Continental Op Stories

Jim Tarr picked up the cigar I rolled across his desk, looked at the band, bit off an end, and reached for a match.

“Fifteen cents straight,” he said. “You must want me to break a couple of laws for you this time.”

I had been doing business with this fat sheriff of Sacramento County for four or five years⁠—ever since I came to the Continental Detective Agency’s San Francisco office⁠—and I had never known him to miss an opening for a sour crack; but it didn’t mean anything.

“Wrong both times,” I told him. “I get two of them for a quarter; and I’m here to do you a favor instead of asking for one. The company that insured Thornburgh’s house thinks somebody touched it off.”

“That’s right enough, according to the fire department. They tell me the lower part of the house was soaked with gasoline, but God knows how they could tell⁠—there wasn’t a stick left standing. I’ve got McClump working on it, but he hasn’t found anything to get excited about yet.”

“What’s the layout? All I know is that there was a fire.”

Tarr leaned back in his chair, turned his red face to the ceiling, and bellowed:

“Hey, Mac!”

The pearl push-buttons on his desk are ornaments as far as he is concerned. Deputy sheriffs McHale, McClump and Macklin came to the door together⁠—MacNab apparently wasn’t within hearing.

“What’s the idea?” the sheriff demanded of McClump. “Are you carrying a bodyguard around with you?”

The two other deputies, thus informed as to who “Mac” referred to this time, went back to their cribbage game.

Harvey Gatewood had issued orders that I was to be admitted as soon as I arrived, so it only took me a little less than fifteen minutes to thread my way past the doorkeepers, office boys, and secretaries who filled up most of the space between the Gatewood Lumber Corporation’s front door and the president’s private office. His office was large, all mahogany and bronze and green plush, with a mahogany desk as big as a bed in the center of the floor.

Gatewood, leaning across the desk, began to bark at me as soon as the obsequious clerk who had bowed me in bowed himself out.

“My daughter was kidnapped last night! I want the ⸻ that did it if it takes every cent I got!”

“Tell me about it,” I suggested, drawing up the chair that he hadn’t thought to offer me.

But he wanted results, it seemed, and not questions, and so I wasted nearly an hour getting information that he could have given me in fifteen minutes.

The Montgomery is a quiet hotel of the better sort, and so I had a very restful time of it⁠—until the third and last day.

Then things changed.

I came down into the lobby that afternoon to find Stacey, the assistant manager on duty at the time, hunting for me.

“One of the maids just phoned that there’s something wrong up in 906,” he said.

We went up to that room together. The door was open. In the center of the floor stood a maid, staring goggle-eyed at the closed door of the clothespress. From under it, extending perhaps a foot across the floor toward us, was a snake-shaped ribbon of blood.

I stepped past the maid and tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it. Slowly, rigidly, a man pitched out into my arms⁠—pitched out backward⁠—and there was a six-inch slit down the back of his coat, and the coat was wet and sticky.

That wasn’t altogether a surprise: the blood on the floor had prepared me for something of the sort. But when 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.

Peering through the smoke, I saw Orrett at once, seated alone in a far corner, looking at the dancers with the set blank face of one who masks an all-seeing watchfulness. I walked down the other side of the room and crossed the strip of dance-floor directly under a light, so that the scar might be clearly visible to him. Then I selected a vacant table not far from his, and sat down facing him.

Ten minutes passed while he pretended an interest in the dancers and I affected a thoughtful stare at the dirty cloth on my table; but neither of us missed so much as a flicker of the other’s lids.

His eyes⁠—grey eyes that were pale without being shallow, with black needlepoint pupils⁠—met mine after a while in a cold, steady, inscrutable stare; and, very slowly, he got to his feet. One hand⁠—his right⁠—in a side pocket of his dark coat, he walked straight across to my table and sat down opposite me.

“Cudner?”

“Looking for me, I hear,” I replied, trying to match the icy smoothness of his voice, as I was matching the steadiness of his gaze.

He had sat down with his left side turned slightly toward me, which put his right arm in not too cramped a position for straight shooting from the pocket that still held his hand.

Something cold touched the nape of my neck.

“Stand up!”

I didn’t stand up: I couldn’t. I was paralyzed. I sat and blinked at the Quarres.

And looking at them, I knew that something cold couldn’t be against the back of my neck; a harsh voice couldn’t have ordered me to stand up. It wasn’t possible!

Mrs. Quarre still sat primly upright against the cushions her husband had adjusted to her back; her eyes still twinkled with friendliness behind her glasses; her hands were still motionless in her lap, crossed at the wrists over the piece of knitting. The old man still stroked his white beard, and let cigar smoke drift unhurriedly from his nostrils.

They would go on talking about the young men in the neighborhood who might be the man I wanted. Nothing had happened. I had dozed.

“Get up!”

The cold thing against my neck jabbed deep into the flesh.

I stood up.

“Frisk him,” the harsh voice came from behind.

The old man carefully laid his cigar down, came to me, and ran his hands over my body. Satisfied that I was unarmed, he emptied my pockets, dropping the contents upon the chair that I had just left.

Mrs. Quarre was pouring herself some more tea.

“Thomas,” she said; “you’ve overlooked that little watch pocket in the trousers.”

He found nothing there.

“That’s all,” he told the man behind me, and returned to his chair and cigar.