The Dain Curse

by Dashiell Hammett

  “I heard,” Mrs. Leggett sobbed; “I heard the shot, and ran up here, and he—he was like that. And I went down to the telephone, and the bell—the doorbell—rang, and it was Mr. Fitzstephan, and I told him. It couldn’t—there was nobody else in the house to—to kill him.”

  “You killed him,” I said to her. “He was going away. He wrote this statement, shouldering your crimes. You killed Ruppert down in the kitchen. That’s what the girl was talking about. Your husband’s letter sounded enough like a suicide letter to pass for one, you thought; so you murdered him—murdered him because you thought his confession and death would hush up the whole business, keep us from poking into it any further.”

  Her face didn’t tell me anything. It was distorted, but in a way that might have meant almost anything. I filled my lungs and went on, not exactly bellowing, but getting plenty of noise out:

  “There are half a dozen lies in your husband’s statement-half a dozen that I can peg now. He didn’t send for you and his daughter. You traced him here. Mrs. Begg said he was the most surprised man she had ever seen when you arrived from New York. He didn’t give Upton the diamonds. His account of why he gave them to Upton and of what he intended doing afterwards is ridiculous: it’s simply the best story he could think of on short notice to cover you up. Leggett would have given him money or he would have given him nothing; he wouldn’t have been foolish enough to give him somebody else’s diamonds and have all this stink raised.

  “Upton traced you here and he came to you with his demand—not to your husband. You had hired Upton to find Leggett; you were the one he knew; he and Ruppert had traced Leggett for you, not only to Mexico City, but all the way here. They’d have squeezed you before this if they hadn’t been sent to Sing Sing for another trick. When they got out, Upton came here and made his play. You framed the burglary; you gave Upton the diamonds; and you didn’t tell your husband anything about it. Your husband thought the burglary was on the level. Otherwise, would he—a man with his record—have risked reporting it to the police?

  “Why didn’t you tell him about Upton? Didn’t you want him to know that you had had him traced step by step from Devil’s Island to San Francisco? Why? His southern record was a good additional hold on him, if you needed one? You didn’t want him to know you knew about Labaud and Howart and Edge?”

  I didn’t give her a chance to answer any of these questions, but sailed ahead, turning my voice loose:

  “Maybe Ruppert, following Upton here, got in touch with you, and you had him kill Upton, a job he was willing to do on his own hook. Probably, because he did kill him and he did come to you afterwards, and you thought it necessary to put the knife into him down in the kitchen. You didn’t know the girl, hiding in the pantry, saw you; but you did know that you were getting out of your depth. You knew that your chances of getting away with Ruppert’s murder were slim. Your house was too much in the spotlight. So you played your only out. You went to your husband with the whole story—or as much of it as could be arranged to persuade him—and got him to shoulder it for you. And then you handed him this—here at the table.

  “He shielded you. He had always shielded you. You,” I thundered, my voice in fine form by now, “killed your sister Lily, his first wife, and let him take the fall for you. You went to London with him after that. Would you have gone with your sister’s murderer if you had been innocent? You had him traced here, and you came here after him, and you married him. You were the one who decided he had married the wrong sister, and you killed her.”

  “She did! She did!” cried Gabrielle Leggett, trying to get up from the chair in which Collinson was holding her. “She—”

  Mrs. Leggett drew herself up straight, and smiled, showing strong yellowish teeth set edge to edge. She took two steps toward the center of the room. One hand was on her hip, the other hanging loosely at her side. The housewife—Fitzstephan’s serene sane soul—was suddenly gone. This was a blonde woman whose body was rounded, not with the plumpness of contented, well-cared-for early middle age, but with the cushioned, soft-sheathed muscles of the hunting cats, whether in jungle or alley.

  I picked up the pistol from the table and put it in my pocket.

  “You wish to know who killed my sister?” Mrs. Leggett asked softly, speaking to me, her teeth clicking together between words, her mouth smiling, her eyes burning. “She, the dope fiend, Gabrielle—she killed her mother. She is the one he shielded.

