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Crime Stories Page 98

by Dashiell Hammett


  The deputy sheriff replied without looking up from his cards. “He didn’t show up at Wynant’s place. King’s been there all day. And he didn’t show up at Ben’s to—to see her. Where else’d he go if he came up here?” He pushed a chip out on the table. “I’ll crack it.” He had two kings in his hand.

  Schumach pushed a clip out and said: “No, sir, he didn’t show up to look at the corpus delicti.”

  Lane dropped his cards face-down on the table. The elder Callaghan put in a chip and picked up the rest of the deck.

  His son said, “Three cards,” and then to Boyer: “You can phone King if you want.” He moved his head to indicate the telephone by the door.

  Boyer looked questioningly at Guild, who said: “Might as well.”

  Guild addressed a question to Lane while the other three men at the table were making their bets and Boyer was using the telephone. “You’re the man who saw Wynant going into the Manchu?”

  “Yes.” Lane’s voice was a quiet bass.

  “Was anybody with him?”

  Lane said, “No,” with certainty, then hesitated thoughtfully and added: “unless they went in ahead of him. I don’t think so, but it’s possible. He was just going in when I saw him and it could’ve happened that he’d stopped to shut his car-door or take his key out or something and whoever was with him had gone on ahead.”

  “Did you see enough of him to make sure it was him?”

  “I couldn’t go wrong on that, even if I did see only his back. My place being next to his, I guess I’ve seen a lot more of him than most people around here, and then, tall and skinny, with those high shoulders and that funny walk, you couldn’t miss him. Besides, his car was there.”

  “Had he cut his whiskers off, or was he still wearing them?”

  Lane opened his eyes wide and laughed. “By God, I don’t know,” he said. “I heard he shaved them, but I never thought of that. You’ve got me there. His back was to me and I wouldn’t’ve seen them unless they happened to be sticking out sideways or I got a slanting look at him. I don’t remember seeing them, yet I might’ve and thought nothing of it. If I’d seen his face without them it’s a cinch I’d’ve noticed, but—You’ve got me there, brother.”

  “Know him pretty well?”

  Lane picked up the cards the younger Callaghan dealt him and smiled. “Well, I don’t guess anybody could say they know him pretty well.” He spread his cards apart to look at them.

  “Did you know the Forrest girl pretty well?”

  The deputy sheriff’s face began to redden. He said somewhat sharply to the undertaker: “Can you do it?”

  The undertaker rapped the table with his knuckles to say he could not.

  Lane had a pair of sixes and a pair of fours. He said, “I’ll do it,” pushed out a chip, and replied to the dark man’s question: “I don’t know just what you mean by that. I knew her. She used to come over sometimes and watch me work the dogs when I had them over in the field near their place.”

  Boyer had finished telephoning and had come to stand beside Guild. He explained: “Ross raises and trains police dogs.”

  The elder Callaghan said: “I hope she didn’t have you going around talking to yourself like she had Ray.” His voice was a nasal whine.

  His son slammed his cards down on the table. His face was red and swollen. In a loud, accusing tone he began: “I guess I ought to go around chasing after—”

  “Ray! Ray!” A stringy white-haired woman in faded blue had come a step in from the next room. Her voice was chiding. “You oughtn’t to—”

  “Well, make him stop jawing about her, then,” the deputy sheriff said. “She was as good as anybody else and a lot better than most I know.” He glowered at the table in front of him.

  In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Boyer said: “Good evening, Mrs. Callaghan. How are you?”

  “Just fine,” she said. “How’s Lucy?”

  “She’s always well, thanks. This is Mr. Guild, Mrs. Callaghan.”

  Guild bowed, murmuring something polite. The woman ducked her head at him and took a backward step. “If you can’t play cards without rowing I wish you’d stop,” she told her son and husband as she withdrew.

  Boyer addressed Guild: “King, the deputy stationed at Wynant’s place, says he hasn’t seen anything of Fremont all day.”

  Guild looked at his watch. “He’s had eleven hours to make it in,” he said. He smiled pleasantly. “Or eleven hours’ start if he headed in another direction.”

  The undertaker leaned over the table. “You think—?”

