# Black Mask/November 1928/Black Lives

Published in Black Mask magazine. The first of four stories later reworked to make The Dain Curse
Black Lives
THE DAIN CURSE
By DASHIELL HAMMETT
Author of "The Cleansing of Poisonville" and other stories of the "Continental" detective.
t was a diamond, all right, sparkling in the grass half a dozen feet from the blue brick walk. It was small—not more than a quarter of a carat—and unmounted. I put it in my pocket and began examining the lawn as thoroughly as I could without going at it on hands and knees.
I had covered a couple of square yards of sod when the Leggetts’ front door opened. A woman stepped out on the broad stone top step and looked down at me with good-natured curiosity.
She was a woman of about my age—forty—with darkish blonde hair, a pleasant, plump face, and dimpled pink cheeks. She had on a lavender-flowered white house dress.
I called off my search for the time and went up to her, asking:
"Is Mr. Leggett in?"
"Yes," Her voice was as pleasant and placid as her face. She smiled from me to the lawn. “You're another detective, aren't you?”
I admitted it. She led me up to a green, orange and chocolate room on the second floor, put me in a brocaded chair, and told me she would call her husband from his laboratory.
While I waited for him I looked around the room, deciding that the dull orange rug under my feet was probably both genuinely Oriental and genuinely ancient, that the carved walnut furniture hadn't been ground out by machinery, and that the Japanese prints on the walls hadn't been selected by a puritan.
Edgar Leggett came in, saying:
​ "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, but I was at a point which I couldn't stop. Have you learned something?"
His voice was unexpectedly harsh, metallic, though friendly enough. He was a dark-skinned, erect man of forty-five or so, medium in height, muscularly slender. He would have been handsome if his brown face hadn't been so deeply marked with lines of pain or of bitterness—sharp, hard lines across his forehead, and from his nostrils down across his mouth-corners. Dark hair, worn rather long, curled above and around his broad, grooved forehead. Red-brown eyes of abnormal brightness looked out through horn-rimmed spectacles. His nose was long, thin, and high-bridged. His lips were thin, sharp and nimble over a small but bony chin. Black and white clothes, carefully made, carefully pressed and laundered, carefully worn, finished the picture.
He was as unusual, and as striking, in appearance as his wife—who had followed him into the room—was wholesomely normal.
"Not yet," I answered his question. "I'm not a police detective—Continental Agency, for the insurance company, and I've just started."
"The insurance company?" he repeated, surprised.
"Yes—North American Surety. Did—"
"Surely," he said quickly, smiling, stopping my words with a flourish of one of his hands. It was a long, thin, dark hand with over-developed finger-tips, ugly as most highly trained hands are. "Surely, they would have been insured. I hadn't thought of that. The diamonds did not belong to me, you know. They were Halstead & Beauchamp’s."
"I didn’t know that. The insurance company gave us no details. You had them from Halstead & Beauchamp on approval?"
"No. I was using them for experimental purposes. Last year I devised a method by which color could be introduced into glass after its manufacture. Halstead became interested in the possibility of the same method being adapted to precious stones, especially in improving the color of off-shade diamonds, removing yellowish and brownish tints, emphasizing blues. He asked me to attempt it, and supplied me with the stones on which to work. These are the diamonds the burglar got.”
“How long had you had them, and how many were there?”
“Five weeks. I think, and there were eight of them, none especially valuable. The largest weighed only a trifle more than half a carat, the smallest only a quarter, and all but two were of poor color.”
"Then you hadn't succeeded?" I asked.
"Not yet," he admitted readily "This was a much more delicate matter than staining glass, and on more obdurate material. I had, frankly, made not the slightest progress."
"Where were the diamonds kept?"
"They were locked up last night, though quite often I had left them lying out in the open, considering them as subjects for my experiments rather than as valuables. But last night they were locked in a cabinet drawer in the laboratory. I put them there several days ago, after my last unsuccessful experiment."
"Who knew about your experiments?"
"Anyone, everyone—there was no necessity for secrecy."
“Now, about the burglary?” I said.
"We heard nothing last night. This morning we found our front door open, the cabinet drawer forced, and the diamonds gone. The police found marks on the kitchen door, and say he came in that way and left by the front door."
"The front door was ajar when I came downstairs this morning, at half-past seven" said Mrs. Leggett. She was sitting beside her husband, her hands folded in her lap. "I went upstairs and awakened Edgar, and ​we searched the house and found the diamonds gone."
"What else was taken?"
"Nothing else seems to have been touched,"
"How about your servants?"
"We've only one," she said, "Minnie Hershey, a negress. She doesn't sleep here, and I'm sure she had nothing to do with it. She has been with us for two years, and I'm sure of her honesty."
I said I'd like to talk to Minnie, and Mrs. Leggett called her in. The servant was a small, wiry mulatto of twenty-something, with the straight black hair and the brown features of an Indian. She was very polite and very insistent that she had nothing to do with the theft of the diamonds, and had known nothing about it until she arrived at the house at eight-thirty this morning. She gave me her home address, a Geary Street number.
"The police questioned her this morning," Mrs. Leggett told me after the girl had gone out. "They don't think she had anything to do with it. They think it was the man I saw—the one Gabrielle saw three nights ago."
I asked for more details.
"When I opened the bedroom windows last night, about midnight, just before going to bed, I saw a man standing up on the corner, I can't say, even now, that there was anything very suspicious-looking about him. He was simply standing there as if waiting for someone, and, though he was looking down this way, there was nothing about him to make me think he might have been watching this house or any other. He was a man past forty, I should say, rather short and broad, somewhat of your build. But he had a bristly brown mustache and was pale. And he wore a brown soft hat and a brown—or dark—overcoat."
"Somebody else had seen him three nights before?" I asked.
"Yes, Gabrielle, my daughter. Coming home late one night, he passed her a pavement or two up the street. She was in an automobile and he was walking. She thought she had seen him come from our steps, but she wasn't sure, and she thought nothing more of it until after the burglary."
"Is she home now? I'd like to talk to her."
Mrs. Leggett went out to get her. I asked Leggett:
"Were the diamonds loose?"
"They were unset, of course, and in small manila envelopes—Halstead & Beauchamp's—each in its own, with a number and the weight of the stone written on it in pencil. The envelopes were taken, too."
Mrs, Leggett returned with her daughter, a girl of twenty or less, in a sleeveless white silk dress; a girl of medium height who looked slenderer than she really was. I stood up to be introduced to her and then asked her about the man she had seen coming from the house the other night.
"I'm not positive that he came from the house," she replied, "or from the lawn." Her manner was a bit petulant, as if being questoned was distasteful. "I thought he might have, but I only saw him walking up the street."
"This was Saturday night?"
"Yes—that is, Sunday morning."
"What time?" I asked, studying her as we talked, Her hair was as curly as, and no longer than, her father's, but of a much lighter brown. Of her features, only her green-brown eyes were large, forehead, mouth and teeth were unusually small, There was a barely noticeable hollowness at cheeks and eyes. She had a pointed chin and extremely white, smooth skin, Her expression was sullen: I couldn't tell whether it was habitual or simply in resentment of my prying.
"Three o'clock or after" she said impatiently,
"Were you alone?"
"Hardly. Eric Collinson brought me home."
I asked her where I could find Eric Collinson. She frowned, hesitated, and ​said that he was employed by Spear, Hoover & Camp, stock brokers, that she had a putrid headache, and that she hoped I would excuse her now as she knew I couldn't have any more questions to ask.
Without waiting for my answer, she turned and went out of the room. Her ears, I noticed, were without lobes and peculiarly pointed at the tops.
Leggett and his wife took me up to the laboratory, a large room that occupied most of the third story. Charts were hung here and there between the windows on the white-washed walls. The wooden floor was uncovered. An X-ray machine—or something similar—four or five smaller machines, a small forge, a large sink, a large zinc table, some smaller porcelain ones, stands, racks of glassware, siphon-shaped metal tanks—that sort of stuff filled the room.
The cabinet from which the diamonds had been taken was a green-painted steel affair of six drawers, all locking together. The second drawer from the top—the one the diamonds had been in—was open. Its edge was dented where a jimmy or chisel had been forced between it and the frame. The other drawers were still locked.
From the laboratory we went downstairs, through a room where the mulatto girl was walking around behind a vacuum cleaner, and into the kitchen. The back door and its frame were marked much as the cabinet had been, the same tool apparently having been used on it.
When I had finished looking at the door I took the diamond I had found out of my pocket and showed it to the Leggetts, asking:
"Is this one of them?"
Leggett picked it up with forefinger and thumb, held it up to the light, turned it from side to side, and said:
"Yes. It has that cloudy spot down at the culet. Where did you get it?"
"Out front, in the grass. I saw it when I came up the walk."
"Ah, where our burglar dropped it in his hurried departure."
I said I doubted it.
Leggett pulled his brows together, looked at me with smaller eyes, asking harshly:
"What do you mean?"
"I think it was planted there," I explained. "Your burglar knew exactly which drawer to go to, and he didn't waste any time on anything else. Somebody who—"
Mrs. Leggett put a hand on my forearm and said earnestly:
"No, no. You're thinking of Minnie. You are mistaken, I assure you. She—"
Minnie came to the door, still holding the vacuum cleaner, and began to cry that she was an honest girl, and nobody had any right to accuse her of anything, and they could search her and her room if they wanted to, and just because she was a colored girl was no reason, and so on and so on. Not all of it could be made out, because the vacuum cleaner was still humming in her hand and she sobbed while she talked. Tears say down her cheeks.
