A thin youth in a chauffeur’s livery started for the door, crying, “Water! We’ve got to have water!”
Stolid Tom waved him back with a pair of automatic pistols produced expertly from the bosom of his ill-fitting garments. “Go back to your bonfire, my lad,” he ordered with friendly firmness, while the brute called Bill slid a limber dark blackjack from a hip pocket and moved toward the chauffeur. The chauffeur hurriedly retreated into the group fighting the fire.
The younger Newbrith and a servant had twisted a thick rug over the sofa’s arm and back, and were patting it sharply with their hands. Two servants had torn down the burning drape, trampling it into shredded black harmlessness under their feet. The elder Newbrith beat a smoldering cushion against the top of a table, sparks riding away on escaping feathers. While the old man beat he talked, but nothing could be made of his words. Mrs. Newbrith was laughing with noisy hysteria beside him. Around these principals the others were grouped: servants unable to find a place to serve, Brenda Newbrith looking at Hugh Trate as if undecided how she should look at him, and the young man himself frowning at the charred corpse of his fire with undisguised resentment.
“What in the world’s the matter now?” the fat man asked from the door.
“The young fellow’s been cutting up,” Tom explained. “He touched off a box of matches and stuck ’em under a pillow in a corner of the sofa. Seemed like a harmless kind of joke, so I left him alone.”
The brutish man raised a transformed face, almost without brutality in its eager hopefulness. “Now you’ll leave me sock him, Joe,” he pleaded.
But the fat man shook his head.
Mrs. Newbrith stopped laughing to cough. The elder Newbrith was coughing, his eyes red, tears on his wrinkled cheeks. A cushion case was limp and empty in his fingers: it had burst under his violent handling and its contents had puffed out to scatter in the air, thickening in an atmosphere already heavy with the smoke and stench of burnt hair and fabric.
“Can’t we open a window for a second?” the younger Newbrith called through this cloud. “Just enough to clear the air?”
“Now you oughtn’t to ask me a thing like that,” fat Joe complained petulantly. “You ought to have sense enough to know we can’t do a thing like that.”
Old Newbrith spread his empty cushion cover out with both hands and began to wave it in the air, fanning a relatively clear space in front of him. Servants seized rugs and followed his example. Smoke swirled away, thinning toward the ceiling. White curls of fleece eddied about, were wafted to distant parts of the room. The three men at the door watched without comment.
“I’m afraid this young man is going to make a nuisance of himself,” the fat man squeaked after a little while. “You’ll have to do something with him, Tom.”
“Aw, leave the young fellow alone,” said Tom. “He’s all—”
A white feather, fluttering lazily down, came to hang for a moment against the tip of Tom’s red nose. He dabbed at it with the back of one of the hands that held his pistols. The feather floated up in the air-current generated by the hand’s motion, but immediately returned to the nose-tip again. Tom’s hand dabbed at it once more and his face puffed out redly. The feather eluded his hand, nestling between nose and upper lip. His face became grotesquely inflated. He sneezed furiously. The gun in the dabbing hand roared. Old Newbrith’s empty cushion case was whisked out of his hands. A hole like a smooth dime appeared in the blind down across a window behind him.
“Tch! Tch!” exclaimed the fat man. “You ought to be carefuller, Tom. You might hurt somebody that way.”
Tom sneezed again, but with precautions now, holding his pistols down, holding his forefingers stiffly away from the triggers. He sneezed a third time, rubbed his nose with the back of a hand, put his weapons out of sight under his coat, and brought out a handkerchief.
“I might of for a fact,” he admitted good naturedly, blowing his nose and wiping his eyes. “Remember that time Snohomish Whitey gunned that bank messenger without meaning to, all on account of being ticklish and having a button bust off his undershirt and slide down on the inside?”
“Yes,” fat Joe remembered, “but Snohomish was always kind of flighty.”
