Crime Stories

by Dashiell Hammett

  The telephone-bell rings. He goes to it. “Gene Richmond speaking,” he says with mechanical suavity. “Oh, good morning, Mr. Fields. No, nothing new yet . . .” He looks thoughtfully at the phone, then: “It might be wise to place another man in the Dartmouth Cement Company’s offices and see what we can get from the inside . . . Yes, I’d advise it . . . All right, I’ll do that.”

  He hangs up and presses the button on his desk. Tommy opens the door, says, “Miss Crane hasn’t showed up yet.”

  Richmond blinks, then laughs. “That’s right,” he says. “That’ll be all.”

  Tommy shuts the door.

  THE BREECH-BORN

  He came backward out of the womb, causing a great deal of trouble to himself, his mother and the attending medical craftsmen. And that was the curse on him, not, as his father, a barber eternally irritated because in the twenty years of barbering he had learned no practicable way of keeping short hairends from sifting through his clothes, said, his becoming a poet. This was merely a manifestation of it. He toiled conscientiously at his verse, sitting day and night over dictionary, thesaurus, rhyming dictionary—that invaluable book in which one finds so readily that there is no acceptable rhyme for the word one has in mind. His poetry was not bad poetry, nor was it good—and that of course is the sort of poetry that makes most trouble for everyone, especially for the poet. After the first of it was published he left his home, thoughtlessly, and went to New York.

  There, in keeping with the curse on him, he met a girl. He loved her quite passionately, and wrote her long and fervent poems, which painted her in such gay colors that she resigned herself to holding his admiration by never letting him become intimate enough to know that she wasn’t quite all he said. After some months of this self-defeating courtship, he sat down to write her a letter which should quite overwhelm her. He worked on the letter for eight days, though it was not a lengthy letter. He polished each phrase until it was perfect. The letter was so good that reading it he was tempted to narcissism.

  Not having heard from him for eight days, the girl’s love for him overcame her liking for his admiration, and she determined to go to his room one night, even if she had to break an engagement with her employer, an extremely wealthy hat manufacturer of no matrimonial connections or intentions. But that afternoon the poet’s letter arrived. Reading it, she saw herself as something greater than she had ever supposed. Her already adequate beauty heightened by this letter, her confidence upholstered, she went forth to the engagement with the affluent employer, and not only convinced him that she had thought his intentions honorable, but convinced him that they might well be.

  For a week the poet waited, for an answer to his letter, while what little money he had left dwindled. That week the girl was too busy accumulating a trousseau, though, to write the poet, which she finally did, inviting him to the house, meaning to thank him for the help he had given her. He walked the streets for that week, unable to write poetry because everything in him had gone in the letter. [He went] without food all day [spending] his last money [on a bouquet of flowers for her. The] emptiness of his stomach brought on hiccoughs as he entered [into her] presence. The fervent speeches with which he customarily greeted her were thus jumbled, so that he gave up talking as hopeless, presented his flowers, and knelt to kiss the toe of her shoe. Somewhat startled, thinking because of his hiccoughs that he was probably drunk, she jerked her foot in surprise, kicking his mouth, breaking out two front teeth, which, entangled in a hiccough, lodged in the neighborhood of his larynx and choked him quite to death. In falling he managed to upset the goldfish and to mash the flowers into the carpet.

  THE HUNTER

  There are people who, coming for the first time in contact with one they know for a detective, look at his feet. These glances, at times mockingly frank, but more often furtive and somewhat scientific in purpose, are doubtless annoying to the detective whose feet are in the broad-toed tradition: Fred Vitt enjoyed them. His feet were small and he kept them neatly shod in the shiniest of blacks.

