The Glass Key

by Dashiell Hammett

“You’ll have to take them,” Ned Beaumont said. “I’m going.”

  O’Rory said: “No.”

  Ned Beaumont said: “Yes.”

  Hinkle turned quickly and went out of the room.

  Ned Beaumont turned around and started for the other door, the one through which he had come into the room, walking erectly without haste.

  O’Rory spoke to the bulldog at his feet. The dog got up in cumbersome haste and waddled around Ned Beaumont to the door. He stood on wide-spread legs in front of the door and stared morosely at Ned Beaumont.

  Ned Beaumont smiled with tight lips and turned to face O’Rory again. The package of hundred-dollar bills was in Ned Beaumont’s hand. He raised the hand, said, “You know where you can stick it,” and threw the package of bills at O’Rory.

  As Ned Beaumont’s arm came down the bulldog, leaping clumsily, came up to meet it. His jaws shut over Ned Beaumont’s wrist. Ned Beaumont was spun to the left by the impact and he sank on one knee with his arm down close to the floor to take the dog’s weight off his arm.

  Shad O’Rory rose from his chair and went to the door through which Hinkle had retreated. He opened it and said: “Come in a minute.” Then he approached Ned Beaumont who, still down on one knee, was trying to let his arm yield to the strain of the dog’s pulling. The dog was almost flat on the floor, all four feet braced, holding the arm.

  Whisky and two other men came into the room. One of the others was the apish bow-legged man who had accompanied Shad O’Rory to the Log Cabin Club. One was a sandy-haired boy of nineteen or twenty, stocky, rosy-cheeked, and sullen. The sullen boy went around behind Ned Beaumont, between him and the door. The bow-legged ruffian put his right hand on Ned Beaumont’s left arm, the arm the dog was not holding. Whisky halted half-way between Ned Beaumont and the other door.

  Then O’Rory said, “Patty,” to the dog.

  The dog released Ned Beaumont’s wrist and waddled over to its master.

  Ned Beaumont stood up. His face was pallid and damp with sweat. He looked at his torn coat-sleeve and wrist and at the blood running down his hand. His hand was trembling.

  O’Rory said in his musical Irish voice: “You would have it.”

  Ned Beaumont looked up from his wrist at the white-haired man. “Yes,” he said, “and it’ll take some more of it to keep me from going out of here.”

  III

  Ned Beaumont opened his eyes and groaned.

  The rosy-cheeked boy with sandy hair turned his head over his shoulder to growl: “Shut up, you bastard.”

  The apish dark man said: “Let him alone, Rusty. Maybe he’ll try to get out again and we’ll have some more fun.” He grinned down at his swollen knuckles. “Deal the cards.”

  Ned Beaumont mumbled something about Fedink and sat up. He was in a narrow bed without sheets or bedclothes of any sort. The bare mattress was blood-stained. His face was swollen and bruised and blood-smeared. Dried blood glued his shirt-sleeve to the wrist the dog had bitten and that hand was caked with drying blood. He was in a small yellow and white bedroom furnished with two chairs, a table, a chest of drawers, a wall-mirror, and three white-framed French prints, besides the bed. Facing the foot of the bed was a door that stood open to show part of the interior of a white-tiled bathroom. There was another door, shut. There were no windows.

  The apish dark man and the rosy-cheeked boy with sandy hair sat on the chairs playing cards on the table. There was about twenty dollars in paper and silver on the table.

  Ned Beaumont looked, with brown eyes wherein hate was a dull glow that came from far beneath the surface, at the card-players and began to get out of bed. Getting out of bed was a difficult task for him. His right arm hung useless. He had to push his legs over the side of the bed one at a time with his left hand and twice he fell over on his side and had to push himself upright again in bed with his left arm.

  Once the apish man leered up at him from his cards to ask humorously: “How’re you making out, brother?” Otherwise the two at the table let him alone.

  He stood finally, trembling, on his feet beside the bed. Steadying himself with his left hand on the bed he reached its end. There he drew himself erect and, staring fixedly at his goal, lurched towards the closed door. Near it he stumbled and went down on his knees, but his left hand, thrown desperately out, caught the knob and he pulled himself up on his feet again.

