The Dain Curse

by Dashiell Hammett

  “Thanks,” I said. “See you tomorrow night.”

  I spent most of the afternoon putting my findings and guesses on paper and trying to fit them together in some sort of order. Eric Collinson phoned twice to ask if I had any news of his Gabrielle. Neither Mickey Linehan nor Al Mason reported anything. At six o’clock I called it a day.

  5

  GABRIELLE

  The next day brought happenings.

  Early in the morning there was a telegram from our New York office. Decoded, it read:

  LOUIS UPTON FORMER PROPRIETOR DETECTIVE AGENCY HERE STOP ARRESTED SEPTEMBER FIRST ONE NINE TWO THREE FOR BRIBING TWO JURORS IN SEXTON MURDER TRIAL STOP TRIED TO SAVE HIMSELF BY IMPLICATING HARRY RUPPERT OPERATIVE IN HIS EMPLOY STOP BOTH MEN CONVICTED STOP BOTH RELEASED FROM SING SING FEBRUARY SIX THIS YEAR STOP RUPPERT SAID TO HAVE THREATENED TO KILL UPTON STOP RUPPERT THIRTY TWO YEARS FIVE FEET ELEVEN INCHES HUNDRED FIFTY POUNDS BROWN HAIR AND EYES SALLOW COMPLEXION THIN FACE LONG THIN NOSE WALKS WITH STOOP AND CHIN OUT STOP MAILING PHOTOGRAPHS

  That placed Ruppert definitely enough as the man Mrs. Priestly and Daley had seen and the man who had probably killed Upton.

  O’Gar called me on the phone to tell me: “That dinge of yours—Rhino Tingley—was picked up in a hock shop last night trying to unload some jewelry. None of it was loose diamonds. We haven’t been able to crack him yet, just got him identified. I sent a man out to Leggett’s with some of the stuff, thinking it might be theirs, but they said no.”

  That didn’t fit in anywhere. I suggested: “Try Halstead and Beauchamp. Tell them you think the stuff is Leggett’s. Don’t tell them he said it wasn’t.”

  Half an hour later the detective-sergeant phoned me again, from the jewelers’, to tell me that Halstead had positively identified two pieces—a string of pearls and a topaz brooch—as articles Leggett had purchased there for his daughter.

  “That’s swell,” I said. “Now will you do this? Go out to Rhino’s flat and put the screws on his woman, Minnie Hershey. Frisk the joint, rough her up; the more you scare her, the better. She may be wearing an emerald ring. If she is, or if it—or any other jewelry that might be the Leggetts’—is there, you can take it away with you; but don’t stay too long and don’t bother her afterwards. I’ve got her covered. Just stir her up and beat it.”

  “I’ll turn her white,” O’Gar promised.

  Dick Foley was in the operatives’ room, writing his report on a warehouse robbery that had kept him up all night. I chased him out to help Mickey with the mulatto.

  “Both of you tail her if she leaves her joint after the police are through,” I said, “and as soon as you put her in anywhere, one of you get to a phone and let me know.”

  I went back to my office and burned cigarettes. I was ruining the third one when Eric Collinson phoned to ask if I had found his Gabrielle yet.

  “Not quite, but I’ve got prospects. If you aren’t busy, you might come over and go along with me—if it so happens that there turns out to be some place to go.”

  He said, very eagerly, that he would do that.

  A few minutes later Mickey Linehan phoned: “The high yellow’s gone visiting,” and gave me a Pacific Avenue address.

  The phone rang again before I got it out of my hand.

  “This is Watt Halstead,” a voice said. “Can you come down to see me for a minute or two?”

  “Not now. What is it?”

  “It’s about Edgar Leggett, and it’s quite puzzling. The police brought some jewelry in this morning, asking whether we knew whose it was. I recognized a string of pearls and a brooch that Edgar Leggett bought from us for his daughter last year—the brooch in the spring, the pearls at Christmas. After the police had gone, I, quite naturally, phoned Leggett; and he took the most peculiar attitude. He waited until I had told him about it, then said: ‘I thank you very much for your interference in my affairs,’ and hung up. What do you suppose is the matter with him?”

