The girl moved against my arm.
“You killed him?” I asked.
“Yes,” too faint to have been heard a yard away.
“Why?”
She shook her short brown hair out of her eyes with a tired jerk of her head.
“Does it make any difference?” she asked. “I did kill him.”
“It might make a difference,” I told her, taking my arm away, and going over to shut the door. People talk more freely in a room with a closed door. “I happen to be in your father’s employ. Mr. Reddy is a police detective. Of course, neither of us can smash any laws, but if you’ll tell us what’s what, maybe we can help you.”
“My father’s employ?” she questioned.
“Yes. When you and your sister disappeared, he engaged me to find you. We found your sister, and—”
Life came into her face and eyes and voice.
“I didn’t kill Ruth!” she cried. “The papers lied! I didn’t kill her! I didn’t know she had the revolver. I didn’t know it! We were going away to hide from—from everything. We stopped in the woods to burn the—those things. That’s the first time I knew she had the revolver. We had talked about suicide at first, but I had persuaded her—thought I had persuaded her—not to. I tried to take the revolver away from her, but I couldn’t. She shot herself while I was trying to get it away. I tried to stop her. I didn’t kill her!”
This was getting somewhere.
“And then?” I encouraged her.
“And then I went to Sacramento and left the car there, and came back to San Francisco. Ruth told me she had written Raymond Elwood a letter. She told me that before I persuaded her not to kill herself—the first time. I tried to get the letter from Raymond. She had written him she was going to kill herself. I tried to get the letter, but Raymond said he had given it to Hador.
“So I came here this evening to get it. I had just found it when there was a lot of noise upstairs. Then Hador came in and found me. He bolted the door. And—and I shot him with the revolver that was in the safe. I—I shot him when he turned around, before he could say anything. It had to be that way, or I couldn’t.”
“You mean you shot him without being threatened or attacked by him?” Pat asked.
“Yes. I was afraid of him, afraid to let him speak. I hated him! I couldn’t help it. It had to be that way. If he had talked I couldn’t have shot him. He—he wouldn’t have let me!”
“Who was this Hador?” I asked.
She looked away from Pat and me, at the walls, at the ceiling, at the queer little dead man on the floor.
X
“He was a—” She cleared her throat, and started again, staring down at her feet. “Raymond Elwood brought us here the first time. We thought it was funny. But Hador was a devil. He told you things and you believed them. You couldn’t help it. He told you everything and you believed it. Perhaps we were drugged. There was always a warm bluish wine. It must have been drugged. We couldn’t have done those things if it hadn’t. Nobody would— He called himself a priest—a priest of Alzoa. He taught a freeing of the spirit from the flesh by—”
Her voice broke huskily. She shuddered.
“It was horrible!” she went on presently in the silence Pat and I had left for her. “But you believed him. That is the whole thing. You can’t understand it unless you understand that. The things he taught could not be so. But he said they were, and you believed they were. Or maybe—I don’t know—maybe you pretended you believed them, because you were crazy and drugs were in your blood. We came back again and again, for weeks, months, before the disgust that had to come drove us away.
“We stopped coming, Ruth and I—and Irma. And then we found out what he was. He demanded money, more money than we had been paying while we believed—or pretended belief—in his cult. We couldn’t give him the money he demanded. I told him we wouldn’t. He sent us photographs—of us—taken during the—the times here. They were—pictures—you—couldn’t—explain. And they were true! We knew them true! What could we do? He said he would send copies to our father, every friend, everyone we knew—unless we paid.
“What could we do—except pay? We got the money somehow. We gave him money—more—more—more. And then we had no more—could get no more. We didn’t know what to do! There was nothing to do, except— Ruth and Irma wanted to kill themselves. I thought of that, too. But I persuaded Ruth not to. I said we’d go away. I’d take her away—keep her safe. And then—then—this!”
She stopped talking, went on staring at her feet.
I looked again at the little dead man on the floor, weird in his black cap and clothes. No more blood came from his throat.
It wasn’t hard to put the pieces together. This dead Hador, self-ordained priest of something or other, staging orgies under the alias of religious ceremonies. Elwood, his confederate, bringing women of family and wealth to him. A room lighted for photography, with a concealed camera. Contributions from his converts so long as they were faithful to the cult. Blackmail—with the help of the photographs—afterward.
I looked from Hador to Pat Reddy. He was scowling at the dead man. No sound came from outside the room.
“You have the letter your sister wrote Elwood?” I asked the girl.
Her hand flashed to her bosom, and crinkled paper there.