  He was a pale plump man with friendly light eyes and a red mouth. The fortunes of job-hunting not guided by definite vocational training had taken him into the employ of a private detective agency some ten years ago. He had stayed there, becoming a rather skillful operative, although by disposition not especially fitted for the work, much of which was distasteful to him. But he liked its irregular variety, the assurances of his own cleverness that come frequently to any but the most uniformly successless of detectives, and the occasional full-tilt chase after a fleeing someone who was, until a court had decided otherwise, a scoundrel of one sort or another. Too, a detective has a certain prestige in some social divisions, a matter in no way equalized by his lack of any standing at all in others, since he usually may either avoid these latter divisions or conceal his profession from them.

  Today Vitt was hunting a forger. The name of H. W. Twitchell—the Twitchell-Bocker Box Company—had been signed to a check for two hundred dollars, which had been endorsed Henry F. Weber and cashed at the bank. Vitt was in Twitchell’s office now, talking to Twitchell, who had failed to remember anyone named Weber.

  “I’d like to see your cancelled checks for the last couple of months,” the detective said.

  The manufacturer of boxes squirmed. He was a large man whose face ballooned redly out of a too-tight collar.

  “What for?” he asked doubtfully.

  “This is too good a forgery not to have been copied from one of ’em. The one of yours that’s most like this should lead me to the forger. It usually works out that way.”

  Vitt looked first for the checks that had made Twitchell squirm. There were three of them, drawn to the order of “Cash,” endorsed by Clara Kroll, but, disappointingly, they were free from noteworthy peculiarities in common with the forgery. The detective put them aside and examined the others until he found one that satisfied him: a check for two hundred and fifty dollars to the order of Carl Rosewater.

  “Who is this Rosewater?” he asked.

  “My tailor.”

  “I want to borrow this check.”

  “You don’t think Rosewater—?”

  “Not necessarily, but this looks like the check that was used as a model. See: the Ca in Carl are closer together than you usually put your letters, and so is the Ca in Cash on this phoney check. When you write two naughts together you connect them, but they’re not connected on the forgery, because whoever did it was going by this two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar check, where there is only one. Your signature on the Rosewater check takes up more space than usual, and slants more—written in a hurry, or standing up—and the forged one does the same. Then the forgery is dated two days after this check. This is the baby, I bet you!”

  * * *

  Only two men in the Rosewater establishment had handled Twitchell’s check: the proprietor and his bookkeeper. Rosewater was heavy with good eating. The bookkeeper was manifestly undernourished: Vitt settled on him. The detective questioned the bookkeeper casually, not accusing him, but alert for the earliest opportunity: he was so distinctly the sort of idiot who would commit a low-priced crime that could be traced straight to him, and, if further reason for suspecting him were needed, he was the most convenient suspect at hand.

  This bookkeeper was tall and concave, with dry hair that lay on his scalp instead of growing out of it. Thick spectacles magnified the muddle in his eyes without enlarging anything else the eyes may have held or been. His clothing tapered off everywhere in fine frayed edges, so that you could not say definitely just where any garment ended: a gentle merging of cloth and air that made him not easily distinguished from his background. His name was James Close. He remembered the Twitchell check, he denied knowledge of the forgery, and his handwriting bore no determinable resemblance to the endorsed Henry F. Weber.

  Rosewater said Close was scrupulously honest, had been in his employ for six years, and lived on Ellis Street.

  “Married?”

  “Jame
s?” Rosewater was surprised. “No!”

  Posing, with the assistance of cards from the varied stock in his pockets, as the agent of a banking house that was about to offer the bookkeeper a glittering if vague position, Vitt interviewed Close’s landlady and several of his neighbors. The bookkeeper unquestionably was a man of most exemplary habits, but, peculiarly, he was married and the father of two children, one recently born. He had lived here—the third floor of a dull building—seven or eight months, coming from an address on Larkin Street, whither the detective presently went. Still a man thoroughly lacking in vices, Close had been unmarried on Larkin Street.

  Vitt returned briskly to the Ellis Street building, intent on questioning Close’s wife, but, when he rang the bell, the bookkeeper, home for luncheon, opened the door. The detective had not expected this, but he accepted the situation.

