The Dain Curse Read online

  “Did he come from the Leggett house?” I asked.

  “From the lawn, at least. He seemed jumpy—that’s why I thought perhaps he’d been nosing around where he shouldn’t. I suggested I go after him and ask him what he was up to, but Gaby wouldn’t have it. Might have been a friend of her father’s. Did you ask him? He goes in for odd eggs.”

  “Wasn’t that late for a visitor to be leaving?”

  He looked away from me, so I asked: “What time was it?”

  “Midnight, I dare say.”

  “Midnight?”

  “That’s the word. The time when the graves give up their dead, and ghosts walk.”

  “Miss Leggett said it was after three o’clock.”

  “You see how it is!” he exclaimed, blandly triumphant, as if he had demonstrated something we had been arguing about. “She’s half blind and won’t wear glasses for fear of losing beauty. She’s always making mistakes like that. Plays abominable bridge—takes deuces for aces. It was probably a quarter after twelve, and she looked at the clock and got the hands mixed.”

  I said: “That’s too bad,” and “Thanks,” and went up to Halstead and Beauchamp’s store in Geary Street.

  Watt Halstead was a suave, pale, bald, fat man, with tired eyes and a too tight collar. I told him what I was doing and asked him how well he knew Leggett.

  “I know him as a desirable customer and by reputation as a scientist. Why do you ask?”

  “His burglary’s sour—in spots anyway.”

  “Oh, you’re mistaken. That is, you’re mistaken if you think a man of his caliber would be mixed up in anything like that. A servant, of course; yes, that’s possible: it often happens, doesn’t it? But not Leggett. He is a scientist of some standing—he has done some remarkable work with color—and, unless our credit department has been misinformed, a man of more than moderate means. I don’t mean that he is wealthy in the modern sense of the word, but too wealthy for a thing of that sort. And, confidentially, I happen to know that his present balance in the Seaman’s National Bank is in excess of ten thousand dollars. Well—the eight diamonds were worth no more than a thousand or twelve or thirteen hundred dollars.”

  “At retail? Then they cost you five or six hundred?”

  “Well,” smiling, “seven fifty would be nearer.”

  “How’d you come to give him the diamonds?”

  “He’s a customer of ours, as I’ve told you, and when I learned what he had done with glass, I thought what a wonderful thing it would be if the same method could be applied to diamonds. Fitzstephan—it was largely through him that I learned of Leggett’s work with glass—was skeptical, but I thought it worth trying—still think so—and persuaded Leggett to try.”

  Fitzstephan was a familiar name. I asked: “Which Fitzstephan was that?”

  “Owen, the writer. You know him?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know he was on the coast. We used to drink out of the same bottle. Do you know his address?”

  Halstead found it in the telephone book for me, a Nob Hill apartment.

  From the jeweler’s I went to the vicinity of Minnie Hershey’s home. It was a Negro neighborhood, which made the getting of reasonably accurate information twice as unlikely as it always is.

  What I managed to get added up to this: The girl had come to San Francisco from Winchester, Virginia, four or five years ago, and for the last half-year had been living with a Negro called Rhino Tingley. One told me Rhino’s first name was Ed, another Bill, but they agreed that he was young, big, and black and could easily be recognized by the scar on his chin. I was also told that he depended for his living on Minnie and pool; that he was not bad except when he got mad—then he was supposed to be a holy terror; and that I could get a look at him the early part of almost any evening in either Bunny Mack’s barber-shop or Big-foot Gerber’s cigar-store.

  I learned where these joints were and then went downtown again, to the police detective bureau in the Hall of Justice. Nobody was in the pawnshop detail office. I crossed the corridor and asked Lieutenant Duff whether anybody had been put on the Leggett job.

  He said: “See O’Gar.”

  I went into the assembly room, looking for O’Gar and wondering what he—a homicide detail detective-sergeant—had to do with my job. Neither O’Gar nor Pat Reddy, his partner, was in. I smoked a cigarette, tried to guess who had been killed, and decided to phone Leggett.