“Yes.”
“It says plainly she meant to kill herself?”
“Yes.”
“That ought to square her with Contra Costa county,” I said to Pat.
He nodded his battered head.
“It ought to,” he agreed. “It’s not likely that they could prove murder on her even without that letter. With it, they’ll not take her into court. That’s a safe bet. Another is that she won’t have any trouble over this shooting. She’ll come out of court free, and thanked in the bargain.”
Myra Banbrock flinched away from Pat as if he had hit her in the face.
I was her father’s hired man just now. I saw her side of the affair.
I lit a cigarette and studied what I could see of Pat’s face through blood and grime. Pat is a right guy.
“Listen, Pat,” I wheedled him, though with a voice that was as if I were not trying to wheedle him at all. “Miss Banbrock can go into court and come out free and thanked, as you say. But to do it, she’s got to use everything she knows. She’s got to have all the evidence there is. She’s got to use all those photographs Hador took—or all we can find of them.
“Some of those pictures have sent women to suicide, Pat—at least two that we know. If Miss Banbrock goes into court, we’ve got to make the photographs of God knows how many other women public property. We’ve got to advertise things that will put Miss Banbrock—and you can’t say how many other women and girls—in a position that at least two women have killed themselves to escape.”
Pat scowled at me and rubbed his dirty chin with a dirtier thumb.
I took a deep breath and made my play.
“Pat, you and I came here to question Raymond Elwood, having traced him here. Maybe we suspected him of being tied up with the mob that knocked over the St. Louis bank last month. Maybe we suspected him of handling the stuff that was taken from the mail cars in that stick-up near Denver week before last. Anyway, we were after him, knowing that he had a lot of money that came from nowhere, and a real estate office that did no real estate business.
“We came here to question him in connection with one of these jobs I’ve mentioned. We were jumped by a couple of the shines upstairs when they found we were sleuths. The rest of it grew out of that. This religious cult business was just something we ran into, and didn’t interest us especially. So far as we knew, all these folks jumped us just through friendship for the man we were trying to question. Hador was one of them, and, tussling with you, you shot him with his own gun, which, of course, is the one Miss Banbrock foun
d in the safe.”
Reddy didn’t seem to like my suggestion at all. The eyes with which he regarded me were decidedly sour.
“You’re goofy,” he accused me. “What’ll that get anybody? That won’t keep Miss Banbrock out of it. She’s here, isn’t she, and the rest of it will come out like thread off a spool.”
“But Miss Banbrock wasn’t here,” I explained. “Maybe the upstairs is full of coppers by now. Maybe not. Anyway, you’re going to take Miss Banbrock out of here and turn her over to Dick Foley, who will take her home. She’s got nothing to do with this party. Tomorrow she, and her father’s lawyer, and I, will all go up to Martinez and make a deal with the prosecuting attorney of Contra Costa county. We’ll show him how Ruth killed herself. If somebody happens to connect the Elwood who I hope is dead upstairs with the Elwood who knew the girls and Mrs. Correll, what of it? If we keep out of court—as we’ll do by convincing the Contra Costa people they can’t possibly convict her of her sister’s murder—we’ll keep out of the newspapers—and out of trouble.”
Pat hung fire, thumb still to chin.
“Remember,” I urged him, “it’s not only Miss Banbrock we’re doing this for. It’s a couple of dead ones, and a flock of live ones, who certainly got mixed up with Hador of their own accords, but who don’t stop being human beings on that account.”
Pat shook his head stubbornly.
“I’m sorry,” I told the girl with faked hopelessness. “I’ve done all I can, but it’s a lot to ask of Reddy. I don’t know that I blame him for being afraid to take a chance on—”
Pat is Irish.
“Don’t be so damned quick to fly off,” he snapped at me, cutting short my hypocrisy. “But why do I have to be the one that shot this Hador? Why not you?”
I had him!
“Because,” I explained, “you’re a bull and I’m not. There’ll be less chance of a slip-up if he was shot by a bona fide, star-wearing, flat-footed officer of the peace. I killed most of those birds upstairs. You ought to do something to show you were here.”
That was only part of the truth. My idea was that if Pat took the credit, he couldn’t very well ease himself out afterward, no matter what happened. Pat’s a right guy, and I’d trust him anywhere—but you can trust a man just as easily if you have him sewed up.
Pat grumbled and shook his head, but:
“I’m ruining myself, I don’t doubt,” he growled, “but I’ll do it, this once.”
