The Dain Curse

by Dashiell Hammett

  “No, I haven’t,” he replied, “and that, my boy, is it. I’ve told you what I know and what I imagine, and none of it is definite. That’s the point—in a year of trying I’ve learned nothing definite about Leggett. Isn’t that—remembering my curiosity and my usual skill in satisfying it—enough to convince you that the man is hiding something and knows how to hide it?”

  “Is it? I don’t know. But I know I’ve wasted enough time learning nothing that anybody can be jailed for. Dinner tomorrow night? Or the next?”

  “The next. About seven o’clock?”

  I said I would stop for him, and went out. It was then after five o’clock. Not having had any luncheon, I went up to Blanco’s for food, and then to darktown for a look at Rhino Tingley.

  I found him in Big-foot Gerber’s cigar-store, rolling a fat cigar around in his mouth, telling something to the other Negroes—four of them—in the place.

  “… says to him: ‘Nigger, you talking yourself out of skin,’ and I reaches out my hand for him, and, ’fore God, there weren’t none of him there excepting his footprints in the cement pavement, eight feet apart and heading home.”

  Buying a package of cigarettes, I weighed him in while he talked. He was a chocolate man of less than thirty years, close to six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds plus, with big yellow-balled pop eyes, a broad nose, a big blue-lipped and blue-gummed mouth, and a ragged black scar running from his lower lip down behind his blue and white striped collar. His clothes were new enough to look new, and he wore them sportily. His voice was a heavy bass that shook the glass of the showcases when he laughed with his audience.

  I went out of the store while they were laughing, heard the laughter stop short behind me, resisted the temptation to look back, and moved down the street toward the building where he and Minnie lived. He came abreast of me when I was half a block from the flat.

  I said nothing while we took seven steps side by side.

  Then he said: “You the man that been inquirying around about me?”

  The sour odor of Italian wine was thick enough to be seen.

  I considered, and said: “Yeah.”

  “What you got to do with me?” he asked, not disagreeably, but as if he wanted to know.

  Across the street Gabrielle Leggett, in brown coat and brown and yellow hat, came out of Minnie’s building and walked south, not turning her face towards us. She walked swiftly and her lower lip was between her teeth.

  I looked at the Negro. He was looking at me. There was nothing in his face to show that he had seen Gabrielle Leggett, or that the sight of her meant anything to him.

  I said: “You’ve got nothing to hide, have you? What do you care who asks about you?”

  “All the same, I’m the party to come to if you wants to know about me. You the man that got Minnie fired?”

  “She wasn’t fired. She quit.”

  “Minnie don’t have to take nobody’s lip. She—”

  “Let’s go over and talk to her,” I suggested, leading the way across the street. At the front door he went ahead, up a flight of stairs, down a dark hall to a door which he opened with one of the twenty or more keys on his ring.

  Minnie Hershey, in a pink kimono trimmed with yellow ostrich feathers that looked like little dead ferns, came out of the bedroom to meet us in the living-room. Her eyes got big when she saw me.

  Rhino said: “You know this gentleman, Minnie.”

  Minnie said: “Y-yes.”

  I said: “You shouldn’t have left the Leggetts’ that way. Nobody thinks you had anything to do with the diamonds. What did Miss Leggett want here?”

  “There been no Miss Leggetts here,” she told me. “I don’t know what you talking about.”

  “She came out as we were coming in.”

  “Oh! Miss Leggett. I thought you said Mrs. Leggett. I beg your pardon. Yes, sir. Miss Gabrielle was sure enough here. She wanted to know if I wouldn’t come back there. She thinks a powerful lot of me, Miss Gabrielle does.”

  “That,” I said, “is what you ought to do. It was foolish, leaving like that.”

  Rhino took the cigar out of his mouth and pointed the red end at the girl.

  “You away from them,” he boomed, “and you stay away from them. You don’t have to take nothing from nobody.” He put a hand in his pants pocket, lugged out a thick bundle of paper money, thumped it down on the table, and rumbled: “What for you have to work for folks?”

