“Suppose you give me a list of all the names you know of enemies he’s made, and I’ll have them checked up.”
“The names I could give you would be only a few of many, and it might take you months to check up those few. It isn’t my intention to go to all that trouble and expense. As I told you, I’m not insisting upon results. My wife is very nervous, and for some peculiar reason she seems to like the old man. So, to soothe her, I agreed to employ a private detective when she asked me to. My idea is that you hang around for a couple of days, until things quiet down and she feels safe again. Meanwhile, if you should stumble upon anything—go to it! If you don’t—well and good.”
My face must have shown something of what I was thinking, for his eyes twinkled and he chuckled.
“Don’t, please,” he drawled, “get the idea that you aren’t to find my father-in-law’s would-be assassin if you wish to. You’re to have a free hand. Go as far as you like, except that I want you to be around the place as much as possible, so my wife will see you and feel that we are being adequately protected. Beyond that, I don’t care what you do. You can apprehend criminals by the carload. As you may have gathered by now, I’m not exactly in love with my wife’s father, and he’s no more fond of me. To be frank, if hating weren’t such an effort—I think I should hate the old devil. But if you want to, and can, catch the man who shot at him, I’d be glad to have you do it. But-”
“All right,” I said. “I don’t like this job much, but since I’m up here I’ll take it on. But, remember, I’m trying all the time.”
“Sincerity and earnestness”—he showed his teeth in a sardonic smile as we got to our feet—“are very praiseworthy traits.”
“So I hear,” I growled shortly. “Now let’s take a look at Mr. Exon’s room.”
Gallaway’s wife and the nurse were with the invalid, but I examined the room before I asked the occupants any questions.
It was a large room, with three wide windows opening over the porch, and two doors, one of which gave to the hall and the other to the adjoining room occupied by the nurse. This door stood open, with a green Japanese screen across it, and, I was told, was left that way at night, so that the nurse could hear readily if her patient was restless or if he wanted attention.
A man standing on the slate roof of the porch, I found, could have easily leaned across one of the window-sills (if he did not care to step over it into the room) and fired at the man in his bed. To get from the ground to the porch roof would have required but little effort, and the descent would be still easier—he could slide down the roof, let himself go feet-first over the edge, checking his speed with hands and arms spread out on the slate, and drop down to the gravel drive. No trick at all, either coming or going. The windows were unscreened.
The sick man’s bed stood just beside the connecting doorway between his room and the nurse’s, which, when he was lying down, placed him between the doorway and the window from which the shot had been fired. Outside, within long rifle range, there was no building, tree, or eminence of any character from which the bullet that had been dug out of the doorframe could have been fired.
I turned from the room to the occupants, questioning the invalid first. He had been a raw-boned man of considerable size in his health, but now he was wasted and stringy and dead-white. His face was thin and hollow; small beady eyes crowded together against the thin bridge of his nose; his mouth was a colorless gash above a bony projecting chin.
His statement was a marvel of petulant conciseness.
“The shot woke me. I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything. I’ve got a million enemies, most of whose names I can’t remember.”
He jerked this out crossly, turned his face away, closed his eyes, and refused to speak again.
Mrs. Gallaway and the nurse followed me into the latter’s room, where I questioned them. They were of as opposite types as you could find anywhere, and between them there was a certain coolness, an unmistakable hostility which I was able to account for later in the day.
Mrs. Gallaway was perhaps five years older than her husband; dark, strikingly beautiful in a statuesque way, with a worried look in her dark eyes that was particularly noticeable when those eyes rested on her husband. There was no doubt that she was very much in love with him, and the anxiety that showed in her eyes at times—the pains she took to please him in each slight thing during my stay at the Exon house—convinced me that she struggled always with a fear that she was about to lose him.
Mrs. Gallaway could add nothing to what her husband had told me. She had been awakened by the shot, had run to her father’s room, had seen nothing—knew nothing—suspected nothing.
The nurse—Barbra Caywood was her name—told the same story, in almost the same words. She had jumped out of bed when awakened by the shot, pushed the screen away from the connecting doorway, and rushed into her patient’s room. She was the first one to arrive there, and she had seen nothing but the old man sitting up in bed, shaking his feeble fists at the window.
This Barbra Caywood was a girl of twenty-one or—two, and just the sort that a man would pick to help him get well—a girl of little under the average height, with an erect figure wherein slimness and roundness got an even break under the stiff white of her uniform; with soft golden hair above a face that was certainly made to be looked at. But she was businesslike and had an air of efficiency, for all her prettiness.
From the nurse’s room, Gallaway led me to the kitchen, where I questioned the Chinese cook. Gong Lim was a sad-faced Oriental whose ever-present smile somehow made him look more gloomy than ever; and he bowed and smiled and yes-yes’d me from start to finish, and told me nothing.
Adam and Emma Figg—thin and stout, respectively, and both rheumatic—entertained a wide variety of suspicions, directed at the cook and the farm hands, individually and collectively, flitting momentarily from one to the other. They had nothing upon which to base these suspicions, however, except their firm belief that nearly all crimes of violence were committed by foreigners.