“Attaboy!” I went over to pick up the girl’s hat from the corner in which it lay. “I’ll wait here until you come back from turning her over to Dick.” I gave the girl her hat and orders together. “You go to your home with the man Reddy turns you over to. Stay there until I come, which will be as soon as I can make it. Don’t tell anybody anything, except that I told you to keep quiet. That includes your father. Tell him I told you not to tell him even where you saw me. Got it?”
“Yes, and I—”
Gratitude is nice to think about afterward, but it takes time when there’s work to be done.
“Get going, Pat!”
They went.
XI
As soon as I was alone with the dead man I stepped over him and knelt in front of the safe, pushing letters and papers away, hunting for photographs. None was in sight. One compartment of the safe was locked.
I frisked the corpse. No key. The locked compartment wasn’t very strong, but neither am I the best safe-burglar in the West. It took me a while to get into it.
What I wanted was there. A thick sheaf of negatives. A stack of prints—half a hundred of them.
I started to run through them, hunting for the Banbrock girls’ pictures. I wanted to have them pocketed before Pat came back. I didn’t know how much farther he would let me go.
Luck was against me—and the time I had wasted getting into the compartment. He was back before I had got past the sixth print in the stack. Those six had been—pretty bad.
“Well, that’s done,” Pat growled at me as he came into the room. “Dick’s got her. Elwood is dead, and so is the only one of the negroes I saw upstairs. Everybody else seems to have beat it. No bulls have shown—so I put in a call for a wagonful.”
I stood up, holding the sheaf of negatives in one hand, the prints in the other.
“What’s all that?” he asked.
I went after him again.
“Photographs. You’ve just done me a big favor, Pat, and I’m not hoggish enough to ask another. But I’m going to put something in front of you, Pat. I’ll give you the lay, and you can name it.
“These”—I waved the pictures at him—“are Hador’s meal-tickets—the photos he was either collecting on or planning to collect on. They’re photographs of people, Pat, mostly women and girls, and some of them are pretty rotten.
“If tomorrow’s papers say that a flock of photos were found in this house after the fireworks, there’s going to be a fat suicide-list in the next day’s papers, and a fatter list of disappearances. If the papers say nothing about the photos, the lists may be a little smaller, but not much. Some of the people whose pictures are here know they are here. They will expect the police to come hunting for them. We know this much about the photographs—two women have killed themselves to get away from them. This is an armful of stuff that can dynamite a lot of people, Pat, and a lot of families—no matter which of those two ways the papers read.
“But, suppose, Pat, the papers say that just before you shot Hador he succeeded in burning a lot of pictures and papers, burning them beyond recognition. Isn’t it likely, then, that there won’t be any suicides? That some of the disappearances of recent months may clear themselves up? There she is, Pat—you name it.”
Looking back, it seems to me I had come a lot nearer being eloquent than ever before in my life.
But Pat didn’t applaud.
He cursed me. He cursed me thoroughly, bitterly, and with an amount of feeling that told me I had won another point in my little game. He called me more things than I ever listened to before from a man who was built of meat and bone, and who therefore could be smacked.
When he was through, we carried the papers and photographs and a small book of addresses we found in the safe into the next room, and fed them to the little round iron stove there. The last of them was ash before we heard the police overhead.
“That’s absolutely all!” Pat declared when we got up from our work. “Don’t ever ask me to do anything else for you if you live to be a thousand.”
“That’s absolutely all,” I echoed.
I like Pat. He is a right guy. The sixth photograph in the stack had been of his wife—the coffee importer’s reckless, hot-eyed daughter.
About the Author
Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) charted a gritty new direction for American crime fiction, crafting true-to-life stories as brash as they are exacting. In 1922, he began writing fiction based on his experience as a private detective, and he pioneered the tough-minded, action-heavy, realistic style that became known as hardboiled. Among his best-known works are Red Harvest (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), The Thin Man (1934), and the Collected Case Files of the Continental Op, most of which were published in Black Mask magazine.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“Foreword” Copyright © 2016 by Julie M. Rivett; “Introduction” Copyright © 2016 by Richard Layman; “Who Killed Bob Teal?�
� Copyright © 1924 by Dashiell Hammett, renewed; “The Whosis Kid” and “The Scorched Face” Copyright © 1925 by Pro-Distributors; renewed by Pro-Distributors as agent for Dashiell Hammett, whose interest was conveyed by will in 1984 to the Dashiell Hammett Literary Property Trust. All Rights Reserved.
Cover design by Jamie Keenan
978-1-5040-3599-6
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