Mrs, Leggett went to her, patted her shoulder, saying: "There, there, don't cry. I know you hadn't anything to do with it. Nobody thinks you had. There, there." Presently she got the girl's tears turned off and sent her upstairs.
Leggett sat on a corner of the kitchen table and asked: "You suspect someone in this house?"
"Somebody who's been in it."
"Whom?"
"Nobody yet."
"That"—he smiled, showing white teeth almost as small his daughter's—"means everybody—all of us."
"Let's go out and look at the lawn," I suggested——. "If we find any more diamonds I'll admit I'm mistaken about this one being planted."
Half-way through the house, as we went toward the front door, we met Minnie Hershey, in a tan coat and vio​let hat, coming to say "Good-bye" to her mistress.
She wouldn't, she said tearfully, work anywhere where anybody thought she had stolen anything. She was just as honest as anybody else, and more than some, and just as much entitled to respect, and if she couldn't get it in one place she could in another, because she knew places where people wouldn't accuse her of being a th-thief after she had worked for them for two long years without ever taking so much as a slice of bread.
Mrs. Leggett pleaded with her, reasoned with her, scolded her, and commanded her, but none of it was any good. The brown girl's mind was made up. She went away. Mrs. Leggett looked at me as severely as her pleasant face would let her, and said a reprovingly: "Now see what you've done."
I said I was sorry, and Leggett and I went out to search the lawn. We didn't find any more diamonds.
II
Leaving Leggett's, I put in a couple of hours canvassing the neighborhood, trying to place the man Mrs. and Miss Leggett had seen. I didn't have any luck on him, but I picked up news of another suspicious character.
A Mrs. Priestly—a pale semi-invalid who lived three doors below the Leggetts—gave me the first news of him. She often sat at a front window in the dark at night, when she couldn't sleep, looking into the street. On two nights she had seen this man.
The first time had been a week ago. He had passed up and down the other side of the street five or six times, at intervals of fifteen or twenty minutes, with his face turned as if he was watching something on Mrs. Priestly's—and the Leggetts'—side of the street. She thought it was between eleven and twelve o'clock when she had seen him the first time, and perhaps one o'clock the last. Several nights later—Saturday night—she had seen him again, not walking, this time, but standing on the corner below, looking up the street, at a little after midnight. He went away after she had watched him for half an hour, down the street, and she had not seen him again.
She said he was a fairly tall man of medium build, young, she thought, and he walked with his head thrust out in front. The street was too dark for her to describe his clothes,
Mrs. Priestly knew all the Leggetts by sight, but said she knew very little about them, except that the daughter was supposed to be a trifle wild. They seemed to be nice people, but kept to themselves. He had moved into the house in 1921, alone except for the housekeeper, a Mrs. Begg, who, Mrs. Priestly understood, was now keeping house for a family named Freemander in Berkeley. Mrs. Leggett and Gabrielle had not come to live with Leggett until 1923.
Mrs, Priestly said she had not been at her window the previous night, and she had not seen the man Mrs. Leggett and her daughter had seen.
A man named Warren Darley, who lived on the opposite side of the street from the Leggetts, but down near the corner on which Mrs. Priestly had seen her man, had, when locking up the house one night, surprised a man—apparently the same one Mrs. Priestly had seen—in his vestibule. Darley was not at home when I called, but Mrs. Darley, after telling me this much, got her husband on the phone for me.
Darley said the man had been standing in the vestibule, either hiding from or watching someone in the street. As soon as Darley opened the door the man ran away, paying no attention to Darley's "What are you doing there?" Darley said he was a man of thirty-five or six, fairly well dressed in dark clothes, and with a very long, thin and sharp nose.
​That was all I could get out of the neighbors. I went downtown, to the Montgomery Street offices of Spear, Hoover & Camp, and asked for Eric Collinson.
He was young, blond, tall, broad, sunburned and immaculate, with the good-looking dumb face of one who would know everything about polo, of shooting, or flying, or stocks and bonds, or whatever interested him, and nothing about anything else. We sat on a broad leather seat in the customers' room, now, after market hours, empty except for a weedy boy juggling numbers on board. I told Collinson about the burglary and asked him about the man he and Miss Leggett had seen Saturday night.
"Ordinary looking chap—short, chunky. You think he took them?"
"Was he coming from the Leggetts' house?"
"From the lawn, yes. Jumpy looking chap. I thought he'd been snooping around. That's why I suggested going after him. Gaby wouldn't have it. Probably a friend of papa's. He goes in for odd eggs."
"Wasn't that late for a visitor to be leaving? What time was it?"
"Midnight, I dare say," but he didn't look at me while he said it.
"Midnight?" I asked sharply.
"That's the word. Time when the graves give up their dead and ghosts walk."
"Miss Leggett said it was after three o'clock."
"You see how it is?" he asked, blandly triumphant, as if he had just demonstrated something we had been arguing about. "Half blind and won't wear glasses for fear of losing beauty. Always doing things like that. Plays abominable bridge—takes deuces for aces. Probably a quarter after twelve. Looks at the clock and gets the hands mixed."
I said, "That's too bad. Thanks." and went around the corner to see Archie Little, junior partner of the Brenderman-Little Company, investment bankers.
I asked Archie what he knew about Collinson. He said there was nothing to know about him, except that his old man was the lumber Collinson and Eric was Princeton and stocks and bonds, a nice boy.
"Maybe he is," I agreed, "but he just lied to me."
"Ts, ts, ts!" Archie shook his head, grinning, "Isn't that like a sleuth? You must have had the wrong fellow. Somebody's impersonating him. The Chevalier Bayard doesn't lie, and besides, lying requires imagination. You've— Wait! Was there a woman involved in your question?
I nodded.
"You're correct, then," Archie assured me. "I apologize, The Chevalier Bayard always lies when there's a woman involved, even if it's unnecessary and puts her to a lot of trouble. It's one of the conventions of Bayardism—something to do with guarding her honor and the like. Is she young? Do I know her? I make a point of knowing all the women people lie about"
I thanked him instead of answering his questions and went up to the Geary Street jewelry store of Halstead & Beauchamp.
Halstead was a suave, pale, bald, fat man with vague eyes and a too-tight collar. I told him what I was doing and asked him if he knew Leggett very well.
"I know him as an occasional customer, and by reputation as a scientist. Why do you ask?"
"The burglary looks phoney."
"Preposterous! That is, it's preposterous if you think a man of his caliber would have anything to do with it. A servant, of course, but not Leggatt. He is a scientist, and he is, unless our credit department has been misinformed, which I think is unlikely, if not wealthy, at least of sufficient means to prevent suspicion falling on him. I happen to know that he has at present with the Seaman's national Bank a bal​ance in excess of ten thousand dollars."
"What were the diamonds worth?"'
"Not more than fifteen hundred dollars at retail."
"That would be seven hundred at cost?"
"Well," smiling, "eight-fifty would be closer."
"How did you come to give him the diamonds?"
"I knew him as a customer, and then, when Fitzstephan told me of his work with glass, it occurred to me that the same sort of treatment applied to diamonds might be of great value. So I persuaded Leggett to try it."
"What Fitzstephan?" I asked.
"Owen, the novelist."
"I've met him," I said, "but I didn't know he was on the Coast. Have you his address?"
Halstead gave it to me—a Nob Hill apartment building.
From the jeweler's I went out to the vicinity of the Geary Street address Minnie Hershey had given me. It was a negro neighborhood, which made the getting of reasonably accurate information even more difficult than it always is.
What I got added up to this: The girl had lived in San Francisco for four or five years, coming from Winchester, Virginia. For the last half-year she had been living in a flat at her present address, with a negro called Rhino Tingley. One informant told me Tingley's first name was Ed, another Bill, but both descriptions agreed; he was young, big, black, and could readily be recognized by his scarred chin and his tie pin, pearls grouped to make a cluster of grapes; he was rather shiftless, living on Minnie and pool, but not bad except when he got mad—then he was a holy terror.
I was told that I could get a look at him the early part of almost any evening in either Bunny Mack's barber shop or Big-foot Gerber's cigar store. I learned where there establishments were located, and then went downtown again, to the police detective bureau in the Hall of Justice.
Nobody was in the Pawnshop Detail office. I crossed the corridor and asked Lieutenant Duff whether any one had been assigned to the Leggett job.
"See O'Gar," he said.
I went into the assembly room, looking for O'Gar and wondering what he—a detective-sergeant attached to the Homicide Detail—had to do with it. Neither O'Gar nor his partner, Pat Reddy, was in. I smoked a cigarette, worried about homicide men being mixed up in my job, and decided to phone Leggett and see if anything had happened out there.
"Have any of the police detectives been in to see you since I left?" I asked when Leggett's harsh voice was in my ear.
"No, but the police called up a little while ago and asked my wife and daughter to come to a house in Golden Gate Avenue to see if they could identify a man who had been killed there. They left a few minutes ago. I didn't accompany them, since I hadn't seen the supposed burglar."
"What was the address?"
He didn't remember the exact number, but he knew the block, one near Van Ness Avenue. I thanked him and went out there.
A uniformed policeman standing in the doorway of a small apartment house guided me to my goal when I reached the designated block. I asked him if O'Gar was there, and where.
"Three-ten," he said.
I went up in a rickety elevator. When I got out of it on the third floor I came face to face with Mrs. Leggett and her daughter, leaving.
