The Main Death and This King Business

by Dashiell Hammett

  Bruno Gungen explained to her at some length that I was connected with the Continental Detective Agency, and that he had employed me to help the police find Jeffrey Main’s murderers and recover the stolen twenty thousand dollars.

  She murmured, “Oh, yes!” in a tone that said she was not the least bit interested, and stood up, saying, “Then I’ll leave you to—”

  “No, no, my dear!” Her husband was waving his pink fingers at her. “I would have no secrets from you.”

  His ridiculous little face jerked around to me, cocked itself sidewise, and he asked, with a little giggle:

  “Is not that so? That between husband and wife there should be no secrets?”

  I pretended I agreed with him.

  “You, I know, my dear,” he addressed his wife, who had sat down again, “are as much interested in this as I, for did we not have an equal affection for dear Jeffrey? Is it not so?”

  She repeated, “Oh, yes!” with the same lack of interest.

  Her husband turned to me and said, “Now?” encouragingly.

  “I’ve seen the police,” I told him. “Is there anything you can add to their story? Anything new? Anything you didn’t tell them?”

  He whisked his face around toward his wife.

  “Is there, Enid, dear?”

  “I know of nothing,” she replied.

  He giggled and made a delighted face at me.

  “That is it,” he said. “We know of nothing.”

  “He came back to San Francisco eight o’clock Sunday night—three hours before he was killed and robbed—with twenty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. What was he doing with it?”

  “It was the proceeds of a sale to a customer,” Bruno Gungen explained. “Mr. Nathaniel Ogilvie, of Los Angeles.”

  “But why cash?”

  The little man’s painted face screwed itself up into a shrewd leer.

  “A bit of hanky-panky,” he confessed complacently, “a trick of the trade, as one says. You know the genus collector? Ah, there is a study for you! Observe. I obtain a golden tiara of early Grecian workmanship, or let me be correct—purporting to be of early Grecian workmanship, purporting also to have been found in Southern Russia, near Odessa. Whether there is any truth in either of these suppositions I do not know, but certainly the tiara is a thing of beauty.”

  He giggled.

  “Now I have a client, a Mr. Nathaniel Ogilvie, of Los Angeles, who has an appetite for curios of the sort—a very devil of a cacoethes carpendi. The value of these items, you will comprehend, is exactly what one can get for them—no more, little less. This tiara—now ten thousand dollars is the least I could have expected for it, if sold as one sells an ordinary article of the sort. But can one call a golden cap made long ago for some forgotten Scythian king an ordinary article of any sort? No! No! So, swaddled in cotton, intricately packed, Jeffrey carries this tiara to Los Angeles to show our Mr. Ogilvie.

  “In what manner the tiara came into our hands Jeffrey will not say. But he will hint at devious intrigues, smuggling, a little of violence and lawlessness here and there, the necessity for secrecy. For your true collector, there is the bait! Nothing is anything to him except as it is difficultly come by. Jeffrey will not lie. No! Mon Dieu, that would be dishonest, despicable! But he will suggest much, and he will refuse, oh, so emphatically! to take a check for the tiara. No check, my dear sir! Nothing which may be traced! Cash moneys!

  “Hanky-panky, as you see. But where is the harm? Mr. Ogilvie is certainly going to buy the tiara, and our little deceit simply heightens his pleasure in his purchase. He will enjoy its possession so much the more. Besides, who is to say that this tiara is not authentic? If it is, then these things Jeffrey suggests are indubitably true. Mr. Ogilvie does buy it, for twenty thousand dollars, and that is why poor Jeffrey had in his possession so much cash money.”

  He flourished a pink hand at me, nodded his dyed head vigorously, and finished with:

  “Voilà! That is it!”

  “Did you hear from Main after he got back?” I asked.

  The dealer smiled as if my question tickled him, turning his head so that the smile was directed at his wife.

  “Did we, Enid, darling?” he passed on the question.

  She pouted and shrugged her shoulders indifferently.

  “The first we knew he had returned,” Gungen interpreted these gestures to me, “was Monday morning, when we heard of his death. Is it not so, my dove?”

