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Director: Bob Rafelson
Screenwriter: Christopher Canaan, Steve Barancik
Producer: Barry M. Berg, David Braun
THE CAST
• Samuel L. Jackson (Jack Friar)
• Milla Jovovich (Erin)
• Stellan Skarsgård (Tyrone)
• Doug Hutchison (Hoop)
Although a very good romantic film noir, there are a few differences in the plot of the movie compared to Hammett’s original story. In both, the Continental Op stumbles across a gorgeous woman involved with a gang of thieves who capture and tie him up. In the original, they are a bunch of grifters who use the beauty to seduce a banker, convince him to steal $100,000 (in 1924 money!), and run away with her. In the film, the gang is planning a bank robbery and, while they are out of the house, leaving Erin behind, she finds the detective, actually an ex-cop named Jack Friar in the film, irresistible.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 209