The farm hands—two smiling, middle-aged, and heavily mustached Italians, and a soft-eyed Mexican youth—I found in one of the fields. I talked to them for nearly two hours, and I left with a reasonable amount of assurance that none of the three had had any part in the shooting.
* * * *
Dr. Rench had just come down from a visit to his patient when Gallaway and I returned from the fields. He was a little, wizened old man with mild manners and eyes, and a wonderful growth of hair on head, brows, cheeks, lips, chin, and nostrils.
The excitement, he said, had retarded Exon’s recovery somewhat, but he did not think the setback would be serious. The invalid’s temperature had gone up a little, but he seemed to be improving now.
I followed Dr. Rench out to his car after he left the others, for a few questions I wanted to put to him in privacy, but the questions might as well have gone unasked for all the good they did me. He could tell me nothing of any value. The nurse, Barbra Caywood, had been secured, he said, from San Francisco, through the usual channels, which made it seem unlikely that she had worked her way into the Exon house for any hidden purpose which might have some connection with the attempt upon Exon’s life.
Returning from my talk with the doctor, I came upon Hilary Gallaway and the nurse in the hall, near the foot of the stairs. His arm was resting lightly across her shoulders, and he was smiling down at her. Just as I came through the door, she twisted away so that his arm slid off, laughed elfishly up into his face, and went on up the stairs.
I did not know whether she had seen me approaching before she eluded the encircling arm or not, nor did I know how long the arm had been there; and both of those questions would make a difference in how their positions were to be construed.
Hilary Gallaway was certainly not a man to allow a girl as pretty as the nurse to lack
attention, and he was just as certainly attractive enough in himself to make his advances not too unflattering. Nor did Barbra Caywood impress me as being a girl who would dislike his admiration. But, at that, it was more than likely that there was nothing very serious between them, nothing more than a playful sort of flirtation.
But, no matter what the situation might be in that quarter, it didn’t have any direct bearing upon the shooting—none that I could see, anyway. But I understood now the strained relations between the nurse and Gallaway’s wife.
Gallaway was grinning quizzically at me while I was chasing these thoughts around in my head.
“Nobody’s safe with a detective around,” he complained.
I grinned back at him. That was the only sort of answer you could give this bird.
After dinner, Gallaway drove me to Knownburg in his roadster, and set me down on the doorstep of the deputy sheriff’s house. He offered to drive me back to the Exon house when I had finished my investigations in town, but I did not know how long those investigations would take, so I told him I would hire a car when I was ready to return.
Shand, the deputy sheriff, was a big, slow-spoken, slow-thinking, blond man of thirty or so—just the type best fitted for a deputy sheriff job in a San Joaquin County town.
“I went out to Exon’s as soon as Gallaway called me up,” he said. “About four-thirty in the morning, I reckon it was when I got there. I didn’t find nothing. There weren’t no marks on the porch roof, but that don’t mean nothing. I tried climbing up and down it myself, and I didn’t leave no marks neither. The ground around the house is too firm for footprints to be followed. I found a few, but they didn’t lead nowhere; and everybody had run all over the place before I got there, so I couldn’t tell who they belonged to.
“Far’s I can learn, there ain’t been no suspicious characters in the neighborhood lately. The only folks around here who have got any grudge against the old man are the Deemses—Exon beat ’em in a law suit a couple years back—but all of them—the father and both the boys—were at home when the shooting was done.”
“How long has Exon been living here?”
“Four-five years, I reckon.”
“Nothing at all to work on, then?”
“Nothing I know about.”
“What do you know about the Exon Family?” I asked.
Shand scratched his head thoughtfully and frowned.
“I reckon it’s Hilary Gallaway you’re meaning,” he said slowly. “I thought of that. The Gallaways showed up here a couple of years after her father had bought the place, and Hilary seems to spend most of his evenings up in Ady’s back room, teaching the boys how to play poker. I hear he’s fitted to teach them a lot. I don’t know, myself. Ady runs a quiet game, so I let ’em alone. But naturally I don’t never set in, myself.
“Outside of being a card-hound, and drinking pretty heavy, and making a lot of trips to the city, where he’s supposed to have a girl on the string, I don’t know nothing much about Hilary. But it’s no secret that him and the old man don’t hit it off together very well. And then Hilary’s room is just across the hall from Exon’s, and their windows open out on the porch roof just a little apart. But I don’t know—”
Shand confirmed what Gallaway had told me about the bullet being .38 caliber, about the absence of any pistol of that caliber on the premises, and about the lack of any reason for suspecting the farm hands or servants.
I put in the next couple of hours talking to whomever I could find to talk to in Knownburg, and I learned nothing worth putting down on paper. Then I got a car and driver from the garage, and was driven out to Exon’s.
Gallaway had not yet returned from town. His wife and Barbra Caywood were just about to sit down to a light dinner before retiring, so I joined them. Exon, the nurse said, was asleep, and had spent a quiet evening. We talked for a while—until about half-past twelve—and then went to our rooms.