  “God knows. Thanks. I’ve got to run now, but I’ll stop in when I get a chance.”

  I hunted up Owen Fitzstephan’s number, called it, and heard his drawled: “Hello.”

  “You’d better get busy on your book-borrowing if any good’s to come of it,” I said.

  “Why? Are things taking place?”

  “Things are.”

  “Such as?” he asked.

  “This and that, but it’s no time for anybody who wants to poke his nose into the Leggett mysteries to be dilly-dallying with pieces about unconscious minds.”

  “Right,” he said: “I’m off to the front now.”

  Eric Collinson had come in while I was talking to the novelist.

  “Come on,” I said, leading the way out towards the elevators. “This might not be a false alarm.”

  “Where are we going?” he asked impatiently. “Have you found her? Is she all right?”

  I replied to the only one of his questions that I had the answer to by giving him the Pacific Avenue address Mickey had given me. It meant something to Collinson. He said: “That’s Joseph’s place.”

  We were in the elevator with half a dozen other people. I held my response down to a “Yeah?”

  He had a Chrysler roadster parked around the corner. We got into it and began bucking traffic and traffic signals toward Pacific Avenue.

  I asked: “Who is Joseph?”

  “Another cult. He’s the head of it. He calls his place the Temple of the Holy Grail. It’s the fashionable one just now. You know how they come and go in California. I don’t like having Gabrielle there, if that’s where she is—though—I don’t know—they may be all right. He’s one of Mr. Leggett’s queer friends. Do you know that she’s there?”

  “Maybe. Is she a member of the cult?”

  “She goes there, yes. I’ve been there with her.”

  “What sort of a layout is it?”

  “Oh, it seems to be all right,” he said somewhat reluctantly. “The right sort of people: Mrs. Pay son Laurence, and the Ralph Colemans, and Mrs. Livingston Rodman, people like that. And the Haldorns—that’s Joseph and his wife Aaronia—seem to be quite all right, but—but I don’t like the idea of Gabrielle going there like this.” He missed the end of a cable car with the Chrysler’s right wheel. “I don’t think it’s good for her to come too much under their influence.”

  “You’ve been there; what is their brand of hocus-pocus?” I asked.

  “It isn’t hocus-pocus, really,” he replied, wrinkling his forehead. “I don’t know very much about their creed, or anything like that, but I’ve been to their services with Gabrielle, and they’re quite as dignified, as beautiful even, as either Episcopalian or Catholic services. You mustn’t think that this is the Holy Roller or House of David sort of thing. It isn’t at all. Whatever it is, it is quite first-rate. The Haldorns are people of—of—well, more culture than I.”

  “Then what’s the matter with them?”

  He shook his head gloomily. “I honestly don’t know that anything is. I don’t like it. I don’t like having Gabrielle go off like this without letting anybody know where she’s gone. Do you think her parents knew where she had gone?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think so either,” he said.

  From the street the Temple of the Holy Grail looked like what it had originally been, a six-story yellow brick apartment building. There was nothing about its exterior to show that it wasn’t still that. I made Collinson drive past it to the corner where Mickey Linehan was leaning his lopsided bulk against a stone wall. He came to the car as it stopped at the curb.

  “The dark meat left ten minutes ago,” he reported, “with Dick behind her. Nobody else that looks like anybody you listed has been out.”

  “Camp here in the car and watch the door,” I told him. “We’re going in,” I said to Collinson. “Let me do most of the talking.”

  When we reached the Temple door I had to caution him: “Try not breathing so hard. Everything will probably be oke.”
/>   I rang the bell. The door was opened immediately by a broad-shouldered, meaty woman of some year close to fifty. She was a good three inches taller than my five feet six. Fiesh hung in little bags on her face, but there was neither softness nor looseness in her eyes and mouth. Her long upper lip had been shaved. She was dressed in black, black clothes that covered her from chin and ear-lobes to within less than an inch of the floor.

  “We want to see Miss Leggett,” I said.

  She pretended she hadn’t understood me.