  He was talking to the girl, but looking at me, grinning, gold teeth shining against purplish mouth. The girl looked at him scornfully, said: “Lead him around, vino,” and turned to me again, her brown face tense, anxious to be believed, saying earnestly: “Rhino got that money in a crap game, mister. Hope to die if he didn’t.”

  Rhino said: “Ain’t nobody’s business where I got my money. I got it. I got—” He put his cigar on the edge of the table, picked up the money, wet a thumb as big as a heel on a tongue like a bath-mat, and counted his roll bill by bill down on the table. “Twenty-thirty—eighty—hundred—hundred and ten—two hundred and ten—three hundred and ten—three hundred and thirty—three hundred and thirty-five—four hundred and thirty-five—five hundred and thirty-five—five hundred and eighty-five—six hundred and five-six hundred and ten—six hundred and twenty—seven hundred and twenty—seven hundred and seventy—eight hundred and twenty-eight hundred and thirty—eight hundred and forty—nine hundred and forty—nine hundred and sixty—nine hundred and seventy-nine hundred and seventy-five—nine hundred and ninety-five—ten hundred and fifteen—ten hundred and twenty—eleven hundred and twenty—eleven hundred and seventy. Anybody want to know what I got, that’s what I got—eleven hundred and seventy dollars. Anybody want to know where I get it, maybe I tell them, maybe I don’t. Just depend on how I feel about it.”

  Minnie said: “He won it in a crap game, mister, up the Happy Day Social Club. Hope to die if he didn’t.”

  “Maybe I did,” Rhino said, still grinning widely at me. “But supposing I didn’t?”

  “I’m no good at riddles,” I said, and, after again advising Minnie to return to the Leggetts, left the flat. Minnie closed the door behind me. As I went down the hall I could hear her voice scolding and Rhino’s chesty bass laughter.

  In a downtown Owl drug-store I turned to the Berkeley section of the telephone directory, found only one Freemander listed, and called the number. Mrs. Begg was there and consented to see me if I came over on the next ferry.

  The Freemander house was set off a road that wound uphill towards the University of California.

  Mrs. Begg was a scrawny, big-boned woman, with not much gray hair packed close around a bony skull, hard gray eyes, and hard, capable hands. She was sour and severe, but plain-spoken enough to let us talk turkey without a lot of preliminary hemming and hawing.

  I told her about the burglary and my belief that the thief had been helped, at least with information, by somebody who knew the Leggett household, winding up: “Mrs. Priestly told me you had been Leggett’s housekeeper, and she thought you could help me.”

  Mrs. Begg said she doubted whether she could tell me anything that would pay me for my trip from the city, but she was willing to do what she could, being an honest woman and having nothing to conceal from anybody. Once started, she told me a great deal, damned near talking me earless. Throwing out the stuff that didn’t interest me, I came away with this information:

  Mrs. Begg had been hired by Leggett, through an employment agency, as housekeeper in the spring of 1921. At first she had a girl to help her, but there wasn’t enough work for two, so, at Mrs. Begg’s suggestion, they let the girl go. Leggett was a man of simple tastes and spent nearly all his time on the top floor, where he had his laboratory and a cubbyhole bedroom. He seldom used the rest of the house except when he had friends in for an evening. Mrs. Begg didn’t like his friends, though she could say nothing against them except that the way they talked was a shame and a disgrace. Edgar Leggett was as nice a man a
s a person could want to know, she said, only so secretive that it made a person nervous. She was never allowed to go up on the third floor, and the door of the laboratory was always kept locked. Once a month a Jap would come in to clean it up under Leggett’s supervision. Well, she supposed he had a lot of scientific secrets, and maybe dangerous chemicals, that he didn’t want people poking into, but just the same it made a person uneasy. She didn’t know anything about her employer’s personal or family affairs and knew her place too well to ask him any questions.

