Red Harvest

I first heard Personville called “Poisonville” by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a “shoit.” I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make “richardsnary” the thieves’ word for “dictionary.” A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

Using one of the phones in the station, I called the Herald, asked for Donald Willsson, and told him I had arrived.

“Will you come out to my house at ten this evening?” He had a pleasantly crisp voice. “It’s 2101 Mountain Boulevard. Take a Broadway car, get off at Laurel Avenue, and walk two blocks west.”

I promised to do that. Then I rode up to the Great Western Hotel, dumped my bags, and went out to look at the city.

The city wasn’t pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters’ stacks.

The first policeman I saw needed a shave. The second had a couple of buttons off his shabby uniform.

I went in, into a ground floor room where a young woman sat at a table that had a lot of papers on it. Some of the papers were financial service bulletins, stock and bond market forecasts. One was a racing chart.

The room was disorderly, cluttered up. There were too many pieces of furniture in it, and none of them seemed to be in its proper place.

“Dinah,” the lunger introduced me, “this gentleman has come from San Francisco on behalf of the Continental Detective Agency to inquire into Mr. Donald Willsson’s demise.”

The young woman got up, kicked a couple of newspapers out of her way, and came to me with one hand out.

She was an inch or two taller than I, which made her about five feet eight. She had a broad-shouldered, full-breasted, round-hipped body and big muscular legs. The hand she gave me was soft, warm, strong. Her face was the face of a girl of twenty-five already showing signs of wear. Little lines crossed the corners of her big ripe mouth. Fainter lines were beginning to make nets around her thick-lashed eyes. They were large eyes, blue and a bit bloodshot.

Her coarse hair⁠—brown⁠—needed trimming and was parted crookedly. One side of her upper lip had been rouged higher than the other. Her dress was of a particularly unbecoming wine color, and it gaped here and there down one side, where she had neglected to snap the fasteners or they had popped open.

Old Elihu was in bed as before, but now a black automatic pistol lay on the covers close to one of his pink hands.

As soon as I appeared he took his head off the pillows, sat upright and barked at me:

“Have you got as much guts as you’ve got gall?”

His face was an unhealthy dark red. The film was gone from his eyes. They were hard and hot.

I let his question wait while I looked at the corpse on the floor between door and bed.

A short thickset man in brown lay on his back with dead eyes staring at the ceiling from under the visor of a gray cap. A piece of his jaw had been knocked off. His chin was tilted to show where another bullet had gone through tie and collar to make a hole in his neck. One arm was bent under him. The other hand held a blackjack as big as a milk bottle. There was a lot of blood.

I looked up from this mess to the old man. His grin was vicious and idiotic.

“You’re a great talker,” he said. “I know that. A two-fisted, you-be-damned man with your words. But have you got anything else? Have you got the guts to match your gall? Or is it just the language you’ve got?”

There was no use in trying to get along with the old boy. I scowled and reminded him:

“Didn’t I tell you not to bother me unless you wanted to talk sense for a change?”

Day was still a little way off. The street was the color of smoke. My feet made a lot of noise on the pavement.

I stopped in front of the door and knocked the glass with a knuckle, not heavily. The green blind down inside the door made a mirror of the glass. In it I saw two men moving up the other side of the street.

No sound came from inside. I knocked harder, then slid my hand down to rattle the knob.

Advice came from indoors:

“Get away from there while you’re able.”

It was a muffled voice, but not a whisper, so probably not Whisper’s.

“I want to talk to Thaler,” I said.

“Go talk to the lard-can that sent you.”

“I’m not talking for Noonan. Is Thaler where he can hear me?”

A pause. Then the muffled voice said: “Yes.”

“I’m the Continental op who tipped Dinah Brand off that Noonan was framing you,” I said. “I want five minutes’ talk with you. I’ve got nothing to do with Noonan except to queer his racket. I’m alone. I’ll drop my rod in the street if you say so. Let me in.”

I waited. It depended on whether the girl had got to him with the story of my interview with her. I waited what seemed a long time.

The muffled voice said:

“When we open, come in quick. And no stunts.”

“All set.”

The latch clicked. I plunged in with the door.

Across the street a dozen guns emptied themselves. Glass shot from door and windows tinkled around us.

All the other delegates to the peace conference were on hand when Noonan and I arrived at Willsson’s home at the appointed time, nine o’clock that night. Everybody nodded to us, but the greetings didn’t go any further than that.

Pete the Finn was the only one I hadn’t met before. The bootlegger was a big-boned man of fifty with a completely bald head. His forehead was small, his jaws enormous⁠—wide, heavy, bulging with muscle.

We sat around Willsson’s library table.

Old Elihu sat at the head. The short-clipped hair on his round pink skull was like silver in the light. His round blue eyes were hard, domineering, under their bushy white brows. His mouth and chin were horizontal lines.

On his right Pete the Finn sat watching everybody with tiny black eyes that never moved. Reno Starkey sat next to the bootlegger. Reno’s sallow horse face was as stolidly dull as his eyes.

Max Thaler was tilted back in a chair on Willsson’s left. The little gambler’s carefully pressed pants legs were carelessly crossed. A cigarette hung from one corner of his tight-lipped mouth.

I sat next to Thaler. Noonan sat on my other side.

Elihu Willsson opened the meeting.