Arson Plus and Other Stories Read online

  I talked to the agency over the phone and got the reports of the operatives who had been looking up Audrey’s friends. The last person to see her had been an Agnes Dangerfield, who had seen her walking down Market street near Sixth, alone, on the night of her abduction—some time between 8:15 and 8:45. Audrey had been too far away for the Dangerfield girl to speak to her.

  For the rest, the boys had learned nothing except that Audrey was a wild, spoiled youngster who hadn’t shown any great care in selecting her friends—just the sort of girl who could easily fall into the hands of a mob of highbinders!

  Noon struck. No sign of the girl. We told the newspapers to turn loose the story, with the added developments of the past few hours.

  Gatewood was broken; he sat with his head in his hands, looking at nothing. Just before I left to follow a hunch I had, he looked up at me, and I’d never have recognized him if I hadn’t seen the change take place.

  “What do you think is keeping her away?” he asked.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him what I was beginning to suspect, now that the money had been paid and she had failed to show up. So I stalled with some vague assurances, and left.

  I caught a street-car and dropped off down in the shopping district. I visited the five largest department stores, going to all the women’s wear departments from shoes to hats, and trying to learn if a man—perhaps one answering Leighton’s description—had been buying clothes that would fit Audrey Gatewood within the past couple days.

  Failing to get any results, I turned the rest of the local stores over to one of the boys from the agency, and went across the bay to canvass the Oakland stores.

  At the first one I got action. A man who might easily have been Leighton had been in the day before, buying clothes that could easily fit Audrey. He had bought lots of them, everything from lingerie to a cloak, and—my luck was hitting on all its cylinders—had had his purchases delivered to T. Offord, at an address on Fourteenth street.

  At the Fourteenth street address, an apartment house, I found Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Offord’s names under the vestibule telephone for apartment 202.

  I had just found them when the front door opened and a stout, middle-aged woman in a gingham house-dress came out. She looked at me a bit curiously, so I asked:

  “Do you know where I can find the manager?”

  “I’m the manager,” she said.

  I handed her a card and stepped indoors with her.

  “I’m from the bonding department of the North American Casualty Company”—a repetition of the lie that was printed on the card I had given her—“and a bond for Mr. Offord has been applied for. Is he all right so far as you know?” With the slightly apologetic air of one going through with a necessary but not too important formality.

  She frowned.

  “A bond? That’s funny! He is going away tomorrow.”

  “Well, I can’t say what the bond is for,” I said lightly. “We investigators just get the names and addresses. It may be for his present employer, or perhaps the man he is going to work for wherever he’s going has applied for it. Or some firms have us look up prospective employees before they hire them, just to be safe.”

  “Mr. Offord, so far as I know, is a very nice young man,” she said, “but he has been here only a week.”

  “Not staying long, then?”

  “No. They came here from Denver, intending to stay, but the low altitude doesn’t agree with Mrs. Offord, so they are going back.”

  “Are you sure they came from Denver?”

  “Well,” she said, “they told me they did.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “Only the two of them; they’re young people.”

  “Well, how do they impress you?” I asked, trying to get the impression that I thought her a woman of shrewd judgment over.

  “They seem to be a very nice young couple. You’d hardly know they were in their apartment most of the time, they are so quiet. I am sorry they can’t stay.”

  “Do they go out much?”

  “I really don’t know. They have their keys, and unless I should happen to pass them going in or out I’d never see them.”

  “Then, as a matter of fact, you couldn’t say whether they stayed away all night some nights or not. Could you?”

  She eyed me doubtfully—I was stepping way over my pretext now, but I didn’t think it mattered—and shook her head.

  “No, I couldn’t say.”

  “They have many visitors?”

  “I don’t know. Mr. Offord is not—”

  She broke off as a man came in quietly from the street, brushed past me, and started to mount the steps to the second floor.

  “Oh, dear!” she whispered. “I hope he didn’t hear me talking about him. That’s Mr. Offord.”

  A slender man in brown, with a light brown hat—Leighton perhaps.

  I hadn’t seen anything of him except his back, nor he anything except mine. I watched him as he climbed the stairs. If he had heard the manager mention his name he would use the turn at the head of the stairs to sneak a look at me.

  He did. I kept my face stolid, but I knew him. He was “Penny” Quayle, a con man who had been active in the East four or five years before. His face was as expressionless as mine. But he knew me.

  A door on the second floor shut. I left the manager and started for the stairs.

  “I think I’ll go up and talk to him,” I told her.

  Coming silently to the door of apartment 202, I listened. Not a sound. This was no time for hesitation. I pressed the bell-button.

  As close together as the tapping of three keys under the fingers of an expert typist, but a thousand times more vicious, came three pistol shots. And waist-high in the door of apartment 202 were three bullet holes.

  The three bullets would have been in my fat carcass if I hadn’t learned years ago to stand to one side of strange doors when making uninvited calls.

  Inside the apartment sounded a man’s voice, sharp, commanding.

