Red Harvest (4 page)

Tears were in her eyes. Through the water her eyes studied my face, apparently trying to learn how I took the story. I didn’t say anything. She asked:

“Is that what you wanted?”

“Practically,” Noonan said. He had walked around to one side. “What did Thaler say this afternoon?”

“He urged me to keep quiet.” Her voice had become small
and flat. “He said either or both of us would be suspected if anyone learned we were there, because Donald had been killed coming from the woman’s house after giving her money.”

“Where did the shots come from?” the chief asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see anything—except—when I looked up—Donald falling.”

“Did Thaler fire them?”

“No,” she said quickly. Then her mouth and eyes spread. She put a hand to her breast. “I don’t know. I didn’t think so, and he said he didn’t. I don’t know where he was. I don’t know why I never thought he might have.”

“What do you think now?” Noonan asked.

“He—he may have.”

The chief winked at me, an athletic wink in which all his facial muscles took part, and cast a little farther back:

“And you don’t know who called you up?”

“He wouldn’t tell me his name.”

“Didn’t recognize his voice?”

“No.”

“What kind of voice was it?”

“He talked in an undertone, as if afraid of being overheard. I had difficulty understanding him.”

“He whispered?” The chief’s mouth hung open as the last sound left it. His greenish eyes sparkled greedily between their pads of fat.

“Yes, a hoarse whisper.”

The chief shut his mouth with a click, opened it again to say persuasively:

“You’ve heard Thaler talk….”

The woman started and stared big-eyed from the chief to me.

“It was he,” she cried. “It was he.”

Robert Albury, the young assistant cashier of the First National Bank, was sitting in the lobby when I returned to the Great Western
Hotel. We went up to my room, had some ice-water brought, used its ice to put chill in Scotch, lemon juice, and grenadine, and then went down to the dining room.

“Now tell me about the lady,” I said when we were working on the soup.

“Have you seen her yet?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“But you’ve heard something about her?”

“Only that she’s an expert in her line.

“She is,” he agreed. “I suppose you’ll see her. You’ll be disappointed at first. Then, without being able to say how or when it happened, you’ll find you’ve forgotten your disappointment, and the first thing you know you’ll be telling her your life’s history, and all your troubles and hopes.” He laughed with boyish shyness. “And then you’re caught, absolutely caught.”

“Thanks for the warning. How’d you come by the information?”

He grinned shamefacedly across his suspended soup spoon and confessed:

“I bought it.”

“Then I suppose it cost you plenty. I hear she likes
dinero.”

“She’s money-mad, all right, but somehow you don’t mind it. She’s so thoroughly mercenary, so frankly greedy, that there’s nothing disagreeable about it. You’ll understand what I mean when you know her.”

“Maybe. Mind telling me how you happened to part with her?”

“No, I don’t mind. I spent it all, that’s how.”

“Cold-blooded like that?”

His face flushed a little. He nodded.

“You seem to have taken it well,” I said.

“There was nothing else to do.” The flush in his pleasant young face deepened and he spoke hesitantly. “It happens I owe her something for it. She—I’m going to tell you this. I want you to see this side of her. I had a little money. After that was gone—
You must remember I was young and head over heels. After my money was gone there was the bank’s. I had—You don’t care whether I had actually done anything or was simply thinking about it. Anyway, she found it out. I never could hide anything from her. And that was the end.”

“She broke off with you?”

“Yes, thank God! If it hadn’t been for her you might be looking for me now—for embezzlement. I owe her that!” He wrinkled his forehead earnestly. “You won’t say anything about this—you know what I mean. But I wanted you to know she has her good side too. You’ll hear enough about the other.”

“Maybe she has. Or maybe it was just that she didn’t think she’d get enough to pay for the risk of being caught in a jam.”

He turned this over in his mind and then shook his head.

“That may have had something to do with it, but not all.”

“I gathered she was strictly pay-as-you-enter.”

“How about Dan Rolff?” he asked.

“Who’s he?”

“He’s supposed to be her brother, or half-brother, or something of the sort. He isn’t. He’s a down-and-outer—t. b. He lives with her. She keeps him. She’s not in love with him or anything. She simply found him somewhere and took him in.”

“Any more?”

“There was that radical chap she used to run around with. It’s not likely she got much money out of him.”

“What radical chap?”

“He came here during the strike—Quint is his name.”

“So he was on her list?”

“That’s supposed to be the reason he stayed here after the strike was over.”

“So he’s still on her list?”

“No. She told me she was afraid of him. He had threatened to kill her.”

“She seems to have had everybody on her string at one time or another,” I said.

“Everybody she wanted,” he said, and he said it seriously.

“Donald Willsson was the latest?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I had never heard anything about them, had never seen anything. The chief of police had us try to find any checks he may have issued to her before yesterday, but we found nothing. Nobody could remember ever having seen any.”

“Who was her last customer, so far as you know?”

“Lately I’ve seen her around town quite often with a chap named Thaler—he runs a couple of gambling houses here. They call him Whisper. You’ve probably heard of him.”

At eight-thirty I left young Albury and set out for the Miners’ Hotel in Forest Street. Half a block from the hotel I met Bill Quint.

“Hello!” I hailed him. “I was on my way down to see you.”

He stopped in front of me, looked me up and down, growled:

“So you’re a gum-shoe.”

“That’s the bunk,” I complained. “I come all the way down here to rope you, and you’re smarted up.”

“What do you want to know now?” he asked.

“About Donald Willsson. You knew him, didn’t you?”

“I knew him.”

“Very well?”

“No.”

“What did you think of him?”

He pursed his gray lips, by forcing breath between them made a noise like a rag tearing, and said:

“A lousy liberal.”