“You can say what you want about Snohomish,” the brutish man said, rubbing his chin reflectively with the blackjack, “but he packs a good wallop in his left, and don’t think he don’t. That time me and him went round and round in the jungle at Sac he made me like it, even if I did take him, and don’t think he didn’t.”
“That’s right enough,” the fat man admitted, “but still and all, I never take much stock in a man that can’t take a draw on your cigarette without getting it all wet. Well, don’t let these folks do any more cutting up on you,” and he waddled away.
Hugh Trate, surrounded by disapproval, sat and stared at the floor for fifteen minutes. Then his face began to redden slowly. When it was quite red he lifted it and looked into the elder Newbrith’s bitter eyes.
“Do you think I started it because I was chilly?” he asked angrily. “Wouldn’t it have smoked these crooks out? Wouldn’t it have brought firemen, police?”
The old man glared at him. “Don’t you think it’s bad enough to be robbed without being cremated? Do you think the insurance company would have paid me a nickel for the house? Do you—?”
A downstairs crash rattled windows, shook the room, put weapons in the hands of men at the door. Feet thumped on distant steps, scurried overhead, stamped in the hall. The door opened far enough to admit a pale hatchet-face.
“Ben,” it addressed the cheerful man, “Big Fat wants you. We been ranked!”
Two shots close together sounded below. Ben, recently Tom, hurried out after the hatchet-face, leaving the brutish Bill alone to guard the prisoners. He glowered threateningly at them with his little red-brown eyes, crouching beside the door, blackjack in one hand, battered revolver in the other.
Another shot thundered. Something broke with a splintering sound in the rear of the house. A distant man yelled throatily, “Put the slug to him!” In another part of the building a man laughed. Heavy feet were on the stairs, in the hall.
Bill spun to the door as the door came in. Gunpowder burned diagonally upward in a dull flash. Metal buttons glistened against blue cloth around, under, over Bill. His blackjack arched through the air, twisted end over end, and thudded on the floor.
A sallow plump man in blue civilian clothes came into the room, stepping over the policemen struggling with Bill on the floor. His hands were in his jacket pockets and he nodded to Newbrith senior without removing his hat.
“Detective-sergeant McClurg,” he introduced himself. “We nabbed six or seven of ’em, all of ’em, I guess. What’s it all about?”
“Robbery, that’s what it’s all about!” Newbrith stormed. “They seized the house at daybreak. All day they’ve held us here, prisoners in our own home! I’ve been forced to withdraw my bank balances, to sell stocks and bonds and everything that could be sold quickly. I’ve been forced to make myself ridiculous by demanding currency for everything, by sending God knows what kind of messengers for it. I’ve been forced to borrow money from men I despise! I might just as well live in a wilderness as in a city that keeps me poor with its taxes for all the protection I’ve got. I haven’t—”
“We can’t guess what’s happening,” the detective-sergeant said. “We came as soon as Pentner gave us the rap.”
“Pentner?” It was a despairing scream. The old man’s eyes rolled frenziedly at the bright round hole in the curtained window that concealed his neighbor’s residence. “That damned scoundrel! I hope he waits for me to thank him for his impudence in meddling in my business! I’d rather lose everything I’ve got in the world than be beholden to that—”
The detective-sergeant’s plumpness shook with an inner mirth. “You don’t have to let that bother you,” he interrupted the old man’s tirade. “He won’t like it so much either! He phoned in saying you had tak
en a shot at him while he was standing in his room brushing his hair. He said he always expected something like that would happen, because he knew you were crazy as a pet cuckoo and ought to have been locked up long ago. He said that, since you had missed him, he was glad you had cut loose at him, because now the city would have to put you away where you belonged.”
“So you see,” came the triumph of Brenda Newbrith’s voice, “Mr. Trate is clever, and he did show you!”
“Eh?” was the most her grandfather could achieve.
