Crime Stories

by Dashiell Hammett

Brady started to haul her up. “She wasn’t hit, was she?” he said.

  “You sound disappointed,” I said.

  Sonia bit her lip. “He is,” she cried. “He wants me dead so he can marry Helen.”

  AL helped me pick her up. “We’d better get her home,” he said. “She’s upset.”

  AL helped Helen and Brady take Sonia home. I went with them as far as Barney’s bar. Then I headed for the terrace. Nora was still there.

  “Darling,” she said. “Your slip is showing.”

  I gagged. “My what?”

  She took a sip from my glass. “Never mind,” she said. “I found the shell.” She handed it to me with a straight face.

  5. I knew that face of Nora’s. It was the same one she put on the time that I was nearly taken in by that con man at San Francisco.

  “It’s a blank,” she said. “See?”

  I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. “We’ve been took,” I said. “The whole brawl is one of Al Thornton’s publicity gags.” Nora snorted. “And you fell for it, Nick.”

  We had another drink and went home. Nora was still kidding me when we got into bed.

  Then Al phoned. “Nick,” he said. “It’s a matter of life and death. You’ve got to come out here.”

  Nora heard every word. “Here we go again,” she said. I pushed her face into the pillow.

  “O.K., Al,” I said. “We’ll be there in an hour.”

  Nora kept singing “Otchi Chornya” until we reached Sonia’s house.

  6. Al was helping her out of her wrap when the second shot of the evening rang out.

  “Ten will get you one it’s a blank,” Nora said.

  Al started to go to pieces. “Nick, that shot came from Sonia’s room!” he shouted.

  I tried the door. It was locked. AL tried to force it.

  “Sonia,” he yelled. “Open up. It’s Al.”

  “Yo Ho Ho Ho,” caroled Nora. “Where do you suppose they keep the brandy? Or is it a different routine this time, Al?”

  I forced the lock and made my way to the bed.

  7. “Never mind the brandy,” I said. “Come on in here.”

  Nora grew pale. “Nick . . . Nick, you don’t mean . . .”

  I dropped Sonia’s limp white hand. “I’m afraid I do, Nora,” I said. “This time she’s dead.”

  Nora shuddered. “The killer,” she said. “He shot her through the bedroom window while we were at the door.”

  8. I poured myself a drink. “You’re so wonderful,” I said. “Now all we have to find out is who he is and why he did it.” I turned to Al. “Was that fairy tale Sonia poured into my ear your brainchild?” I asked him.

  “What if it was?” he said.

  “Then you fired the blank,” I said.

  Al nodded. “For publicity,” he said. “But why don’t you find out who fired the shot that killed her?”

  “All right,” I said. “All I want is a simple yes or no. Was Bill Brady’s behavior towards his wife tonight a fair sample of what usually went on?”

  Al looked away. “Why ask me?” he said. “Why don’t you ask Helen Roberts?”

  Someone walked through the front door. It turned out to be Brady and Helen. “You wanted to see me?” she said.

  9. Brady stepped in front of her. “Who gave you a license to annoy people?” he asked.

  “Now I’ll ask one,” I said. “Suppose you tell me why you had your face lifted?” His hand jumped to his face. I pointed to the little scars near his ears. Quickly I said, “A guy with a face lift should better be annoyed by me than by coppers. How did you and your wife get along, Brady?”

  My question caught him off guard. “Sonia never brought me anything but trouble,” he said. “She’s a low-down, doublecrossing . . .”

  Helen stopped him this time. “Button your lip, Bill,” she said.

  I laughed. “So you’re an English coach,” I said.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” she said. “Sonia and me—we’re from the Brooklyn burleycue.”

  10. She started to demonstrate her strip routine.

  “She’s Sonia’s sister!” Nora said.

  Helen patted Nora’s head. “Yeah,” she said. “We’re sisters all right. Brady caught our act in Brooklyn two years ago and called AL in to do the Russky ballyhoo dressing.”