  The girl cried out something unintelligible.

  “Nonsense,” I said. “She was a baby.”

  “Oh, but it is not nonsense,” the woman said. “She was nearly five, a child of five playing with a pistol that she had taken from a drawer while her mother slept. The pistol went off and Lily died. An accident, of course, but Maurice was too sensitive a soul to bear the thought of her growing up knowing that she had killed her mother. Besides, it was likely that Maurice would have been convicted in any event. It was known that he and I were intimate, that he wanted his freedom from Lily; and he was at the door of Lily’s bedroom when the shot was fired. But that was a slight matter to him: his one desire was to save the child from memory of what she had done, so her life might not be blackened by the knowledge that she had, however accidentally, killed her mother.”

  What made this especially nasty was the niceness with which the woman smiled as she talked, and the care—almost fastidious—with which she selected her words, mouthing them daintily. She went on:

  “Gabrielle was always, even before she became addicted to drugs, a child of, one might say, limited mentality; and so, by the time the London police had found us, we had succeeded in quite emptying her mind of the last trace of memory, that is, of this particular memory. This is, I assure you, the entire truth. She killed her mother; and her father, to use your expression, took the fall for her.”

  “Fairly plausible,” I conceded, “but it doesn’t hang together right. There’s a chance that you made Leggett believe that, but I doubt it. I think you’re trying to hurt your step-daughter because she’s told us of seeing you knife Ruppert downstairs.”

  She pulled her lips back from her teeth and took a quick step toward me, her eyes wide and white-ringed; then she checked herself, laughed sharply, and the glare went from her eyes—or maybe went back through them, to smolder behind them. She put her hands on her hips and smiled playfully, airily, at me and spoke playfully to me, while mad hatred glowed behind eyes, smile, and voice.

  “Am I? Then I must tell you this, which I should not tell you unless it was true. I taught her to kill her mother. Do you understand? I taught her, trained her, drilled her, rehearsed her. Do you understand that? Lily and I were true sisters, inseparable, hating one another poisonously. Maurice, he wished to marry neither of us—why should he?—though he was intimate enough with both. You are to try to understand that literally. But we were poverty-ridden and he was not, and, because we were and he wasn’t, Lily wished to marry him. And I, I wished to marry him because she did. We were true sisters, like that in all things. But Lily got him, first—trapped him—that is crude but exact—into matrimony.

  “Gabrielle was born six or seven months later. What a happy little family we were. I lived with them—weren’t Lily and I inseparable?—and from the first Gabrielle had more love for me than for her mother. I saw to that: there was nothing her Aunt Alice wouldn’t do for her dear niece; because her preferring me infuriated Lily, not that Lily herself loved the child so much, but that we were sisters; and whatever one wanted the other wanted, not to share, but exclusively.

  “Gabrielle had hardly been born before I began planning what I should some day do; and when she was nearly five I did it. Maurice’s pistol, a small one, was kept in a locked drawer high in a chiffonier. I unlocked the drawer, unloaded the pistol, and taught Gabrielle an amusing little game. I would lie on Lily’s bed, pretending to sleep. The child would push a chair to the chiffonier, climb up on it, take the pistol from the drawer, creep over to the bed, put the muz
zle of the pistol to my head, and press the trigger. When she did it well, making little or no noise, holding the pistol correctly in her tiny hands, I would reward her with candy, cautioning her against saying anything about the game to her mother or to anyone else, as we were going to surprise her mother with it.

  “We did. We surprised her completely one afternoon when, having taken aspirin for a headache, Lily was sleeping in her bed. That time I unlocked the drawer but did not unload the pistol. Then I told the child she might play the game with her mother; and I went to visit friends on the floor below, so no one would think I had had any part in my dear sister’s demise. I thought Maurice would be away all afternoon. I intended, when I heard the shot, to rush upstairs with my friends and find with them that the child playing with the pistol had killed her mother.