"Now I hope you're satisfied that Minnie had nothing to do with it," Mrs. Leggett said chidingly.
"Was he the man you saw?"
"Yes. And the envelopes the diamonds were in are there,"
I turned to Gabrielle Leggett and said:
​"Eric Collinson insists that it was only midnight, or a few minutes after, that you got home, and saw the man, Saturday night."
"Eric," she said irritably, walking past me to enter the elevator, "is an ass."
Her mother, following her into the elevator, reprimanded her amiably: "Now, dear!"
I closed the door for them and walked down the hall to a doorway where Pat Reddy stood talking to a couple of reporters, said "Hello" to them, squeezed past them into a short passage-way, and went through that to a shabbily furnished room where a dead man lay on a wall bed.
Phels of the Identification Bureau looked up from his magnifying glass to nod at me, and then went on examining the edge of a mission table that stood against one wall. O'Gar pulled his head and shoulders in the open window and growled:
"So we got to put up with you again?"
He was a burly, hard-faced, stolid man of fifty who wore wide-brimmed soft black hats of the movie village-constable sort. There were a lot of shrewd ideas in his grizzled bullet head and he was comfortable to work with.
I looked at the corpse—a man of forty or so, with a heavy face, short hair touched with gray, a scrubby dark mustache, thick shoulders and stocky arms and legs. There was a bullet-hole just above his navel, and another high in the left side of his chest.
"It's a man," O'Gar informed me as I put the blanket over him again. "He's dead."
"What else did somebody tell you?" I asked,
"Looks like him and another bimbo nicked Leggett for the ice and then the other bimbo decided to take a one-way split. The envelopes are here"—O'Gar took them out of his pocket and ruffled them with his thumb—"but the stuff ain't. Neither is the gun the two slugs came out of. It went down the fire escape with Mr. X a little while back. People saw him go down, but they lost him when he cut through the alley. Tall guy with a long nose. This one"—O'Gar pointed at the bed with the envelopes—"has been here a week. Name of Louis Upton. New York labels. We don't know him. Nobody in the dump 's ever seen him with anybody else. Nobody will say they know Mr, X,"
Pat Reddy, a big, jovial youngster with almost enough brains to make for his lack of experience came in. I told him and O'Gar what I had turned up on the diamond job so far.
"Long-nose and this bird taking turns watching Leggett's," Reddy suggested when I was through."
"Maybe," I admitted, "but there was an inside angle to the job."
"How about the yellow girl?"
"I'm going out for a look man tonight. You people are trying New York on this Upton?"
"Practically," O'Gar said.
III
At the Nob Hill address that Halstead had given me I told the boy at the switchboard my name, wondering if Fitzstephan would remember it. I had run into him five years ago, in New York City, where I had been digging dirt on a chain of fake mediums who had taken a coal-and-ice dealer's widow for a hundred thousand dollars. Fitzstephan was combing the same field for literary material, and, becoming acquainted, we had pooled forces. He knew the ghost racket inside and out. With his help I had cleaned up my job in a week or two. We kept up a fairly intimate friendship for a couple of months after that, until I left New York for the West.
At that time he had been in his early thirties—a long, lean, sorrel-haired man with sleepy gray eyes, a wide, humorous mouth, and carelessly worn clothes. He pretended to be lazier than he was, ​would rather talk than do anything else, and had a lot of what seemed to be accurate information and original ideas on any subject that happened to come up, so long as it was out of the ordinary.
"Mr. Fitzstephan says to come right up, sir," the boy said.
His apartment was on the sixth floor. He was standing at its door when I got out of the elevator.
"By God!" he said, holding out a lean hand, "it is you."
"None other."
We went into a room where half a dozen bookcases and four tables left little room for anything else. Magazines and books in various languages, papers, clippings, proof sheets, were scattered everywhere—all exactly as it had been in his New York rooms.
We sat down, found places for our feet between table-legs, and accounted, more or less roughly, for our lives since we had last seen one another. He had been in San Francisco a little less than a year. He liked the city, he said, but he wouldn't oppose any movement to give the West back to the Indians.
"How's the literary grift go?" I asked.
He looked at me sharply, demanded:
"You haven't been reading me?"
"No. Where'd you get that idea?'
"There was something in your tone, something proprietary, as in the voice of one who had bought an author for two dollars and a half. I haven't met it often enough to be used to it. Good God! Remember once I offered to give you a set of my books?"
"You were drunk," I said.
"On sherry—Elsa Donne's sherry. Remember Elsa? She showed us a picture she had just finished and you said it was pretty. Whoops, wasn't she furious! You said it so vapidly, and sincerely? Remember? She put us out, But I had already got tight on her sherry, and so had you. But you weren't plastered enough to accept the books."
"I was afraid I'd read them and understand them," I explained, "and then you'd have felt insulted,"
A Chinese boy brought us cold white wine. Fitzstephan said;
"It's queer we should have been in the same city for a year without running into one another. How did you finally come across me?'"
"Watt Halstead gave me your address, after he'd told me you knew Edgar Leggett."
A gleam pushed through the sleepiness in the novelist's gray eyes.
"Leggett's been up to something?" he drawled, sitting a little higher in his chair.
"Why do you say that?"
"I didn't say it." He sank back lazily in his chair, but the gleam was still in his eyes. "I asked it. Come—out with it. I'm a novelist. My business is with souls and what goes on in them. What's Leggett been up to?"
"We don't do it that way. We trade information. How long have you known him?"
"Nearly a year. I met him soon after I came here, I think at Marquard's—the sculptor, not the restaurant. He interested me. There's something obscure in him, something dark and inviting. Physically ascetic—neither smoking nor drinking—eating meagerly, a vegetarian, sleeping only four hours a night, I'm told. Mentally sensual—does that mean anything?—to the point of decadence. You think I like the fantastic—you should know him. His friends—he hasn't any. His choice in companions are those who have the most outlandish ideas to offer—the wildest, most maniac, brutal, degenerate, abnormal. Marquard, with his insane figures that are not figures but boundaries of the portions of space which are the real figures; Denbar Curt, with his algebraism; crazy Laura Joines; Farnham—"
"And you," I put in, "with your explanations and descriptions that explain and describe nothing, I hope you don't suppose that what you've said so far means anything to me."
​"I remember you now; you were always like that." He grinned at me, running long fingers through his sorrel hair. "Tell me what's up while I try to find one-syllable words to use on you."
I told him about the diamonds, and about the dead man. He looked very disappointed.
"That's trivial, sordid," he complained. "I've been thinking of Leggett in terms of Dumas, and you bring me a piece of gimcrackery out of O. Henry. You've let me down—you and and your shabby diamonds. But"—his eyes brightened again—"they may lead to something. Leggett may or may not be a criminal, but there's more to him than a two-penny insurance swindle."
"You mean," I asked sarcastically, "that he's one of these master minds? So you've been reading newspapers? What do you think he is? King of the bootleggers? Chief of an international crime syndicate? A white slave magnate? Head of a dope ring? Or maybe queen of the counterfeiters in disguise?"
"Don't be an idiot. He's got brains, that man, and there's something black in him. There's something he doesn't want to think about. I've told you that he revels in ail that's dizziest in thought, yet he's intellectually as cold as a fish, but with a bitter-dry coldness. He's neurotic, yet he doesn't even smoke. He keeps his body sensitive and fit and ready—for what?—while he drugs his mind against memory with the wildest of intellectual lunacies, with ideas that belong to the mad. Yet the man is cold and sane.
"There's only one explanation: there's darkness in his past that he wants to forget. But why shouldn't he anesthetize his mind through his body, by sensuality if not by drugs? There's still only one explanation; the darkness in his past is not dead, and he must keep himself fit to cope with it should it come into the present."
"All right. What is it?"
"If I don't know—and I don't—it isn't because I haven't tried to learn; but try getting information out of Leggett some time. I don't believe that's his name."
"No?
"No," Fitzstephan said, "he's French. I'd risk anything on it. He told me once that he came from Atlanta, but he's French in outlook, in quality of mind, in everything but admission."
"What of the rest of the family? The daughter's cuckoo, isn't she?"
"I wonder." Fitzstephan looked queerly at me, "Are you saying that carelessly, or do you really think she's off?"
"I don't know, but she's odd. She's got animal ears and almost no forehead, and her eyes change from green to brown. An uncomfortable sort of person."
"If you're cataloging her physical peculiarities you can add that her upper thumb joints—between metacarpal bones and first phalanx—don't work."
"I'm not. In your snooping around have you been able to pry into any of her affairs?"
"Are you—who make your living snooping and prying—sneering at my curiosity about people and my attempts to satisfy it?"
"We're different," I said, "I do mine with the object of putting people in jail, and I get paid for it, though not as much as I should."
"That's not different," he said, "I do mine with the object of putting people in books, and I get paid for it, and not as much as I should. Gabrielle hates her father. He worships her."
"Howcome the hate?"
Fitzstephan shrugged his lean shoulders; said:
"I don't know. Perhaps because worships her."
"There's no sense to that," I growled. "You're just being literary. How about Mrs. Leggett?"
"You've never eaten one of her meals, I suppose? You'd have no doubts about her if you had. None but a serene sane soul ever achieved such cook​ing. I've often wondered what she thinks of the weird pair that is her husband and daughter, or if she simply accepts them as they are without being aware of their weirdness. I rather suppose she does."
"All this is well enough in its way," I said, "but you still haven't told me anything definite about them. Come on, loosen up."