  “I don’t know,” Guild said. “I don’t know anything. That’s the hell of it. We don’t know anything.”

  “There’s nothing to know,” the deputy sheriff said querulously, “except that Wynant was jealous and killed her and ran away and you haven’t been able to find him.”

  Guild, staring bleakly at the younger Callaghan, said nothing.

  Boyer cleared his throat. “Well, Ray,” he began, “Mr. Guild and I have found quite a bit of confusing evidence in the—”

  The elder Callaghan prodded his son with a gnarled forefinger. “Did you tell them about that Smoot boy?”

  The deputy sheriff pulled irritably away from his father’s finger. “That don’t amount to nothing,” he said, “and, besides, what chance’ve I got to tell anything with all the talking you’ve been doing?”

  “What was it?” Boyer asked eagerly.

  “It don’t amount to nothing. Just that this kid—maybe you know him, Pete Smoot’s boy—had a telegram for Wynant and took it up to his house. He got there at five minutes after two. He wrote down the time because nobody answered the door and he had to poke the telegram under the door.”

  “This was yesterday afternoon?” Guild asked.

  “Yes,” the deputy sheriff said gruffly. “Well, the kid says the blue car, the one she drove out from the city in, was there then, and Wynant’s wasn’t.”

  “He knew Wynant’s car?” Guild asked.

  Pointedly ignoring Guild, the deputy sheriff said: “He says there wasn’t any other car there, either in the shed or outside. He’d’ve seen it if there was. So he put the telegram under the door, got on his bike, and rode back to the telegraph office. Coming back along the road he says he saw the Hopkinses cutting across the field. They’d been down at Hooper’s buying Hopkins a suit. The kid says they didn’t see him and they were too far from the road for him to holler at them about the telegram.” The deputy sheriff’s face began to redden again. “So if that’s right, and I guess it is, they’d’ve got back to the house, I reckon, around twenty past two—not before that, anyway.” He picked up the cards and began to shuffle them, though he had dealt the last hand. “You see, that—well—it don’t mean anything or help us any.”

  Guild had finished lighting a cigarette. He asked Callaghan, before Boyer could speak: “What do you figure? She was alone in the house and didn’t answer the kid’s knock because she was hurrying to get her packing done before Wynant came home? Or because she was already dead?”

  Boyer began in a tone of complete amazement: “But the Hopkinses said—”

  Guild said: “Wait. Let Callaghan answer.”

  Callaghan said in a voice hoarse with anger: “Let Callaghan answer if he wants to, but he don’t happen to want to, and what do you think of that?” He glared at Guild. “I got nothing to do with you.” He glared at Boyer. “You got nothing to do with me. I’m a deputy sheriff and Petersen’s my boss. Go to him for anything you want. Understand that?”

  Guild’s dark face was impassive. His voice was even. “You’re not the first deputy sheriff that ever tried to make a name for himself by holding back information.” He started to put his cigarette in his mouth, lowered it, and said: “You got the Hopkinses’ call. You were first on the scene, weren’t you? What’d you find there that you’ve kept to yourself?”

  Callaghan stood up. Lane and the undertaker rose hastily from their places at the table.
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  Boyer said: “Now, wait, gentlemen, there’s no use of our quarreling.”

  Guild, smiling, addressed the deputy sheriff blandly: “You’re not in such a pretty spot, Callaghan. You had a yen for the girl. You were likely to be just as jealous as Wynant when you heard she was going off with Fremont. You’ve got a childish sort of hot temper. Where were you around two o’clock yesterday afternoon?”

  Callaghan, snarling unintelligible curses, lunged at Guild.

  Lane and the undertaker sprang between the two men, struggling with the deputy sheriff. Lane turned his head to give the growling dog in the corner a quieting command. The elder Callaghan did not get up, but leaned over the table whining remonstrances at his son’s back. Mrs. Callaghan came in and began to scold her son.

  Boyer said nervously to Guild: “I think we’d better go.”

  Guild shrugged. “Whatever you say, though I would like to know where he spent the early part of yesterday afternoon.” He glanced calmly around the room and followed Boyer to the front door.

  Outside, the district attorney exclaimed: “Good God! You don’t think Ray killed her!”