  “We want to see Miss Leggett,” I repeated, “Miss Gabrielle Leggett.”

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was bass. “But come in.”

  She took us not very cheerfully into a small, dimly lighted reception room to one side of the foyer, told us to wait there, and went away.

  “Who’s the village blacksmith?” I asked Collinson.

  He said he didn’t know her. He fidgeted around the room. I sat down. Drawn blinds let in too little light for me to make out much of the room, but the rug was soft and thick, and what I could see of the furniture leaned towards luxury rather than severity.

  Except for Collinson’s fidgeting, no sound came from anywhere in the building. I looked at the open door and saw that we were being examined. A small boy of twelve or thirteen stood there staring at us with big dark eyes that seemed to have lights of their own in the semi-darkness.

  I said: “Hello, son.”

  Collinson jumped around at the sound of my voice.

  The boy said nothing. He stared at me for at least another minute with the blank, unblinking, embarrassing stare that only children can manage completely, then turned his back on me and walked away, making no more noise going than he had made coming.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Collinson.

  “It must be the Haldorns’ son Manuel. I’ve never seen him before.”

  Collinson walked up and down. I sat and watched the door. Presently a woman, walking silently on the thick carpet, appeared there and came into the reception room. She was tall, graceful; and her dark eyes seemed to have lights of their own, like the boy’s. That was all I could see clearly then.

  I stood up.

  She addressed Collinson: “How do you do? This is Mr. Collinson, isn’t it?” Her voice was the most musical I had ever heard.

  Collinson mumbled something or other and introduced me to the woman, calling her Mrs. Haldorn. She gave me a warm, firm hand and then crossed the room to raise a blind, letting in a fat rectangle of afternoon sun. While I blinked at her in the sudden brightness, she sat down and motioned us into chairs.

  I saw her eyes first. They were enormous, almost black, warm, and heavily fringed with almost black lashes. They were the only live, human, real things in her face. There was warmth and there was beauty in her oval, olive-skinned face, but, except for the eyes, it was warmth and beauty that didn’t seem to have anything to do with reality. It was as if her face were not a face, but a mask that she had worn until it had almost become a face. Even her mouth, which was a mouth to talk about, looked not so much like flesh as like a too perfect imitation of flesh, softer and redder and maybe warmer than genuine flesh, but not genuine flesh. Above this face, or mask, uncut black hair was tied close to her head, parted in the middle, and drawn across temples and upper ears to end in a knot on the nape of her neck. Her neck was long, strong, slender; her body tall, fully fleshed, supple; her clothes dark and silky, part of her body.

  I said: “We want to see Miss Leggett, Mrs. Haldorn.”

  She asked curiously: “Why do you think she is here?”

  “That doesn’t make any difference, does it?” I replied quickly, before Collinson could say something wrong. “She is. We’d like to see her.”

  “I don’t think you can,” she said slowly. “She isn’t well, and she came here to rest, particularly to get away from people for a while.”

  “Sorry,” I said, “but it’s a case of have to. We wouldn’t have come like this if it hadn’t been important.”

  “It is important?”

  “Yeah.”

  She hesitated, said: “Well, I’ll see,” excused herself, and left us.

  “I wouldn’t mind moving in here myself,” I told Collinson.

  He didn’t know what I was talking about. His face was flushed and excited.

  “Gabrielle may not like our coming here like this,” he said.

  I said that would be too bad.

  Aaronia Haldorn returned to us.

  “I’m really very sorry,” she said, standing in the doorway, smiling politely, “but Miss Leggett doesn’t wish to see you.”

  “I’m sorry she doesn’t,” I said, “but we’ll have to see her.”

  She drew herself up straight and her smile went away.

  “I beg your pardon?” she said.

  “We’ll have to see her,” I repeated, keeping my voice amiable. “It’s important, as I told you.”

  “I am sorry.” Even the iciness she got into her voice didn’t keep it from being beautiful. “You cannot see her.”

  I said: “Miss Leggett’s an important witness, as you probably know, in a robbery and murder job. Well, we’ve got to see her. If it suits you better, I’m willing to wait half an hour till we can get a policeman up here with whatever authority you make necessary. We’re going to see her.”

