The Glass Key Read online

  “I don’t know. It’s been in the back of my head for a long time. That was about the only thing that’d fit in with Paul’s foolishness. If he’d killed Taylor he’d’ve let me know before this. There was no reason why he should hide that from me. There was a reason why he’d hide your father’s crimes from me. He knew I didn’t like your father. I’d made that plain enough. He didn’t think he could trust me not to knife your father. He knew I wouldn’t knife him. So, when I’d told him I was going to clear up the killing regardless of what he said, he gave me that phony confession to stop me.”

  She asked: “Why didn’t you like Father?”

  “Because,” he said hotly, “I don’t like pimps.”

  Her face became red, her eyes abashed. She asked in a dry constricted voice: “And you don’t like me because—?”

  He did not say anything.

  She bit her lip and cried: “Answer me!”

  “You’re all right,” he said, “only you’re not all right for Paul, not the way you’ve been playing him. Neither of you were anything but poison for him. I tried to tell him that. I tried to tell him you both considered him a lower form of animal life and fair game for any kind of treatment. I tried to tell him your father was a man all his life used to winning without much trouble and that in a hole he’d either lose his head or turn wolf. Well, he was in love with you, so—” He snapped his teeth together and walked over to the piano.

  “You despise me,” she said in a low hard voice. “You think I’m a whore.”

  “I don’t despise you,” he said irritably, not turning to face her. “Whatever you’ve done you’ve paid for and been paid for and that goes for all of us.”

  There was silence between them then until she said: “Now you and Paul will be friends again.”

  He turned from the piano with a movement as if he were about to shake himself and looked at the watch on his wrist. “I’ll have to say good-by now.”

  A startled light came into her eyes. “You’re not going away?”

  He nodded. “I can catch the four-thirty.”

  “You’re not going away for good?”

  “If I can dodge being brought back for some of these trials and I don’t think that’ll be so hard.”

  She held her hands out impulsively. “Take me with you.”

  He blinked at her. “Do you really want to go or are you just being hysterical?” he asked. Her face was crimson by then. Before she could speak he said: “It doesn’t make any difference. I’ll take you if you want to go.” He frowned. “But all this”—he waved a hand to indicate the house—“who’ll take care of that?”

  She said bitterly: “I don’t care—our creditors.”

  “There’s another thing you ought to think about,” he said slowly. “Everybody’s going to say you deserted your father as soon as he got in trouble.”

  “I am deserting him,” she said, “and I want people to say that. I don’t care what they say—if you’ll take me away.” She sobbed. “If—I wouldn’t if only he hadn’t gone away and left him lying there alone in that dark street.”

  Ned Beaumont said brusquely: “Never mind that now. If you’re going get packed. Only what you can get in a couple of bags. We can send for the other stuff later, maybe.”

  She uttered a high-pitched unnatural laugh and ran out of the room. He lit a cigar, sat down at the piano, and played softly until she returned. She had put on a black hat and black coat and was carrying two traveling-bags.

  III

  They rode in a taxicab to his rooms. For most of the ride they were silent. Once she said suddenly: “In that dream—I didn’t tell you—the key was glass and shattered in our hands just as we got the door open, because the lock was stiff and we had to force it.”

  He looked sidewise at her and asked: “Well?”

  She shivered. “We couldn’t lock the snakes in and they came out all over us and I woke up screaming.”

  “That was only a dream,” he said. “Forget it.” He smiled without merriment. “You threw my trout back—in the dream.”

  The taxicab stopped in front of his house. They went up to his rooms. She offered to help him pack, but he said: “No, I can do it. Sit down and rest. We’ve got an hour before the train leaves.”

  She sat in one of the red chairs. “Where are you—we going?” she asked timidly.

  “New York, first anyhow.”

  He had one bag packed when the door-bell rang. “You’d better go into the bedroom,” he told her and carried her bags in there. He shut the connecting door when he came out.

  He went to the outer door and opened it.

  Paul Madvig said: “I came to tell you you were right and I know it now.”

  “You didn’t come last night.”

  “No, I didn’t know it then. I got home right after you left.”

  Ned Beaumont nodded. “Come in,” he said, stepping out of the doorway.

  Madvig went into the living-room. He looked immediately at the bags, but let his glance roam around the room for a while before asking: “Going away?”

  “Yes.”

  Madvig sat in the chair Janet Henry had occupied. His age showed in his face and he sat down wearily.

  “How’s Opal?” Ned Beaumont asked.

  “She’s all right, poor kid. She’ll be all right now.”

  “You did it to her.”

  “I know, Ned. Jesus, I know it!” Madvig stretched his legs out and looked at his shoes. “I hope you don’t think I’m feeling proud of myself.” After a pause Madvig added: “I think—I know Opal’d like to see you before you go.”

  “You’ll have to say good-by to her for me and to Mom too. I’m leaving on the four-thirty.”

  Madvig raised blue eyes clouded by anguish. “You’re right, of course, Ned,” he said huskily, “but—well—Christ knows you’re right!” He looked down at his shoes again.

  Ned Beaumont asked: “What are you going to do with your not quite faithful henchmen? Kick them back in line? Or have they kicked themselves back?”