  She started to get hysterical. Brady took her out of the house. AL said he felt dizzy. He took some aspirin and went to sleep on the couch. I never saw a man go to sleep so fast. It was a case of the nerves being completely fagged, I thought. I shook him, and when he kept on snoring, I gave him up for the night.

  “Let’s look around,” I said to Nora. “I’ll take the clues closet.”

  11. Nora started to go through the drawers in Sonia’s room.

  In Al’s jacket pocket I found a California intention-to-wed certificate. It was three years old. A year older than Sonia’s marriage.

  Nora found something, too. “Sonia had a secret vice,” she said. “She liked to chew toast in bed. I found this toaster under her bed. It was connected and piping hot, Nick. Nearly burned my . . .”

  12. I cut her short. “Look what I found,” I said.

  She read the certificate. “But Sonia was already married,” she said.

  “Not when that was filed,” I said. “Nora, I’m a blundering, stupid idiot. Boy, would I like to speak to AL right now!”

  Nora pointed to the living room. “That’s easy,” she said. “He’s still in there.”

  I put the certificate in my pocket. “Yeah,” I said, “and I have a hunch he is also in trouble.”

  AL was in trouble all right. Brady had returned and was backing him up against a chair with a gun.

  “Nick,” AL pleaded, “don’t let him kill me. He killed Sonia and . . .”

  Brady took a step closer to the flack. “You’re a trouble-maker, Al,” he said. “You’ve had a slug coming to you for a long time.” He never took his eyes off Al. That was all I had to see. I jumped him.

  13. After I took his gun away, I poured myself a nice stiff drink. AL poured a big one for himself.

  “He was going to kill me, Nick,” he said.

  “That’s funny,” I said. “I thought so, too, Al.”

  Brady started to come to. He rubbed his jaw where I clipped him.

  14. “This is still my house, Charles,” he said. “Now get out.”

  I helped him up. “Sure,” I said. “But first my good wife is going to phone for the police.”

  Nora picked up the phone. “Nick,” she said, “shall I reserve one in the west wing for Mr. Brady?”

  I made sure the gun was loaded before I answered her. “No,” I said. “I think you’d better make that reservation in Al’s name.”

  AL jumped up. “Have you gone crazy, too?”

  I showed him the gun. “I’m not crazy,” I said.

  We went home after the police took AL away. Nora didn’t want to sleep.

  15. “How about a drink?” I said.

  “No. Explain things to me, Nick. What was Al’s motive?”

  I kicked off my shoes. “After marrying Brady, Sonia promised to divorce him and marry Al. Then she double-crossed AL for the second time.”

  Nora nodded. “But when did he kill her, Nick?”

  I looked for the whiskey. “Just before he phoned us, Nora. When he heard us coming, he placed a blank cartridge on that toaster. The toaster’s heat exploded the blank. Satisfied?”

  Nora had more questions. I stopped her. “How about a drink?” I said.

  Click magazine’s innovation of Cameradio, introduced by that Thin Man story in its December 1941 issue, did not cause the excitement its publishers hoped. Instead, that month its readers were surprised by a big distraction. Hammett found out about the distraction one Sunday while adjusting his radio. He heard that the American fleet at Pearl Harbor had been bombed by Japanese planes.

  Now America joined World War II. American lives would be broken apart like so many puzzle pieces, then
put back together—but never the same way.

  A MAN NAMED THIN

  Papa was, though I may be deemed an undutiful son for saying it, in an abominable mood. His chin protruded across the desk at me in a fashion that almost justified the epithet of brutal which had once been applied to it by an unfriendly journalist; and his mustache seemed to bristle with choler of its own, though this was merely the impression I received. It would be preposterous to assume actual change in the mustache which, whatever Papa’s humor, was always somewhat irregularly salient.

  “So you’re still fooling with this damned nonsense of yours?”

  On Papa’s desk, under one of his hands, lay a letter which, its odd shape and color informed me immediately, was from the editor of The jongleur to whom, a few days before, I had sent a sonnet.

  “If you mean my writing,” I replied respectfully, but none the less staunchly; for my thirtieth birthday being some months past, I considered myself entitled to some liberty of purpose, even though that purpose might he distasteful to Papa. “If you mean my writing, Papa, I assure you I am not fooling, but am completely in earnest.”