  Collinson said something unintelligible, though it sounded apologetic.

  Aaronia Haldorn made the slightest of bows.

  “You may do as you see fit,” she said coldly. “I do not approve of your disturbing Miss Leggett against her wishes, and so far as my permission is concerned, I do not give it. If you insist, I cannot prevent you.”

  “Thanks. Where is she?”

  “Her room is on the fifth floor, just beyond the stairs, to the left.”

  She bent her head a little once more and went away.

  Collinson put a hand on my arm, mumbling: “I don’t know whether I—whether we ought to do this. Gabrielle’s not going to like it. She won’t—”

  “Suit yourself,” I growled, “but I’m going up. Maybe she won’t like it, but neither do I like having people running away and hiding when I want to ask them about stolen diamonds.”

  He frowned, chewed his lips, and made uncomfortable faces, but he went along with me. We found an automatic elevator, rode to the fifth floor, and went down a purple-carpeted corridor to the door just beyond the stairs on the left-hand side.

  I tapped the door with the back of my hand. There was no answer from inside. I tapped again, louder.

  A voice sounded inside the room. It might have been anybody’s voice, though probably a woman’s. It was too faint for us to know what it said and too smothered for us to know who was saying it.

  I poked Collinson with my elbow and ordered: “Call her.”

  He pulled at his collar with a forefinger and called hoarsely: “Gaby, it’s Eric.”

  That didn’t bring an answer.

  I thumped the wood again, calling: “Open the door.”

  The voice inside said something that was nothing to me. I repeated my thumping and calling. Down the corridor a door opened and a sallow thin-haired old man’s head stuck out and asked: “What’s the matter?” I said: “None of your damned business,” and pounded the door again.

  The inside voice came strong enough now to let us know that it was complaining, though no words could be made out yet. I rattled the knob and found that the door was unlocked. Rattling the knob some more, I worked the door open an inch or so. Then the voice was clearer. I heard soft feet on the floor. I heard a choking sob. I pushed the door open.

  Eric Collinson made a noise in his throat that was like somebody very far away yelling horribly.

  Gabrielle Leggett stood beside the bed, swaying a little, holding the white foot-rail of the bed with one hand. Her face was white as lime. Her eyes were all brown, dull, focused on nothing, and her small forehead was wrinkled. She looked as if she knew there was something in front of
her and was wondering what it was. She had on one yellow stocking, a brown velvet skirt that had been slept in, and a yellow chemise. Scattered around the room were a pair of brown slippers, the other stocking, a brown and gold blouse, a brown coat, and a brown and yellow hat.

  Everything else in the room was white: white-papered walls and white-painted ceiling; white-enameled chairs, bed, table, fixtures—even to the telephone—and woodwork; white felt on the floor. None of the furniture was hospital furniture, but solid whiteness gave it that appearance. There were two windows, and two doors besides the one I had opened. The door on the left opened into a bathroom, the one on the right into a small dressing-room.

  I pushed Collinson into the room, followed him, and closed the door. There was no key in it, and no place for a key, no lock of any fixable sort. Collinson stood gaping at the girl, his jaw sagging, his eyes as vacant as hers; but there was more horror in his face. She leaned against the foot of the bed and stared at nothing with dark, blank eyes in a ghastly, puzzled face.

  I put an arm around her and sat her on the side of the bed, telling Collinson: “Gather up her clothes.” I had to tell him twice before he came out of his trance.

  He brought me her things and I began dressing her. He dug his fingers into my shoulder and protested in a voice that would have been appropriate if I had been robbing a poor-box:

  “No! You can’t—”

  “What the hell?” I asked, pushing his hand away. “You can have the job if you want it.”

  He was sweating. He gulped and stuttered: “No, no! I couldn’t—it—” He broke off and walked to the window.

  “She told me you were an ass,” I said to his back, and discovered I was putting the brown and gold blouse on her backwards. She might as well have been a wax figure, for all the help she gave me, but at least she didn’t struggle when I wrestled her around, and she stayed where I shoved her.