  Then the apish man laid his cards carefully down on the table and said: “Now.” His grin, showing remarkably beautiful white teeth, was wide enough to show that the teeth were not natural. He went over and stood beside Ned Beaumont.

  Ned Beaumont was tugging at the door-knob.

  The apish man said, “Now there, Houdini,” and with all his weight behind the blow drove his right fist into Ned Beaumont’s face.

  Ned Beaumont was driven back against the wall. The back of his head struck the wall first, then his body crashed flat against the wall, and he slid down the wall to the floor.

  Rosy-cheeked Rusty, still holding his cards at the table, said gloomily, but without emotion: “Jesus, Jeff, you’ll croak him.”

  Jeff said: “Him?” he indicated the man at his feet by kicking him not especially hard on the thigh. “You can’t croak him. He’s tough. He’s a tough baby. He likes this.” He bent down, grasped one of the unconscious man’s lapels in each hand, and dragged him to his knees. “Don’t you like it, baby?” he asked and, holding Ned Beaumont up on his knees with one hand, struck his face with the other fist.

  The door-knob was rattled from the outside.

  Jeff called: “Who’s that?”

  Shad O’Rory’s pleasant voice. “Me.”

  Jeff dragged Ned Beaumont far enough from the door to let it open, dropped him there, and unlocked the door with a key taken from his pocket.

  O’Rory and Whisky came in. O’Rory looked at the man on the floor, then at Jeff, and finally at Rusty. His blue-grey eyes were clouded. When he spoke it was to ask Rusty: “Jeff been slapping him down for the fun of it?”

  The rosy-cheeked boy shook his head. “This Beaumont is a son of a bitch,” he said sullenly. “Every time he comes to he gets up and starts something.”

  “I don’t want him killed, not yet,” O’Rory said. He looked down at Ned Beaumont. “See if you can bring him around again. I want to talk to him.”

  Rusty got up from the table. “I don’t know,” he said. “He’s pretty far gone.”

  Jeff was more optimistic. “Sure we can,” he said. “I’ll show you. Take his feet, Rusty.” He put his hands under Ned Beaumont’s armpits.

  They carried the unconscious man into the bathroom and put him in the tub. Jeff put the stopper in and turned on cold water from both the faucet below and the shower above. “That’ll have him up and singing in no time,” he predicted.

  Five minutes later, when they hauled him dripping from the tub and set him on his feet, Ned Beaumont could stand. They took him into the bedroom again. O’Rory was sitting on one of the chairs smoking a cigarette. Whisky had gone.

  “Put him on the bed,” O’Rory ordered.

  Jeff and Rusty led their charge to the bed, turned him around, and pushed him down on it. When they took their hands away from him he fell straight back on the bed. They pulled him into a sitting position again and Jeff slapped his battered face with an open hand, saying: “Come on, Rip Van Winkle, come to life.”

  “A swell chance of him coming to life,” the sullen Rusty grumbled.

  “You think he won’t?” Jeff asked cheerfully and slapped Ned Beaumont again.

  Ned Beaumont opened the one eye not too swollen to be opened.

  O’Rory said: “Beaumont.”

  Ned Beaumont raised his head and tried to look around the room, but there was nothing to show he could see Shad O’Rory.

  O’Rory got up from his chair and stood in front of Ned Beaumont, bending down until his face was a few inches from the other man’s. He asked: “Can you hear me, Beaumont?”

  Ned Beaumont’s
open eye looked dull hate into O’Rory’s eyes.

  O’Rory said: “This is O’Rory, Beaumont. Can you hear what I say?”

  Moving his swollen lips with difficulty, Ned Beaumont uttered a thick “Yes.”

  O’Rory said: “Good. Now listen to what I tell you. You’re going to give me the dope on Paul.” He spoke very distinctly without raising his voice, without his voice losing any of its musical quality. “Maybe you think you won’t, but you will. I’ll have you worked on from now till you do. Do you understand me?”

  Ned Beaumont smiled. The condition of his face made the smile horrible. He said: “I won’t.”

  O’Rory stepped back and said: “Work on him.”

  While Rusty hesitated, the apish Jeff knocked aside Ned Beaumont’s upraised hand and pushed him down on the bed. “I got something to try.” He scooped up Ned Beaumont’s legs and tumbled them on the bed. He leaned over Ned Beaumont, his hands busy on Ned Beaumont’s body.

