A KNIFE WILL CUT FOR ANYBODY
When Samuel Spade knocked on the door it swung open far enough to let him see the mutilated dead face of a woman. She lay on her back on the floor in a lot of blood and a red-stained hunting-knife with a heavy six-inch blade lay in blood beside her. She was tall and slender, her hair was dark, her dress was green: her face and body had been hacked so that little beyond this could be said about her.
Spade breathed out sharply once and his face became wooden except for the alertness of his yellow-grey eyes. He flattened his left hand against the door and slowly pushed it farther back. The fingers of his right hand, held a little away from his side, curved as if they held a ball. He glanced swiftly to right and left, up and down the ground-floor hallway in which he stood, then into as much of the room as was visible from where he stood.
The room was wide, and open double doors made it and the room behind it one long room. Grey and black were the predominant colors and the furniture, modern in design, was obviously new.
Spade went into the room, walking around the dead woman, avoiding the blood on the floor, and saw in the next room a pale grey telephone. He called the San Francisco Police Department’s number and asked for Lieutenant Dundy of the Homicide Detail. He said: “Hello, Dundy, Sam Spade . . . I’m at 1950 Green Street. There’s a woman here’s been killed.” He listened. “I wouldn’t kid you: somebody’s made hamburger of her . . . Right.” He put down the telephone and made a cigarette.
Lieutenant Dundy turned his short, stocky back to the corpse and addressed Spade: “Well?”
Two of the men—one was small, one very large—who had come in with Dundy were bending over the dead woman. A uniformed policeman stood at attention near one of the front windows.
Spade said: “Well, the Argentine Consul hired me to find a Teresa Moncada, for her family or something.” He nodded at the dead woman. “Looks like I did.”
“This her?”
Spade moved his thick, sloping shoulders a little. “What you can see of her fits the photo and description they gave me. There’s a fellow at the consulate who knows her. I phoned him to come over. He ought to—” He broke off as the men who had been examining the dead woman stood up.
The smaller man—he had a lean dark intelligent face—wiped his hands carefully with a blue-bordered handkerchief and said: “Dead an hour, I’d say. This knife all right.”
Dundy nodded. “You found her?” he asked Spade.
“Yes. The street-door was open, so when nobody answered the bell I came on in and tried this one, and there it was. There wasn’t anybody else here. Looks like there’s nobody else in the house. I rang both upstairs-flat bells, but no luck. Another thing, there’s no clothes here except her hat and coat there on the chair, and there’s nothing in her handbag except about twenty bucks, lipstick, powder, and that kind of stuff. That’s the works.”
Dundy’s lips worked together under his close-clipped grizzled mustache. He was about to speak when a grey-faced man wearing a wide-brimmed black hat stuck his head in at the door and said: “There’s a fellow says his name’s Sanchez Cornejo here wanting to see Spade.”
“That’s the fellow from the consulate,” Spade told Dundy.
“Send him in.”
The man at the door stepped aside and said, “O.K., come on,” to someone behind him.
A very tall, very thin young man appeared in the doorway. His glossy black hair, parted in the middle, was brushed smooth to his somewhat narrow head. His face was long and dark, his eyes large and dark. He wore dark clothes and carried a black derby hat and a dark walking-stick in his hands.
He dropped his stick when he saw the woman on the floor, his eyes opened to show whites all around the irises, and blood going out of his face left it a dingy yellow. “Virgen santìsima!” He went down on one knee beside her. Then he mumbled something to himself and stood up again. Color began to come back into his face. He bent over to pick up his stick.
Dundy, scowling suspiciously at him, asked, “You’re Sanchez Cornejo?”
Cornejo winced a little, as if at the Lieutenant’s pronunciation of his name, and said, “Yes, sir.”
“You know Teresa Moncada?”
Cornejo began to tremble. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He nodded his reply.
“This her?”
Cornejo dropped his stick again and jumped nervously when it clattered on the floor. His dark eyes were wide with bewilderment. “Si—yes, sir,” he stammered. “Of course.”
