Who Killed Bob Teal? by Dashiell Hammett

Author:Dashiell Hammett [Hammett, Dashiell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Google: CVRmAQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Giuseppe Castrovilli
Published: 2001-06-09T18:30:00+00:00

I found Dean in the detectives' assembly-room in the Hall of Justice.

“The landlady identified Mae Landis as Mrs. Quirk,” he said. “Now what?”

“Where is she now?”

“One of the policewomen is holding both of them in the captain's office.”

“Ogburn is over in the Pawnshop Detail office,” I told him. “Let's take the landlady in for a look at him.”

Ogburn sat leaning forward, holding his head in his hands' and staring sullenly at the feet of the uniformed man who guarded him, when we took the gaunt landlady in to see him.

“Ever see him before?” I asked her.

“Yes” — reluctantly — “that's Mr. Quirk.”

Ogburn didn't look up, and he paid not the least attention to any of us.

After we had told the landlady that she could go home, Dean led me back to a far corner of the assembly-room, where we could talk without disturbance.

“Now spill it!” he burst out. “How come all the startling developments, as the newspaper boys call 'em?”

“Well, first-off, I knew that the question 'Who killed Bob Teal?' could have only one answer. Bob wasn't a boob! He might possibly have let a man he was trailing lure him behind a row of billboards on a dark night, but he would have gone prepared for trouble. He wouldn't have died with empty hands, from a gun that was close enough to scorch his coat. The murderer had to be somebody Bob trusted, so it couldn't be Whitacre. Now Bob was a conscientious sort of lad, and he wouldn't have stopped shadowing Whitacre to go over and talk with some friend. There was only one man who could have persuaded him to drop Whitacre for a while, and that one man was the one he was working for — Ogburn.

“If I hadn't known Bob, I might have thought he had hidden behind the billboards to watch Whitacre; but Bob wasn't an amateur. He knew better than to pull any of that spectacular gumshoe stuff. So there was nothing to it but Ogburn!

“With all that to go on, the rest was duck soup. All the stuff Mae Landis gave us — identifying the gun as Whitacre's, and giving Ogburn an alibi by saying she had talked to him on the phone at ten o'clock — only convinced me that she and Ogburn were working together. When the landlady described 'Quirk' for us, I was fairly certain of it. Her description would fit either Whitacre or Ogburn, but there was no sense to Whitacre's having the apartment on Greenwich Street, while if Ogburn and the Landis woman were thick, they'd need a meeting-place of some sort. The rest of the box of cartridges there helped some too.

“Then tonight I put on a little act in Ogburn's apartment, chasing a nickel along the floor and finding traces of dried mud that had escaped the cleaning-up he no doubt gave the carpet and clothes after he came home from walking through the lot in the rain. We'll let the experts decide whether it could be mud from the lot on which Bob was killed, and the jury can decide whether it is.

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