“You know very well,” she declared, “that if he hadn’t set fire to the sofa you wouldn’t have burst the cushion, and the feathers wouldn’t have tickled that man’s nose, and he wouldn’t have sneezed, and his gun wouldn’t have gone off, and the bullet wouldn’t have frightened Mr. Pentner into thinking you were trying to kill him, and he wouldn’t have phoned the police, and they wouldn’t have come here to rescue us. That stands to reason. Well, then, how can you say that Mr. Trate’s cleverness didn’t do it?”
Detective-sergeant McClurg’s plumpness shook again. Old Newbrith snorted and fumbled for words that wouldn’t come. The younger Newbrith murmured something about the house that Jack built.
The young man who had been clever turned a bit red and had a moment of trouble with his breathing, but the bland smile his face wore was the smile of one who wears honestly won laurels easily, neither over-valuing nor under-valuing them.
“I think it’s wonderful,” the girl assured him, “to be able to make plans that go through successfully no matter how much everybody tries to spoil them from the very beginning.”
Nobody could find a reply to that—if one were possible.
TOO MANY HAVE LIVED
The man’s tie was as orange as a sunset. He was a large man, tall and meaty, without softness. The dark hair parted in the middle, flattened to his scalp, his firm, full cheeks, the clothes that fit him with noticeable snugness, even the small, pink ears flat against the sides of his head—each of these seemed but a differently colored part of one same, smooth surface. His age could have been thirty-five or forty-five.
He sat beside Samuel Spade’s desk, leaning forward a little over his Malacca stick, and said, “No. I want you to find out what happened to him. I hope you never find him.” His protuberant green eyes stared solemnly at Spade.
Spade rocked back in his chair. His face—given a not unpleasantly Satanic cast by the V’s of his bony chin, mouth, nostrils, and thickish brows—was as politely interested as his voice. “Why?”
The green-eyed man spoke quietly, with assurance: “I can talk to you, Spade. You’ve the sort of reputation I want in a private detective. That’s why I’m here.”
Spade’s nod committed him to nothing.
The green-eyed man said, “And any fair price is all right with me.”
Spade nodded as before. “And with me,” he said, “but I’ve got to know what you want to buy. You want to find out what’s happened to this—uh—Eli Haven, but you don’t care what it is?”
The green-eyed man lowered his voice, but there was no other change in his mien: “In a way I do. For instance, if you found him and fixed it so he stayed away for good, It might be worth more money to me.”
“You mean even if he didn’t want to stay away?”
The green-eyed man said, “Especially.”
Spade smiled and shook his head. “Probably not enough more money—the way you mean it.” He took his long, thick-fingered hands from the arms of his chair and turned their palms up. “Well, what’s it all about, Colyer?”
Colyer’s face reddened a little, but his eyes maintained their unblinking cold stare. “This man’s got a wife. I like her. They had a row last week and he blew. If I can convince her he’s gone for good, there’s a chance she’ll divorce him.”
“I’d want to talk to her,” Spade said. “Who is this Eli Haven? What does he do?”
“He’s a bad egg. He doesn’t do anything. Writes poetry or something.”
“What can you tell me about him that’ll help?”
“Nothing Julia, his wife, can’t tell you. You’re going to talk to her.” Colyer stood up. “I’ve got connections. Maybe I can get something for you through them later.” . . .
A small-boned woman of twenty-five or -six opened the apartment door. Her powder-blue dress was trimmed with silver buttons. She was full-bosomed but slim, with straight shoulders and narrow hips, and she carried herself with a pride that would have been cockiness in one less graceful.
Spade said, “Mrs. Haven?”
She hesitated before saying “Yes.”
“Gene Colyer sent me to see you. My name’s Spade. I’m a private detective. He wants me to find your husband.”
“And have you found him?”
“I told him I’d have to talk to you first.”
Her smile went away. She studied his face gravely, feature by feature, then she said, “Certainly,” and stepped back, drawing the door back with her.