  “Any police detective been in since I left?” I asked when his harsh voice was in my ear.

  “No, but the police called up a little while ago and asked my wife and daughter to come to a place in Golden Gate Avenue to see if they could identify a man there. They left a few minutes ago. I didn’t accompany them, not having seen the supposed burglar.”

  “Whereabouts in Golden Gate Avenue?”

  He didn’t remember the number, but he knew the block—above Van Ness Avenue. I thanked him and went out there.

  In the designated block I found a uniformed copper standing in the doorway of a small apartment house. I asked him if O’Gar was there.

  “Up in three ten,” he said.

  I rode up in a rickety elevator. When I got out on the third floor, I came face to face with Mrs. Leggett and her daughter, leaving.

  “Now I hope you’re satisfied that Minnie had nothing to do with it,” Mrs. Leggett said chidingly.

  “The police found your man?”

  “Yes.”

  I said to Gabrielle Leggett: “Eric Collinson says it was only midnight, or a few minutes later, that you got home Saturday night.”

  “Eric,” she said irritably, passing me to enter the elevator, “is an ass.”

  Her mother, following her into the elevator, reprimanded her amiably: “Now, dear.”

  I walked down the hall to a doorway where Pat Reddy stood talking to a couple of reporters, said hello, squeezed past them into a short passage-way, and went through that to a shabbily furnished room where a dead man lay on a wall bed.

  Phels, of the police identification bureau, looked up from his magnifying glass to nod at me and then went on with his examination of a mission table’s edge.

  O’Gar pulled his head and shoulders in the open window and growled: “So we got to put up with you again?”

  O’Gar was a burly, stolid man of fifty, who wore wide-brimmed black hats of the movie-sheriff sort. There was a lot of sense in his hard bullet-head, and he was comfortable to work with.

  I looked at the corpse—a man of forty or so, with a heavy, pale face, short hair touched with gray, a scrubby, dark mustache, and stocky arms and legs. There was a bullet hole just over his navel, and another high on the left side of his chest.

  “It’s a man,” O’Gar said as I put the blankets over him again. “He’s dead.”

  “What else did somebody tell you?” I asked.

  “Looks like him and another guy glaumed the ice, and then the other guy decided to take a one-way split. The envelopes are here”—O’Gar took them out of his pocket and ruffled them with a thumb—“but the diamonds ain’t. They went down the fire-escape with the other guy a little while back. People spotted him making the sneak, but lost him when he cut through the alley. Tall man with a long nose. This one”—he pointed the envelopes at the bed—“has been here a week. Name of Louis Upton, with New York labels. We don’t know him. Nobody in the dump’ll say they ever saw him with anybody else. Nobody’ll say they know Long-nose.”

  Pat Reddy came in. He was a big, jovial youngster, with almost brains enough to make up for his lack of experience. I told him and O’Gar what I had turned up on the job so far.

  “Long-nose and this bird taking turns watching Leggett’s?” Reddy suggested.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but there’s an inside angle. How many envelopes have you got there, O’Gar?”

  “Seven.”

  “Then the one for the planted diamond is missing.”

  “How about the yellow girl?” Reddy asked.

  “I’m going ou
t for a look at her man tonight,” I said. “You people trying New York on this Upton?”

  “Uh-huh,” O’Gar said.

  3

  SOMETHING BLACK

  At the Nob Hill address Halstead had given me, I told my name to the boy at the switchboard and asked him to pass it on to Fitzstephan. I remembered Fitzstephan as a long, lean, sorrel-haired man of thirty-two, with sleepy gray eyes, a wide, humorous mouth, and carelessly worn clothes; a man who pretended to be lazier than he was, would rather talk than do anything else, and had a lot of what seemed to be accurate information and original ideas on any subject that happened to come up, as long as it was a little out of the ordinary.