  “I had little fear of the child’s talking afterwards. Of, as I have said, limited mentality, loving and trusting me as she did, and in my hands both before and during any official inquiry that might be made, I knew I could very easily control her, make sure that she said nothing to reveal my part in the—ah—enterprise. But Maurice very nearly spoiled the whole thing. Coming home unexpectedly, he reached the bedroom door just as Gabrielle pressed the trigger. The tiniest fraction of a second earlier, and he would have been in time to save his wife’s life.

  “Well, that was unfortunate in that it led to his being convicted; but it certainly prevented his ever suspecting me; and his subsequent desire to wipe from the child’s mind all remembrance of the deed relieved me of any further anxiety or effort. I did follow him to this country after his escape from Devil’s Island, and I did follow him to San Francisco when Upton had found him for me; and I used Gabrielle’s love for me and her hatred of him—I had carefully cultivated that with skilfully clumsy attempts to persuade her to forgive him for murdering her mother—and the necessity of keeping her in ignorance of the truth, and my record of faithfulness to him and her, to make him marry me, to make him think that marrying me would in some sense salvage our ruined lives. The day he married Lily I swore I would take him away from her. And I did. And I hope my dear sister in hell knows it.”

  The smile was gone. Mad hatred was no longer behind eyes and voice: it was in them, and in the set of her features, the pose of her body. This mad hatred—and she as part of it—seemed the only live thing in the room. The eight of us who looked at and listened to her didn’t, for the moment, count: we were alive to her, but not to each other, nor to anything but her.

  She turned from me to fling an arm out at the girl on the other side of the room; and now her voice was throaty, vibrant, with savage triumph in it; and her words were separated into groups by brief pauses, so that she seemed to be chanting them.

  “You’re her daughter,” she cried; “and you’re cursed with the same black soul and rotten blood that she and I and all the Dains have had; and you’re cursed with your mother’s blood on your hands in babyhood; and with the twisted mind and the need for drugs that are my gifts to you; and your life will be black as your mother’s and mine were black; and the lives of those you touch will be black as Maurice’s was black; and your—”

  “Stop!” Eric Collinson gasped. “Make her stop.”

  Gabrielle Leggett, both hands to her ears, her face twisted with terror, screamed once—horribly—and fell forward out of her chair.

  Pat Reddy was young at manhunting, but O’Gar and I should have known better than to stop watching Mrs. Leggett even for a half-second, no matter how urgently the girl’s scream and fall pulled at our attention. But we did look at the girl—if for less than half a second—and that was long enough. When we looked at Mrs. Leggett again, she had a gun in her hand, and she had taken her first step towards the door.

  Nobody was between her and the door: the uniformed copper had gone to help Collinson with Gabrielle Leggett. Nobody was behind her: her back was to the door and by turning she had brought Fitzstephan into her field of vision. She glared over the black gun, burning eyes darting from one to another of us, taking another step backward, snarling: “Don’t you move.”

  Pat Reddy shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. I frowned at him, shaking my head. The hall and stairs were better places in which to catch her: in here somebody would die.

  She backed over the sill, blew breath between her teeth with a hissing, spitting sound, and was gone down the hall.

  Owen Fitzstephan was first through the door after her. The policeman got in my way, but I was second out. The woman had reached the head of the stairs, at the other end of the dim hall, with Fitzstephan, not far behind, rapidly overtaking her.

  He caught her on the between-floors landing, just as I reached the top of the stairs. He pinned one of her arms to her body, but the other, with the gun, was free. He grabbed at it and missed. She twisted the muzzle in to his body as I—with my head bent to miss the edge of the floor—leaped down at them.

  I landed on them just in time, crashing into them, smashing them into the corner of the wall, sending her bullet, meant for the sorrel-haired man, into a step.

  We weren’t standing up. I caught with both hands at the flash of her gun, missed, and had her by the waist. Close to my chin Fitzstephan’s lean fingers closed on her gun-hand wrist.

  She twisted her body against my right arm. My right arm was still lame from our spill out of the Chrysler. It wouldn’t hold. Her thick body went up, turning over on me.

  Gunfire roared in my ear, burnt my cheek.