  His dove murmured, “Yes,” and left her chair, saying, “You’ll excuse me? I have a letter to write.”

  “Certainly, my dear,” Gungen told her as he and I stood up.

  She passed close to him on her way to the door. His small nose twitched over his dyed mustache and he rolled his eyes in a caricature of ecstasy.

  “What a delightful scent, my precious!” he exclaimed. “What a heavenly odor! What a song to the nostrils! Has it a name, my love?”

  “Yes,” she said, pausing in the doorway, not looking back.

  “And it is?”

  “Dèsir du Cœur,” she replied over her shoulder as she left us.

  Bruno Gungen looked at me and giggled.

  I sat down again and asked him what he knew about Jeffrey Main.

  “Everything, no less,” he assured me. “For a dozen years, since he was a boy of eighteen he has been my right eye, my right hand.”

  “Well, what sort of man was he?”

  Bruno Gungen showed me his pink palms side by side.

  “What sort is any man?” he asked over them.

  That didn’t mean anything to me, so I kept quiet, waiting.

  “I shall tell you,” the little man began presently. “Jeffrey had the eye and the taste for this traffic of mine. No man living save myself alone has a judgment in these matters which I would prefer to Jeffrey’s. And, honest, mind you! Let nothing I say mislead you on that point. Never a lock have I to which Jeffrey had not also the key, and might have it forever, if he had lived so long.

  “But there is a but. In his private life, rascal is a word that only does him justice. He drank, he gambled, he loved, he spent—dear God, how he spent! He was, in this drinking and gaming and loving and spending, a most promiscuous fellow, beyond doubt. With moderation he had nothing to do. Of the moneys he got by inheritance, of the fifty thousand dollars or more his wife had when they were married, there is no remainder. Fortunately, he was well insured—else his wife would have been left penniless. Oh, he was a true Heliogabalus, that fellow!”

  Bruno Gungen went down to the front door with me when I left. I said, “Good night,” and walked down the gravel path to where I had left my car. The night was clear, dark, moonless. High hedges were black walls on both sides of the Gungen place. To the left there was a barely noticeable hole in the blackness—a dark-gray hole—oval—the size of a face.

  I got into my car, stirred up the engine and drove away. Into the first cross-street I turned, parked the machine, and started back toward Gungen’s afoot. I was curious about that face-size oval.

  When I reached the corner, I saw a woman coming toward me from the direction of Gungen’s. I was in the shadow of a wall. Cautiously, I backed away from the corner until I came to a gate with brick buttresses sticking out. I made myself flat between them.

  The woman crossed the street, went on up the driveway, toward the car line. I couldn’t make out anything about her, except that she was a woman. Maybe she was coming from Gungen’s grounds, maybe not. Maybe it was her face I had seen against the hedge, maybe not. It was a heads or tails proposition. I guessed yes and tailed her up the drive.

  Her destination was a drugstore on the car line. Her business there was with the telephone. She spent ten minutes at it. I didn’t go into the store to try for an earful, but stayed on the other side of the street, contenting myself with a good look
at her.

  She was a girl of about twenty-five, medium in height, chunky in build, with pale gray eyes that had little pouches under them, a thick nose and a prominent lower lip. She had no hat over her brown hair. Her body was wrapped in a long blue cape.

  From the drug store I shadowed her back to the Gungen house. She went in the back door. A servant, probably, but not the maid who had opened the door for me earlier in the evening.

  I returned to my car, drove back to town, to the office.

  “Is Dick Foley working on anything?” I asked Fiske, who sits on the Continental Detective Agency’s affairs at night.

  “No. Did you ever hear the story about the fellow who had his neck operated on?”

  With the slightest encouragement, Fiske is good for a dozen stories without a stop, so I said:

  “Yes. Get hold of Dick and tell him I’ve got a shadow job out Westwood Park way for him to start on in the morning.”

