Who Killed Bob Teal? and Other Stories

by Dashiell Hammett

  We couldn’t find Maxwell. We couldn’t find anybody who knew Maxwell. We couldn’t find any evidence that Maxwell was anything but a name.

  One of the operatives went up to the yellow house on the hill, and rang the bell for half an hour with no result. We didn’t try that again, not wanting to stir things up at this stage.

  I made another trip up the hill, house-hunting. I couldn’t find a place as near the yellow house as I would have liked, but I succeeded in renting a three-room flat from which the approach to it could be watched.

  Dick and I camped in the flat—with Pat Reddy, when he wasn’t off on other duties—and watched machines turn into the screened path that led to the egg-tinted house. Afternoon and night there were machines. Most of them carried women. We saw no one we could place as a resident of the house. Elwood came daily, once alone, the other time with women whose faces we couldn’t see from our window.

  We shadowed some of the visitors away. They were without exception reasonably well off financially, and some were socially prominent. We didn’t go up against any of them with talk. Even a carefully planned pretext is as likely as not to tip your mitt when you’re up against a blind game.

  Three days of this—and our break came.

  It was early evening, just dark. Pat Reddy had phoned that he had been up on a job for two days and a night, and was going to sleep the clock around. Dick and I were sitting at the window of our flat, watching automobiles turn toward the yellow house, writing down their license numbers as they passed through the blue-white patch of light an arc-lamp put in the road just beyond our window.

  A woman came climbing the hill, afoot. She was a tall woman, strongly built. A dark veil, not thick enough to advertise the fact that she wore it to hide her features, nevertheless did hide them. Her way was up the hill, past our flat, on the other side of the roadway.

  A night-wind from the Pacific was creaking a grocer’s sign down below, swaying the arc-light above. The wind caught the woman as she passed out of our building’s sheltered area. Coat and skirts tangled. She put her back to the wind, a hand to her hat. Her veil whipped out straight from her face.

  Her face was a face from a photograph—Myra Banbrock’s face.

  Dick made her with me.

  “Our Baby!” he cried, bouncing to his feet.

  “Wait,” I said. “She’s going into the joint on the edge of the hill. Let her go. We’ll go after her when she’s inside. That’s our excuse for frisking the joint.”

  I went into the next room, where our telephone was, and called Pat Reddy’s number.

  “She didn’t go in,” Dick called from the window. “She went past the path.”

  “After her!” I ordered. “There’s no sense to that! What’s the matter with her?” I felt sort of indignant about it. “She’s got to go in! Tail her. I’ll find you after I get Pat.”

  Dick went.

  Pat’s wife answered the telephone. I told her who I was.

  “Will you shake Pat out of the covers and send him up here? He knows where I am. Tell him I want him in a hurry.”

  “I will,” she promised. “I’ll have him there in ten minutes—wherever it is.”

  Outdoors, I went up the road, hunting for Dick and Myra Banbrock. Neither was in sight. Passing the bushes that masked the yellow house, I went on, circling down a stony path to the left. No sign of either.

  I turned back in time to see Dick going into our flat. I followed.

  “She’s in,” he said when I joined him. “She went up the road, cut across through some bushes, came back to the edge of the cliff, and slid feet-first through a cellar window.”

  That was nice. The crazier the people you are sleuthing act, as a rule, the nearer you are to an ending of your troubles.

  Reddy arrived within a minute or two of the time his wife had promised. He came in buttoning his clothes.

  “What the hell did you tell Althea?” he growled at me. “She gave me an overcoat to put over my pajamas, dumped the rest of my clothes in the car, and I had to get in them on the way over.”

  “I’ll cry with you after awhile,” I dismissed his troubles. “Myra Banbrock just went into the joint through a cellar window. Elwood has been there an hour. Let’s knock it off.”

  Pat is deliberate.

  “We ought to have papers, even at that,” he stalled.

  “Sure,” I agreed, “but you can get them fixed up afterward. That’s what you’re here for. Contra Costa county wants her—maybe to try her for murder. That’s all the excuse we need to get into the joint. We go there for her. If we happen to run into anything else—well and good.”

  Pat finished buttoning his vest.

  “Oh, all right!” he said sourly. “Have it your way. But if you get me smashed for searching a house without authority, you’ll have to give me a job with your law-breaking agency.”

  “I will.” I turned to Foley. “You’ll have to stay outside, Dick. Keep your eye on the getaway. Don’t bother anybody else, but if the Banbrock girl gets out, stay behind her.”

  “I expected it,” Dick howled. “Any time there’s any fun I can count on being stuck off somewhere on a street corner!”

  VIII

  Pat Reddy and I went straight up the bush-hidden path to the yellow house’s front door, and rang the bell.

  A big black man in a red fez, red silk jacket over red-striped silk shirt, red zouave pants and red slippers, opened the door. He filled the opening, framed in the black of the hall behind him.

  “Is Mr. Maxwell home?” I asked.

  The black man shook his head and said words in a language I don’t know.

  “Mr. Elwood, then?”

  Another shaking of the head. More strange language.