  The woman’s body went limp.

  When O’Gar and Reddy pulled us apart she lay still. The second bullet had gone through her throat.

  I went up to the laboratory. Gabrielle Leggett, with the doctor and Collinson kneeling beside her, was lying on the floor.

  I told the doctor: “Better take a look at Mrs. Leggett. She’s on the stairs. Dead, I think, but you’d better take a look.”

  The doctor went out. Collinson, chafing the unconscious girl’s hands, looked at me as if I were something there ought to be a law against, and said:

  “I hope you’re satisfied with the way your work got done.”

  “It got done,” I said.

  8

  BUT AND IF

  Fitzstephan and I ate one of Mrs. Schindler’s good dinners that evening in her low-ceilinged basement, and drank her husband’s good beer. The novelist in Fitzstephan was busy trying to find what he called Mrs. Leggett’s psychological basis.

  “The killing of her sister is plain enough, knowing her character as we now do,” he said, “and so are the killing of her husband, her attempt to ruin her niece’s life when she was exposed, and even her determination to kill herself on the stairs rather than be caught. But the quiet years in between—where do they fit in?”

  “It’s Leggett’s murder that doesn’t fit in,” I argued. “The rest is all one piece. She wanted him. She killed her sister—or had her killed—in a way to tie him to her; but the law pulled them apart. There was nothing she could do about that, except wait and hope for the chance that always existed, that he would be freed some day. We don’t know of anything else she wanted then. Why shouldn’t she be quiet, holding Gabrielle as her hostage against the chance she hoped for, living comfortably enough, no doubt, on his money? When she heard of his escape, she came to America and set about finding him. When her detective located him here she came to him. He was willing to marry her. She had what she wanted. Why should she be anything but quiet? She wasn’t a trouble-maker for the fun of it—one of these people who act out of pure mischief. She was simply a woman who wanted what she wanted and was willing to go to any length to get it. Look how patiently, and for how many years, she hid her hatred from the girl. And her wants weren’t even very extravagant. You won’t find the key to her in any complicated derangements. She was simple as an animal, with an animal’s simple ignorance of right and wrong, dislike for being thwarted, and spitefulness when trapped.”

  Fitzstephan drank beer and asked:

  “You’d r
educe the Dain curse, then, to a primitive strain in the blood?”

  “To less than that, to words in an angry woman’s mouth.”

  “It’s fellows like you that take all the color out of life.” He sighed behind cigarette smoke. “Doesn’t Gabrielle’s being made the tool of her mother’s murder convince you of the necessity—at least the poetic necessity—of the curse?”

  “Not even if she was the tool, and that’s something I wouldn’t bet on. Apparently Leggett didn’t doubt it. He stuffed his letter with those ancient details to keep her covered up. But we’ve only got Mrs. Leggett’s word that he actually saw the child kill her mother. On the other hand, Mrs. Leggett said, in front of Gabrielle, that Gabrielle had been brought up to believe her father the murderer—so we can believe that. And it isn’t likely—though it’s possible—that he would have gone that far except to save her from knowledge of her own guilt. But, from that point on, one guess at the truth is about as good as another. Mrs. Leggett wanted him and she got him. Then why in hell did she kill him?”

  “You jump around so,” Fitzstephan complained. “You answered that back in the laboratory. Why don’t you stick to your answer? You said she killed him because the letter sounded enough like a pre-suicide statement to pass, and she thought it and his death would ensure her safety.”

  “That was good enough to say then,” I admitted; “but not now, in cold blood, with more facts to fit in. She had worked and waited for years to get him. He must have had some value to her.”

  “But she didn’t love him, or there is no reason to suppose she did. He hadn’t that value to her. He was to her no more than a trophy of the hunt; and that’s a value not affected by death—one has the head embalmed and nailed on the wall.”

  “Then why did she keep Upton away from him? Why did she kill Ruppert? Why should she have carried the load for him there? It was his danger. Why did she make it hers if he had no value to her? Why did she risk all that to keep him from learning that the past had come to life again?”