  I gave Fiske—to be passed on to Dick—Gungen’s address and a description of the girl who had done the phoning from the drugstore. Then I assured the night man that I had also heard the story about the pickaninny named Opium, and likewise the one about what the old man said to his wife on their golden wedding anniversary. Before he could try me with another, I escaped to my own office, where I composed and coded a telegram to our Los Angeles branch, asking that Main’s recent visit to that city be dug into.

  The next morning Hacken and Begg dropped in to see me and I gave them Gungen’s version of why the twenty thousand had been in cash. The police detectives told me a stool-pigeon had brought them word that Bunky Dahl—a local guerrilla who did a moderate business in hijacking—had been flashing a roll since about the time of Main’s death.

  “We haven’t picked him up yet,” Hacken said. “Haven’t been able to place him, but we’ve got a line on his girl. Course, he might have got his dough somewhere else.”

  At ten o’clock that morning I had to go over to Oakland to testify against a couple of flimflammers who had sold bushels of stock in a sleight-of-hand rubber manufacturing business. When I got back to the Agency, at six that evening, I found a wire from Los Angeles on my desk.

  Jeffrey Main, the wire told me, had finished his business with Ogilvie Saturday afternoon, had checked out of his hotel immediately, and had left on the Owl that evening, which would have put him in San Francisco early Sunday morning. The hundred-dollar bills with which Ogilvie had paid for the tiara had been new ones, consecutively numbered, and Ogilvie’s bank had given the Los Angeles operative the numbers.

  Before I quit for the day, I phoned Hacken, gave him these numbers, as well as the other dope in the telegram.

  “Haven’t found Dahl yet,” he told me.

  Dick Foley’s report came in the next morning. The girl had left the Gungen house at 9:15 the previous night, had gone to the corner of Miramar Avenue and Southwood Drive, where a man was waiting for her in a Buick coupe. Dick described him: Age about 30; height about five feet ten; slender, weight about 140; medium complexion; brown hair and eyes; long, thin face with pointed chin; brown hat, suit and shoes and gray overcoat.

  The girl got into the car with him and they drove out to the beach, along the Great Highway for a little while, and then back to Miramar and Southwood, where the girl got out. She seemed to be going back to the house, so Dick let her go and tailed the man in the Buick down to the Futurity Apartments in Mason Street.

  The man stayed in there for half an hour or so and then came out with another man and two women. This second man was of about the same age as the first, about five feet eight inches tall, would weigh about a hundred and seventy pounds, had brown hair and eyes, a dark complexion, a flat, broad face with high cheek bones, and wore a blue suit, gray hat, tan overcoat, black shoes, and a pear-shaped pearl tie-pin.

  One of the women was about twenty-two years old, small, slender and blonde. The other was probably three or four years older, red-haired, medium in height and build, with a turned-up nose.

  The quartet had got in the car and gone to the Algerian Café, where they had stayed until a little after one in the morning. Then they had returned to the Futurity Apartments. At half-past three the two men had left, driving the Buick to a garage in Post Street, and then walking to the Mars Hotel.

  When I had finished reading this I called Mickey Linehan in from the operatives’ room, gave him the report and instructions:

  “Find out who these folks are.”

  Mickey went out. My phone rang.

  Bruno Gungen: “Good morning. May you have something to tell me today?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “You’re downtown?”

  “Yes, in my shop. I shall be here until four.”

  “Right. I’ll be in to see you this afternoon.”

  At noon Mickey Linehan returned. “The first bloke,” he reported, “the one Dick saw with the girl, is named Benjamin Weel. He owns the Buick and lives in the Mars—room 410. He’s a salesman, though it’s not known what of. The other man is a friend of his who has been staying with him for a couple of days. I couldn’t get anything on him. He’s not registered. The two women in the Futurity are a couple of hustlers. They live in apartment 303. The larger one goes by the name of Mrs. Effie Roberts. The little blonde is Violet Evarts.”

  “Wait,” I told Mickey, and went back into the file room, to the index-card drawers.

  I ran through the W’s—Weel, Benjamin, alias Coughing Ben, 36,312W.

