It and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett Read Free Book Online

another followed him—facing me, this one, with a dark, distorted face—I dropped the one I had caught and jumped back.
    And as I jumped a third man came tumbling out after the others.
    From behind me came a scream and a thud as the maid fainted. I wasn’t feeling any too steady myself. I’m no sensitive plant, and I’ve looked at a lot of unlovely sights in my time, but for weeks afterward I could see those three dead men coming out of that clothespress to pile up at my feet: coming out slowly—almost deliberately—in a ghastly game of “follow your leader.”
    Seeing them, you couldn’t doubt that they were really dead. Every detail of their falling, every detail of the heap in which they now lay, had a horrible certainty of lifelessness in it.
    I turned to Stacey, who, deathly white himself, was keeping on his feet only by clinging to the foot of the brass bed.
    â€œGet the woman out! Get doctors—police!”
    I pulled the three dead bodies apart, laying them out in a grim row, faces up. Then I made a hasty examination of the room.
    A soft hat, which fitted one of the dead men, lay in the center of the unruffled bed. The room key was in the door, on the inside. There was no blood in the room except what had leaked out of the clothespress, and the room showed no signs of having been the scene of a struggle.
    The door to the bathroom was open. In the bottom of the bath tub was a shattered gin bottle, which, from the strength of the odor and the dampness of the tub, had been nearly full when broken. In one corner of the bathroom I found a small whisky glass, and another under the tub. Both were dry, clean, and odorless.
    The inside of the clothespress door was stained with blood from the height of my shoulder to the floor, and two hats lay in the puddle of blood on the closet floor. Each of the hats fitted one of the dead men.
    That was all. Three dead men, a broken gin bottle, blood.
    Stacey returned presently with a doctor, and while the doctor was examining the dead men, the police detectives arrived.
    The doctor’s work was soon done.
    â€œThis man,” he said, pointing to one of them, “was struck on the back of the head with a small blunt instrument, and then strangled. This one,” pointing to another, “was simply strangled. And the third was stabbed in the back with a blade perhaps five inches long. They have been dead for about two hours—since noon or a little after.”
    The assistant manager identified two of the bodies. The man who had been stabbed—the first to fall out of the clothespress—had arrived at the hotel three days before, registering as Tudor Ingraham of Washington, D. C., and had occupied room 915, three doors away.
    The last man to fall out—the one who had been simply choked—was the occupant of this room. His name was Vincent Develyn. He was an insurance broker and had made the hotel his home since his wife’s death, some four years before.
    The third man had been seen in Develyn’s company frequently, and one of the clerks remembered that they had come into the hotel together at about five minutes after twelve this day. Cards and letters in his pockets told us that he was Homer Ansley, a member of the law firm of Lankershim and Ansley, whose offices were in the Miles Building—next door to Develyn’s office, in fact.
    Develyn’s pockets held between $150 and $200; Ansley’s wallet contained more than $100; Ingraham’s pockets yielded nearly $300, and in a money belt around his waist we found $2200 and two medium-sized unset diamonds. All three had watches—Develyn’s was a valuable one—in their pockets, and Ingraham wore two rings, both of which were expensive ones. Ingraham’s room key was in his pocket.
    Beyond this money—whose presence would seem to indicate that robbery hadn’t been the motive behind the three killings—we found nothing on any of