My room was next to the nurse’s, on the same side of the hall that divided the second story in half. I sat down and wrote my report for the day, smoked a cigar, and then, the house being quiet by this time, put a gun and a flashlight in my pockets, went downstairs, and out the kitchen door.
The moon was just coming up, lighting the grounds vaguely, except for the shadows cast by house, outbuildings, and the several clumps of shrubbery. Keeping in these shadows as much as possible, I explored the grounds, finding everything as it should be.
The lack of any evidence to the contrary pointed to last night’s shot having been fired—either accidentally, or in fright at some fancied move of Exon’s—by a burglar, who had been entering the sick man’s room through a window. If that were so, then there wasn’t one chance in a thousand of anything happening tonight. But I felt restless and ill at ease, nevertheless.
Gallaway’s roadster was not in the garage. He had not returned from Knownburg. Beneath the farm hands’ window I paused until snores in three distinct keys told me that they were all safely abed.
After an hour of this snooping around, I returned to the house. The luminous dial of my watch registered 2:35 as I stopped outside the Chinese cook’s door to listen to his regular breathing.
Upstairs, I paused at the door of the Figgs’s room, until my ear told me that they were sleeping. At Mrs. Gallaway’s door I had to wait several minutes before she sighed and turned in bed. Barbra Caywood was breathing deeply and strongly, with the regularity of a young animal whose sleep is without disturbing dreams. The invalid’s breath came to me with the evenness of slumber and the rasping of the pneumonia convalescent.
This listening tour completed, I returned to my room.
Still feeling wide-awake and restless, I pulled a chair up to a window, and sat looking at the moonlight on the river which twisted just below the house so as to be visible from this side, smoking another cigar, and turning things over in my mind—to no great advantage.
Outside there was no sound.
Suddenly down the hall came the heavy explosion of a gun being fired indoors! I threw myself across the room, out into the hall.
A woman’s voice filled the house with its shriek—high, frenzied.
Barbra Caywood’s door was unlocked when I reached it. I slammed it open. By the light of the moonbeams that slanted past her window, I saw her sitting upright in the center of her bed. She wasn’t beautiful now. Her face was twisted with terror. The scream was just dying in her throat.
All this I got in the flash of time that it took me to put a running foot across her sill.
Then another shot crashed out—in Exon’s room.
The girl’s face jerked up—so abruptly that it seemed her neck must snap—she clutched both hands to her breast—and fell face-down among the bedclothes.
I don’t know whether I went through, over, or around the screen that stood in the connecting doorway. I was circling Exon’s bed. He lay on the floor on his side, facing a window. I jumped over him—leaned out the window.
In the yard that was bright now under the moon, nothing moved. There was no sound of flight. Presently, while my eyes still searched the surrounding country, the farm hands, in their underwear, came running barefooted from the direction of their quarters. I called down to them, stationing them at points of vantage.
Meanwhile, behind me, Gong Lim and Adam Figg had put Exon back in his bed, while Mrs. Gallaway and Emma Figg tried to check the blood that spurted from a hole in Barbra Caywood’s side.
I sent Adam Figg to the telephone, to wake the doctor and the deputy sheriff, and then I hurried down to the grounds.
Stepping out of the door, I came face to face with Hilary Gallaway coming from the direction of the garage. His face was flushed, and his breath was eloquent of the refreshments that had accompanied the game in Ady’s back room, but his step was steady enough, and his smile was as l
azy as ever.
“What’s the excitement?” he asked.
“Same as last night! Meet anybody on the road? Or see anybody leaving here?”
“No.”
“All right. Get in that bus of yours, and bum up the road in the other direction. Stop anybody you meet going away from here or who looks wrong! Got a gun?”
He spun on his heel with nothing of indolence.
“One in my car,” he called as he broke into a run.
The farm hands still at their posts, I combed the grounds from east to west and from north to south. I realized that I was spoiling my chance of finding footprints when it would be light enough to see them, but I was banking on the man I wanted still being close at hand. And then Shand had told me that the ground was unfavorable for tracing prints, anyway.
On the gravel drive in front of the house I found the pistol from which the shots had been fired—a cheap .38-caliber revolver, slightly rusty, smelling freshly of burned powder, with three empty shells and three that had not been fired in it.
Besides that I found nothing. The murderer—from what I had seen of the hole in the girl’s side, I called him that—had vanished.
Shand and Dr. Rench arrived together, just as I was finishing my fruitless search. A little later, Hilary Gallaway came back—empty-handed.
* * * *
Breakfast that morning was a melancholy meal, except to Hilary Gallaway. He refrained from jesting openly about the night’s excitement, but his eyes twinkled whenever they met mine, and I knew he thought it a tremendously good joke for the shooting to have taken place right under my nose. During his wife’s presence at the table, however, he was almost grave, as if not to offend her.
Mrs. Gallaway left the table shortly, and Dr. Rench joined us. He said that both of his patients were in as good shape as could be expected, and he thought both would recover.
The Dashiell Hammett Megapack: 20 Classic Stories Page 14