Crime Stories

by Dashiell Hammett

  “Good shooting!” Papa was saying. “Pull it by yourself?”

  “I cooperated with Detectives Hooley and Strong. I am sure the subterfuge was as obvious to them as to me.”

  But even as I spoke a doubt arose in my mind. There was, it seemed to me, a possibility, however slight, that the police detectives had not seen the solution as clearly as I had. At the time I had assumed that Sergeant Hooley was attempting to conceal his knowledge from me; but now, viewing the situation in retrospect, I suspected that what the sergeant had been concealing was his lack of knowledge.

  However, that was not important. What was important was that, in the image of jewels among vegetables, I had found a figure of incongruity for my sonnet.

  Excusing myself, I left Papa’s office for my own, where, with rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, and carbon copy on my desk again, I lost myself in the business of clothing my new simile with suitable words, thankful indeed that the sonnet had been written in the Shakespearean rather than the Italian form, so that a change in the rhyme of the last two lines would not necessitate similar alterations in other lines.

  Time passed, and then I was leaning back in my chair, experiencing that unique satisfaction that Papa felt when he had apprehended some especially elusive criminal. I could not help smiling when I reread my new concluding couplet.

  And shining there, no less inaptly shone

  Than diamonds in a spinach garden sown.

  That, I fancied, would satisfy the editor of The Jongleur.

  SEVEN PAGES

  One

  She was one of the rare red-haired women whose skins are without blemish: she was marble, to the eye. I used to quote truthfully to her, “Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.” She was utterly unpractical. One otherwise dreary afternoon she lay with her bright head on my knee while I read Don Marquis’ Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady to her. When I had finished she made a little purring noise and stared dreamily distant-eyed past me. “Tell me about this Don Marquis,” she said. “Do you know him?”

  Two

  I sat in the lobby of the Plaza, in San Francisco. It was the day before the opening of the second absurd attempt to convict Roscoe Arbuckle of something. He came into the lobby. He looked at me and I at him. His eyes were the eyes of a man who expected to be regarded as a monster but was not yet inured to it. I made my gaze as contemptuous as I could. He glared at me, went on to the elevator still glaring. It was amusing. I was working for his attorneys at the time, gathering information for his defense.

  Three

  We would leave the buildings in early darkness, walk a little way across the desert, and go down into a small canyon where four trees grouped around a level spot. The night-dampness settling on earth that had cooked since morning would loose the fragrance of ground and plant around us. We would lie there until late in the night, our nostrils full of world-smell, the trees making irregular map-boundary divisions among the stars. Our love seemed dependent on not being phrased. It seemed if one of us had said, “I love you,” the next instant it would have been a lie. So we loved and cursed one another merrily, ribaldly, she usually stopping her ears in the end because I knew more words.

  Four

  He came into the room in brown stocking-feet, blue policeman’s pants, and gray woolen undershirt. “Who the hell moved that pi-ano?” he demanded, and grunted and cursed while wheeling it back into the inconvenient corner from which we had dragged it. “It’s my pi-ano, and it stays where I put it, see,” he assured us before he went out again. His daughters were quite embarrassed, since Jack and I had bought the whisky that was in him, so they didn’t object when, just before we left, we took all the pictures down from the walls and stacked them behind the pi-ano. That was in the part of Baltimore called Pig Town, a few blocks from another house where we had found one night two in the company who would not drink alcohol. We gave them root beer into which had been put liberal doses of aromatic cascara.

  Five

  I talked to her four times. Each time she complained of her husband. He was ruining her health, he was after her all the time, this supergoat, he simply would not let her alone. I supposed he was nearly, if not altogether, impotent.

