Red Harvest (2 page)

Back in the war days the I. W. W.—in full bloom then throughout the West—had lined up the Personville Mining Corporations help. The help hadn’t been exactly pampered. They used their new strength to demand the things they wanted. Old Elihu gave them what he had to give them, and bided his time.

In 1921 it came. Business was rotten. Old Elihu didn’t care whether he shut down for a while or not. He tore up the agreements he had made with his men and began kicking them back into their pre-war circumstances.

Of course the help yelled for help. Bill Quint was sent out from I. W. W. headquarters in Chicago to give them some action. He was against a strike, an open walk-out. He advised the old sabotage racket, staying on the job and gumming things up from the inside. But that wasn’t active enough for the Personville crew. They wanted to put themselves on the map, make labor history.

They struck.

The strike lasted eight months. Both sides bled plenty. The wobblies had to do their own bleeding. Old Elihu hired gunmen, strike-breakers, national guardsmen and even parts of the regular army, to do his. When the last skull had been cracked, the last rib kicked in, organized labor in Personville was a used firecracker.

But, said Bill Quint, old Elihu didn’t know his Italian history. He won the strike, but he lost his hold on the city and the state. To beat the miners he had to let his hired thugs run wild. When the fight was over he couldn’t get rid of them. He had given his city to them and he wasn’t strong enough to take it away from them. Personville looked good to them and they took it over. They had won his strike for him and they took the city for their spoils. He couldn’t openly break with them. They had too much on him. He was responsible for all they had done during the strike.

Bill Quint and I were both fairly mellow by the time we had
got this far. He emptied his glass again, pushed his hair out of his eyes and brought his history up to date:

“The strongest of ’em now is probably Pete the Finn. This stuff we’re drinking’s his. Then there’s Lew Yard. He’s got a loan shop down on Parker Street, does a lot of bail bond business, handles most of the burg’s hot stuff, so they tell me, and is pretty thick with Noonan, the chief of police. This kid Max Thaler-Whisper—had got a lot of friends too. A little slick dark guy with something wrong with his throat. Can’t talk. Gambler. Those three, with Noonan, just about help Elihu run his city—help him more than he wants. But he’s got to play with ’em or else—”

“This fellow who was knocked off tonight—Elihu’s son—where did he stand?” I asked.

“Where papa put him, and he’s where papa put him now.”

“You mean the old man had him—?”

“Maybe, but that’s not my guess. This Don just came home and began running the papers for the old man. It wasn’t like the old devil, even if he was getting close to the grave, to let anybody cop anything from him without hitting back. But he had to be cagey with these guys. He brought the boy and his French wife home from Paris and used him for his monkey—a damned nice fatherly trick. Don starts a reform campaign in the papers. Clear the burg of vice and corruption—which means clear it of Pete and Lew and Whisper, if it goes far enough. Get it? The old man’s using the boy to shake ’em loose. I guess they got tired of being shook.”

“There seems to be a few things wrong with that guess,” I said.

“There’s more than a few things wrong with everything in this lousy burg. Had enough of this paint?”

I said I had. We went down to the street. Bill Quint told me he was living in the Miners’ Hotel in Forest Street. His way home ran past my hotel, so we walked down together. In front of my hotel a beefy fellow with the look of a plain-clothes man stood on the curb and talked to the occupant of a Stutz touring car.

“That’s Whisper in the car,” Bill Quint told me.

I looked past the beefy man and saw Thaler’s profile. It was young, dark and small, with pretty features as regular as if they had been cut by a die.

“He’s cute,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” the gray man agreed, “and so’s dynamite.”

The
Morning Herald
gave two pages to Donald Willsson and his death. His picture showed a pleasant intelligent face with curly hair, smiling eyes and mouth, a cleft chin and a striped necktie.

The story of his death was simple. At ten-forty the previous night he had been shot four times in stomach, chest and back, dying immediately. The shooting had taken place in the eleven-hundred block of Hurricane Street. Residents of that block who looked out after hearing the shots saw the dead man lying on the sidewalk. A man and a woman were bending over him. The street was too dark for anyone to see anybody or anything clearly. The man and woman had disappeared before anybody else reached the street. Nobody knew what they looked like. Nobody had seen them go away.

Six shots had been fired at Willsson from a .32 caliber pistol. Two of them had missed him, going into the front wall of a house. Tracing the course of these two bullets, the police had learned that the shooting had been done from a narrow alley across the street. That was all anybody knew.

Editorially the
Morning Herald
gave a summary of the dead
man’s short career as a civic reformer and expressed a belief that he had been killed by some of the people who didn’t want Personville cleaned up. The
Herald
said the chief of police could best show his own lack of complicity by speedily catching and convicting the murderer or murderers. The editorial was blunt and bitter.

I finished it with my second cup of coffee, jumped a Broadway car, dropped off at Laurel Avenue, and turned down toward the dead man’s house.

I was half a block from it when something changed my mind and my destination.

A smallish young man in three shades of brown crossed the street ahead of me. His dark profile was pretty. He was Max Thaler, alias Whisper. I reached the corner of Mountain Boulevard in time to catch the flash of his brown-covered rear leg vanishing into the late Donald Willsson’s doorway.

I went back to Broadway, found a drug store with a phone booth in it, searched the directory for Elihu Willsson’s residence number, called it, told somebody who claimed to be the old man’s secretary that I had been brought from San Francisco by Donald Willsson, that I knew something about his death, and that I wanted to see his father.

When I made it emphatic enough I got an invitation to call.

The czar of Poisonville was propped up in bed when his secretary—a noiseless slim sharp-eyed man of forty—brought me into the bedroom.