  “Why not?” Guild snapped the remainder of his cigarette to the middle of the roadbed in a long red arc. “I don’t know. Somebody did and I’ll tell you a secret. I’m damned if I think Wynant did.”

  IX

  Hopkins and a tall younger man with a reddish mustache came out of Wynant’s house when Boyer stopped his automobile in front of it.

  The district attorney got down on the ground, saying: “Good evening, gentlemen.” Indicating the red-mustached man, he said to Guild: “This is deputy sheriff King, Mr. Guild. Mr. Guild,” he explained, “is working with me.”

  The deputy sheriff nodded, looking the dark man up and down. “Yes,” he said, “I been hearing about him. Howdy, Mr. Guild.”

  Guild’s nod included Hopkins and King.

  “No sign of Fremont yet?” Boyer asked.

  “No.”

  Guild spoke: “Is Mrs. Hopkins still up?”

  “Yes, sir,” her husband said, “she’s doing some sewing.”

  The four men went indoors.

  Mrs. Hopkins, sitting in a rocking-chair hemming an unbleached linen handkerchief, started to rise, but sank back in her chair with a “How do you do” when Boyer said: “Don’t get up. We’ll find chairs.”

  Guild did not sit down. Standing by the door, he lit a cigarette while the others were finding seats. Then he addressed the Hopkinses: “You told us it was around three o’clock yesterday afternoon that Columbia Forrest got back from the city.”

  “Oh, no, sir!” The woman dropped her sewing on her knees. “Or at least we never meant to say anything like that. We meant to say it was around three o’clock when we heard them—him—quarreling. You can ask Mr. Callaghan what time it was when I called him up and—”

  “I’m asking you,” Guild said in a pleasant tone. “Was she here when you got back from the village—from buying the suit—at two-twenty?”

  The woman peered nervously through her spectacles at him. “Well, yes, sir, she was, if that’s what time it was. I thought it was later, Mr. Gould, but if you say that’s what time it was I guess you know, but she’d only just got home.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She said so. She called downstairs to know if it was us coming in and she said she’d just that minute got home.”

  “Was there a telegram under the door when you came in?”

  The Hopkinses looked at each other in surprise and shook their heads. “No, there was not,” the man said.

  “Was he here?”

  “Mr. Wynant?”

  “Yes. Was he here when you got home?”

  “Yes. I—I think he was.”

  “Do you know?”

  “Well, it”—she looked appealingly at her husband—“he was here when we heard them fighting not much after that, so he must’ve been—”

  “Or did he come in after you got back?”

  “Not—we didn’t see him come in.”

  “Hear him?”

  She shook her head certainly. “No, sir.”

  “Was his car here when you got back?”

  The woman started to say yes, stopped midway, and looked questioningly at her husband. His round face was uncomfortably confused. “We—we didn’t notice,” she stammered.

  “Would you have heard him if he’d driven up while you were here?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Gould. I think—I don’t know. If I was in the kitchen with the water running and Willie—Mr. Hopkins that is—don’t hear any too good anyway. Maybe we—”

  Guild turned his back to her and addressed the district attorney. “There’s no sense to their story. If I were you I’d throw them in the can and charge them with the murder.”

  Boyer gaped. Hopkins’s face went yellow. His wife leaned over her sewing and began to cry. King stared at the dark man as at some curio seen for the first time.

  The district attorney was the first to speak. “But—but why?”

  “You don’t believe them, do you?” Guild asked in an amused tone.

  “I don’t know. I—”

  “If it was up to me I’d do it,” Guild said good-naturedly, “but if you want to wait till we locate Wynant, all right. I want to get some more specimens of Wynant’s and the girl’s handwriting.” He turned back to the Hopkinses and asked casually: “Who was Laura Porter?”

  The name seemed to mean nothing to them. Hopkins shook his head dumbly. His wife did not stop crying.

  “I didn’t think you knew,” Guild said. “Let’s go up and get those scratch samples, Boyer.”