  Ned Beaumont’s body and arms and legs jerked convulsively and three times he groaned. After that he lay still.

  Jeff straightened up and took his hands away from the man on the bed. He was breathing heavily through his ape’s mouth. He growled, half in complaint, half in apology: “It ain’t no good now. He’s throwed another joe.”

  IV

  When Ned Beaumont recovered consciousness he was alone in the room. The lights were on. As laboriously as before he got himself out of bed and across the room to the door. The door was locked.

  He was fumbling with the knob when the door was thrown open pushing him back against the wall.

  Jeff in his underwear, barefoot, came in. “Ain’t you a pip?” he said. “Always up to some kind of tricks. Don’t you never get tired of being bounced off the floor?” He took Beaumont by the throat with his left hand and struck him in the face with his right fist, twice, but not so hard as he had hit him before. Then he pushed him backwards over to the bed and threw him on it. “And stay put awhile this time,” he growled.

  Ned Beaumont lay still with closed eyes.

  Jeff went out, locking the door behind him.

  Painfully Ned Beaumont climbed out of bed and made his way to the door. He tried it. Then he withdrew two steps and tried to hurl himself against it, succeeding only in lurching against it. He kept trying until the door was flung open again by Jeff.

  Jeff said: “I never seen a guy that liked being hit so much or that I liked hitting so much.” He leaned far over to one side and swung his fist up from below his knee.

  Ned Beaumont stood blindly in the fist’s path. It struck his cheek and knocked him the full length of the room. He lay still where he fell. He was lying there two hours later when Whisky came into the room.

  Whisky awakened him with water from the bathroom and helped him to the bed. “Use your head,” Whisky begged him. “These mugs’ll kill you. They’ve got no sense.”

  Ned Beaumont looked dully at Whisky through a dull and bloody eye. “Let ’em,” he managed to say.

  He slept then until he was awakened by O’Rory, Jeff, and Rusty. He refused to tell O’Rory anything about Paul Madvig’s affairs. He was dragged out of bed, beaten into unconsciousness, and flung into bed again.

  This was repeated a few hours later. No food was brought to him.

  Going on hands and knees into the bathroom when he had regained consciousness after the last of these beatings, he saw, on the floor behind the wash-stand’s pedestal, a narrow safety-razor-blade red with the rust of months. Getting it out from behind the pedestal was a task that took him all of ten minutes and his nerveless fingers failed a dozen times before they succeeded in picking it up from the tile floor. He tried to cut his throat with it, but it fell out of his hand after he had no more than scratched his chin in three pieces. He lay down on the bathroom-floor and sobbed himself to sleep.

  When he awakened again he could stand, and did. He doused his head in cold water and drank four glasses of water. The water made him sick and after that he began to shake with a chill. He went into the bedroom and lay down on the bare blood-stained mattress, but got up almost immediately to go stumbling and staggering in haste back to the bathroom, where he got down on hands and knees and searched the floor until he had found the rusty razor-blade. He sat on the floor and put the razor-blade into his vest-pocket. Putting it in, his fingers touched his lighter. He took the lighter out and looked at it. A cunning gleam came into his one open eye as he looked at the lighter. The gleam was not sane.

  Shaking so that his teeth rattled together, he got up from the bathroom-floor and went into the bedroom again. He laughed harshly when he saw the newspaper under the table where the apish dark man and the sullen rosy-cheeked boy had played cards. Tearing and rumpling and wadding the paper in his hands, he carried it to the door and put it on the floor there. In each of the drawers in the chest of drawers he found a piece of wrapping-paper folded to cover the bottom. He rumpled them and put them with the newspaper against the door. With the razor-blade he made a long gash in the mattress, pulled out big handfulls of the coarse grey cotton with which the mattress was stuffed, and carried them to the door. He was not shaking now, nor stumbling, and he used both hands dexterously, but presently he tired of gutting the mattress and dragged what was left of it—tick and all—to the door.

  He giggled then and, after the third attempt, got his lighter ignited. He set fire to the bottom of the heap against the door. At first he stood close to the heap, crouching over it, but as the smoke increased it drove him back step by step, reluctantly, coughing as he retreated. Presently he went into the bathroom, soaked a towel with water, and wrapped it around his head, covering eyes, nose, and mouth. He came stumbling back into the bedroom, a dim figure in the smoky room, fell against the bed, and sat down on the floor beside it.