"I've told you," he insisted, "everything I know. And that's the thing, my son, You know what a——in your words——a snooper and prier——I am. Well, if, after a year of it, I know no more about a man who interests me than I do about Leggett, isn't that the most conclusive sort of evidence that he's hiding something, and that he is a hider of no mean sort?"
"Is it? I don't know. But I know I've wasted enough time here learning nothing that anybody can be jailed for."
It was a little after five o'clock when I left Fitzstephan's apartment. I stopped at a restaurant for some food, and then went out for a look at Minnie Hershey's man, Rhino Tingley.
I found him in Big-foot Gerber's cigar store, rolling a fat cigar around in his mouth, telling something to the other negroes——four of them in the place.
". . . says to him, 'Nigger, you talking yourself out of skin,' and I reaches out my hand for him, and, 'fore Gawd, there wasn't none of him there excepting his footprints in the cement pavement, eight feet apart and leading home."
Buying a package of cigarettes, I weighed him in while he talked. He was a chocolate man of not more than thirty years, close to six feet tall, and weighing two hundred pounds plus, with big yellow-balled pop eyes, a broad nose, a big mouth, and a ragged black scar running from his lower lip down behind his blue and white striped collar. His clothes were new enough to look new, and he wore them sportily. His voice was a heavy bass, and when he laughed with his audience after he had finished his story the glass of the showcases shook.
I went out of the store while they were laughing, heard his laughter stop short behind me, resisted the temptation to look back, and moved down in the direction of the building where he and Minnie lived. He came abreast of me when I was half a block from the flats.
I said nothing while we took seven steps. Then he said:
"You the man that been inquiring around about me?"
The sour odor of Italian red wine came thick enough to be seen.
I considered and replied:
"Yeah."
"What you got to do with me?" he asked, not disagreeably, but as if he wanted to know.
On the other side of the street, Gabrielle Leggett, in brown coat, brown and yellow hat, came out of Minnie's building and walked up the street, not turning her head toward us. She walked swiftly and her lower lip was between her teeth,
I looked at the negro. He was looking at me. There was nothing in his face to show that he had seen Gabrielle Leggett or that the sight of her meant anything to him. I said:
"You've got nothing to hide, have you? What do you care who asks about you?"
"All the same, I'm the party to come to if he wants to know about me, You the man that got Minnie fired?"
"She wasn't fired. She quit."
"Minnie don't have to take nobody's lip, She——"
"Let's go over and talk to her," I suggested, leading the way across the street. At the door he went ahead, up a flight of steps, down a dark hall to a door that he opened with one of the twenty or more keys on his ring.
Minnie Hershey, in a pink kimono trimmed with yellow ostrich feathers that looked like little dead ferns, came out of the bedroom to meet us in the ​living-room. Her eyes got big when she saw me.
Rhino Tingley said: "You know this gentleman, Minnie?"
Minnie said: "Yes."
"You shouldn't have left Leggetts' that way. Nobody thinks you had anything to do with the diamonds. What did Miss Leggett want here?"
"There been no Miss Leggetts here," she told me. "I don't know what you talking about.
"She came out just as we were coming in."
"Oh, Miss Leggett! I thought you said Mrs. Leggett. I beg your pardon. Yes, sir. Miss Gabrielle was sure enough here. She wanted to know if I wouldn't come back. She thinks a powerful lot of me, Miss Gabrielle does."
That, I thought, is a lie.
"That," I said, "is what you ought to do. It was foolish—leaving like that." Rhino Tingley took the cigar out of his mouth and pointed it at the girl, "You away from them," he boomed, "and you stay away from them, You don't have to take nothing from nobody." He put a hand in his pants pocket, lugged out a thick bundle of paper money, thumped it down on the table, and rumbled: "What for you have to work for folks?"
He was talking to the girl, but looking at me, grinning, gold teeth shining. The bundle of money was on the table close to me. I picked it up, counted it—eleven hundred and sixty-five dollars—and dropped it on the table again. Rhino, still grinning, returned it to his pocket.
The girl looked at the man, said scornfully, "Lead him around, vino," and turned to me again, her small face tense, anxious to be believed, saying:
"Rhino got that money in a crap game, mister, Hope to die if he didn't."
I assured her that I believed every word she said, again advised her to go back to the Leggetts, and departed.
Downtown, in an Owl drug store, I looked in the Berkeley section of the telephone directory, found only one Freemander listed, and called it. Mrs. Begg was there, and she told me she could see me if I came over right away. I caught the next ferry. The Freemander house was set off a road that wound uphill toward the University of California.
Mrs. Begg was a scrawny, big-boned woman, with not much gray hair packed close around a bony skull, hard gray eyes, and hard, capable hands. She was sour and severe, but plain-spoken enough to let us talk turkey without a lot of preliminary hemming and hawing.
I told her about the theft of the diamonds and my belief that the burglar had been helped, at least with information, by somebody who knew the Leggett household, and added:
"Mrs. Priestly told me you had been Leggett's housekeeper a few years ago, and thought you could help me."
Mrs, Begg said she doubted if she could tell me anything that would help me, but she was willing to do all she could, being an honest woman and having nothing to conceal from anybody. Once she started, she told me a great deal, damned near talking me earless. Throwing out the stuff that didn't interest me, I came away with the following information:
In the spring of 1921 Mrs. Begg had been hired by Leggett, through an agency, as housekeeper. At first she had a girl to help her, but there wasn't work enough for both, so, at her suggestion, the girl was let go. Leggett was a man of simple tastes, and spent most of his time on the top floor, where he had his laboratory and bedroom. He seldom used the rest of the house except when he had friends in for an evening. Mrs. Begg didn't like his friends, though she could tell me nothing about them except that "the way they talked was a shame and a disgrace."
Edgar Leggett was as nice a man as a person could want to know, she said, only so secretive that he made a person nervous. She was never allowed to go up on the top floor, and the doors were ​kept locked. Once a month he would have a Jap in to clean up under his supervision. Well, she supposed he had a lot of scientific secrets, and maybe dangerous chemicals, that he didn't want people poking into, but just the same it a person uneasy.
She didn't know anything about her employer, and knew her place better than to ask him. In August, 1923―it was a rainy morning, she remembered―a woman and a girl of fifteen with a lot of suitcases arrived at the house. She let them in and the woman asked for Mr. Leggett. Mrs. Begg went up to the laboratory and told him, and he came down. Never in all her born days had she seen such a surprised man as he was when he saw them. He turned absolutely white and she thought he was going to fall down, he shook so bad.
She didn't know what Leggett said to the woman and girl, because they all jabbered in some foreign language, though the lot of them could talk as good English as anybody else, and better than most. She went about her work. Pretty soon Leggett came out to the kitchen and told her the visitors were a Mrs. Dain, his sister-in-law, and her daughter Gabrielle, neither of whom he had seen for ten years, and that they were going to stay with him. Mrs. Dain later told the housekeeper that they were English but had been living in New York for several years. Mrs. Begg said she liked Mrs. Dain, who was a sensible woman and a real housewife, but Gabrielle was a tartar.
With Mrs, Dain's arrival, and with her ability as a housekeeper, there was no longer any place in the household for Mrs. Begg. They had been very liberal with her, she said, helping her find a new place and giving her a generous bonus when she left. She had seen none of them since, but in the Examiner a week later―she was the sort of woman who keeps a careful watch on marriages, deaths and births―she saw that a marriage license had been issued to Edgar Leggett and Alice Dain.
IV
When I arrived at the Agency at nine the next morning, Eric Collinson was sitting in the outer office. His sunburned face was dingy without pinkness, and he had neglected to put stick-em on his hair.
"Do you know anything about Miss Leggett?" he asked, jumping up and striding toward me as soon as I appeared in the doorway. "She wasn't home last night, and she's not home yet. Her father wouldn't say he didn't know where she was, but I'm sure he didn't. He told me not to worry, but how can I help worrying? Do you know anything about it?"
I said I didn't, told him I had seen her leaving Minnie Hershey's, gave him the mulatto's address, and suggested that he see if he could learn anything from her. He jammed his hat on his head and hurried out of the office. Getting O'Gar on the phone, I asked if he had heard from New York.
"Uh-huh. Upton—that's his right—name was once a private detective, till '23, when him and a fellow named Harry Ruppert were sent over to Sing Sing for fixing a jury. They were sprung last month. How'd you make out with the dinges?"
"Her man—a big smoke called Rhino Tingley—is toting an eleven-hundred-buck roll. He says he won it in a crapgame. It's more than he could have got for the diamonds, but maybe the diamonds aren't the big item in this job. Suppose you have Rhino looked up."
O'Gar said he would and hung up.
I wired our New York branch for additional dope on Upton and Ruppert, and then trotted up to the County Clerk's office, in the City Hall, and dug into the August and September, 1923, marriage licenses. I found the applications I wanted, dated August 26. Edgar Leggett had stated that he was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 6, 1883, ​and that this was his second marriage. Alice Dain had given London as her birthplace, October 22, 1888, as the date, and had stated that she had never been married before.
That clicked with my opinion that Gabrielle, if not the daughter of both, was more likely the man's than the woman's.
When I got back to the Agency, Eric Collinson, his yellow hair still further disarranged, confronted me again.
"I saw Minnie," he said excitedly, "and she wouldn't tell me anything. She said Gaby was there last night to ask her to come back to work, but that's all she knows about her. But she―she was wearing an emerald ring which I'm positive is Gaby's."
"Did you ask her about it?"
"Who? Minnie? No. How could I? It would have been―you know."