  “Got some more questions,” he said, and followed Close into the living- and dining-room (now that the bed was folded up into the wall) through whose opposite door he could see a woman putting, with thick pink arms, dishes on a kitchen table. A child stopped building something with blocks in the doorway and gaped at the visitor. Out of sight a baby cried without purpose. Close put the builder and his materials into the kitchen, closed the door, and the two men sat down.

  “Close,” the detective said softly, “you forged that check.”

  A woodenness came up and settled on the bookkeeper’s face. First his chin lengthened, pushing his mouth into a sullen lump, then his nose thinned and tiny wrinkles appeared beside it, paralleling its upper part and curving up to the inner corners of his eyes. His eyes became smaller, clouded behind their glasses. Thin white arcs showed under the irides, which turned the least bit outward. His brows lifted slightly, and the lines in his forehead became shallower. He said nothing, and did not gesture.

  “Of course,” the detective went on, “it’s your funeral, and you can take any attitude you like. But if you want the advice of one who’s seen a lot of ’em, you’ll be sensible, and come clean about it. I don’t know, and I can’t promise anything, but two hundred dollars is not a lot of money, and maybe it can be patched up somehow.”

  Though this was said with practiced smoothness—it being an established line of attack—Vitt meant it honestly enough: so far as his feelings were affected, he felt some pity for the man in front of him.

  “I didn’t do it,” Close said miserably.

  Vitt erased the denial with a four-inch motion of one plump white hand.

  “Now listen: it won’t get you anything to put us to a lot of trouble digging up things on you—not that it’ll need much digging. For instance, when and where were you married?”

  The bookkeeper blushed. The rosiness that so surely did not belong in his face gave him the appearance of a colored cartoon.

  “What’s that got to—?”

  “Let it go, then,” Vitt said generously. He had him there. His guess had been right: Close was not married. “Let it go. But what I’m trying to show you is that you’d better be wise and come through!”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  The repetition irritated Vitt. The woodenness of the bookkeeper’s face, unlivened by the color that had for a moment washed it, irritated him. He stood up, close to the bookkeeper, and spoke louder.

  “You forged that check, Close! You copied it from Twitchell’s!”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  The kitchen door opened and the woman came into the room, the child who had been playing with the blocks holding a fold of her skirt. She was a pink-fleshed woman of perhaps thirty years, attracive in a slovenly way: sloppy was the word that occurred to the detective.

  “What is it, James?” Her voice was husky. “What is it?”

  “I didn’t do it,” Close said. “He says I forged a check, but I didn’t do it.”

  Vitt was warm under his clothes, and his hands perspired. The woman and child made him uncomfortable. He tried to ignore them, speaking to Close again, very slowly.

  “You forged that check, Close, and I’m giving you your last chance to come through.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  Vitt seized the irritation that the idiocy of this reiteration aroused in him, built it up, made a small anger of it, and his discomfort under the gazes of the woman and child grew less.

  “Listen: you can take your choice,” he said. “Be bull-headed, or be reasonable. It’s nothing to me. This is all in my day’s work. But I don’t like to see a man hurt himself, especially when he’s not a crook by nature. I’d like to see you get off easy, but if you think you know what you’re doing—hop to it!”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  A suspicion that all this was ridiculous came to the detective, but he put it out of his mind. After he got a confession out of his man he could remember things and laugh. Meanwhile, what had to be done to get that confession needed an altogether different mood. If he could achieve some sort of rage . . .

  He turned sharply to the woman.

  “When and where were you folks married?” he demanded.

  “None of your business!”

  That was better. Against antagonism he could make progress. He felt the blood in his temples, and, his autogenetic excitement lessening the field of his vision, everything except the woman’s moist pink face became blurred.

  “Exactly!” he said. “But, just so you’ll know where you stand, I’ll tell you that you never were married—not to each other anyway!”

  “What of it?” She stood between her man and the detective, hands on broad hips. “What of it?”

  Vitt snorted derisively. He had reared by now a really considerable rage in himself, both weapon and anesthetic.

  “In this state,” he said, nodding vigorously, “there’s a law to protect children’s morals. You can be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minor children! Ever think of that?”