When they were seated in facing chairs in a cheaply furnished room overlooking a playground where children were noisy, she asked, “Did Gene tell you why he wanted Eli found?”
“He said if you knew he was gone for good maybe you’d listen to reason.”
She said nothing.
“Has he ever gone off like this before?”
“Often.”
“What’s he like?”
“He’s a swell man,” she said dispassionately, “when he’s sober; and when he’s drinking he’s all right except with women and money.”
“That leaves him a lot of room to be all right in. What does he do for a living?”
“He’s a poet,” she replied, “but nobody makes a living at that.”
“Well?”
“Oh, he pops in with a little money now and then. Poker, races, he says. I don’t know.”
“How long’ve you been married?”
“Four years, almost”—he smiled mockingly.
“San Francisco all the time?”
“No, we lived in Seattle the first year and then came here.”
“He from Seattle?”
She shook her head. “Some place in Delaware.”
“What place?”
“I don’t know.”
Spade drew his thickish brows together a little. “Where are you from?”
She said sweetly, “You’re not hunting for me.”
“You act like it,” he grumbled. “Well, who are his friends?”
“Don’t ask me!”
He made an impatient grimace. “You know some of them,” he insisted.
“Sure. There’s a fellow named Minera and a Louis James and somebody he calls Conny.”
“Who are they?”
“Men,” she replied blandly. “I don’t know anything about them. They phone or drop by to pick him up, or I see him around town with them. That’s all I know.”
“What do they do for a living? They can’t all write poetry.”
She laughed. “They could try. One of them, Louis James, is a—member of Gene’s staff, I think. I honestly don’t know any more about them than I’ve told you.”
“Think they’d know where your husband is?”
She shrugged. “They’re kidding me if they do. They still call up once in a while to see if he’s turned up.”
“And these women you mentioned?”
“They’re not people I know.”
Spade scowled thoughtfully at the floor, asked, “What’d he do before he started not making a living writing poetry?”
“Anything—sold vacuum cleaners, hoboed, went to sea, dealt blackjack, railroaded, canning houses, lumber camps, carnivals, worked on a newspaper—anything.”
“Have any money when he left?”
“Three dollars he borrowed from me.”
“What’d he say?”
She laughed. “Said if I used whatever influence I had with God while he was gone he’d be back at dinnertime with a surprise for me.”
“Oh, yes. Our last fight had been patched up a couple of days before.”
“When did he leave?”
“Thursday afternoon; three o’clock, I guess.”
“Got any photographs of him?”
“Yes.” She went to a table by one of the windows, pulled a drawer out, and turned towards Spade again with a photograph in her hand.
Spade looked at the picture of a thin face with deep-set eyes, a sensual mouth, and a heavily lined forehead topped by a disorderly mop of coarse blond hair.
He put Haven’s photograph in his pocket and picked up his hat. He turned towards the door, halted. “What kind of poet is he? Pretty good?”
She shrugged. “That depends on who you ask.”
“Any of it around here?”
“No.” She smiled. “Think he’s hiding between pages?”
“You never can tell what’ll lead to what. I’ll be back some time. Think things over and see if you can’t find some way of loosening up a little more. ‘By.”
He walked down Post Street to Mulford’s book store and asked for a volume of Haven’s poetry.
“I’m sorry,” the girl said. “I sold my last copy last week”—she smiled—“to Mr. Haven himself. I can order it for you.”
“You know him?”
“Only through selling him books.”
Spade pursed his lips, asked, “What day was it?” He gave her one of his business cards. “Please. It’s important.”
She went to a desk, turned the pages of a red-bound sales-book, and came back to him with the book open in her hand. “It was last Wednesday,” she said, “and we delivered it to a Mr. Roger Ferris, 1981 Pacific Avenue.”
“Thanks a lot,” he said.
Outside, he hailed a taxicab and gave the driver Mr. Roger Ferris’s address . . .
Crime Stories Page 150