Woman in the Dark by Dashiell Hammett

Author:Dashiell Hammett [Hammett, Dashiell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780679722656
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1933-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE

Conclusion

It was nearly nine o’clock by the dial on the dashboard, and quite dark, when Luise Fischer and her captors passed a large square building whose illuminated sign said “Mile Valley Lumber Co.” and turned in to what was definitely a town street, though its irregularly spaced houses were not many. Ten minutes later the sedan came to rest at the curb in front of a gray public building. The driver got out. The other man held the door open for Luise. They took her into a ground-floor room in the gray building.

Three men were in the room. A sad-faced man of sixty-some years, with ragged white hair and mustache, was tilted back in a chair, with his feet on a battered yellowish desk. He wore a hat but no coat. A pasty-faced young blond man, straddling a chair in front of the filing cabinet on the other side of the room, was saying, “So the traveling salesman asked the farmer if he could put him up for the night and—” but broke off when Luise Fischer and her companions came in.

The third man stood with his back to the window. He was a slim man of medium height, not far past thirty, thin-lipped, pale, flashily dressed in brown and red. His collar was very tight. He advanced swiftly toward Luise Fischer, showing white teeth in a smile. “I’m Harry Klaus. They wouldn’t let me see you down there, so I came on up to wait for you.” He spoke rapidly and with assurance. “Don’t worry. I’ve got everything fixed.”

The storyteller hesitated, changed his position. The two men who had brought Luise Fischer up from the city looked at the lawyer with obvious disapproval.

Klaus smiled again with complete assurance. “You know she’s not going to tell you anything at all till we’ve talked it over, don’t you? Well, what the hell, then?”

The man at the desk said: “All right, all right.” He looked at the two men standing behind the woman. “If Tuft’s office is empty, let ’em use that.”

“Thanks.” Harry Klaus picked up a brown briefcase from a chair, took Luise Fischer’s elbow in his hand, and turned her to follow the thick-chested, florid man.

He led them down the corridor a few feet to an office that was similar to the one they had just left. He did not go in with them. He said, “Come on back when you’re finished,” and, when they had gone in, slammed the door.

Klaus jerked his head at the door. “A lot of whittlers,” he said cheerfully. “We’ll stand them on their heads.” He tossed his briefcase on the desk. “Sit down.”

“Brazil?” she said. “He is—”

His shrug lifted his shoulders almost to his ears. “I don’t know. Can’t get anything out of these people.”

“Then—?”

“Then he got away,” he said.

“Do you think he did?”

He shrugged his shoulders again. “We can always hope.”

“But one of those policemen told me he had been shot and—”

“That don’t have to mean anything but that they hope they hit him.

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