  In August 1923—it was a rainy morning, she remembered—a woman and a girl of fifteen, with a lot of suitcases, had come to the house. She let them in and the woman asked for Mr. Leggett. Mrs. Begg went up to the laboratory door and told him, and he came down. Never in all her born days had she seen such a surprised man as he was when he saw them. He turned absolutely white, and she thought he was going to fall down, he shook that bad. She didn’t know what Leggett and the woman and the girl said to one another that morning, because they jabbered away in some foreign language, though the lot of them could talk English as good as anybody else, and better than most, especially that Gabrielle when she got to cursing. Mrs. Begg had left them and gone on about her business. Pretty soon Leggett came out to the kitchen and told her his visitors were a Mrs. Dain, his sister-in-law, and her daughter, neither of whom he had seen for ten years; and that they were going to stay there with him. Mrs. Dain later told Mrs. Begg that they were English, but had been living in New York for several years. Mrs. Begg said she liked Mrs. Dain, who was a sensible woman and a first-rate housewife, but that Gabrielle was a tartar. Mrs. Begg always spoke of the girl as “that Gabrielle.”

  With the Dains there, and with Mrs. Dain’s ability as a housekeeper, there was no longer any place for Mrs. Begg. They had been very liberal, she said, helping her find a new place and giving her a generous bonus when she left. She hadn’t seen any of them since, but, thanks to the careful watch she habitually kept on the marriage, death, and birth notices in the morning papers, she had learned, a week after she left, that a marriage license had been issued to Edgar Leggett and Alice Dain.

  4

  THE VAGUE HARPERS

  When I arrived at the agency at nine the next morning, Eric Collinson was sitting in the reception room. His sun-burned face was dingy without pinkness, and he had forgotten to put stickum on his hair.

  “Do you know anything about Miss Leggett?” he asked, jumping up and meeting me at the door. “She wasn’t home last night, and she’s not home yet. Her father wouldn’t say he didn’t know where she was, but I’m sure he didn’t. He told me not to worry, but how can I help worrying? Do you know anything about it?”

  I said I didn’t and told him about seeing her leave Minnie Hershey’s the previous evening. I gave him the mulatto’s address and suggested that he ask her. He jammed his hat on his head and hurried off.

  Getting O’Gar on the phone, I asked him if he had heard from New York yet.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Upton—that’s his right name—was once one of you private dicks—had a agency of his own—till ’23, when him a guy named Harry Ruppert were sent over for trying to fix a jury. How’d you make out with the shine?”

  “I don’t know. This Rhino Tingley’s carrying an eleven-hundred-case roll. Minnie says he got it with the rats and mice. Maybe he did: it’s twice what he could have peddled Leggett’s stuff for. Can you try to have it checked? He’s supposed to have got it at the Happy Day Social Club.”

  O’Gar promised to do what he could and hung up.

  I sent a wire to our New York branch, asking for more dope on Upton and Ruppert, and then went up to the county clerk’s office in the municipal building, where I dug into the August and September 1923 marriage-license file. The application I wanted was dated August 26 and bore Edgar Leggett’s statement that he was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 6, 1883, and that this was his second marriage; and Alice Dain’s statement that she was born in London, England, on October 22, 1888, and that she had not been married before.

  When I returned to the agency, Eric Collinson, his yellow hair still further disarranged was again lying in wait for me.

  “I saw Minnie,” he said excitedly, “and she couldn’t tell me anything. She said Gaby was there last night to ask her to come back to work, but that’s all she knew about her. But she—she’s wearing an emerald ring that I’m positive is Gaby’s.”

  “Did you ask her about it?”

  “Who? Minnie? No. How could I? It would have been—you know.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed, thinking of Fitzstephan’s Chevalier Bayard, “we must always be polite. Why did you lie to me about the time you and Miss Leggett got home the other night?”

  Embarrassment made his face more attractive-looking and less intelligent.

  “That was silly of me,” he stammered, “but I didn’t—you know—I thought you—I was afraid—”

  He wasn’t getting anywhere. I suggested: “You thought that was a late hour and didn’t want me to get wrong notions about her?”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  I shooed him out and went into the operatives’ room, where Mickey Linehan—big, loose-hung, red-faced—and Al Mason—slim, dark, sleek—were swapping lies about the times they had been shot at, each trying to pretend he had been more frightened than the other. I told them who was who and what was what on the Leggett job—as far as my knowledge went, and it didn’t go far when I came to putting it in words—and sent Al out to keep an eye on the Leggetts’ house, Mickey to see how Minnie and Rhino behaved.