"That's right," I agreed, "we must always be polite. Why did you lie to me about the time you and Miss Leggett got home the other night?"
His face got stupider than ever with embarrassment.
"That was silly of me," he stammered, "but I didn't―I was afraid you'd―I thought that―"
He wasn't getting anywhere. I suggested:
"You thought that was too late for her to be out and didn't want me to get wrong notions about her?"
"Yes, that's it."
I thought of Little's Chevalier Bayard, hid my grin, and shooed Collinson out.
In the operatives’ room, where Mickey Linehan—big, loose-hung, red-faced—and Al Mason—slim, dark, sleek—were swapping lies about the times they had been shot at, each pretending to have been more frightened than the other. I told them who was who in my diamond job and sent Al out to keep an eye on the Leggetts, Mickey to see how Minnie and Rhino behaved.
Mrs. Leggett, a worried shadow on her pleasant face, opened the door when I rang her bell an hour later. We went up to the green, orange and chocolate room, where we were joined by her husband.
I passed on to them the information about Upton that O'Gar had got from New York, and told them I had wired for additional information on Harry Ruppert.
"Some of your neighbors saw a man who was not Upton loitering around, and the same man was seen running down the fire-escape from Upton's room. There's no reason why he couldn't have been Ruppert."
Nothing changed in the scientist's too bright red-brown eyes They held interest and nothing else. No muscle flickered in his face.
I asked "Is Miss Leggett in?"
"No," he replied.
"When will she be?"
"Probably not for several days."
"Where can I find her?" I asked, turning to Mrs. Leggett. "I've some questions to ask her."
Mrs. Leggett avoided my gaze, looking at her husband. His metallic voice answered my question:
"We don't know, exactly. Friends of hers, a Mr. and Mrs. Harper, drove up from Los Angeles and asked her to go with them on their trip up in the mountains. I don't know which route they are taking, and doubt if they had any definite plans."
I didn't believe that. I asked questions about the Harpers. Edgar Leggett admitted knowing very little about them. Mrs. Harper's given name was Carmel, he said, and everybody called the man Bud, but he, Leggett, didn't know either his first name or his initials. Nor did he know their Los Angeles address. He thought they had a house somewhere near Pasadena, but he wasn't sure.
While he told me all this nonsense, his wife sat staring at the floor, lifting her blue eyes now and then to look swiftly, pleadingly, at her husband.
​"Don't you know more about them than that?" I asked her.
"N-no," she said weakly, darting a timid look at her husband's face, while he, paying no attention to her, stared levelly at me.
"When did they leave?" I asked.
"Early this morning," Leggett told me. "They were staying at one of the hotels―I don't know which―and Gabrielle spent the night with them, so they could make an early start."
I had enough of the Harpers.
"Did any of you have any dealings with Upton before this affair?" I asked.
"No."
There were other questions to which I would have liked answers, but the sort of replies he gave me answered nothing. I was tempted to tell him what I thought of him, but there was no profit in that. I stood up.
He got on his feet, smiling apologetically, and said:
"I'm sorry to have caused the insurance company all this trouble and expense. After all, the diamonds were probably lost because of my carelessness in not safeguarding them. I should like your opinion: do you really think I should accept responsibility for the loss and make it good?"
"I think you should," I replied, "but that won't stop the investigation."
Mrs. Leggett put her handkerchief to her mouth quickly. Leggett said calmly:
"Thanks. I'll have to think it over."
On my way back to the Agency I dropped in on Owen Fitzstephan for a half-hour visit. He was writing, he told me, an article for the Psychopathological Review, or something of the sort, condemning the hypothesis of an unconscious or subconscious mind as a snare and delusion, a pitfall for the unwary and a set of false whiskers for the charlatan, a gap in psychology's roof that made it impossible, or nearly, for the sound scientist to smoke out such faddists as, for example, the psychoanalyst and the behaviorist. He went on like that for ten minutes or more before he came back to the United States with:
"How are you getting along with the problem of the elusive diamonds?"
"This way and that way," I said, and told him all I had done and learned so far.
"You've certainly," he complimented me when I had finished, "got it all as tangled and confused as possible."
"It'll be worse before it's better," I predicted. "I'd like to have ten minutes alone with Mrs. Leggett. Away from her husband, I imagine things could be got out of her. Could you do anything with her?"
"I'll try. Suppose I go out there tomorrow afternoon, to borrow a book―Waite's Rosy Cross will do it. They know I'm interested in that sort of stuff. He will be working in the laboratory and I'll insist on not disturbing him, and perhaps I can get something from her, though it'll have to be in a casual, offhand way."
I thanked him, returned to the Agency, and spent most of the afternoon putting my findings on paper and trying to fit them together in some sort of order. Eric Collinson phoned twice to ask if I had found his Gabrielle. Neither Mickey Linehan nor Al Mason sent in any report. At six o'clock I called it a day.
V
The following day brought happenings.
Early in the morning there was a telegram from our New York branch. Decoded, it read:
That placed Harry Ruppert; he was undoubtedly the man Mrs. Priestly and Darley had seen, and the man who had been seen leaving Upton's room.
My phone rang. Detective-sergeant O'Gar:
"That nigger Rhino Tingley of yours was picked up last night in a hock shop, trying to unload some jewelry, pretty good junk. We haven't been able to crack him yet―just got him identified this morning. I sent the stuff out to Leggett's, thinking maybe they'd know something about it, but they didn't."
"Try Halstead & Beauchamp," I suggested. "Tell them you think the stuff is Gabrielle Leggett's, but don't tell them the Leggetts have said 'no.'"
Half an hour later O'Gar phoned me from the jeweler's, telling me that Halstead had positively identified two pieces―a string of pearls and a topaz brooch―as articles Leggett had purchased there, gifts for his daughter.
"Fine!" I said. "Now will you do this? Go out to Rhino's house and put the screws on his woman, Minnie Hershey. Frisk the joint, rough her up, the more you scare her the better, but don't stay too long, and then beat it, leaving her alone. I've got her covered. I'll give you all the explanations later."
"I'll turn her white," O'Gar promised.
Dick Foley was in the operatives' room, writing a report on a warehouse robbery that had kept him up all night. I chased him out to help Mickey Linehan with Minnie.
"Both of you tail her if she leaves her joint after the police are through," I instructed him, "and as soon as you put her anywhere, one of you get to a phone and let me know."
I went back to my cubbyhole and burned cigarettes. I was destroying the third one when Eric Collinson called up to ask if I had learned anything yet.
"Nothing definite, but I've got prospects. If you aren't busy you might come over here and wait with me."
He said, very eagerly, that he would do that.
Five minutes later Mickey Linehan phoned:
"The high yellow's in the Primrose Hotel on Mason Street,"
The phone rang again by the time I had put it down.
"This is Watt Halstead," a voice said. "Can you come down?"
"Not right now. Perhaps not for several hours. Is it―?"
"It's about Edgar Leggett, and it's quite puzzling. The police brought in some jewelry this morning, asking if we could tell whether it belonged to Gabrielle Leggett. I recognized a string of pearls and a brooch which her father bought from us last year―the brooch in the spring, the pearls at Christmas. After the police had gone I, quite naturally, phoned Leggett, and he took the most peculiar attitude. He waited until I had told him all about it, then said, 'I thank you very much for your interference in my affairs,' and hung up. What do you suppose is the matter with him?"
"God knows. Thanks. I've got to run now, but I'll be in as soon as I can."
Eric Collinson had arrived while I was listening to the jeweler's story.
"Just a minute," I told the blond youngster, "and we'll dash out on what might not be a false alarm."
I called Information, got Fitzstephan's number, had it rung, and heard his drawled "Hello."
"You'd better get going with your ​book-borrowing, if any good's to come it," I advised him.
"Why? Are things taking place?"
"Things are."
"Such as?"
"This and that, but it's no time for anybody who wants to poke into the Great Leggett Mystery to be dilly-dallying with pieces about unconscious minds."
"Come on," I told Collinson, putting the phone down and leading the way to the elevators.
He had a Chrysler roadster around the corner. We got in it and bucked traffic and traffic signals for the ten blocks that lay between our starting point and the Primrose Hotel, a gaudy establishment of the fly-by-night variety, run by an ex-tent-showman named Felix Weber.
I made Collinson drive past the hotel to the next corner, where Mickey Linehan was leaning his lopsided bulk against a garage door. He came to us when we stopped at the curb.
"The shine left ten minutes ago," he reported, "with Dick behind her. Nobody else has been out that looks like any of the birds you told us about."
"You camp in the car and watch the door," I told him. "We're going in. Let me do the talking," I instructed Collinson as we walked back to the Primrose, "and try not breathing so hard. Everything will come out O.K."
At the desk I asked for Weber and was directed to a frosted glass door marked Manager's Office. Weber, a little fat blond man with round blue childish eyes and no conscience, looked up from his desk when we came in, and then jumped up to shake my hand enthusiastically. We were old friends. We were old friends. Ten years back I had just barely missed putting him in the West Virginia big-house for a swindle, and wouldn't have missed if he hadn't had too much money to spend on witnesses. In the same affair he had just barely missed putting a .45 slug in my body, and wouldn't have missed if he hadn't had too much white mule in him. I introduced Collinson and said:
"We're looking for a girl who probably came here night before last. Her name is Leggett, no matter what one she's using. A girl of twenty, medium height and build, with a small face, pointed chin, white skin. Maybe she was wearing a brown coat and a brown and yellow hat. She here?"
"I'll see," he said, starting for the door.