  “Let’s see whoever is home then,” I insisted.

  Out of the jumble of words that meant nothing to me, I picked three in garbled English, which I thought were “master,” “not,” and “home.”

  The door began to close. I put a foot against it.

  Pat flashed his buzzer.

  Though the black man had poor English, he had knowledge of police badges.

  One of his feet stamped on the floor behind him. A gong boomed deafeningly in the rear of the house.

  The black man bent his weight to the door.

  My weight on the foot that blocked the door, I leaned sidewise, swaying to the negro.

  Slamming from the hip, I put my fist in the middle of him.

  Reddy hit the door and we went into the hall.

  “’Fore God, Fat Shorty,” the black man gasped in good black Virginian, “you done hurt me!”

  Reddy and I went by him, down the hall whose bounds were lost in darkness.

  The bottom of a flight of steps stopped my feet.

  A gun went off upstairs. It seemed to point at us. We didn’t get the bullets.

  A babel of voices—women screaming, men shouting—came and went upstairs; came and went as if a door was being opened and shut.

  “Up, my boy!” Reddy yelped in my ear.

  We went up the stairs. We didn’t find the man who had shot at us.

  At the head of the stairs, a door was locked. Reddy’s bulk forced it.

  We came into a bluish light. A large room, all purple and gold. Confusion of overturned furniture and rumpled rugs. A gray slipper lay near a far door. A green silk gown was in the center of the floor. No person was there.

  I raced Pat to the curtained door beyond the slipper. The door was not locked. Reddy yanked it wide.

  A room with three girls and a man crouching in a corner, fear in their faces. Neither of them was Myra Banbrock, or Raymond Elwood, or anyone we knew.

  Our glances went away from them after the first quick look.

  The open door across the room grabbed our attention.

  The do
or gave to a small room.

  The room was chaos.

  A small room, packed and tangled with bodies. Live bodies, seething, writhing. The room was a funnel into which men and women had been poured. They boiled noisily toward the one small window that was the funnel’s outlet. Men and women, youths and girls, screaming, struggling, squirming, fighting. Some had no clothes.

  “We’ll get through and block the window!” Pat yelled in my ear.

  “Like hell—” I began, but he was gone ahead into the confusion.

  I went after him.

  I didn’t mean to block the window. I meant to save Pat from his foolishness. No five men could have fought through that boiling turmoil of maniacs. No ten men could have turned them from the window.

  Pat—big as he is—was down when I got to him. A half dressed girl—a child—was driving at his face with sharp high-heels. Hands, feet, were tearing him apart.

  I cleared him with a play of gun-barrel on shins and wrists—dragged him back.

  “Myra’s not there!” I yelled into his ear as I helped him up. “Elwood’s not there!”

  I wasn’t sure, but I hadn’t seen them, and I doubted that they would be in this mess. These savages, boiling again to the window, with no attention for us, whoever they were, weren’t insiders. They were the mob, and the principals shouldn’t be among them.

  “We’ll try the other rooms,” I yelled again. “We don’t want these.”

  Pat rubbed the back of his hand across his torn face and laughed.

  “It’s a cinch I don’t want ’em any more,” he said.

  We went back to the head of the stairs the way we had come. We saw no one. The man and girls who had been in the next room were gone.

  At the head of the stairs we paused. There was no noise behind us except the now fainter babel of the lunatics fighting for their exit.

  A door shut sharply downstairs.

  A body came out of nowhere, hit my back, flattened me to the landing.

  The feel of silk was on my cheek. A brawny hand was fumbling at my throat.

  I bent my wrist until my gun, upside down, lay against my cheek. Praying for my ear, I squeezed.

  My cheek took fire. My head was a roaring thing, about to burst.

  The silk slid away.

  Pat hauled me upright.

  We started down the stairs.

  Swish!

  A thing came past my face, stirring my bared hair.

  A thousand pieces of glass, china, plaster, exploded upward at my feet.

  I tilted head and gun together.

  A negro’s red-silk arms were still spread over the balustrade above.

  I sent him two bullets. Pat sent him two.

  The negro teetered over the rail.

  He came down on us, arms out-flung—a dead man’s swan-dive.

  We scurried down the stairs from under him.

  He shook the house when he landed, but we weren’t watching him then.

  The smooth sleek head of Raymond Elwood took our attention.

  In the light from above, it showed for a furtive split-second around the newel-post at the foot of the stairs. Showed and vanished.

  Pat Reddy, closer to the rail than I, went over it in a one-hand vault down into the blackness below.

  I made the foot of the stairs in two jumps, jerked myself around with a hand on the newel, and plunged into the suddenly noisy dark of the hall.

  A wall I couldn’t see hit me. Caroming off the opposite wall, I spun into a room whose curtained grayness was the light of day after the hall.

  IX

  Pat Reddy stood with one hand on a chair-back, holding his belly with the other. His face was mouse-colored under its blood. His eyes were glass agonies. He had the look of a man who had been kicked.

  The grin he tried failed. He nodded toward the rear of the house. I went back.

  In a little passageway I found Raymond Elwood.