  Six

  The fat cook and I huddled to the fire that had thawed him out of his vomiting blue cold-sickness. Behind us the Coeur d’Alene mountains rose toward Montana, down below us a handful of yellow lights marked a railway stop. Perhaps it was Murray: I’ve forgotten. “You’re crazier than hell, that’s what!” the fat cook said. “Any lousy bastard that says Cabell ain’t a romantycist is crazier than hell!” “He’s not,” I insisted. “He’s anti-romanticist: all he’s ever done for romance is take off its clothes and laugh at it. He’s a romanticist just like Mencken’s a Tory, which is just like the wooden horse was a Trojan.” The fat cook bunched his lips and spat brownly at the fire. “Grease us twice, Slim!” he complained. “If you ain’t a son-of-a-gun for damn-fool arguments!”

  Seven

  In Washington, D.C., I worked for a while in a freight depot. On my platform were two men who worked together, sweeping out cars, repairing broken crates, sealing doors. One of them was a man of fifty-something with close-clipped gray hair on a very round head. He was a small man but compact. He boasted of the hardness of his skull and told stories of butting duels, head-top crashed against head-top until blood came from noses, mouths, ears. His mate told me privately he thought these combats degrading. “It’s being no better than animals,” he said. This mate of the butter was a younger man, a country-man, brown-skinned and awkward. He who boasted the hard gray head told me this country-man had a fly tattooed on his penis. Gray-head thought this disgusting. “I’d think it’d make his wife sick to her stomach,” he said.

  FAITH

  Sprawled in a loose evening group on the river bank, the fifty-odd occupants of the slapboard barrack that was the American bunkhouse listened to Morphy damn the canning-factory, its superintendent, its equipment, and its pay. They were migratory workingmen, these listeners, simple men, and they listened with that especial gravity which the simple man—North American Indian, Zulu, or hobo—affects.

  But when Morphy had finished one of them chuckled.

  Without conventions any sort of group life is impossible, and no division of society is without its canons. The laws of the jungles are not the laws of the drawing-room, but they are as certainly existent, and as important to their subjects. If you are a migratory workingman you may pick your teeth wherever and with whatever tool you like, but you may not either by word or act publicly express satisfaction with your present employment; nor may you disagree with any who denounce the conditions of that employment. Like most conventions, this is not altogether without foundation in reason.

  So now the fifty-odd men on the bank looked at him who had chuckled, turned upon him the stare that is the social lawbreaker’s lot everywhere: their faces held antagonism suspended in expectancy of worse to come; physically a matter of raised brows over blank eyes, and teeth a little apart behind closed lips.

  “What’s eatin’ you?” Morphy—a big bodied dark man who said “the proletariat” as one would say “the seraphim”—demanded. “You think this is a good dump?”

  The chuckler wriggled, scratching his back voluptuously against a prong of uptorn stump that was his bolster, and withheld his answer until it seemed he had none. He was a newcomer to the Bush River cannery, one of the men hurried up from Baltimore that day: the tomatoes, after an unaccountable delay in ripening, had threatened to overwhelm the normal packing force.

  “I’ve saw worse,” the newcomer said at last, with the true barbarian’s lack of discomfiture in the face of social disapproval. “And I expect to see worse.”

  “Meanin’ what?”

  “Oh, I ain’t saying!” The words were light-flung, airy. “But I know a few things. Stick around and you’ll see.”

  No one could make anything of that. Simple men are not ready questioners. Someone spoke of
something else.

  The man who had chuckled went to work in the process-room, where half a dozen Americans and as many Polacks cooked the fresh-canned tomatoes in big iron kettles. He was a small man, compactly plump, with round maroon eyes above round cheeks whose original ruddiness had been tinted by sunburn to a definite orange. His nose was small and merrily pointed, and a snuff-user’s pouch in his lower lip, exaggerating the lift of his mouth at the corners, gave him a perpetual grin. He held himself erect, his chest arched out, and bobbed when he walked, rising on the ball of the propelling foot midway each step. A man of forty-five or so, who answered to the name Feach and hummed through his nose while he guided the steel-slatted baskets from truck, to kettle, to truck.

  After he had gone, the men remembered that from the first there had been a queerness about Feach, but not even Morphy tried to define that queerness. “A nut,” Morphy said, but that was indefinite.