“Sure?”
The dark young man had recovered his composure. “Yes, sir, I am,” he said with conviction.
“Right. Come on back here.” Dundy led the way into the next room. He waved a stubby hand at a metal chair and the young man sat down. “Now give me what you’ve got.”
Cornejo stared at the detective. “I do not understand.”
Spade sat on the corner of a table near Cornejo. “What you know about her,” he explained. “I’m Sam Spade, a private detective. Your Consul, Mr. Navarrete, hired me to find her and told me you knew her. That’s how I happened to run into this and call you.”
The young man nodded several times. “I understand. Señor Navarrete had the kindness to tell me.” He smiled at Dundy. “Please excuse my not understanding. I will tell you all I know.”
“All right.” Dundy’s face and voice responded in no way to the young man’s smile. “Do that little thing.”
Cornejo moistened his lips and looked uneasily at the Lieutenant.
Spade’s manner was more friendly. “How long have you known her?”
“Three years. That is I met her three years ago in the house of her uncle and guardian, Doctor Felix Haya de la Torre, in Buenos Ayres, but I have not seen her for quite a year and a half—” he swallowed “—until today.”
“An orphan?”
“Yes, and supposedly the second wealthiest woman in our country.” He frowned earnestly. “That is why her uncle was so afraid—so anxious to find her. You see, she did not like her uncle, and she resented his perhaps too careful guardianship, and so when, on her twenty-first birthday last August, she came into control of her estate and was her own mistress, she left his house.”
“And came to America?” Dundy asked.
“To North America? No, not immediately, but her uncle thought her too young and inexperienced and too wealthy to be quite safe alone and considered it his duty to continue to watch over her in spite of her objections.” Cornejo shrugged. “As I say, she resented that, and last month she, with a distant cousin, a Camilla Cerro, disappeared, presumably coming here and assuming fictitious names.”
Spade nodded. “This flat was rented under the name of Thelma Magnin.”
“Yes?” Dundy said. “Well, Cornejo, or whatever your name is, who killed her?”
The young man’s voice and eyes were steady. “I do not know.”
“Who’d have reason to?”
“I do not know.”
“Who’d get her dough?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Her heirs?” Spade explained.
“Oh! I don’t know. Her uncle and his sons Federico and Victor are her nearest relatives, but she may have made a will, of course.”
Dundy scowled at Spade. “What do you think?”
“Nothing yet.”
Dundy looked at Cornejo thoughtfully, surveyed him deliberately from head to foot, and turned to Spade again. “I guess we’re safe in calling it a spick job. They like knives.”
Cornejo’s face flushed. He said stiffly: “A knife will cut for anybody, I believe. That knife is not—”
Spade, grinning wolfishly, interrupted the young man. “How do you know she was killed with that knife?”
Cornejo stared blankly at Spade.
Dundy growled: “All right. What does this other girl, this Camilla Cerro, look like?”
Spade, still grinning, said softly: “I bet she looks more like that girl lying in there on the floor th
an Teresa Moncada does.”
Dundy said: “What?”
Cornejo opened his mouth as if he were trying to say something, but no sound came out. His face was ghastly with fear.
Spade said: “Though they must look something alike or he wouldn’t’ve tried to pass one off as the other when he found we’d guessed wrong.”
The young man could speak now and did, very rapidly, so that his accent, barely noticeable before, became more pronounced. “It is true. It is true that they look somewhat alike, I mean, and I may have made a mistake. It may be Camilla Cerro and not Señorita Moncada who was killed. I have not seen them since a year and a half ago and—”
Spade said, “Tch, tch, tch,” reprovingly and asked: “How do you suppose I found this place?”
“I don’t know.”
“By shadowing you.”
The young man lowered his head and stared miserably at the floor.
Detective-sergeant Polhaus—a burly carelessly shaven florid man—appeared in the doorway. “All through with the body. Want it anymore?”