"Never mind seeing. If she owes you anything we'll pay it, so you won't have to find out if she does, and collect it, before you let us have her." He came back from the door, smiling good-naturedly, saying:
"She's in 416, registered as Geraldine Long. What do you want her for?"
"We're going up to see her. The chances are she'll leave with us, so have the bill, if any, ready when we come down."
Outside the manager's door, Collinson put a hand on my arm and mumbled:
"I don't know whether I—whether we ought to do this. She won't—"
"Suit yourself," I growled, "but I'm going up. Maybe she won't like it, but neither do I like people running away and hiding when I want to ask them about diamonds."
He frowned, chewed his lip, and made uncomfortable faces, but he went along with me. We found room 416, and I tapped the door with the backs of my fingers. There was no answer. I knocked again, louder.
Behind the door a voice spoke. It might have been anybody's voice, though probably a woman's, but it was too faint for identification, too smothered for us to know what it was saying.
I poked Collinson with my elbow and ordered:
"Call her."
He pulled at his collar with a forefinger and called hoarsely:
"Gaby, it's Eric."
That didn't bring any answer.
​I thumped the door again and called: "Open the door." The voice said something that was nothing to me. I repeated my thumping and calling. Down the corridor a door opened and a pasty-faced boy with patent-leather hair stuck his head out to ask: "What's the matter?"
I said, "None of your damned business," and pounded 416 again.
The voice inside rose strong enough now for us to know that it was complaining, though no words could be made out.
Then a bed creaked. Feet rustled on carpet. Presently the key rattled on the other side of the lock.
When the lock clicked, I turned the knob and pushed the door open.
"Good God!" Eric Collinson exclaimed chokingly.
Gabrielle Leggett stood there, swaying a little. Her face was white as paper. Her eyes were all brown, dull, focused on nothing, and her tiny forehead was wrinkled, as if she knew there was something in front of her and was trying to decide what it was.
She had on one yellow stocking, a brown velvet skirt that was wrinkled as if it had been slept in, and a yellow chemise. Scattered around the room were a pair of brown slippers, the other stocking, a brown and gold blouse, a brown coat and a brown and yellow hat.
I pushed Collinson into the room, followed him, and closed the door, turning the key. He stood gaping at the girl, his jaw sagging, his eyes as vacant as hers, though more horrified. She leaned unsteadily against the wall beside the door and started at nothing with her dark, blank eyes and ghastly, puzzled face.
I put an arm around her and led her to the bed, telling Collinson:
"Gather up the clothes." I had to tell him twice before he came out of his trance.
The girl went docilely across the room with me—if I had let go of her she would have stopped still where I left her—and let me set her down on the edge of the rumpled bed.
Collinson had finished gathering up her clothes when fingers drummed on the door.
"Well?" I called.
Weber's voice, full of curiosity:
"Everything all right?"
"Swell! Will you send a boy down to the corner and tell the man in the Chrysler roadster to drive up to the door and wait. The boy can't miss him—a big man with ears like a pair of red wings and a wide, red face."
With disappointment in his voice, Weber promised to send, and went away from the door. I began dressing the girl.
Collinson dug his fingers in my shoulder and protested in a tone that would have been appropriate if I had been robbing an altar:
"No! You can't—"
I pushed his hand away, growling:
"What the hell? You can have the job if you want it."
He was sweating. He gulped and stuttered:
"No. No. It—I couldn't—" He broke off and walked to the window.
"She told me you were an ass," I said to his back, and discovered that I was putting the brown and gold blouse on backward.
She gave me no more assistance than if she had been a wax figure, but at least she didn't struggle when I pushed her around and she stayed in whatever position I shoved her. Putting on her stockings, I found another physical peculiarity to add to the list Fitzstephan and I had made. There were only four toes on her foot, three small ones—instead of the normal four—beside the big toe. I felt her other foot through its stocking and found it the same.
By the time I had got her into hat and coat, Collinson had come away from the window and was spluttering questions at me. What was the matter room with her? Oughtn't we get a doctor? Was it safe to take her out? And when ​I stood up he took her away from me, supporting her with his long, muscular arms, babbling "It's Eric, Gaby. Don't you know me? Speak to me. What's the matter, dear?"
"There's nothing wrong with her except a skinful of dope," I said. "Don't try to bring her out of it now. Wait till we get her home. You take that arm and I'll take this. She can walk, and there's no use putting on a show for the public. Let's go."
We got her downstairs and into roadster without attracting any crowds. I sent Mickey up to her room to see what he could find; Collinson and I wedged the girl between us on the seat, and he put the car in motion.
We rode three blocks and he asked:
"Are you sure home is the best place for her?"
I said I was. He didn't say anything more for another five blocks and then repeated his question, adding something about a hospital.
"Why not a newspaper office?" I sneered.
Three blocks of silence, and he started again:
"I know a doctor who―"
"I've got work to do," I informed him, "and Miss Leggett, home now, in the shape she's in now, will help me do it. So she goes home."
He scowled at me, accusing me angrily:
"You'd humiliate her, disgrace her, endanger her life for the sake of—"
"Her life's in no more danger than yours or mine. She's simply got a little more hop in her than she can stand up under. And she took it. I didn't give it to her."
The subject of our argument was alive and breathing between us—even sitting up with her eyes open—but knowing no more of what was going on than if she had been in Finland.
We should have turned to the right at the next corner. Collinson held the car straight, and stepped it up to forty-five miles an hour, staring ahead, his face hard and lumpy.
"Take the next turn," I commanded.
"No," he said, and the speedometer showed a 50. People on the sidewalks began looking at us as we whizzed past.
"Well" I asked, wriggling an arm loose from the girl's side.
"We're going down the peninsular," he announced firmly. "She's not going home in that condition."
I grunted, "So?" and flashed my free the arm at the controls. He knocked my hand aside, holding the wheel with one hand, stretching the other out to block me if I should try to kill the engine I again.
"Don't do that," he cautioned me, increasing our speed another half-dozen miles. "You know what will happen to us all if you—"
I cursed him, bitterly, fairly thoroughly, and from the heart.
His face jerked around to me, full of righteous indignation, because, I suppose, my language wasn't the kind one should use in a lady's presence.
And that brought it about.
A blue sedan came out of a cross street a split second before we got there.
Collinson got his eyes and attention back to his driving in time to twist the roadster away from the sedan, but not in time to make a neat job of it.
We missed the sedan by a couple of inches, but as we passed behind it our rear wheels started sliding out of line. Collinson did what he could, giving the roadster its head, going with the skid, but the corner curb wouldn't co-operate. It stood stiff and hard where it was.
We hit the curb sidewise and rolled over on the lamp-post behind it. The lamp-post snapped, crashed down to the sidewalk. The roadster, over on its side, slipped us out on the lamp-post. Gas from the broken pipe roared up at our feet.
Collinson, most of the skin off one side of his face, crawled on all fours to the roadster and turned off the motor. I sat up, raising the girl, who was on ​my chest, with me. My right shoulder and arm were out of whack―dead. The girl was making whimpering noises in her chest, but I couldn't see any marks on her except a shallow scratch on one cheek. I had been her cushion, had taken the bump for her. The soreness of my chest and belly told me how much I had saved her.
People helped us up. Collinson stood with his arms around the girl, begging her to say she wasn't dead, and so on. The smash-up had shaken her into semi-consciousness, but she was still too full of narcotics to know whether there had been an accident or a wedding.
I went over and helped Collinson hold her up—though neither needed help—saying earnestly to the gathering crowd: "We've got to get her home. Who can—?"
A pudgy man in plus fours offered his and his car's services. Collinson and I sat in the back with the girl, and I gave the pudgy man her address. He said something about a hospital, but I insisted that home was the place for her. Collinson was too rattled over the girl's various troubles to say anything.
Twenty minutes later we were taking the girl out of the car in front of her house. I thanked the pudgy man profusely, giving him no opportunity to follow us indoors, and Collinson and I led the girl up the blue brick walk and up the front steps.
VI
The girl was now nearly enough awake to answer "No" when I asked her if she had a key. I rang the bell. The door was opened, after a little delay, by Owen Fitzstephan. There was no sleepiness left in his gray eyes; they were hot and bright, as they always got when he found life interesting. Knowing the sort of things that interested him, I wondered what had happened.
"What have you been doing?" he asked, looking at our clothes, at Collinson's scraped face, and at the girl's scratched cheek.
"Automobile accident," I explained "Nothing serious. Where's everybody?"
"Everybody," he said, stressing the word, "is up in the laboratory. Come here."
He took me across the reception hall to the foot of the stairs, leaving Collinson and the girl standing together by the door, put his mouth to my ear, and whispered:
"Leggett's committed suicide."
"Where is he?" I was more annoyed than surprised.
"In the laboratory. Mrs. Leggett and the police are up there, too. It happened not more than half an hour ago."
"We'll all go up," I decided.
"Isn't that," he protested, "rather unnecessarily brutal—taking the girl there?"
"Maybe," I said irritably, "but it can't be helped. Anyway, she's coked up and better able to stand the shock than she will be later, when the stuff's dying out in her." I turned to Collinson. "Come on, we'll all go up to the laboratory."
I went ahead, letting Fitzstephan help Collinson with the girl.