  What Feach had was a secret. Evidence of it was not in his words only: they were neither many nor especially noteworthy, and his silence held as much ambiguity as his speech. There was in his whole air—in the cock of his round, boy’s head, in the sparkle of his red- brown eyes, in the nasal timbre of his voice, in his trick of puffing out his cheeks when he smiled—a sardonic knowingness that seemed to mock whatever business was at hand. He had for his work and for the men’s interests the absent-minded, bantering sort of false- seriousness that a busy parent has for its child’s affairs. His every word, gesture, attention, seemed thinly to mask preoccupation with some altogether different thing that would presently appear: a man waiting for a practical joke to blossom.

  He and Morphy worked side by side. Between them the first night had put a hostility which neither tried to remove. Three days later they increased it.

  It was early evening. The men, as usual, were idling between their quarters and the river, waiting for bed-time. Feach had gone indoors to get a can of snuff from his bedding. When he came out Morphy was speaking.

  “Of course not,” he was saying. “You don’t think a God big enough to make all this would be crazy enough to do it, do you? What for? What would it get Him?”

  A freckled ex-sailor, known to his fellows as Sandwich, was frowning with vast ponderance over the cigarette he was making, and when he spoke the deliberation in his voice was vast.

  “Well, you can’t always say for certain. Sometimes a thing looks one way, and when you come to find out, is another. It don’t looklike there’s no God. I’ll say that. But—”

  Feach, tamping snuff into the considerable space between his lower teeth and lip, grinned around his fingers, and managed to get derision into the snapping of the round tin lid down on the snuff-can.

  “So you’re one of them guys?” he challenged Morphy.

  “Uh-huh.” The big man’s voice was that of one who, confident of his position’s impregnability, uses temperateness to provoke an assault. “If somebody’d show me there was a God, it’d be different. But I never been showed.”

  “I’ve saw wise guys like you before!” The jovial ambiguity was suddenly gone from Feach; he was earnest, and indignant. “You want what you call proof before you’ll believe anything. Well, you wait—you’ll get your proof thistime, and plenty of it.”

  “That’s what I’d like to have. You ain’t got none of this proof onyou, have you?”

  Feach sputtered.

  Morphy rolled over on his back and began to roar out a song to the Maryland sky, a mocking song that Wobblies sing to the tune of “When the bugle calls up yonder I’ll be there.”

  “You will eat, by and by, In that glorious land they call the sky—’ Way up high! Work and pray, Live on hay. You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”

  Feach snorted and turned away, walking down the river bank. The singer’s booming notes followed him until he had reached the pines beyond the two rows of frame huts that were the Polacks’ quarters.

  By morning the little man had recovered his poise. For two weeks he held it—going jauntily around with his cargo of doubleness and his bobbing walk, smiling with puffed cheeks when Morphy called him “Parson”—and then it began to slip away from him. For a while he still smiled, and still said one thing while patently thinking of another; but his eyes were no longer jovially occupied with those other things: they were worried.

  He took on the look of one who is kept waiting at a rendezvous, and tries to convince himself that he will not be disappointed. His nights became restless; the least creaking of the clapboard barrack or the stirring of a sleeping man would bring him erect in bed.

  One afternoon the boiler of a small hoisting engine exploded. A hole was blown in the storehouse wall, but no one was hurt. Feach raced the others to the spot and stood grinning across the wreckage at Morphy. Carey, the superintendent, came up.

  “Every season it’s got to be something!” he complained. “But thank God this ain’t as bad as the rest—like last year when the roof fell in and smashed everything to hell and gone.”

  Feach stopped grinning and went back to work.

  Two nights later a thunderstorm blew down over the canning-factory. The first distant rumble awakened Feach. He pulled on trousers, shoes, and shirt, and left the bunk-house. In the north, approaching clouds were darker than the other things of night. He walked toward them, breathing with increasing depth, until, when the clouds were a black smear overhead, his chest was rising and falling to the beat of some strong rhythm.