  Mrs. Leggett, her pleasant face shadowed, opened the door when I rang the bell an hour later. We went into the green, orange, and chocolate room, where we were joined by her husband. I passed on to them the information about Upton that O’Gar had received from New York and told them I had wired for more dope on Ruppert.

  “Some of your neighbors saw a man who was not Upton loitering around,” I said, “and a man who fits the same description ran down the fire-escape from the room Upton was killed in. We’ll see what Ruppert looks like.”

  I was watching Leggett’s face. Nothing changed in it. His too bright red-brown eyes held interest and nothing else.

  I asked: “Is Miss Leggett in?”

  He said: “No.”

  “When will she be in?”

  “Probably not for several days. She’s gone out of town.”

  “Where can I find her?” I asked, turning to Mrs. Leggett. “I’ve some questions to ask her.”

  Mrs. Leggett avoided my gaze, looking at her husband.

  His metallic voice answered my question: “We don’t know, exactly. Friends of hers, a Mr. and Mrs. Harper, drove up from Los Angeles and asked her to go along on a trip up in the mountains. I don’t know which route they intended taking, and doubt if they had any definite destination.”

  I asked questions about the Harpers. Leggett admitted knowing very little about them. Mrs. Harper’s first name was Carmel, he said, and everybody called the man Bud, but Leggett wasn’t sure whether his name was Frank or Walter. Nor did he know the Harpers’ Los Angeles address. He thought they had a house somewhere in Pasadena, but wasn’t sure, having, in fact, heard something about their selling the house, or perhaps only intending to. While he told me this nonsense, his wife sat staring at the floor, lifting her blue eyes twice to look swiftly, pleadingly, at her husband.

  I asked her: “Don’t you know anything more about them than that?”

  “No,” she said weakly, darting another glance at her husband’s face, while he, paying no attention to her, stared levelly at me.

  “When did they leave?” I asked.

  “Early this morning,” Leggett said. “They were staying at one of the hotels—I don’t know which—and Gabrielle spent the night with them so they could start early.”

  I had enough of the Harpers. I asked: “Did either of you—any of you—know anything about Upton—have any dealings with him of any sort�
�before this affair?”

  Leggett said: “No.”

  I had other questions, but the kind of replies I was drawing didn’t mean anything, so I stood up to go. I was tempted to tell him what I thought of him, but there was no profit in that.

  He got up too, smiling politely, and said: “I’m sorry to have caused the insurance company all this trouble through what was, after all, probably my carelessness. I should like to ask your opinion: do you really think I should accept responsibility for the loss of the diamonds and make it good?”

  “The way it stands,” I said, “I think you should; but that wouldn’t stop the investigation.”

  Mrs. Leggett put her handkerchief to her mouth quickly.

  Leggett said: “Thanks.” His voice was casually polite. “I’ll have to think it over.”

  On my way back to the agency I dropped in on Fitzstephan for half an hour. He was writing, he told me, an article for the Psychopathological Review—that’s probably wrong, but it was something on that order—condemning the hypothesis of an unconscious or subconscious mind as a snare and a delusion, a pitfall for the unwary and a set of false whiskers for the charlatan, a gap in psychology’s roof that made it impossible, or nearly, for the sound scholar to smoke out such faddists as, for example, the psychoanalyst and the behaviorist, or words to that effect. He went on like that for ten minutes or more, finally coming back to the United States with: “but how are you getting along with the problem of the elusive diamonds?”

  “This way and that way,” I said, and told him what I had learned and done so far.

  “You’ve certainly,” he congratulated me when I finished, “got it all as tangled and confused as possible.”

  “It’ll be worse before it’s better,” I predicted. “I’d like to have ten minutes alone with Mrs. Leggett. Away from her husband, I imagine things could be done with her. Could you get anything out of her? I’d like to know why Gabrielle has gone, even if I can’t learn where.”

  “I’ll try,” Fitzstephan said willingly. “Suppose I go out there tomorrow afternoon—to borrow a book. Waite’s Rosy Cross will do it. They know I’m interested in that sort of stuff. He’ll be working in the laboratory, and I’ll refuse to disturb him. I’ll have to go at it in an offhand way, but maybe I can get something out of her.”