  He was sobbing and pulling frantically at a locked door. His face was the hard white of utter terror.

  I measured the distance between us.

  He turned as I jumped.

  I put everything I had in the downswing of my gun-barrel—

  A ton of meat and bone crashed into my back.

  I went over against the wall, breathless, giddy, sick.

  Red-silk arms that ended in brown hands locked around me.

  I wondered if there was a whole regiment of these gaudy negroes—or if I was colliding with the same one over and over.

  This one didn’t let me do much thinking.

  He was big. He was strong. He didn’t mean any good.

  My gun-arm was flat at my side, straight down. I tried a shot at one of the negro’s feet. Missed. Tried again. He moved his feet. I wriggled around, half facing him.

  Elwood piled on my other side.

  The negro bent me backward, folding my spine on itself like an accordion.

  I fought to hold my knees stiff. Too much weight was hanging on me. My knees sagged. My body curved back.

  Pat Reddy, swaying in the doorway, shone over the negro’s shoulder like the Angel Gabriel.

  Gray pain was in Pat’s face, but his eyes were clear. His right hand held a gun. His left was getting a blackjack out of his hip pocket.

  He swung the sap down on the negro’s shaven skull.

  The black man wheeled away from me, shaking his head.

  Pat hit him once more before the negro closed with him—hit him full in the face, but couldn’t beat him off.

  Twisting my freed gun-hand up, I drilled Elwood neatly through the chest, and let him slide down me to the floor.

  The negro had Pat against the wall, bothering him a lot. His broad red back was a target.

  But I had used five of the six bullets in my gun. I had more in my pocket, but reloading takes time.

  I stepped out of Elwood’s feeble hands, and went to work with the flat of my gun on the negro. There was a roll of fat where his skull and neck fit together. The third time I hit it, he flopped, taking Pat with him.

  I rolled him off. The blond police detective—not very blond now—got up.

  At the other end of the passageway, an open door showed an empty kitchen.

  Pat and I went to the door that Elwood had been playing with. It was a solid piece of carpentering, and neatly fastened.

  Yoking ourselves together, we began to beat the door with our combined three hundred and seventy or eighty pounds.

  It shook, but held. We hit it again. Wood we couldn’t see tore.

  Again.

  The door popped away from us. We went through—down a flight of steps—rolling, snowballing down—until a cement floor stopped us.

  Pat came back to life first.

  “You’re a hell of an acrobat,” he said. “Get off my neck!”

  I stood up. He stood up. We seemed to be dividing the evening between falling on the floor and getting up from the floor.

  A light-switch was at my shoulder. I turned it on.

  If I looked anything like Pat, we were a fine pair of nightmares. He was all raw meat and dirt, with not enough clothes left to hide much of either.

  I didn’t like his looks, so I looked around the basement in which we stood. To the rear was a furnace, coal-bins and a woodpile. To the front was a hallway and rooms, after the manner of the upstairs.

  The first door we tried was locked, but not strongly. We smashed through it into a photographer’s dark-room.

  The second door was unlocked, and put us in a chemical laboratory: retorts, tubes, burners and a small still. There was a little round iron stove in the middle of the room. No one was there.

  We went out into the hallway and to the third door, not so cheerfully. This cellar looked like a bloomer. We were wasting our time here,
when we should have stayed upstairs. I tried the door.

  It was firm beyond trembling.

  We smacked it with our weight, together, experimentally. It didn’t shake.

  “Wait.”

  Pat went to the woodpile in the rear and came back with an axe.

  He swung the axe against the door, flaking out a hunk of wood. Silvery points of light sparkled in the hole. The other side of the door was an iron or steel plate.

  Pat put the axe down and leaned on the helve.

  “You write the next prescription,” he said.

  I didn’t have anything to suggest, except:

  “I’ll camp here. You beat it upstairs, and see if any of your coppers have shown up. This is a God-forsaken hole, but somebody may have sent in an alarm. See if you can find another way into this room—a window, maybe—or man-power enough to get us in through this door.”

  Pat turned toward the steps.

  A sound stopped him—the clicking of bolts on the other side of the iron-lined door.

  A jump put Pat on one side of the frame. A step put me on the other.

  Slowly the door moved in. Too slowly.

  I kicked it open.

  Pat and I went into the room on top of my kick.

  His shoulder hit the woman. I managed to catch her before she fell.

  Pat took her gun. I steadied her back on her feet.

  Her face was a pale blank square.

  She was Myra Banbrock, but she now had none of the masculinity that had been in her photographs and description.

  Steadying her with one arm—which also served to block her arms—I looked around the room.

  A small cube of a room whose walls were brown-painted metal. On the floor lay a queer little dead man.

  A little man in tight-fitting black velvet and silk. Black velvet blouse and breeches, black silk stockings and skull cap, black patent leather pumps. His face was small and old and bony, but smooth as stone, without line or wrinkle.

  A hole was in his blouse, where it fit high under his chin. The hole bled very slowly. The floor around him showed it had been bleeding faster a little while ago.

  Beyond him, a safe was open. Papers were on the floor in front of it, as if the safe had been tilted to spill them out.