  When the storm broke he stood still, on a little hummock that was screened all around by bush and tree. He stood very straight, with upstretched arms and upturned face. Rain—fat thunder-drops that tapped rather than pattered—drove into his round face. Jagged streaks of metal fire struck down at ground and tree, house and man. Thunder that could have been born of nothing less than the impact of an enormous something upon the earth itself, crashed, crashed, crashed, reverberations lost in succeeding crashes as they strove to keep pace with the jagged metal streaks.

  Feach stood up on his hummock, a short man compactly plump, hidden from every view by tree and undergrowth; a little man with a pointed nose tilted at the center of the storm, and eyes that held fright when they were not blinking and squinting under fat rain-drops. He talked aloud, though the thunder made nothing of his words. He talked into the storm, cursing God for half an hour without pause, with words that were vilely blasphemous, in a voice that was suppliant.

  The storm passed down the river. Feach went back to his bunk, to lie awake all night, shivering in his wet underwear and waiting. Nothing happened.

  He began to mumble to himself as he worked. Carey, reprimanding him for overcooking a basket of tomatoes, had to speak three times before the little man heard him. He slept little. In his bunk, he either tossed from side to side or lay tense, straining his eyes through the darkness for minute after minute.

  Frequently he would leave the sleeping-house to prowl among the buildings, peering expectantly into each shadow that house or shed spread in his path.

  Another thunderstorm came. He went out into it and cursed God again. Nothing happened. He slept none after that, and stopped eating. While the others were at table he would pace up and down beside the river, muttering to himself. All night he wandered around in distorted circles, through the pines, between the buildings, down to the river, chewing the ends of his fingers and talking to himself. His jauntiness was gone: a shrunken man who slouched when he walked, and shivered, doing his daily work only because it required neither especial skill nor energy. His eyes were more red than brown, and dull except when they burned with sudden fevers. His fingernails ended in red arcs where the quick was exposed.

  On his last night at the cannery, Feach came abruptly into the center of the group that awaited the completion of night between house and river. He shook his finger violently at Morphy.

  “That’s crazy!” he screeched. “Of course there’s a God! There’s got to be! That’s crazy!”

  His red-edged eyes peered thr
ough the twilight at the men’s faces: consciously stolid faces once they had mastered their first surprise at this picking up of fortnight-old threads: the faces of men to whom exhibitions of astonishment were childish. Feach’s eyes held fear and a plea.

  “Got your proof with you tonight?” Morphy turned on his side, his head propped on one arm, to face his opponent. “Maybe you can show me why there’s got to be a God?”

  “Ever’ reason!” Moisture polished the little man’s face, and muscles writhed in it.

  “There’s the moon, and the sun, and the stars, and flowers, and rain, and—”

  “Pull in your neck!” The big man spit for emphasis. “What do you know about them things? Edison could’ve made ‘em for all you know. Talk sense. Why has there got to be a God?”

  “Why? I’ll tell you why!” Feach’s voice was a thin scream; he stood tiptoe, and his arms jerked in wild gestures. “I’ll tell you why! I’ve stood up to Him, and had His hand against me. I’ve been cursed by Him, and cursed back. That’s how I know! Listen: I had a wife and kid once, back in Ohio on a farm she got from her old man. I come home from town one night and the lightning had came down and burnt the house flat—with them in it. I got a job in a mine near Harrisburg, and the third day I’m there a cave-in gets fourteen men. I’m down with ‘em, and get out without a scratch. I work in a box- factory in Pittsburgh that burns down in less’n a week. I’m sleeping in a house in Galveston when a hurricane wrecks it, killing ever’body but me and a fella that’s only crippled. I shipped out of Charleston in the Sophie, that went down off Cape Flattery, and I’m the only one that gets ashore. That’s when I began to know for sure that it was God after me. I had sort of suspected it once or twice before—just from queer things I’d noticed—but I hadn’t been certain. But now I knew what was what, and I wasn’t wrong either! For five years I ain’t been anywhere that something didn’t happen. Why was I hunting a job before I came up here? Because a boiler busts in the Deal’s Island packing-house where I worked before and wiped out the place. That’s why!”