  “Contributing to— Why, that’s foolish! I raise my children as decent as anybody. I—”

  “I know! But in California if you’re living with a man not your husband, then you’re guilty of it—setting them a bad example, or something like that.”

  The bookkeeper appeared from behind the woman.

  “You stop that!” he ordered. “You hear me, you stop that! Amy hasn’t done anything!”

  The child began to cry. The woman seized one of Vitt’s arms.

  “Let me tell you!” Defiance was gone out of her. “My husband left me when he found I was going to have another baby. He went out on a Sunday night in the rain and didn’t ever come back. Not ever! I didn’t have anybody to help me but James. He took me in, and he’s been as good a man as there ever was! The children are better off with him than they ever were with Tom. He’s better to them. I—”

  The detective pulled his arm away from her. A detective is a man employed to do certain defined things: he is not a judge, a god. Every thief has his justification, to hear him tell it. This hullabaloo just made his work that much harder, without doing anybody any real good.

  “That’s tough!” He put into word and feature all the callousness for which he was fumbling inside. “But the way it stands is that if you’re going to fight me on this check business, I’m going to make the going as tough as I can for the pair of you.”

  “You mean,” Close cried, “that if I don’t say I forged that check you’ll have Amy and me arrested for this—this delinquency thing?”

  “I mean that if you’ll be reasonable I’ll not make any more trouble than I have to. But if you want to be hard-boiled, then I’ll go the limit.”

  “And Amy’ll be arrested?”

  “Yes.”

  “You—you—” The bookkeeper clawed at Vitt with hands fashioned for grappling with pens and ledger-pages. Vitt could have handled him without especial difficulty, for, beneath his plumpness, the detective was strong enough. But the passion for which he had groped with affectation of face and voice had at last become actual.

  He made
a ball of one fist and drove it into the bookkeeper’s hollow belly. The bookkeeper folded over it and writhed on the floor. Screaming, the woman knelt beside him. The child who had come into the room with the woman and the baby Vitt had not seen yelled together. The doorbell began to ring. From the kitchen came the stench of scorched food.

  Presently Close sat up, leaning against the kneeling woman, his spectacles dangling from one ear.

  “I forged it,” he said into the clamor. “I didn’t have any money to pay the bills after the baby came. I told Amy I borrowed the money from Rosewater.” He laughed two sharp notes. “She didn’t know him, so she believed me. Anyway, the bills are paid.”

  Vitt hurried his prisoner down to the city prison, had him booked and locked in, and then hastened up to the shopping district. The department stores closed at half past five, and his wife had asked him to bring home three spools of No. 60 black thread.

  THE KISS-OFF

  I

  A high school is letting hundreds of youngsters out into a street. A girl of 16 waits for a boy of the same age. His clothes are old and neat; hers are newer and a bit gaudy. They are happy together in a quiet, casual way. They go to shooting gallery where boy works after school. Girl remains behind until the proprietor has left boy in charge, and then joins him. She shoots at targets with pistol; is a terrible shot. The boy shoots, seeming to pay little attention to what he is doing, but putting his bullets where he wants them. After a while she persuades him to show his skill again. Proprietor returns in middle of exhibition and gives boy hell for wasting cartridges. The girl runs away.

  II

  The girl goes home to a shabby furnished flat—not a tenement. Her mother—a frail woman with a weak once-pretty face—is in the kitchen cooking. The girl’s step-father—Tom Cooley—is sitting with white-stockinged feet on the dining-room table, reading a newspaper. He is a fleshy man of forty-something with a round, good-natured face and a jovial manner. He looks at the clock and asks the girl where she has been since school let out. She won’t tell him. He scowls, insists. The girl keeps quiet. Her manner isn’t defiant—just spiritlessly stubborn. He twists her arm, threatens her with a fist (but keeps his feet on the table); she won’t tell. He grins at her with paternal pride, pats her cheek, gives her a half-dollar, and praises her: “Good kid! Don’t never tell nobody nothing!”