Read Online Creeping Siamese and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett - Free Book Online

Healy’s—another hole. My reception was the same here—I was given a table and let alone. Healy’s orchestra was giving Don’t You Cheat , all they had, while those customers who felt athletic were romping it out on the dance-floor. One of the dancers was Jack Counihan, his arms full of a big olive-skinned girl with a pleasant, thick-featured, stupid face.
    Jack was a tall, slender lad of twenty-three or four who had drifted into the Continental’s employ a few months before. It was the first job he’d ever had, and he wouldn’t have had it if his father hadn’t insisted that if sonny wanted to keep his fingers in the family till he’d have to get over the notion that squeezing through a college graduation was enough work for one lifetime. So Jack came to the Agency. He thought gumshoeing would be fun. In spite of the fact that he’d rather catch the wrong man than wear the wrong necktie, he was a promising young thief-catcher. A likable youngster, well-muscled for all his slimness, smooth-haired, with a gentleman’s face and a gentleman’s manner, nervy, quick with head and hands, full of the don’t-give-a-damn gaiety that belonged to his youthfulness. He was jingle-brained, of course, and needed holding, but I would rather work with him than with a lot of old-timers I knew.
    Half an hour passed with nothing to interest me.
    Then a boy came into Healy’s from the street—a small kid, gaudily dressed, very pressed in the pants-legs, very shiny in the shoes, with an impudent sallow face of pronounced cast. This was the boy I had seen sauntering down Broadway a moment after Beno had been rubbed out.
    Leaning back in my chair so that a woman’s wide-hatted head was between us, I watched the young Armenian wind between tables to one in a far corner, where three men sat. He spoke to them—off-hand—perhaps a dozen words—and moved away to another table where a snub-nosed, black-haired man sat alone. The boy dropped into the chair facing snub-nose, spoke a few words, sneered at snub-nose’s questions, and ordered a drink. When his glass was empty he crossed the room to speak to a lean, buzzard-faced man, and then went out of Healy’s.
    I followed him out, passing the table where Jack sat with the girl, catching his eye. Outside, I saw the young Armenian half a block away. Jack Counihan caught up with me, passed me. With a Fatima in my mouth I called to him:
    â€œGot a match, brother?”
    While I lighted my cigarette with a match from the box he gave me I spoke behind my hands:
    â€œThe goose in the glad rags—tail him. I’ll string behind you. I don’t know him, but if he blipped Beno off for talking to me last night, he knows me. On his heels!”
    Jack pocketed his matches and went after the boy. I gave Jack a lead and then followed him. And then an interesting thing happened.
    The street was fairly well filled with people, mostly men, some walking, some loafing on corners and in front of soft-drink parlors. As the young Armenian reached the corner of an alley where there was a light, two men came up and spoke to him, moving a little apart so that he was between them. The boy would have kept walking apparently paying no attention to them, but one checked him by stretching an arm out in front of him. The other man took his right hand out of his pocket and flourished it in the boy’s face so that the nickel-plated knuckles on it twinkled in the light. The boy ducked swiftly under threatening hand and outstretched arm, and went on across the alley, walking, and not even looking over his shoulder at the two men who were now closing on his back.
    Just before they reached him another reached them—a broad-backed, long-armed, ape-built man I had not seen before. His gorilla’s paws went out together. Each caught a man. By the napes of their necks he yanked them away from the boy’s back, shook them till their hats