Red Harvest (26 page)

Ted Wright had told me Whisper’s hiding place was in the back, upstairs. The distant rumbling voice could have been coming from there.

I twisted my face around to Mickey and said:

“Flashlight?”

He put it in my left hand. I had my gun in my right. We crept forward.

The door, still a foot open, let in enough light to show us the way across this room to a doorless doorway. The other side of the doorway was black.

I flicked the light across the blackness, found a door, shut off the light, and went forward. The next squirt of light showed us steps leading up.

We went up the steps as if we were afraid they would break under our feet.

The rumbling voice had stopped. There was something else in the air. I didn’t know what. Maybe a voice not quite loud enough to be heard, if that meant anything.

I had counted nine steps when a voice spoke clearly above us. It said:

“Sure, I killed the bitch.”

A gun said something, the same thing four times, roaring like a 16-inch rifle under the iron roof.

The first voice said: “All right.”

By that time Mickey and I had put the rest of the steps behind us, had shoved a door out of the way, and were trying to pull Reno Starkey’s hands away from Whisper’s throat.

It was a tough job and a useless one. Whisper was dead.

Reno recognized me and let his hands go limp.

His eyes were as dull, his horse face as wooden, as ever.

Mickey carried the dead gambler to the cot that stood in one end of the room, spreading him on it.

The room, apparently once an office, had two windows. In their light I could see a body stowed under the cot—Dan Rolff. A Colt’s service automatic lay in the middle of the floor.

Reno bent his shoulders, swaying.

“Hurt?” I asked.

“He put all four in me,” he said, calmly, bending to press both forearms against his lower body.

“Get a doc,” I told Mickey.

“No good,” Reno said. “I got no more belly left than Peter Collins.”

I pulled a folding chair over and sat him down on it, so he could lean forward and hold himself together.

Mickey ran out and down the stairs.

“Did you know he wasn’t croaked?” Reno asked.

“No. I gave it to you the way I got it from Ted Wright.”

“Ted left too soon,” he said. “I was leary of something like that, and came to make sure. He trapped me pretty, playing dead till I was under the gun.” He stared dully at Whisper’s corpse. “Game at that, damn him. Dead, but wouldn’t lay down, bandaging hisself, laying here waiting by hisself.” He smiled, the only smile I had ever seen him use. “But he’s just meat and not much of it now.”

His voice was thickening. A little red puddle formed under the edge of his chair. I was afraid to touch him. Only the pressure of his arms, and his bent-forward position, were keeping him from falling apart.

He stared at the puddle and asked:

“How the hell did you figure you didn’t croak her?”

“I had to take it out in hoping I hadn’t, till just now,” I said. “I had you pegged for it, but couldn’t be sure. I was all hopped up that night, and had a lot of dreams, with bells ringing and voices calling, and a lot of stuff like that. I got an idea maybe it wasn’t straight dreaming so much as hop-head nightmares stirred up by things that were happening around me.

“When I woke up, the lights were out. I didn’t think I killed her, turned off the light, and went back to take hold of the ice pick. But it could have happened other ways. You knew I was there that night. You gave me my alibi without stalling. That got
me thinking. Dawn tried blackmailing me after he heard Helen Albury’s story. The police, after hearing her story, tied you, Whisper, Rolff and me together. I found Dawn dead after seeing O’Marra half a block away. It looked like the shyster had tried blackmailing you. That and the police tying us together started me thinking the police had as much on the rest of you as on me. What they had on me was that Helen Albury had seen me go in or out or both that night. It was a good guess they had the same on the rest of you. There were reasons for counting Whisper and Rolff out. That left you—and me. But why you killed her’s got me puzzled.”

“I bet you,” he said, watching the red puddle grow on the floor. “It was her own damned fault. She calls me up, tells me Whisper’s coming to see her, and says if I get there first I can bushwhack him. I’d like that. I go over there, stick around, but he don’t show.”

He stopped, pretending interest in the shape the red puddle was taking. I knew pain had stopped him, but I knew he would go on talking as soon as he got himself in hand. He meant to die as he had lived, inside the same tough shell. Talking could be torture, but he wouldn’t stop on that account, not while anybody was there to see him. He was Reno Starkey who could take anything the world had without batting an eye, and he would play it out that way to the end.

“I got tired of waiting,” he went on after a moment. “I hit her door and asked howcome. She takes me in, telling me there’s nobody there. I’m doubtful, but she swears she’s alone, and we go back in the kitchen. Knowing her, I’m beginning to think maybe it’s me and not Whisper that’s being trapped.”

Mickey came in, telling us he had phoned for an ambulance.

Reno used the interruption to rest his voice, and then continued with his story:

“Later, I find that Whisper did phone her he was coming, and got there before me. You were coked. She was afraid to let him in, so he beat it. She don’t tell me that, scared I’ll go and leave her. You’re hopped and she wants protection against Whisper
coming back. I don’t know none of that then. I’m leary that I’ve walked into something, knowing her. I think I’ll take hold of her and slap the truth out of her. I try it, and she grabs the pick and screams. When she squawks, I hear a man’s feet hitting the floor. The trap’s sprung, I think.”

He spoke slower, taking more time and pains to turn each word out calmly and deliberately, as talking became harder. His voice had become blurred, but if he knew it he pretended he didn’t.

“I don’t mean to be the only one that’s hurt. I twist the pick out of her hand and stick it in her. You gallop out, coked to the edges, charging at the whole world with both eyes shut. She tumbles into you. You go down, roll around till your hand hits the butt of the pick. Holding on to that, you go to sleep, peaceful as she is. I see it then, what I’ve done. But hell! she’s croaked. There’s nothing to do about it. I turn off the lights and go home. When you—”

A tired looking ambulance crew—Poisonville gave them plenty of work—brought a litter into the room, ending Reno’s tale. I was glad of it. I had all the information I wanted, and sitting there listening to and watching him talk himself to death wasn’t pleasant.

I took Mickey over to a corner of the room and muttered in his ear:

“The job’s yours from now on. I’m going to duck. I ought to be in the clear, but I know my Poisonville too well to take any chances. I’ll drive your car to some way station where I can catch a train for Ogden. I’ll be at the Roosevelt Hotel there, registered as P. F. King. Stay with the job, and let me know when it’s wise to either take my own name again or a trip to Honduras.”

I spent most of my week in Ogden trying to fix up my reports so they would not read as if I had broken as many Agency rules, state laws and human bones as I had.

Mickey arrived on the sixth night.

He told me that Reno was dead, that I was no longer officially
a criminal, that most of the First National Bank stick-up loot had been recovered, that MacSwain had confessed killing Tim Noonan, and that Personville, under martial law, was developing into a sweet-smelling thornless bed of roses.

Mickey and I went back to San Francisco.

I might just as well have saved the labor and sweat I had put into trying to make my reports harmless. They didn’t fool the Old Man. He gave me merry hell.

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.

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
www.randomhouse.com