Dundy’s attention did not waver from Cornejo. Only a corner of his mouth moved slightly. “No.”
Polhaus left the doorway and his cheerful voice came in from the other room. “All right, boys, pack it out.”
A THRONE FOR THE WORM
“Are you going to be all morning? Your breakfast is on the table?”
“I’ll be down in a minute now.”
Elmer Kipp’s reedy voice wavered like an uncertain ghost down the stairs that had resounded to his wife’s ululant contralto. Hastily finishing his shaving, he got into the rest of his clothes while descending to the dining-room, where his wife and daughter were eating, and where his own meal was cooling on a cold plate.
“Good morning,” the head of the Kipp family said indistinctly.
His wife said nothing; Doris’ inattention was even more deliberate, and when she spoke presently to her mother she spoke as one who complains without hope of relief—for the purpose of having the records show that an objection has been made, as the lawyers say.
“I do wish papa would use a little judgment. He came in the parlor last night, and I thought he was never going to bed. He staid until almost time for Lloyd to go. I should think a girl who earns her own living and pays her own board might be allowed to entertain her own company.”
Kipp looked at his daughter without raising his head: a turning up of faded eyes that made him resemble not so much an abject man as a cartoon of an abject man.
“I didn’t think that— We got talking and—” He brightened with foolish guile. “That Lloyd is a mighty clever young fellow.”
Doris did not seem to have heard her father.
“Just because Lloyd has to be polite, papa seems to think Lloyd comes to see him.”
Mrs. Kipp sighed with exaggerated resignation.
“Your father will never be any different. I never knew such a man for not considering other people. I’ve talked to him enough, goodness knows. But you can’t do anything with him.”
At the office Kipp found something wrong with his chair. When he attempted to lean back in it the superstructure came out of its socket and slid him off to the floor. An examination convinced him that this was not his chair at all, that his chair now served Harry Terns. But the chairs were all of the same model and age; and for the recovery of his own chair conclusive proof of proprietorship, as well as some skill in repartee, would be essential. So Kipp merely called the chief clerk’s attention to the broken one, and brought in a straight-backed chair from the outer office.
For half an hour Kipp’s world was six sheets of paper, each divided into little squares that either held inked numerals or yawned for them. Then a gust of air flung the sheets into swirling anarchy. He closed the window beside his desk and rearranged his world.
“Good gracious, Mr. Kipp!” Miss Propson’s syllables clicked as monotonously from between her thin lips as the keys of her typewriter clicked under her thin fingers. “Don’t you think we should have some ventilation?”
From their desks farther away Eells and Bowne looked up with annoyance, and the rustling of papers in the chief clerk’s hands stopped.
“A little fresh air won’t kill you,” Harry Terns said.
Just as this window was beside Kipp’s desk, there were windows beside Eells and the chief clerk, and they were closed. But Kipp did not denounce the manifest injustice of this; he capitulated before the unanimity of his colaborers’ protests, and disposed his two paperweights, a box of pins, a metal ruler, and an extra inkwell so that his papers were not blown around enough to prevent his working.
An hour passed, and a harsh buzzing broke out: the signal that summoned Kipp to his employer’s office. Lucian Dovenmichle was fat beyond the fatness that gives a body many curves. His curves were few, but gigantic in sweep. Kipp came softly into this mountainous presence.
“Finish the National accounts?” The Dovenmichle voice was fat with a husky pinguidness.
“Yes, sir. That is, the recapitulation will be ready by noon.”
“All right.”
Then, Kipp’s hand on the door-knob.
“My shoe-lace is undone. Can’t tie it with all these damned clothes on. Tie it, will you?”
Kipp bent deferentially over the Dovenmichle foot—a leather-enveloped thing as large as a healthy baby—and tugged at the ends of the inadequate black strings. The Dovenmichle leg jerked in what was nearly a kick.
“Damn it, Kipp, are you trying to choke me?”
Kipp got the lace knotted in place and went back to his desk.