  “Cut it, kid! For God’s sake, not that!”

  A woman’s voice, shrill, bitter, spiteful screaming blasphemies.

  Two more bullets came through the door.

  “Stop! No! No!” The man’s voice had a note of fear in it now.

  The woman’s voice, cursing hotly. A scuffle. A shot that didn’t hit the door.

  I hurled my foot against the door, near the knob, and the lock broke away.

  On the floor of the room, a man—Quayle—and a woman were tussling. He was bending over her, holding her wrists, trying to keep her down. A smoking automatic pistol was in one of her hands. I got to it in a jump and tore it loose.

  “That’s enough!” I called to them when I was planted. “Get up and receive company.”

  Quayle released his antagonist’s wrists, whereupon she struck at his eyes with curved, sharp-nailed fingers, tearing his cheek open. He scrambled away from her on hands and knees, and both of them got to their feet.

  He sat down on a chair immediately, panting and wiping his bleeding cheek with a handkerchief.

  She stood, hands on hips, in the center of the room, glaring at me.

  “I suppose,” she spat, “you think you’ve raised hell!”

  I laughed—I could afford to.

  “If your father is in his right mind,” I told her, “he’ll do it with a razor strop when he gets you home again. A fine joke you picked out to play on him!”

  “If you’d been tied to him as long as I have, and had been bullied and held down as much, I guess you’d do most anything to get enough money so that you could go away and live your own life.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. Remembering some of the business methods Harvey Gatewood had used—particularly some of his war contracts that the Department of Justice was still investiga
ting—I suppose the worst that could be said about Audrey was that she was her father’s own daughter.

  “How’d you rap to it? ” Quayle asked me, politely.

  “Several ways,” I said. “First, I’m a little doubtful about grown persons being kidnapped in cities. Maybe it really happens sometimes, but at least nine-tenths of the cases you hear about are fakes. Second, one of Audrey’s friends saw her on Market street between 8:15 and 8:45 the night she disappeared; and your letter to Gatewood was post-marked 9 P.M. Pretty fast work. You should have waited a while before mailing it, even if it had to miss the first morning delivery. I suppose she dropped it in the post office on her way over here?”

  Quayle nodded.

  “Then third,” I went on, “there was that phone call of hers. She knew it took anywhere from ten to fifteen minutes to get her father on the wire at the office. If time had been as valuable as it would have been if she had gotten to a phone while imprisoned, she’d have told her story to the first person she got hold of—the phone girl, most likely. So that made it look as if, besides wanting to throw out that Twin Peaks line, she wanted to stir the old man out of his bull-headedness.

  “When she failed to show up after the money was paid I figured it was a sure bet that she had kidnapped herself. I knew that if she came back home after faking this thing we’d find it out before we’d talked to her very long—and I figured she knew that too, and would stay away.

  “The rest was easy, as I got some good breaks. We knew a man was working with her after we found the woman’s clothes you left behind, and I took a chance on there being no one else in it. Then I figured she’d need clothes —she couldn’t have taken any from home without tipping her mitt—and there was an even chance that she hadn’t laid in a stock beforehand. She’s got too many girl friends of the sort that do a lot of shopping to make it safe for her to risk showing herself in stores. Maybe, then, the man would buy what she needed for her. And it turned out that he did, and that he was too lazy to carry away his purchases, or perhaps there was too many of them, and so he had them sent out. That’s the story.”

  Quayle nodded again.

  “I was damned careless,” he said, and then, jerking a contemptuous thumb toward the girl. “But what can you expect? She’s had a skin full of hop ever since we started. Took all my time and attention keeping her from running wild and gumming the works. Just now was a sample—I told her you were coming up and she goes crazy and tries to add your corpse to the wreck!”

  The Gatewood reunion took place in the office of the captain of inspectors, on the second floor of the Oakland City Hall, and it was a merry little party. For an hour it was a toss-up whether Harvey Gatewood would die of apoplexy, strangle his daughter, or send her off to the state reformatory until she was of age. But Audrey licked him. Besides being a chip off the old block, she was young enough to be careless of consequences, while her father, for all his bullheadedness, had had some caution hammered into him.

  The card she beat him with was a threat of spilling everything she knew about him to the newspapers, and at least one of the San Francisco papers had been trying to get his scalp for years. I don’t know what she had on him, and I don’t think he was any too sure himself; but, with his war contracts even then being investigated by the Department of Justice, he couldn’t afford to take a chance. There was no doubt at all that she would have done as she threatened.

  And so, together, they left for home, sweating hate for each other at every pore.

  We took Quayle upstairs and put him in a cell, but he was too experienced to let that worry him. He knew that if the girl was to be spared, he himself couldn’t very easily be convicted of anything.

  SLIPPERY FINGERS

  Black Mask, 15 October 1923

  Dashiell Hammett writing as Peter Collinson

  You’ll have the time of your life trying to solve this crime before you get to the end of the story. You’ll think some of the characters don’t act logically, but when you figure it out afterward you’ll decide they were all pretty wise.

