Дэшил Хэммет: The Hunter and Other Stories

Though this was said with practiced smoothness — it being an established line of attack — Vitt meant it honestly enough: so far as his feelings were affected, he felt some pity for the man in front of him.

“I didn’t do it,” Close said miserably.

Vitt erased the denial with a four-inch motion of one plump white hand.

“Now listen: it won’t get you anything to put us to a lot of trouble digging up things on you — not that it’ll need much digging. For instance, when and where were you married?”

The bookkeeper blushed. The rosiness that so surely did not belong in his face gave him the appearance of a colored cartoon.

“What’s that got to—?”

“Let it go, then,” Vitt said generously. He had him there. His guess had been right: Close was not married. “Let it go. But what I’m trying to show you is that you’d better be wise and come through!”

“I didn’t do it.”

The repetition irritated Vitt. The woodenness of the bookkeeper’s face, unlivened by the color that had for a moment washed it, irritated him. He stood up, close to the bookkeeper, and spoke louder.

“You forged that check, Close! You copied it from Twitchell’s!”

“I didn’t do it.”

The kitchen door opened and the woman came into the room, the child who had been playing with the blocks holding a fold of her skirt. She was a pink-fleshed woman of perhaps thirty years, attractive in a slovenly way: sloppy was the word that occurred to the detective.

“What is it, James?” Her voice was husky. “What is it?”

“I didn’t do it,” Close said. “He says I forged a check, but I didn’t do it.”

Vitt was warm under his clothes, and his hands perspired. The woman and child made him uncomfortable. He tried to ignore them, speaking to Close again, very slowly.

“You forged that check, Close, and I’m giving you your last chance to come through.”

“I didn’t do it.”

Vitt seized the irritation that the idiocy of this reiteration aroused in him, built it up, made a small anger of it, and his discomfort under the gazes of the woman and child grew less.

“Listen: you can take your choice,” he said. “Be bull-headed, or be reasonable. It’s nothing to me. This is all in my day’s work. But I don’t like to see a man hurt himself, especially when he’s not a crook by nature. I’d like to see you get off easy, but if you think you know what you’re doing — hop to it!”

“I didn’t do it.”

A suspicion that all this was ridiculous came to the detective, but he put it out of his mind. After he got a confession out of his man he could remember things and laugh. Meanwhile, what had to be done to get that confession needed an altogether different mood. If he could achieve some sort of rage...

He turned sharply to the woman.

“When and where were you folks married?” he demanded.

“None of your business!”

That was better. Against antagonism he could make progress. He felt the blood in his temples, and, his autogenetic excitement lessening the field of his vision, everything except the woman’s moist pink face became blurred.

“Exactly!” he said. “But, just so you’ll know where you stand, I’ll tell you that you never were married — not to each other anyway!”

“What of it?” She stood between her man and the detective, hands on broad hips. “What of it?”

Vitt snorted derisively. He had reared by now a really considerable rage in himself, both weapon and anesthetic.

“In this state,” he said, nodding vigorously, “there’s a law to protect children’s morals. You can be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minor children! Ever think of that?”

“Contributing to— Why, that’s foolish! I raise my children as decent as anybody. I—”

“I know! But in California if you’re living with a man not your husband, then you’re guilty of it — setting them a bad example, or something like that.”

The bookkeeper appeared from behind the woman.

“You stop that!” he ordered. “You hear me, you stop that! Amy hasn’t done anything!”

The child began to cry. The woman seized one of Vitt’s arms.

“Let me tell you!” Defiance was gone out of her. “My husband left me when he found I was going to have another baby. He went out on a Sunday night in the rain and didn’t ever come back. Not ever! I didn’t have anybody to help me but James. He took me in, and he’s been as good a man as there ever was! The children are better off with him than they ever were with Tom. He’s better to them. I—”

The detective pulled his arm away from her. A detective is a man employed to do certain defined things: he is not a judge, a god. Every thief has his justification, to hear him tell it. This hullabaloo just made his work that much harder, without doing anybody any real good.

“That’s tough!” He put into word and feature all the callousness for which he was fumbling inside. “But the way it stands is that if you’re going to fight me on this check business, I’m going to make the going as tough as I can for the pair of you.”

“You mean,” Close cried, “that if I don’t say I forged that check you’ll have Amy and me arrested for this — this delinquency thing?”

“I mean that if you’ll be reasonable I’ll not make any more trouble than I have to. But if you want to be hard-boiled, then I’ll go the limit.”

“And Amy’ll be arrested?”

“Yes.”

“You... you—” The bookkeeper clawed at Vitt with hands fashioned for grappling with pens and ledger-pages. Vitt could have handled him without especial difficulty, for, beneath his plumpness, the detective was strong enough. But the passion for which he had groped with affectation of face and voice had at last become actual.

He made a ball of one fist and drove it into the bookkeeper’s hollow belly. The bookkeeper folded over it and writhed on the floor. Screaming, the woman knelt beside him. The child who had come into the room with the woman and the baby Vitt had not seen yelled together. The doorbell began to ring. From the kitchen came the stench of scorched food.

Presently Close sat up, leaning against the kneeling woman, his spectacles dangling from one ear.

“I forged it,” he said into the clamor. “I didn’t have any money to pay the bills after the baby came. I told Amy I borrowed the money from Rosewater.” He laughed two sharp notes. “She didn’t know him, so she believed me. Anyway, the bills are paid.”

Vitt hurried his prisoner down to the city prison, had him booked and locked in, and then hastened up to the shopping district. The department stores closed at half past five, and his wife had asked him to bring home three spools of No. 60 black thread.

The house was large and austerely symmetrical in the later Bourbon fashion. Its pilastered façade, factually of a light gray stone, was dully whitish in the morning sun. Level grassplots cut by sharp-edged paths spread around the house, holding it apart from its neighbors and from the street. The grassplots in turn were guarded from the outer world by a fence of iron pickets, unfriendly as so many tall black pikes. Just inside the fence’s eastern line the billboard stood. Its wide back was to the house. Its edge was to the street. It faced, with an outrageous red and green face advertising a forgotten cure-all — Pentner’s Potent Pills — a porticoed house of red brick behind tidy hedges some twenty yards away.

Hugh Trate, walking up from the car-line with that briskness which young twenty-two need not temper to moderate hills, stared at the billboard’s ugly discordance until he was nearly abreast it and its edge had become too meager to hold his attention. Then his attention passed on to the stone house, his destination.