The old man’s head was small and almost perfectly round under its close-cut crop of white hair. His ears were too small and plastered too flat to the sides of his head to spoil the spherical effect. His nose also was small, carrying down the curve of his bony forehead. Mouth and chin were straight lines chopping the sphere off. Below them a short thick neck ran down into white pajamas between square meaty shoulders. One of his arms was outside the covers, a short compact arm that ended in a thick-fingered blunt hand. His eyes were round, blue, small and watery. They looked as if they were hiding behind the watery film and
under the bushy white brows only until the time came to jump out and grab something. He wasn’t the sort of man whose pocket you’d try to pick unless you had a lot of confidence in your fingers.

He ordered me into a bedside chair with a two-inch jerk of his round head, chased the secretary away with another, and asked:

“What’s this about my son?”

His voice was harsh. His chest had too much and his mouth too little to do with his words for them to be very clear.

“I’m a Continental Detective Agency operative, San Francisco branch,” I told him. “A couple of days ago we got a check from your son and a letter asking that a man be sent here to do some work for him. I’m the man. He told me to come out to his house last night. I did, but he didn’t show up. When I got downtown I learned he had been killed.”

Elihu Willsson peered suspiciously at me and asked:

“Well, what of it?”

“While I was waiting your daughter-in-law got a phone message, went out, came back with what looked like blood on her shoe, and told me her husband wouldn’t be home. He was shot at ten-forty. She went out at ten-twenty, came back at eleven-five.”

The old man sat straight up in bed and called young Mrs. Willsson a flock of things. When he ran out of words of that sort he still had some breath left. He used it to shout at me:

“Is she in jail?”

I said I didn’t think so.

He didn’t like her not being in jail. He was nasty about it. He bawled a lot of things I didn’t like, winding up with:

“What the hell are you waiting for?”

He was too old and too sick to be smacked. I laughed and said:

“For evidence.”

“Evidence? What do you need? You’ve—”

“Don’t be a chump,” I interrupted his bawling. “Why should she kill him?”

“Because she’s a French hussy! Because she—”

The secretary’s frightened face appeared at the door.

“Get out of here!” the old man roared at it, and the face went.

“She jealous?” I asked before he could go on with his shouting. “And if you don’t yell maybe I’ll be able to hear you anyway. My deafness is a lot better since I’ve been eating yeast.”

He put a fist on top of each hump his thighs made in the covers and pushed his square chin at me.

“Old as I am and sick as I am,” he said very deliberately, “I’ve a great mind to get up and kick your behind.”

I paid no attention to that, repeating:

“Was she jealous?”

“She was,” he said, not yelling now, “and domineering, and spoiled, and suspicious, and greedy, and mean, and unscrupulous, and deceitful, and selfish, and damned bad—altogether damned bad!”

“Any reason for her jealousy?”

“I hope so,” he said bitterly. “I’d hate to think a son of mine would be faithful to her. Though likely enough he was. He’d do things like that.”

“But you don’t know any reason why she should have killed him?”

“Don’t know any reason?” He was bellowing again. “Haven’t I been telling you that—”

“Yeah. But none of that means anything. It’s kind of childish.”

The old man flung the covers back from his legs and started to get out of bed. Then he thought better of it, raised his red face and roared:

“Stanley!”

The door opened to let the secretary glide in.

“Throw this bastard out!” his master ordered, waving a fist at me.

The secretary turned to me. I shook my head and suggested:

“Better get help.”

He frowned. We were about the same age. He was weedy, nearly a head taller than I, but fifty pounds lighter. Some of my
hundred and ninety pounds were fat, but not all of them. The secretary fidgeted, smiled apologetically, and went away.

“What I was about to say,” I told the old man: “I intended talking to your son’s wife this morning. But I saw Max Thaler go into the house, so I postponed my visit.”

Elihu Willsson carefully pulled the covers up over his legs again, leaned his head back on the pillows, screwed his eyes up at the ceiling, and said:

“Hm-m-m, so that’s the way it is, is it?”

“Mean anything?”

“She killed him,” he said certainly. “That’s what it means.”

Feet made noises in the hall, huskier feet than the secretary’s. When they were just outside the door I began a sentence:

“You were using your son to run a—”

“Get out of here!” the old man yelled at those in the doorway. “And keep that door closed.” He glowered at me and demanded: “What was I using my son for?”

“To put the knife in Thaler, Yard and the Finn.”

“You’re a liar.”

“I didn’t invent the story. It’s all over Personville.”

“It’s a lie. I gave him the papers. He did what he wanted with them.”

“You ought to explain that to your playmates. They’d believe you.”

“What they believe be damned! What I’m telling you is so.”

“What of it? Your son won’t come back to life just because he was killed by mistake—if he was.”

“That woman killed him.”

“Maybe.”

“Damn you and your maybes! She did.”

“Maybe. But the other angle has got to be looked into too—the political end. You can tell me—”

“I can tell you that that French hussy killed him, and I can tell you that any other damned numbskull notions you’ve got are way off the lode.”

“But they’ve got to be looked into,” I insisted. “And you know the inside of Personville politics better than anyone else I’m likely to find. He was your son. The least you can do is—”

“The least I can do,” he bellowed, “is tell you to get to hell back to Frisco, you and your numbskull—”

I got up and said unpleasantly:

“I’m at the Great Western Hotel. Don’t bother me unless you want to talk sense for a change.”

I went out of the bedroom and down the stairs. The secretary hovered around the bottom step, smiling apologetically.

“A fine old rowdy,” I growled.

“A remarkably vital personality,” he murmured.