  “Farr and the rest of those rats?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m going to teach them something.” Madvig spoke with determination, but there was no enthusiasm in his voice and he did not look up from his shoes. “It’ll cost me four years, but I can use those four years cleaning house and putting together an organization that will stay put.”

  Ned Beaumont raised his eyebrows. “Going to knife them at the polls?”

  “Knife them, hell, dynamite them! Shad’s dead. I’m going to let his crew run things for the next four years. There’s none of them that can build anything solid enough for me to worry about. I’ll get the city back next time and by then I’ll have done my housecleaning.”

  “You could win now,” Ned Beaumont said.

  “Sure, but I don’t want to win with those bastards.”

  Ned Beaumont nodded. “It takes patience and guts, but it’s the best way to play it, I reckon.”

  “They’re all I’ve got,” Madvig said miserably. “I’ll never have any brains.” He shifted the focus of his eyes from his feet to the fireplace. “Have you got to go, Ned?” he asked almost inaudibly.

  “Got to.”

  Madvig cleared his throat violently. “I don’t want to be a God-damned fool,” he said, “but I’d like to think that whether you went or stayed you weren’t holding anything against me, Ned.”

  “I’m not holding anything against you, Paul.”

  Madvig raised his head quickly. “Shake hands with me?”

  “Certainly.”

  Madvig jumped up. His hand caught Ned Beaumont’s, crushed it. “Don’t go, Ned. Stick it out with me. Christ knows I need you now. Even if I didn’t—I’ll do my damndest to make up for all that.”

  Ned Beaumont shook his head. “You haven’t got anything to make up for with me.”

  “And you’ll—?”

  Ned Beaumont shook his head again. “I can’t. I’ve got to go.”

&nbs
p; Madvig released the other’s hand and sat down again, morosely, saying: “Well, it serves me right.”

  Ned Beaumont made an impatient gesture. “That’s got nothing to do with it.” He stopped and bit his lip. Then he said bluntly: “Janet’s here.”

  Madvig stared at him.

  Janet Henry opened the bedroom-door and came into the living-room. Her face was pale and drawn, but she held it high. She went straight up to Paul Madvig and said: “I’ve done you a lot of harm, Paul. I’ve—”

  His face had become pale as hers. Now blood rushed into it. “Don’t, Janet,” he said hoarsely. “Nothing you could do.” The rest of his speech was unintelligibly mumbled.

  She stepped back, flinching.

  Ned Beaumont said: “Janet is going away with me.”

  Madvig’s lips parted. He looked dumbly at Ned Beaumont and as he looked the blood went out of his face again. When his face was quite bloodless he mumbled something of which only the word “luck” could be understood, turned clumsily around, went to the door, opened it, and went out, leaving it open behind him.

  Janet Henry looked at Ned Beaumont. He stared fixedly at the door.

  Dashiell Hammett was born in St. Marys County, Maryland, in 1894. He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. He left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, timekeeper, yardman, machine operator, and stevedore. He finally became an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency.

  World War I, in which he served as a sergeant, interrupted his sleuthing and injured his health. When he was finally discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. Subsequently, he turned to writing, and in the late 1920s he became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. During World War II, Mr. Hammett again served as a sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians. He died in 1961.

  ALSO BY DASHIELL HAMMETT

  THE DAIN CURSE

  The Continental Op is a short, squat, and utterly unsentimental tank of a private detective. Miss Gabrielle Dain Leggett is young, wealthy, and a devotee of morphine and religious cults. She has an unfortunate effect on the people around her: they have a habit of dying violently. Is Gabrielle the victim of a family curse? Or is the truth about her weirder and infinitely more dangerous? The Dain Curse is one of the Continental Op’s most bizarre cases, and a tautly crafted masterpiece of suspense.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72260-1

  THE GLASS KEY

  Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett’s tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72262-5

  THE MALTESE FALCON

  A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shopworn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grafter named Joel Cairo, a fat man named Gutman, and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett’s coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72264-9

  NIGHTMARE TOWN

  Laconic coppers, lowlifes, and mysterious women double-and triple-cross their colleagues with practiced nonchalance. A man on a bender awakens in a small town with a dark mystery at its heart. A woman confronts a brutal truth about her husband. Here is classic noir: hard-boiled descriptions to rival Hemingway, verbal exchanges punctuated with pistol shots and fisticuffs. Devilishly plotted, whip-smart, impassioned, Nightmare Town is a treasury of tales from America’s poet laureate of the dispossessed.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-375-70102-3

  RED HARVEST

  When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty—even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72261-8

  THE THIN MAN

  Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett’s most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. At once knowing and unabashedly romantic, The Thin Man is a murder mystery that doubles as a sophisticated comedy of manners.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72263-2

  WOMAN IN THE DARK

  On a dark night a young woman seeks refuge at an isolated house. She is hurt and frightened. The man and woman who live there take her in. But their decency is utterly unequipped to deal with the Woman in the Dark, or with the designs of the men who want her. First published in installments in Liberty magazine and now rediscovered after many years, Woman in the Dark shows Dashiell Hammett at the peak of his narrative powers.

  Fiction/Crime/978-0-679-72265-6

  ALSO AVAILABLE:

  The Big Knockover, 978-0-679-72259-5

  The Continental OP, 978-0-679-72258-5

  VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD

  Available at your local bookstore, or visit

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