  I had met him five years before, in New York, where I was digging dirt on a chain of fake mediums who had taken a coal-and-ice dealers widow for a hundred thousand dollars. Fitzstephan was plowing the same field for literary material. We became acquainted and pooled forces. I got more out of the combination than he did, since he knew the spook racket inside and out; and, with his help, I cleaned up my job in a couple of weeks. We were fairly chummy for a month or two after that, until I left New York.

  “Mr. Fitzstephan says to come right up,” the switchboard boy said.

  His apartment was on the sixth floor. He was standing at its door when I got out of the elevator.

  “By God,” he said, holding out a lean hand, “it is you!”

  “None other.”

  He hadn’t changed any. We went into a room where half a dozen bookcases and four tables left little room for anything else. Magazines and books in various languages, papers, clippings, proof sheets, were scattered everywhere—all just as it used to be in his New York rooms.

  We sat down, found places for our feet between table legs, and accounted roughly for our lives since we had last seen one another. He had been in San Francisco for a little more than a year—except, he said, for week-ends, and two months hermiting in the country, finishing a novel. I had been there nearly five years. He liked San Francisco, he said, but wouldn’t oppose any movement to give the West back to the Indians.

  “How’s the literary grift go?” I asked.

  He looked at me sharply, demanding: “You haven’t been reading me?”

  “No. Where’d you get that funny idea?”

  “There was something in your tone, something proprietary, as in the voice of one who has bought an author for a couple of dollars. I haven’t met it often enough to be used to it. Good God! Remember once I offered you a set of my books as a present?” He had always liked to talk that way.

  “Yeah. But I never blamed you. You were drunk.”

  “On sherry—Elsa Donne’s sherry. Remember Elsa? She showed us a picture she had just finished, and you said it was pretty. Sweet God, wasn’t she furious! You said it so vapidly and sincerely and as if you were so sure that she would like your saying it. Remember? She put us out, but we’d both already got plastered on her sherry. But you weren’t tight enough to take the books.”

  “I was afraid I’d read them and understand them,” I explained, “and then you’d have felt insulted.”

  A Chinese boy brought us cold white wine.

  Fitzstephan said: “I suppose you’re still hounding the unfortunate evil-doer?”

  “Yeah. That’s how I happened to locate you. Halstead tells me you know Edgar Leggett.”

  A gleam pushed through the sleepiness in his gray eyes, and he sat up a little in his chair, asking: “Leggett’s been up to something?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I didn’t say it. I asked it.” He made himself limp in the chair again, but the gleam didn’t go out of his eyes. “Come on, out with it. Don’t try to be subtle with me, my son; that’s not your style at all. Try it and you’re sunk. Out with it: what’s Leggett been up to?”

  “We don’t do it that way,” I said. “You’re a storywriter. I can’t trust you not to build up on what I tell you. I’ll save mine till after you’ve spoken your piece, so yours won’t be twisted to fit mine. How long have you known him?”

  “Since shortly after I came here. He’s always interested me. There’s something obscure in him, something dark and inviting. He is, for instance, physically ascetic—neither smoking or drinking, eating meagerly, sleeping, I’m told, only three or four hours a night—but mentally, or spiritually, sensual—does that mean anything to you?—to the point of decadence. You used to think I had an abnormal appetite for the fantastic. You should know him. His friends—no, he hasn’t any—his choice companions are those who have the most outlandish ideas to offer: Marquard and his insane figures that aren’t figures, but the boundaries of areas in space that are the figures; Denbar Curt and his algebraism; the Haldorns and their Holy Grail sect; crazy Laura Joines; Farnham—”

  “And you,” I put in, “with explanations and descriptions that explain and describe nothing. I hope you don’t think any of what you’ve said means anything to me.”

  “I remember you now: you were always like that.” He grinned at me, running thin fingers through his sorrel hair. “Tell me what’s up while I try to find one-syllable words for you.”

  I asked him if he knew Eric Collinson. He said he did; there was nothing to know about him except that he was engaged to Gabrielle Leggett, that his father was the lumber Collinson, and that Eric was Princeton, stocks and bonds, and hand-ball, a nice boy.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but he lied to me.”

