The stock-keeper was the first to speak.
“Hello!” he said. “Somebody broke that window!” And it was true. Somebody had not only broken the window, but had broken every pane and the sash itself. But Mr. Gubb was not interested in this. He was gazing at the electric bulb and thinking of Part Two, Lesson Six of the Course of Twelve Lessons — “How to Identify by Finger-Prints, with General Remarks on the Bertillon System.” He looked about for some means of reaching the bulb above his head. His eye lit on the fallen chair. By placing the chair upright and placing one foot on the frame of Henry Smitz’s machine and the other on the chair-back, he could reach the bulb. He righted the chair and stepped onto its seat. He put one foot on the frame of Henry Smitz’s machine; very carefully he put the other foot on the top of the chair-back. He reached upward and unscrewed the bulb.
The stock-keeper saw the chair totter. He sprang forward to steady it, but he was too late. Philo Gubb, grasping the air, fell on the broad, level board that formed the middle part of Henry Smitz’s machine.
The effect was instantaneous. The cogs and wheels of the machine began to revolve rapidly. Two strong, steel arms flopped down and held Detective Gubb to the table, clamping his arms to his side. The roll of burlap unrolled, and as it unrolled, the loose end was seized and slipped under Mr. Gubb and wrapped around him and drawn taut, bundling him as a sheep’s carcass is bundled. An arm reached down and back and forth, with a sewing motion, and passed from Mr. Gubb’s head to his feet. As it reached his feet a knife sliced the burlap in which he was wrapped from the burlap on the roll.
And then a most surprising thing happened. As if the board on which he lay had been a catapult, it suddenly and unexpectedly raised Philo Gubb and tossed him through the open window. The stock-keeper heard a muffled scream and then a great splash, but when he ran to the window, the great paper-hanger detective had disappeared in the bosom of the Mississippi.
Like Henry Smitz he had tried to reach the ceiling by standing on the chair-back; like Henry Smitz he had fallen upon the newly invented burlaping and loading machine; like Henry Smitz he had been wrapped and thrown through the window into the river; but, unlike Henry Smitz, he had not been sewn into the burlap, because Philo Gubb had the double-pointed shuttle-action needle in his pocket.
Page Seventeen of Lesson Eleven of the Rising Sun Detective Agency’s Correspondence School of Detecting’s Course of Twelve Lessons, says: —
In cases of extreme difficulty of solution it is well for the detective to reenact as nearly as possible the probable action of the crime.
Mr. Philo Gubb had done so. He had also proved that a man may be sewn in a sack and drowned in a river without committing willful suicide or being the victim of foul play.
They Can Only Hang You Once
by Dashiell Hammett
A return visit by the hero of “The Maltese Falcon” — rough, tough Sam Spade, in a typical Hammett thriller.
Samuel Spade said: “My name is Ronald Ames. I want to see Mr. Binnett — Mr. Timothy Binnett.”
“Mr. Binnett is resting now, sir,” the butler replied hesitantly.
“Will you find out when I can see him? It’s important.” Spade cleared his throat. “I’m — uh — just back from Australia, and it’s about some of his properties there.”
The butler turned on his heel while saying “I’ll see, sir,” and was going up the front stairs before he had finished speaking.
Spade made and lit a cigarette.
The butler came downstairs again. “I’m sorry; he can’t be disturbed now, but Mr. Wallace Binnett — Mr. Timothy’s nephew — will see you.”
Spade said, “Thanks,” and followed the butler upstairs.
Wallace Binnett was a slender, handsome, dark man of about Spade’s age — thirty-eight — who rose smiling from a brocaded chair, said, “How do you do, Mr. Ames?” waved his hand at another chair, and sat down again. “You’re from Australia?”
“Got in this morning.”
“You’re a business associate of Uncle Tim’s?”
Spade smiled and shook his head. “Hardly that, but I’ve some information I think he ought to have — quick.”
Wallace Binnett looked thoughtfully at the floor, then up at Spade. “I’ll do my best to persuade him to see you, Mr. Ames, but, frankly, I don’t know.”
Spade seemed mildly surprised. “Why?”
Binnett shrugged. “He’s peculiar sometimes. Understand, his mind seems perfectly all right, but he has the testiness and eccentricity of an old man in ill health and — well — at times he can be difficult.”
Spade asked slowly: “He’s already refused to see me?”
“Yes.”
Spade rose from his chair. His blond satan’s face was expressionless.
Binnett raised a hand quickly. “Wait, wait,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to make him change his mind. Perhaps if—” His dark eyes suddenly became wary. “You’re not simply trying to sell him something, are you?”
“No.”
The wary gleam went out of Binnett’s eyes. “Well, then, I think I can—”
A young woman came in crying angrily, “Wally, that old fool has—” She broke off with a hand to her breast when she saw Spade.
Spade and Binnett had risen together. Binnett said suavely: “Joyce, this is Mr. Ames. My sister-in-law, Joyce Court.”
Spade bowed.
Joyce Court uttered a short, embarrassed laugh and said: “Please excuse my whirlwind entrance.” She was a tall, blue-eyed, dark woman of twenty-four or — five with good shoulders and a strong, slim body. Her features made up in warmth what they lacked in regularity. She wore wide-legged blue satin pajamas.
Binnett smiled good-naturedly at her and asked: “Now what’s all the excitement?”
Anger darkened her eyes again and she started to speak. Then she looked at Spade and said: “But we shouldn’t bore Mr. Ames with our stupid domestic affairs. If—” She hesitated.
Spade bowed again. “Sure,” he said, “certainly.”
“I won’t be a minute,” Binnett promised, and left the room with her.
Spade went to the open doorway through which they had vanished and, standing just inside, listened. Their footsteps became inaudible. Nothing else could be heard. Spade was standing there — his yellow-gray eyes dreamy — when he heard the scream. It was a woman’s scream, high and shrill with terror. Spade was through the doorway when he heard the shot. It was a pistol shot, magnified, reverberated by walls and ceilings.
Twenty feet from the doorway Spade found a staircase, and went up it three steps at a time. He turned to the left. Halfway down the hallway a woman lay on her back on the floor.
Wallace Binnett knelt beside her, fondling one of her hands desperately, crying in a low, beseeching voice: “Darling, Molly, darling!”
Joyce Court stood behind him and wrung her hands while tears streaked her cheeks.
The woman on the floor resembled Joyce Court but was older, and her face had a hardness the younger one’s had not.
“She’s dead, she’s been killed,” Wallace Binnett said incredulously, raising his white face towards Spade. When Binnett moved his head Spade could see the round hole in the woman’s tan dress over her heart and the dark stain which was rapidly spreading below it.
Spade touched Joyce Court’s arm. “Police, emergency hospital — phone,” he said. As she ran towards the stairs he addressed Wallace Binnett: “Who did—”