There were six people in the laboratory; a uniformed policeman, a big man with a red mustache, standing beside the open door; Mrs. Leggett, sitting on a wooden chair in the farther end of the room, her body bent forward, her hands holding a handkerchief to her face, sobbing quietly; O'Gar and Reddy, standing by one of the windows, close together, reading a sheaf of papers that the bullet-headed sergeant held in his thick fists; a gray-faced, dandified man in dark clothes, standing beside the zinc table, twiddling eye-glasses on a black ribbon in his hand; and Edgar Leggett, seated on a chair at the table, his head and upper body resting on the table, his arms sprawled out.
O'Gar and Reddy looked up from their reading as I came in. Passing the table, to join them at the window, I ​saw blood, a small black automatic pistol lying close to one of Leggett's hands, and seven unset diamonds grouped close to his head.
O'Gar said, "Take a look," and handed me part of his sheaf―four sheets of stiff white paper covered with very small, precise and plain handwriting in black ink. I was getting interested in what was written when Fitzstephan and Collinson came to the door with the girl.
Collinson saw what had happened in a glance. His face went white, and he put his big body between the girl and her dead father.
"Come in," I said.
"This is no place for Miss Leggett, in her condition," he replied hotly, turning to take her away.
We ought to have everybody in here," I told O'Gar. He nodded his bullet head at the policeman, who put a hand on Collinson's shoulder and said: "You'll have to come in, the both of you."
Fitzstephan placed a chair by one of the end windows for the girl. She sat in it and looked around the room―at the dead man, at Mrs. Leggett, who had not looked up, at all of us―with eyes that were dull, but no longer completely blank. Collinson stood beside her chair, looking belligerently at me.
I addressed O'Gar loudly enough for the rest to hear:
"Let's read Leggett's letter out loud."
He screwed up his eyes, hesitated, then thrust the rest of the sheets at me, saying:
"Fair enough. You read it."
Not wanting the job, I passed it on to Owen Fitzstephan. Standing beside me, he read:
Shortly after my marriage I had discovered that I had made a terrible mistake, that it was really Alice, and not Lily, whom I loved. I kept this discovery to myself until the child was past the more difficult baby years, that is, until she was nearly five. Then I told my wife, and asked her to divorce me so I could marry Alice. She refused.
On June 6, 1913, I shot and killed Lily, and fled with Alice and Gabrielle to London, where I was soon arrested and returned to Paris. There I was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. Alice, who had no part in the murder, and who had been horrified by it, and had gone to London with me only through her love for the child, was also tried, but, justly, acquitted.
If there is any humanity or human likeness left in me, it is not the fault of those who have made Devil's Island the almost perfect hell it is. In 1918 I escaped with a fellow convict named Jacques Labaud on a flimsy raft. Neither of us knew how long we were adrift in the ocean, nor, toward the last, how long we had been without food and water. A week, perhaps, but every hour was a new eternity. Then Labaud died. He died of exposure and starvation. I did not kill him. No living creature could have been feeble enough for me to kill. But when Labaud was dead there was enough food for one, and I lived until I was washed ashore in the Golfo Trieste.
Changing my name to Armand Bacot, I secured employment with a British copper mining company at Aroa, and within a few months became private secretary to Philip Howart, the resident manager. Shortly ​after that I was approached by a cockney named John Edge, who described to me a plan by which we could defraud the company. When I refused to take part in it, Edge told me he knew who I was, and threatened to expose me. That Venezuela had no extradition treaty with France would not save me, Edge said, since Labaud's body had been cast ashore, undecomposed enough to show what had happened to him, and I could not prove that I had not killed him in Venezuelan waters to keep from starving.
I still refused to take part in Edge's plan and made up my mind to go away. But before I could start, Edge killed Howart and robbed the company safe. He urged me to flee with him, arguing that I could not face the sort of investigation the police would make. That was true, and so I agreed. Two months later, in Mexico City, it became apparent to me why Edge had asked me to accompany him. He had a firm hold on me and expected to use me in crimes that were beyond his abilities. I was determined, no matter what happened, no matter what became necessary, I would never go back to Devil's Island, or to any prison, but neither did I intend becoming a professional criminal. I attempted to desert Edge, he found me, and we fought. I killed him, but it was in self-defense. He struck me first.
In 1920 I came to the United States, to San Francisco, changed my name once more, to Edgar Leggett, and began making a new career for myself, developing some experiments I had made with colors when I was a young artist. In 1923, believing that Edgar Leggett could never now be connected with Maurice de Mayenne, I sent for Alice and Gabrielle, who were then living in New York, and Alice and I were married.
But the past was not dead. Alice, not hearing from me after my escape, not knowing what had happened to me, employed a private detective to find me―a Louis Upton. He sent a man named Harry Ruppert to South America. Ruppert succeeded in tracing me step by step from my landing in the Golfo Trieste up to, but no farther than, my departure from Mexico City. In doing this he of course learned of the deaths of Labaud, Howart and Edge―three deaths of which I was innocent, but of which I most certainly should be convicted if tried.
I do not know how Upton found me here. Possibly he traced Alice and Gabrielle to me. Late last Saturday night he called on me and demanded money. Having no money available at the time, I put him off until Tuesday, when I gave him the diamonds as part payment of his demands. But I was desperate, and I knew what being at Upton's mercy would mean, so I determined to kill him. I decided to pretend a burglar had taken the diamonds, notifying the police. Upton, I was sure, would immediately communicate with me then, and I would make an appointment with him and shoot him down in cold blood. The diamonds would be found in his possession. It would not be difficult for me to fix up a story that would make me seem justified in killing this man whom the police would suppose was the burglar.
But Harry Ruppert―hunting for Upton, with a grudge against him―saved me that killing, himself shooting Upton. Ruppert, the man who had traced me through Venezuela and Mexico for Upton, had also―either by following Upton here or making Upton talk before killing him―learned my identity. With the police after him for Upton's murder, he came here, demanding that I shelter him from them, returning the incriminating diamonds to me, and demanding money in their stead.
Maurice De Mayenne.
Nobody said anything for a long moment after Fitzstephan had finished his reading. Mrs. Leggett had taken the handkerchief from her face, listening, sobbing now and then. Gabrielle Leggett was looking jerkily around the room light fighting cloudiness in her eyes, her lips writhing together as if she were trying to get words out but couldn't.
I went to the table, bent over the dead man, felt his clothes. The inside coat pocket was stuffed. I reached under his arm, unbuttoned and opened the coat, took a brown wallet out of the pocket. The wallet was thick with paper money―fifteen thousand dollars, when we counted it afterward.
Showing the wallet's contents to the others, I asked:
"He leave any message besides the one that's been read?"
"None that's been found," O'Gar replied. "Why?"
"He didn't commit suicide," I said. "He was murdered."
Gabrielle Leggett screamed piercingly and sprang out of her chair, pointing a sharp white finger at Mrs. Leggett.
"She killed him," the girl shrieked. "She said, 'Come back here,' and held the kitchen door open with one hand, and picked up the butcher-knife from the drainboard with the other, and he went past her she pushed it in his back. I saw her do it. I wasn't dressed, and when I heard them coming, I hid in the pantry."
Mrs. Leggett got to her feet, her face washed empty by amazement and grief. She staggered and would have fallen if Fitzstephan hadn't gone over to steady her.
The gray-faced, dandified man by the table―a Doctor Riese, learned later—said in a cold, crisp voice:
"There is no stab wound. He was shot through the temple by a bullet from this pistol, held close, slanting up. Clearly suicide, I should say."
Collinson forced the girl down in her chair again, trying to calm her.
I disagreed with the doctor's last statement, and said so, while my brains were busy with another matter:
"Murder. His letter is the letter of a man who is still fighting. There's plenty of determination in it, but no despair. When he wrote it he meant to go away. If he had intended to kill himself he would have left some word for his wife and daughter. How was he found?"
"I heard," Mrs. Leggett sobbed, "I heard the shot, and ran up here, and he―he was like that. And I went down to the telephone, and the bell―the doorbell―rang―and it was Mr. Fitzstephan, and I told him. It couldn't―there was nobody else in the house to―to kill him.".
"You killed him," I said to her. "He was going away. He wrote this statement, taking the blame for your crimes. You killed Ruppert down in the kitchen. That's what the girl was talking about. Your husband's statement sounded enough like a suicide letter to pass for one, you thought, so you murdered him—murdered him believing that his death and confession would close up the whole business, stop us from poking into it any more."
Her face didn't tell me anything. It was distorted, but in a way that might mean almost anything. I filled my lungs and went on, not exactly bellowing, but making plenty of noise:
"There are a half-dozen lies in your husband's statement——a half-dozen that I know of now. He didn't send for you and his daughter. Mrs. Begg said ​he was the most surprised man she had ever seen when you arrived from New York. He wouldn't have given Upton the diamonds and then called in the police. He'd have given him money or he would have killed him without giving him anything. Upton didn't come to Leggett with his demands; he came to you. You were the one he knew. His agency had traced Leggett here for you―not only to Mexico City―all the way here, but he and Ruppert had been jailed before they could bleed you. When he got out, he came here and made his play. You got the diamonds for him, and you didn't tell your husband anything about the burglary being a fake. Why? You didn't want him to know that you knew about his South American and Mexican murders. Why? A good additional hold on him, if you needed it? Anyway, you dealt with Upton.
"Maybe Ruppert had got in touch with you, and you had him kill Upton for you―a job he'd be glad to do on his own hook. Probably, because Ruppert did kill Upton, and he did come to see you afterward, and you thought it necessary to put the knife in him down in the kitchen. You didn't know that the girl, concealed in the pantry, saw it. Horrified, having known all along that her father had killed her mother, seeing you now kill a man, she got dressed and ran away from this slaughter-house, taking her jewelry to Minnie to sell, drugging herself into forgetfulness.