  “You are already familiar, of course, with the particulars of my father’s—ah—death?”

  “The papers are full of it, and have been for three days,” I said, “and I’ve read them; but I’ll have to have the whole story first-hand.”

  “There isn’t very much to tell.”

  This Frederick Grover was a short, slender man of something under thirty years, and dressed like a picture out of Vanity Fair. His almost girlish features and voice did nothing to make him more impressive, but I began to forget these things after a few minutes. He wasn’t a sap. I knew that downtown, where he was rapidly building up a large and lively business in stocks and bonds without calling for too much help from his father’s millions, he was considered a shrewd article; and I wasn’t surprised later when Benny Forman, who ought to know, told me that Frederick Grover was the best poker player west of Chicago. He was a cool, well-balanced, quick-thinking little man.

  “Father has lived here alone with the servants since mother’s death, two years ago,” he went on. “I am married, you know, and live in town. Last Saturday evening he dismissed Barton—Barton was his butler-valet, and had been with father for quite a few years—at a little after nine, saying that he did not want to be disturbed during the evening.

  “Father was here in the library at the time, looking through some papers. The servants’ rooms are in the rear, and none of the servants seem to have heard anything during the night.

  “At seven-thirty the following morning—Sunday—Barton found father lying on the floor, just to the right of where you are sitting, dead, stabbed in the throat with the brass paper-knife that was always kept on the table here. The front door was ajar.

  “The police found bloody finger-prints on the knife, the table, and the front door; but so far they have not found the man who left the prints, which is why I am employing your agency. The physician who came with the police placed the time of father’s death at between eleven o’clock and midnight.

  “Later, on Monday, we learned that father had drawn $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills from the bank Saturday morning. No trace of the money has been found. My finger-prints, as well as the servants’, were compared with the ones found by the police, but there was no similarity. I think that is all.”

  “Do you know of any enemies your father had?”

  He shook his head.

  “I know of none, though he may have had them. You see, I really didn’t know my father very well. He was a very reticent man and, until his retirement, about five years ago, he spent most of his time in South America, where most of his mining interests were. He may have had dozens of enemies, though Barton—who probably knew more about him than anyone—seems to know of no one who hated father enough to kill him.”

  “How about relatives?”

  “I was his heir and only child, if that is what you are getting at. So far as I know he had no other living relatives.”

  “I’ll talk to the servants,” I said.

  The maid and the cook could tell me nothing, and I learned very little more from Barton. He had been with Henry Grover since 1912, had been with him in Yunnan, Peru, Mexico, and Central America, but apparently he knew little or nothing of his master’s business or acquaintances.

  He said that Grover had not seemed excited or worried on the night of the murder, and that nearly every night Grover dismissed him at about the same time, with orders that he be not disturbed; so no importance was to be attached to that part of it. He knew of no one with whom Grover had communicated during the day, and he had not seen the money Grover had drawn from the bank.

  I made a quick inspection of the house and grounds, not expecting to find anything; and I didn’t. Half the jobs that come to a private detective are like this one: three or four days—and often as many weeks—have passed since the crime was committed. The police work on t
he job until they are stumped; then the injured party calls in a private sleuth, dumps him down on a trail that is old and cold and badly trampled, and expects—Oh, well! I picked out this way of making a living, so …

  I looked through Grover’s papers—he had a safe and a desk full of them—but didn’t find anything to get excited about. They were mostly columns of figures.

  “I’m going to send an accountant out here to go over your father’s books,” I told Frederick Grover. “Give him everything he asks for, and fix it up with the bank so they’ll help him.”

  I caught a street-car and went back to town, called at Ned Root’s office, and headed him out toward Grover’s. Ned is a human adding machine with educated eyes, ears, and nose. He can spot a kink in a set of books farther than I can see the covers.

  “Keep digging until you find something, Ned, and you can charge Grover whatever you like. Give me something to work on—quick!”

  The murder had all the earmarks of one that had grown out of blackmail, though there was—there always is—a chance that it might have been something else. But it didn’t look like the work of an enemy or a burglar: either of them would have packed his weapon with him, would not have trusted to finding it on the grounds. Of course, if Frederick Grover, or one of the servants, had killed Henry Grover … but the finger-prints said “No.”

  Just to play safe, I put in a few hours getting a line on Frederick. He had been at a ball on the night of the murder; he had never, so far as I could learn, quarreled with his father; his father was liberal with him, giving him everything he wanted; and Frederick was taking in more money in his brokerage office than he was spending. No motive for a murder appeared on the surface there.

  At the city detective bureau I hunted up the police sleuths who had been assigned to the murder; Marty O’Hara and George Dean. It didn’t take them long to tell me what they knew about it. Whoever had made the bloody finger-prints was not known to the police here: they had not found the prints in their files. The classifications had been broadcast to every large city in the country, but with no results so far.