With eleven o’clock, this being the fifteenth of the month, came the chief clerk with Kipp’s salary. After that Kipp worked erratically, with a trembling of the pen in his fingers, a feverish lip-licking trick of tongue, and a careless spattering of ink about the mouth of his inkwell. When the noon gong sounded he was the first man through the Dovenmichle door.
Ignoring the establishment where he usually ate, he plunged through the mid-block traffic to where a barber’s sign revolved brilliantly against a white building front.
Very leisurely—while four barbers stood at attention behind their chairs and a negro held ready hands for each garment—Kipp removed his coat, his vest, his collar and tie, and last of all his hat. His face now was not the one with which his familiars were acquainted. His jaw had advanced, his lips had reared up, his sallow skin had acquired pinkness, his shoulders were almost straight, and what chest had survived twenty years of crouching over desks did its best to arch. The unhurried disrobing completed, he turned—very deliberately—and strutted to the farthest vacant chair.
“Fairly close. Not too high with the clippers.”
His voice achieved depth with unostentatious authority. The first Napoleon, ordering a brigade or two of dragoons forward, may have spoken thus.
A nod summoned a bootblack. Another a manicure. With two men and a woman hovering attentively, obsequiously, over his head, his feet, his hands, Elmer Kipp sat looking with rapt eyes at the picture he made in the wall mirror opposite.
ACTION AND THE QUIZ KID
Lots of kids used to hero-worship Action. At eighteen, he could never navigate the sidewalks without a coterie of awestruck ten year olds swarming around him. They worshipped him for his round black derby and the fat cigar that left a wavering trace of smoke over the route to the poolroom. But none of them had the great crush of Vittorio Corregione.
Action had entered the City College Business School. His high school marks had been poor and he had been forced to take an entrance exam to make the college. I drilled and coached him for a solid two-week period and his voracious brain devoured and held everything I fed it. He passed the exam with highest marks.
The successful entrance was only the beginning of his troubles. To pick out a course that would lead to a money-making profession was the real problem. Uncle Myron volunteered the advice. Having stashed away the most loot in the family, Uncle Myron was e
ntitled to offer advice to young college entrées.
“Take a course in accounting,” pontificated Uncle Myron, “and when you get out you’ll find a wide-open field. I personally will guarantee you placement in an accounting job.”
The money man had spoken, so Action followed through. Years later, when Action had staggered past the course without having cracked a single book, he came to Uncle Myron for the promised job. Myron told him to enlist in the army. Our uncle always held patriotism above all.
Action found the business administration course a complete bore. The usual shortage of cash at home forced him to get a job delivering dog medicine to Park Ave. homes but he grew tired of seeing the dogs wearing finer sweaters than he had and he quit. He had refrained from betting for a couple of months after starting school, but the old lure was too strong and after he located a bookmaker and ticker near the college he was back in the old-time groove. He hung around the Board, noting scores and getting in an occasional small bet when he met the kid.
Vittorio Corregione was a skinny little runt of fourteen with snapping black eyes, and a hungry wet red mouth that puckered in a perpetual pout. He was a bright bundle of brain and attended the honor school that was housed in the college building. Action failed to discover why he shunned his home and the kid wouldn’t volunteer the information, but the kid never did want to return at night. He adored Action and saw in the little schemes and plots that my brother wove, the manifestations of genius.
Action had noted the kid hanging around the poolroom but had never bothered to say too much to him until one day, when the runt came over with a five-dollar bill and asked Action to wager it for him. He placed the bet as per the request and the money rode safely home. Thereafter, Vittorio would seek out Action for all of his wagers and even allow him to hold the cash winnings.
The following term the kid was moved to the afternoon session and couldn’t make the poolroom during the action hours. He’d hand my brother a small roll and give him carte blanche to pick winners for him, phoning later in the afternoon to discover how he had made out. I was spending the afternoon with Action one day when the kid called. Action eyed the incomplete scores on the Board and rattled off some names. Each one was a stiff and the kid was sure to drop some twenty bucks.
Crime Stories Page 133