  “Isn’t that like a sleuth?” Fitzstephan shook his head, grinning. “You must have had the wrong fellow—somebody impersonating him. The Chevalier Bayard doesn’t lie, and, besides, lying requires imagination. You’ve—or wait! Was a woman involved in your question?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re correct, then,” Fitzstephan assured me. “I apologize. The Chevalier Bayard always lies when a woman is involved, even if it’s unnecessary and puts her to a lot of trouble. It’s one of the conventions of Bayardism, something to do with guarding her honor or the like. Who was the woman?”

  “Gabrielle Leggett,” I said, and told him all I knew about the Leggetts, the diamonds, and the dead man in Golden Gate Avenue. Disappointment deepened in his face while I talked.

  “That’s trivial, dull,” he complained when I had finished. “I’ve been thinking of Leggett in terms of Dumas, and you bring me a piece of gimcrackery out of O. Henry. You’ve let me down, you and your shabby diamonds. But”—his eyes brightened again—“this may lead to something. Leggett may or may not be criminal, but there’s more to him than a two-penny insurance swindle.”

  “You mean,” I asked, “that he’s one of these master minds? So you read newspapers? What do you think he is? King of the bootleggers? Chief of an international crime syndicate? A whiteslave magnate? Head of a dope ring? Or queen of the counterfeiters in disguise?”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he said. “But he’s got brains, and there’s something black in him. There’s something he doesn’t want to think about, but must not forget. I’ve told you that he’s thirsty for all that’s dizziest in thought, yet he’s cold as a fish, but with a bitter-dry coldness. He’s a neurotic who keeps his body fit and sensitive and ready—for what?—while he drugs his mind with lunacies. Yet he’s cold and sane. If a man has a past that he wants to forget, he can easiest drug his mind against memory through his body, with sensuality if not with narcotics. But suppose the past is not dead, and this man must keep himself fit to cope with it should it come into the present. Well, then he would be wisest to anaesthetize his mind directly, letting his body stay strong and ready.”

  “And this past?”

  Fitzstephan shook his head, saying: “If I don’t know—and I don’t—it isn’t my fault. Before you’re through, you’ll know how difficult it is to get information out of that family.”

  “Did you try?”

  “Certainly I’m a novelist. My business is with souls and what goes on in them. He’s got one that attracts me, and I’ve always considered myself unjustly
treated by his not turning himself inside out for me. You know, I doubt if Leggett’s his name. He’s French. He told me once he came from Atlanta, but he’s French in outlook, in quality of mind, in everything except admission.”

  “What of the rest of the family?” I asked. “Gabrielle’s cuckoo, isn’t she?”

  “I wonder.” Fitzstephan looked curiously at me. “Are you saying that carelessly, or do you really think she’s off?”

  “I don’t know. She’s odd, an uncomfortable sort of person. And, then, she’s got animal ears, hardly any forehead; and her eyes shift from green to brown and back without ever settling on one color. How much of her affairs have you turned up in your snooping around?”

  “Are you—who make your living snooping—sneering at my curiosity about people and my attempts to satisfy it?”

  “We’re different,” I said. “I do mine with the object of putting people in jail, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.”

  “That’s not different,” he said. “I do mine with the object of putting people in books, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should.”

  “Yeah, but what good does that do?”

  “God knows. What good does putting them in jail do?”

  “Relieves congestion,” I said. “Put enough people in jail, and cities wouldn’t have traffic problems. What do you know about this Gabrielle?”

  “She hates her father. He worships her.”

  “How come the hate?”

  “I don’t know; perhaps because he worships her.”

  “There’s no sense to that,” I complained. “You’re just being literary. What about Mrs. Leggett?”

  “You’ve never eaten one of her meals, I suppose? You’d have no doubts if you had. None but a serene, sane soul ever achieved such cooking. I’ve often wondered what she thinks of the weird creatures who are her husband and daughter, though I imagine she simply accepts them as they are without even being conscious of their weirdness.”

  “All this is well enough in its way,” I said, “but you still haven’t told me anything definite.”