  “But why in”—if now and then I garble Papa’s remarks in reporting them, it is not, I beg you to believe, because he is addicted to incoherencies, but simply because he frequently saw fit to sacrifice the amenities of speech to what he considered a vigor of expression—“do you have to pick on poetry? Aren’t there plenty of other things to write about? Why, Robin, you could write some good serious articles about our work, articles that would tell the public the truth about it and at the same time give us some advertising.”

  “One writes what one is impelled to write,” I began not too hopefully, for this was by no means the first time I had begun thus. “The creative impulse is not to be coerced into—”

  “Florence!”

  I do not like to say Papa bellowed, but the milder synonyms are not entirely adequate to express the volume of sound he put into our stenographer’s given name by which he insisted on addressing her.

  Miss Queenan appeared at the door—an unfamiliar Miss Queenan who did not advance to Papa’s desk with that romping mixture of flippancy and self-assurance which the press, with its propensity to exaggerate, has persuaded our generation to expect; instead, she stood there awaiting Papa’s attention.

  “After this, Florence, will you see that my desk is not cluttered up with correspondence dealing with my son’s Mother Goose rhymes!”

  “Yes, Mr. Thin,” she replied in a voice surprisingly meek for someone accustomed to speak to Papa as if she were a member of his family.

  “My dear Papa,” I endeavored to remonstrate when Miss Queenan had retired, “I really think—”

  “Don’t dear Papa me! And you don’t think! Nobody that thought could be such a . . .”

  It would serve no purpose to repeat Papa’s words in detail. They were, for the most part, quite unreasonable, and not even my deep-seated sense of filial propriety could enable me to keep my face from showing some of the resentment I felt; but I heard him through in silence and when he had underscored his last sentence by thrusting The Jongleur’s letter at me, I withdrew to my office.

  The letter, which had come to Papa’s desk through the carelessness of the editor in omitting the Jr. from my name, had to do with the sonnet I have already mentioned—a sonnet entitled “Fictitious Tears.” The editor’s opinion was that its concluding couplet, which he quoted in his letter, was not, as he politely put it, up to my usual standard, and he requested that I rewrite it, adjusting it more exactly to the tone of the previous lines, for which it was, he thought, a trifle too serious.

  And glisten there no less incongruously

  Than Christmas balls on deadly upas tree.

  I reminded myself, as I took my rhyming dictionary from behind Gross’s Kriminal Psychologie where, in the interest of peace, I habitually concealed it, that I had not been especially pleased with those two lines; but after repeated trials I had been unable to find more suitable ones. Now, as I heard the noon whistles, I brought out my carbon copy of the sonnet and determined to devote the quiet of the luncheon hour to the creation of another simile that would express incongruity in a lighter vein.

  To that task I addressed myself, submerging my consciousness to such an extent that when I heard Papa’s voice calling “Robin!” with a force that fairly agitated the three intervening partitions, I roused as if from sleep, with a suspicion that the first call I had heard had not been the first Papa had uttered. This suspicion was confirmed when, putting away paper and books, I hastened into Papa’s presence.

  “Too busy listening to the little birdies twitter to hear me?” But this was mere perfunctory gruffness; his eyes were quite jovial so that in a measure I was prepared for his next words. “Barnable’s stuck up. Get to it.”

  The Barnable Jewelry company’s store was six blocks from our offices, and a convenient street car conveyed me there before Papa’s brief order was five minutes old. The store, a small one, occupied a portion of the ground floor of the Bulwer Building, on the north side of O’Farrell Street, between Powell and Stockton Streets. The store’s neighbors on the ground floor of the same building were, going east toward Stockton Street, a haberdasher (in whose window, by the way, I noticed an intriguing lavender dressing robe), a barber shop, and a tobacconist’s; and going westward toward Powell Street, the main entrance and lobby of the Bulwer Building, a prescription druggist, a hatter, and a lunchroom.