  The district attorney’s face, as he went upstairs with Guild, was a theater where anxiety played. He stared at the dark man with troubled, pleading eyes. “I—I wish you’d tell me why you think Wynant didn’t do it,” he said in a wheedling voice, “and why you think Ray and the Hopkinses are mixed up in it.” He made a despairing gesture with his hands. “What do you really think, Guild? Do you really suspect these people or are you—?” His face flushed under the dark man’s steady, unreadable gaze and he lowered his eyes.

  “I suspect everybody,” Guild said in a voice that was devoid of feeling. “Where were you between two and three o’clock yesterday afternoon?” Boyer jumped and a look of fear came into his young face. Then he laughed sheepishly and said: “Well, I suppose you’re right. I want you to understand, Guild, that I keep asking you things not because I think you’re off on the wrong track, but because I think you know so much more about this kind of thing than I do.”

  Guild was in San Francisco by two o’clock in the morning. He went straight to the Manchu.

  Elsa Fremont was singing when he stepped out of the elevator. She was wearing a taffeta gown—snug of bodice, billowy of skirt—whereon great red roses were printed against a chalky blue background, with two rhinestone buckles holding a puffy sash in place. The song she sang had a recurring line, “Boom, chisel, chisel!”

  When she finished her second encore she started toward Guild’s table, but two men and a woman at an intervening table stopped her, and it was then ten minutes or more before she joined him. Her eyes were dark, her face and voice nervous. “Did you find Charley?”

  Guild, on his feet, said: “No. He didn’t go up to Hell Bend.”

  She sat down twisting her wrist-scarf, nibbling her lip, frowning.

  The dark man sat down, asking: “Did you think he’d gone there?”

  She jerked her head up indignantly. “I told you I did. Don’t you ever believe anything that anybody tells you?”

  “Sometimes I do and am wrong,” Guild said. He tapped a cigarette on the table. “Wherever he’s gone, he’s got a new car and an all-day start.”

  She put her hands on the table suddenly, palms up in a suppliant gesture. “But why should he want to go anywhere else?”

  Guild was looking at her hands. “I don’t know, but he did.” He bent his head further over h
er hands as if studying their lines. “Is Frank Kearny here now and can I talk to him?”

  She uttered a brief throaty laugh. “Yes.” Letting her hands lie as they were on the table, she turned her head and caught a passing waiter’s attention. “Lee, ask Frank to come here.” She looked at the dark man again, somewhat curiously. “I told him you wanted to see him. Was that all right?”

  He was still studying her palms. “Oh, yes, sure,” he said good-naturedly. “That would give him time to think.”

  She laughed again and took her hands off the table.

  A man came to the table. He was a full six feet tall, but the width of his shoulders made him seem less than that. His face was broad and flat, his eyes small, his lips wide and thick, and when he smiled he displayed crooked teeth set apart. His age could have been anything between thirty-five and forty-five.

  “Frank, this is Mr. Guild,” Elsa Fremont said.

  Kearny threw his right hand out with practiced heartiness. “Glad to know you, Guild.”

  They shook hands and Kearny sat down with them. The orchestra was playing “Love Is Like That” for dancers.

  “Do you know Laura Porter?” Guild asked Kearny.

  The proprietor shook his ugly head. “Never heard of her. Elsa asked me.”

  “Did you know Columbia Forrest?”

  “No. All I know is she’s the girl that got clipped up there in Whitfield County and I only know that from the papers and from Elsa.”

  “Know Wynant?”

  “No, and if somebody saw him coming in here all I got to say is that if lots of people I don’t know didn’t come in here I couldn’t stay in business.”

  “That’s all right,” Guild said pleasantly, “but here’s the thing: when Columbia Forrest opened a bank-account seven months ago under the name of Laura Porter you were one of the references she gave the bank.”

  Kearny’s grin was undisturbed. “That might be, right enough,” he said, “but that still don’t mean I know her.” He put out a long arm and stopped a waiter. “Tell Sing to give you that bottle and bring ginger ale set-ups.” He turned his attention to Guild again. “Look it, Guild. I’m running a joint. Suppose some guy from the Hall or the Municipal Building that can do me good or bad, or some guy that spends with me, comes to me and says he’s got a friend—or a broad—that’s hunting a job or wants to open some kind of account or get a bond, and can they use my name? Well, what the hell! It happens all the time.”

 

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