  The contents of folder No. 36,312W told me that Coughing Ben Weel had been arrested in Amador County in 1916 on a highgrading charge and had been sent to San Quentin for three years. In 1922 he had been picked up again in Los Angeles and charged with trying to blackmail a movie actress, but the case had fallen through. His description fit the one Dick had given of the man in the Buick. His photograph—a copy of the one taken by the Los Angeles police in ’22—showed a sharp-featured young man with a chin like a wedge.

  I took the photo back to my office and showed it to Mickey.

  “This is Weel five years ago. Follow him around a while.”

  When the operative had gone I called the police detective bureau. Neither Hacken nor Begg was in. I got hold of Lewis, in the identification department.

  “What does Bunky Dahl look like?” I asked him.

  “Wait a minute,” Lewis said, and then: “32, 67½, 174, medium, brown, brown, broad flat face with prominent cheek-bones, gold bridge work in lower left jaw, brown mole under right ear, deformed little toe on right foot.”

  “Have you a picture of him to spare?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks, I’ll send a boy down for it.”

  I told Tommy Howd to go down and get it, and then went out for some food. After luncheon I went up to Gungen’s establishment in Post Street. The little dealer was gaudier than ever this afternoon in a black coat that was even more padded in the shoulders and tighter in the waist than his dinner coat had been the other night, striped gray pants, a vest that leaned toward magenta, and a billowy satin tie wonderfully embroidered with gold thread.

  We went back through his store, up a narrow flight of stairs to a small cube of an office on the mezzanine floor.

  “And now you have to tell me?” he asked when we were seated, with the door closed.

  “I’ve got more to ask than tell. First, who is the girl with the thick nose, the thick lower lip, and the pouches under grey eyes, who lives in your house?”

  “That is one Rose Rubury.” His little painted face was wrinkled in a satisfied smile. “She is my dear wife’s maid.”

  “She goes riding with an ex-convict.”

  “She does?” He stroked his dyed goatee with a pink hand, highly pleased. “Well, she is my dear wife’s maid, that she is.”

  “Main didn’t drive up from Los Angeles with a friend, as he told his wife. He came up on the t
rain Saturday night—so he was in town twelve hours before he showed up at home.”

  Bruno Gungen giggled, cocking his delighted face to one side.

  “Ah!” he tittered. “We progress! We progress! Is it not so?”

  “Maybe. Do you remember if this Rose Rubury was in the house on Sunday night—say from eleven to twelve?”

  “I do remember. She was. I know it certainly. My dear wife was not feeling well that night. My darling had gone out early that Sunday morning, saying she was going to drive out into the country with some friends—what friends I do not know. But she came home at eight o’clock that night complaining of a distressing headache. I was quite frightened by her appearance, so that I went often to see how she was, and thus it happens that I know her maid was in the house all of that night, until one o’clock, at least.”

  “Did the police show you the handkerchief they found with Main’s wallet?”

  “Yes.” He squirmed on the edge of his chair, his face like the face of a kid looking at a Christmas tree.

  “You’re sure it’s your wife’s?”

  His giggle interfered with his speech, so he said, “Yes,” by shaking his head up and down until the goatee seemed to be a black whiskbroom brushing his tie.

  “She could have left it at the Mains’ some time when she was visiting Mrs. Main,” I suggested.

  “That is not possible,” he corrected me eagerly. “My darling and Mrs. Main are not acquainted.”

  “But your wife and Main were acquainted?”

  He giggled and brushed his tie with his whisker again.

  “How well acquainted?”

  He shrugged his padded shoulders up to his ears.

  “I know not,” he said merrily. “I employ a detective.”

  “Yeah?” I scowled at him. “You employ this one to find out who killed and robbed Main—and for nothing else. If you think you’re employing him to dig up your family secrets, you’re as wrong as Prohibition.”

  “But why? But why?” He was flustered. “Have I not the right to know? There will be no trouble over it, no scandal, no divorce suing, of that be assured. Even Jeffrey is dead, so it is what one calls ancient history. While he lived I knew nothing, was blind. After he died I saw certain things. For my own satisfaction—that is all, I beg you to believe—I should like to know with certainty.”