  At the jeweler’s door a uniformed policeman was busily engaged in preventing a curious crowd, most of whom presumably out on their luncheon hours, from either blocking the sidewalk or entering the store. Passing through this throng, I nodded to the policeman, not that I was personally acquainted with him but because experience had taught me that a friendly nod will often forestall questions, and went into the store.

  Detective-Sergeant Hooley and Detective Strong of the Police Department were in the store. In one hand the former held a dark gray cap and a small automatic pistol which did not seem to belong to any of the people to whom the detectives were talking: Mr. Barnable, Mr. Barnable’s assistant, and two men and a woman unknown to me.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” I addressed the detectives. “May I participate in the inquiry?”

  “Ah, Mr. Thin!”

  Sergeant Hooley was a large man whose large mouth did nothing to shape his words beyond parting to emit them, so that they issued somewhat slovenly from a formless opening in his florid face. His face held now, as when I had engaged him in conversation heretofore, an elusively derisive expression—as if, with intent to annoy, he pretended to find in me, in my least word or act, something amusing. The same impulse was noticeable in the stressed mister with which he invariably prefixed my name, notwithstanding that he called Papa Bob, a familiarity I was quite willing to be spared.

  “As I was telling the boys, participating is just exactly what we need.” Sergeant Hooley exercised his rather heavy wit. “Some dishonest thief has been robbing the joint. We’re about through inquiring, but you look like a fellow that can keep a secret, so I don’t mind letting you in on the dirt, as we used to say at dear old Harvard.”

  I am not privy to the quirk in Sergeant Hooley’s mind which makes attendance at this particular university constitute, for him, a humorous situation; nor can I perceive why he should find so much pleasure in mentioning that famous seat of learning to me who, as I have often taken the trouble to explain to him, attended an altogether different university.

  “What seems to have happened,” he went on, “is that some bird come in here all by himself, put Mr. Barnable and his help under the gun, took ’em for what was in the safe, and blew out, trampling over some folks that got in his way. He then beat it up to Powell Street, jumped into a car, and what more do you want to know?”

  “At what time did this occur?”

  “Right after twelve o’clock, Mr. Thin—not more than a couple of minutes after, if that many,” said Mr. Bar
nable, who had circled the others to reach my side. His brown eyes were round with excitement in his round brown face, but not especially melancholy, since he was insured against theft in the company on whose behalf I was now acting.

  “He makes Julius and me lay down on the floor behind the counter while he robs the safe, and then he backs out. I tell Julius to get up and see if he’s gone, but just then he shoots at me.” Mr. Barnable pointed a spatulate finger at a small hole in the rear wall, near the ceiling. “So I didn’t let Julius get up till I was sure he’d gone. Then I phoned the police and your office.”

  “Was anyone else, anyone besides you and Julius, in the store when the robber entered?”

  “No. We hadn’t had anyone in for maybe fifteen minutes.”

  “Would you be able to identify the robber if you were to see him again, Mr. Barnable?”

  “Would I? Say, Mr. Thin, would Carpentier know Dempsey?”

  This counter-question, which seemed utterly irrelevant, was intended, I assumed, as an affirmative.

  “Kindly describe him for me, Mr. Barnable.”

  “He was maybe forty years old and tough-looking, a fellow just about your size and complexion.” I am, in height and weight, of average size, and my complexion might best be described as medium, so there was nothing in any way peculiar about my having these points of resemblance to the robber; still I felt that the jeweler had been rather tactless in pointing them out. “His mouth was kind of pushed in, without much lips, and his nose was long and flatfish, and he had a scar on one side of his face. A real tough-looking fellow!”

  “Will you describe the scar in greater detail, Mr. Barnable?”

  “It was back on his cheek, close to his ear, and ran all the way down from under his cap to his jawbone.”

  “Which cheek, Mr. Barnable?”

  “The left,” he said tentatively, looking at Julius, his sharp-featured young assistant. When Julius nodded, the jeweler repeated, with certainty, “The left.”

  “How was he dressed, Mr. Barnable?”

  “A blue suit and that cap the sergeant has got. I didn’t notice anything else.”