"You didn't know she had seen you kill Ruppert, but you did know you had got out of your depth. You did know that your chances of disposing of the body were slim―your house was too much in the spotlight. So you played your only part, you told your husband the whole thing, got him to shoulder it for you, and then handed him his―here at the table.
"He shielded you. He had always shielded you. You," I thundered, my voice in fine form by now, "killed your sister Lily, his first wife, and let him take the fall for you. You went to London with him afterward. Would you have gone with your sister's murderer if you were innocent? You had him traced here, and you came here after him, and you married him. You were the one who decided that he had married the wrong sister―and you killed her."
"She did, she did!" cried Gabrielle Leggett, trying to get up from the chair in which Collinson held her. "She―"
Mrs. Leggett drew herself up straight, and smiled, showing white teeth set edge to edge, and came two steps toward the center of the room. One hand was on her hip, the other hanging at her hand side. The housewife―Fitzstephan's "serene, sane soul"―was gone; this was a wild animal in the form of a blonde woman―except the eyes, which were the animal's own. Even her body seemed now not rounded with the plumpness of well-cared-for early middle age; it was rounded as a tiger's or panther's is, with cushioned, soft-sheathed muscles.
I picked the gun up from the table and put it in my pocket.
"You wish to know who killed my sister?" she asked softly, speaking to me, her teeth clicking together between words, her lips smiling, her eyes burning. "She―the dope fiend―Gabrielle―she killed her mother. She is the one he shielded."
The girl cried out something unintelligible.
"Nonsense," I said. "She was a baby."
"Oh, but it is not nonsense," the woman insisted. "She was nearly five, a child of five playing with a pistol she had taken from a drawer while her mother slept. The pistol went off, and Lily died. An accident, of course, but Maurice, a sensitive soul, could not bear that the child should grow up knowing that her hand had sent her mother out of this world. Besides, it was likely that Maurice would have been convicted in any event. He and I had been intimate, you know. But that was a slight matter to him. His one thought ​was to erase from the child's mind all memory of the accident, so she might never remember what she had done, so her life might not be darkened by the knowledge that she had, even though accidentally, killed her mother."
It wouldn't have been so bad if she hadn't been smiling so coolly as she talked, selecting her words so carefully, almost fastidiously, and mouthing them so daintily. She went on:
"Gabrielle was always, even before she began using drugs, a child of, one might say, limited mentality, so by the time the London police found us we had succeeded in quite emptying her mind of the last trace of memory, that is, of that particular memory. This is, I assure you, the truth of the whole affair. She killed her mother, and her father―to use your quaint expression―'took the fall for her.'"
"Fairly plausible," I said, "but weak in spots. You're trying to hurt her because she witnessed your latest murder."
She pulled her lips back from her teeth and started toward me, her eyes flaring, then checked herself, laughed sharply, and began talking again, rapidly, with a hysterical swing or cadence to her words, almost as if she were singing:
"Am I? Then I must tell you this, which I should not tell unless it were true. I taught her to kill her mother. Do you understand? I taught her, trained her, drilled her. Do you understand that? Lily and I were true sisters, inseparable, hating one another poisonously. Maurice―he wished to marry neither of us, though he was intimate enough with both. You are to understand that literally. But we were poor and he was not, and because he was not, Lily wanted to marry him. And because Lily wanted to, I wanted to. We were like that in all things. But she got him—first—trapped him into matrimony.
"Gabrielle was born six or seven months later. I lived with them. What a happy little family we were! From the first Gabrielle loved me more than her mother. I saw to that; there was nothing Aunt Alice wouldn't do for her niece, because her preferring me infuriated Lily. It infuriated Lily, not because she herself loved the child, but because we had always hated one another, had always each tried to take everything from the other. When Gabrielle was no more than a year old I planned what I would some day do.
"When she was nearly five I did it. I taught her a little amusing game. Maurice's pistol, a small one, was kept in a locked drawer high in a chiffonier. I unlocked the drawer, unloaded the pistol, and lay on Lily's bed, pretending I was asleep. The child pushed a chair over to the chiffonier, climbed on it, took the pistol from the drawer, crept across to the bed, put the muzzle of the pistol to my head, and pressed the trigger. When she did well, making little or no noise, holding the pistol correctly in both of her tiny hands, I rewarded her with candy, cautioning her to say nothing about the game to anyone else, as we were going to surprise her mother with it.
"We did; we surprised her completely, one afternoon when Lily, having taken asperin for a headache, was sleeping in her bed. I unlocked the drawer, but did not unload the pistol. Then I told the child she might play the game with her mother, and I went down to visit friends on the floor below, so no one would think I had anything to do with my dear sister's death. I thought Maurice would be out all afternoon, and intended, as soon as we heard the shot, to rush upstairs with my friends and find that the child playing with the pistol had killed her mother.
"I had little fear of the child's talking afterward. Of, as I have said, no brilliant mentality, loving and trusting me as she did, and in my hands both before and during the official inquiry into her mother's death, it would have been very easy for me to control her, to be ​sure she said nothing that would reveal my part in the―ah―enterprise. But Maurice, coming home unexpectedly, came to the bedroom door just as Gabrielle pressed the trigger, the tiniest fraction of a second too late to save his wife's life. His subsequent desire to wipe all memory of the deed from the child's mind made any further effort, or anxiety, on my part unnecessary. I did follow him here, and I used Gabrielle's love for me and her hatred of him―which I had carefully cultivated by deliberately clumsy attempts to make her forgive him for killing her mother-to persuade him to marry me, so that Gabrielle, whom he loved, could be kept close to him. The day he married Lily I swore I would take him away from her―and I did―and I hope my dear sister in hell knows it!"
Her face had changed as she talked―or chanted―her eyes growing wilder, the wildness spreading down from them, making her face less and less human. By now the last trace of sanity was gone from voice and features. She spun to face the girl across the room, flung an arm out toward her, screamed. shrilly:
"You're her daughter, and you're cursed with the same rotten soul and black blood that she and I and all the Dains have had; you're cursed with your mother's death on your hands before you were five; you're cursed with the warped mind and the need for drugs that I've given you in pay for your silly love since you were a baby. Your life will be black as Lily's and mine were black; the lives of those you touch will be black as Maurice's was black; and the—"
"Stop!" Collinson gasped brokenly. "Make her stop!"
Gabrielle Leggett, both hands to her ears, her face twisted with terror, shrieked once—horribly—and fell forward out of her chair.
Reddy was young at the game, but O'Gar and I should have known better than to lose sight of Mrs. Leggett, even for a half-second, no matter how strongly Collinson's gasp and the girl's shriek drew our attention. But we did look at them―if for less than a half-second―and that was long enough.
When we looked at Mrs. Leggett again, she had a gun in her hand, and she had taken a step toward the door.
Nobody was between her and the door. Nobody was behind her, because her back was to the door and by turning she had brought Fitzstephan into her field of vision.
She glared savagely over the black gun, crazy eyes darting from one to an other of us, taking another step backward, snarling:
"Don't you move!"
Pat Reddy shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. I frowned at him, shaking my head. The hall or stairs were better places in which to take her alive. In here somebody would die.
She went over the sill, blew her breath between her teeth with a hissing, spitting sound, and was gone down the hall.
Owen Fitzstephan was first through the door after her. The policeman got in my way, but I was second out. The woman had reached the head of the stairs, at the other end of the dim hall, with Fitzstephan, not far behind, rapidly overtaking her.
He caught her on the mid-floor landing just as I reached the top of the stairs. He had one of her arms pinned to her body, but the hand holding the gun was free. He grabbed at it and missed.
She twisted the muzzle in to his body as I—with my head bent to miss the edge of the floor—leaped down at them.
I landed on them just in time, crashing into them, smashing them into the corner of the wall, sending her bullet, meant for the sorrel-haired man, ripping into a step.
None of us was standing up. I caught with both hands at the flash of her gun, missed, and had her by the waist. Close to my chin, the novelist's ​lean fingers closed around her gun-hand wrist.
She twisted her body against my right arm, which, benumbed in the automobile accident, wouldn't hold. Her thick body heaved up, turning over on me.
Gunfire roared in my ear, burnt my cheek. The woman's body went limp. When O'Gar and Reddy pulled us apart she lay still. The last bullet had torn through her throat.
I went up to the laboratory. Gabrielle Leggett, with Collinson and the doctor kneeling beside her, was lying on the floor. I told the doctor:
"Mrs. Leggett's dead, I think, but you'd better see if there's any chance. She's on the stairs."
The doctor went out. Collinson, chafing the unconscious girl's hands, looked at me as if I were something he didn't like, and said:
"I hope now you're satisfied with the manner in which your work got done."
"I'm not particularly satisfied with the manner," I told him, "but"―stubbornly ―"it got done."
Collinson returned his attention to the girl, who had moved an arm.
I walked down the hall toward the stairs, repeating my last three words―It got done. I didn't think I was soft-headed enough to have been impressed by Mrs. Leggett's curse, yet I didn't feel that everything was done here. I hadn't the sort of satisfaction you feel when you've completely and finally wound up a job. The diamonds had been recovered; their going had been explained; and everybody who might have been jailed over their going was dead. There were no loose ends that I knew of. Nevertheless. . . . I gave it up, telling myself as I went downstairs:
"Well, if more comes, it'll come."
I was, it turned out, right about that.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1961, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 63 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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