“You know Dinah Brand?” I asked.

“I know her.” His neck was shorter and thicker than it had been.

“Think she killed Willsson?”

“Sure. It’s a kick in the pants.”

“Then you didn’t?”

“Hell, yes,” he said, “the pair of us together. Got any more questions?”

“Yeah, but I’ll save my breath. You’d only lie to me.”

I walked back to Broadway, found a taxi, and told the driver to take me to 1232 Hurricane Street.

My destination was a gray frame cottage. When I rang the bell the door was opened by a thin man with a tired face that had no color in it except a red spot the size of a half-dollar high on each cheek. This, I thought, is the lunger Dan Rolff.

“I’d like to see Miss Brand,” I told him.

“What name shall I tell her?” His voice was a sick man’s and an educated man’s.

“It wouldn’t mean anything to her. I want to see her about Willsson’s death.”

He looked at me with level tired dark eyes and said:

“Yes?”

“I’m from the San Francisco office of the Continental Detective Agency. We’re interested in the murder.”

“That’s nice of you,” he said ironically. “Come in.”

I went in, into a ground-floor room where a young woman sat at a table that had a lot of papers on it. Some of the papers were financial service bulletins, stock and bond market forecasts. One was a racing chart.

The room was disorderly, cluttered up. There were too many
pieces of furniture in it, and none of them seemed to be in its proper place.

“Dinah,” the lunger introduced me, “this gentleman has come from San Francisco on behalf of the Continental Detective Agency to inquire into Mr. Donald Willsson’s demise.”

The young woman got up, kicked a couple of newspapers out of her way, and came to me with one hand out.

She was an inch or two taller than I, which made her about five feet eight. She had a broad-shouldered, full-breasted, round-hipped body and big muscular legs. The hand she gave me was soft, warm, strong. Her face was the face of a girl of twenty-five already showing signs of wear. Little lines crossed the corners of her big ripe mouth. Fainter lines were beginning to make nets around her thick-lashed eyes. They were large eyes, blue and a bit bloodshot.

Her coarse hair—brown—needed trimming and was parted crookedly. One side of her upper lip had been rouged higher than the other. Her dress was of a particularly unbecoming wine color, and it gaped here and there down one side, where she had neglected to snap the fasteners or they had popped open. There was a run down the front of her left stocking.

This was the Dinah Brand who took her pick of Poisonville’s men, according to what I had been told.

“His father sent for you, of course,” she said while she moved a pair of lizard-skin slippers and a cup and saucer off a chair to make room for me.

Her voice was soft, lazy.

I told her the truth:

“Donald Willsson sent for me. I was waiting to see him while he was being killed.”

“Don’t go away, Dan,” she called to Rolff.

He came back into the room. She returned to her place at the table. He sat on the opposite side, leaning his thin face on a thin hand, looking at me without interest.

She drew her brows together, making two creases between them, and asked:

“You mean he knew someone meant to kill him?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say what he wanted. Maybe just help in the reform campaign.”

“But do you—”

I made a complaint:

“It’s no fun being a sleuth when somebody steals your stuff, does all the questioning.”

“I like to find out what’s going on,” she said, a little laugh gurgling down in her throat.

“I’m that way too. For instance, I’d like to know why you made him have the check certified.”

Very casually, Dan Rolff shifted in his chair, leaning back, lowering his thin hands out of sight below the table’s edge.

“So you found out about that?” Dinah Brand asked. She crossed left leg over right and looked down. Her eyes focussed on the run in her stocking. “Honest to God, I’m going to stop wearing them!” she complained. “I’m going barefooted. I paid five bucks for these socks yesterday. Now look at the damned things. Every day—runs, runs, runs!”

“It’s no secret,” I said. “I mean the check, not the runs. Noonan’s got it.”

She looked at Rolff, who stopped watching me long enough to nod once.

“If you talked my language,” she drawled, looking narrow-eyed at me, “I might be able to give you some help.”

“Maybe if I knew what it was.”

“Money,” she explained, “the more the better. I like it.”

I became proverbial:

“Money saved is money earned. I can save you money and grief.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me,” she said, “though it sounds like it’s meant to.”

“The police haven’t asked you anything about the check?”

She shook her head, no.

I said:

“Noonan’s figuring on hanging the rap on you as well as on Whisper.”

“Don’t scare me,” she lisped. “I’m only a child.”

“Noonan knows that Thaler knew about the check. He knows that Thaler came here while Willsson was here, but didn’t get in. He knows that Thaler was hanging around the neighborhood when Willsson was shot. He knows that Thaler and a woman were seen bending over the dead man.”

The girl picked up a pencil from the table and thoughtfully scratched her cheek with it. The pencil made little curly black lines over the rouge.

Rolff’s eyes had lost their weariness. They were bright, feverish, fixed on mine. He leaned forward, but kept his hands out of sight below the table.

“Those things,” he said, “concern Thaler, not Miss Brand.”

“Thaler and Miss Brand aren’t strangers,” I said. “Willsson brought a five-thousand-dollar check here, and was killed leaving. That way, Miss Brand might have had trouble cashing it—if Willsson hadn’t been thoughtful enough to get it certified.”

“My God!” the girl protested, “if I’d been going to kill him I’d have done it in here where nobody could have seen it, or waited until he got out of sight of the house. What kind of a dumb onion do you take me for?”

“I’m not sure you killed him,” I said. “I’m just sure that the fat chief means to hang it on you.”

“What are you trying to do?” she asked.

“Learn who killed him. Not who could have or might have, but who did.”

“I could give you some help,” she said, “but there’d have to be something in it for me.”