  Jeff found him there when he came in.

  Jeff came in cursing and coughing through the rag he held against nose and mouth. In opening the door he had pushed most of the burning heap back a little. He kicked some more out of the way and stamped through the rest to reach Ned Beaumont. He took Ned Beaumont by the back of the collar and dragged him out of the room.

  Outside, still holding Ned Beaumont by the back of the collar, Jeff kicked him to his feet and ran him down to the far end of the corridor. There he pushed him through an open doorway, bawled, “I’m going to eat one of your ears when I come back, you bastard,” at him, kicked him again, stepped back into the corridor, slammed the door, and turned the key in its lock.

  Ned Beaumont, kicked into the room, saved himself from a fall by catching hold of a table. He pushed himself up a little nearer straight and looked around. The towel had fallen down muffler-fashion around his neck and shoulders. The room had two windows. He went to the nearer window and tried to raise it. It was locked. He unfastened the lock and raised the window. Outside was night. He put a leg over the sill, then the other, turned so that he was lying belly-down across the sill, lowered himself until he was hanging by his hands, felt with his feet for some support, found none, and let himself drop.

  5

  THE HOSPITAL

  I

  A nurse was doing something to Ned Beaumont’s face.

  “Where am I?” he asked.

  “St. Luke’s Hospital.” She was a small nurse with very large bright hazel eyes, a breathless sort of hushed voice, and an odor of mimosa.

  “What day?”

  “It’s Monday.”

  “What month and year?” he asked. When she frowned at him he said: “Oh, never mind. How long have I been here?”

  “This is the third day.”

  “Where’s the telephone?” He tried to sit up.

  “Stop that,” she said. “You can’t use the telephone and you mustn’t get yourself excited.”

  “You use it, then. Call Hartford six one one six and tell Mr. Madvig that I’ve got to see him right away.”

  “Mr. Madvig’s here every afternoon,” she said, “but I don’t think Doctor Tait will
let you talk to anybody yet. As a matter of fact you’ve done a whole lot more talking now than you ought to.”

  “What is it now? Morning or afternoon?”

  “Morning.”

  “That’s too long to wait,” he said. “Call him now.”

  “Doctor Tait will be in in a little while.”

  “I don’t want any Doctor Taits,” he said irritably. “I want Paul Madvig.”

  “You’ll do what you’re told,” she replied. “You’ll lie there and be quiet till Doctor Tait comes.”

  He scowled at her. “What a swell nurse you are. Didn’t anybody ever tell you it’s not good for patients to be quarreled with?”

  She ignored his question.

  He said: “Besides, you’re hurting my jaw.”

  She said: “If you’d keep it still it wouldn’t get hurt.”

  He was quiet for a moment. Then he asked: “What’s supposed to have happened to me? Or didn’t you get far enough in your lessons to know?”

  “Probably a drunken brawl,” she told him, but she could not keep her face straight after that. She laughed and said: “But honestly you shouldn’t talk so much and you can’t see anybody till the doctor says so.”

  II

  Paul Madvig arrived early in the afternoon. “Christ, I’m glad to see you alive again!” he said. He took the invalid’s unbandaged left hand in both of his.

  Ned Beaumont said: “I’m all right. But here’s what we’ve got to do: grab Walt Ivans and have him taken over to Braywood and shown to the gun-dealers there. He—”

  “You told me all that,” Madvig said. “That’s done.”

  Ned Beaumont frowned. “I told you?”

  “Sure—the morning you were picked up. They took you to the Emergency Hospital and you wouldn’t let them do anything to you till you’d seen me and I came down there and you told me about Ivans and Braywood and passed out cold.”

  “It’s a blank to me,” Ned Beaumont said. “Did you nail them?”

  “We got the Ivanses, all right, and Walt Ivans talked after he was identified in Braywood and the Grand Jury indicted Jeff Gardner and two John Does, but we’re not going to be able to nail Shad on it. Gardner’s the man Ivans dickered with and anybody knows he wouldn’t do anything without Shad’s say-so, but proving it’s another thing.”