Free Creeping Siamese and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett

O’Farrell, where a fat-faced young man in gray overcoat and gray hat left the curb to link arms with her and lead her to a taxi stand up O’Farrell Street. I let them go, making a note of the taxi number—the fat-faced man looked more like a customer than a pal.
    It was a little shy of two in the morning when I turned back into Market Street and went up to the office. Fiske, who holds down the Agency at night, said Jack Counihan had not reported, nothing else had come in. I told him to rouse me an operative, and in ten or fifteen minutes he succeeded in getting Mickey Linehan out of bed and on the wire.
    â€œListen, Mickey,” I said, “I’ve got the nicest corner picked out for you to stand on the rest of the night. So pin on your diapers and toddle down there, will you?”
    In between his grumbling and cursing I gave him the name and number of the Stockton Street hotel, described Red O’Leary, and told him which pigeon-hole the note had been put in.
    â€œIt mightn’t be Red’s home, but the chance is worth covering,” I wound up. “If you pick him up, try not to lose him before I can get somebody down there to take him off your hands.”
    I hung up during the outburst of profanity this insult brought.
    The Hall of Justice was busy when I reached it, though nobody had tried to shake the upstairs prison loose yet. Fresh lots of suspicious characters were being brought in every few minutes. Policemen in and out of uniform were everywhere. The detective bureau was a bee-hive.
    Trading information with the police detectives, I told them about the Armenian boy. We were making up a party to visit the remains when the captain’s door opened and Lieutenant Duff came into the assembly room.
    â€œ Allez! Oop! ” he said, pointing a thick finger at O’Gar, Tully, Reeder, Hunt and me. “There’s a thing worth looking at in Fillmore.”
    We followed him out to an automobile.
    VI
    A gray frame house in Fillmore Street was our destination. A lot of people stood in the street looking at the house. A police-wagon stood in front of it, and police uniforms were indoors and out.
    A red-mustached corporal saluted Duff and led us into the house, explaining as we went, “’Twas the neighbors give us the rumble, complaining of the fighting, and when we got here, faith, there weren’t no fight left in nobody.”
    All the house held was fourteen dead men.
    Eleven of them had been poisoned—over-doses of knockout drops in their booze, the doctors said. The other three had been shot, at intervals along the hall. From the looks of the remains, they had drunk a toast—a loaded one—and those who hadn’t drunk, whether because of temperance or suspicious natures, had been gunned as they tried to get away.
    The identity of the bodies gave us an idea of what their toast had been. They were all thieves—they had drunk their poison to the day’s looting.
    We didn’t know all the dead men then, but all of us knew some of them, and the records told us who the others were later. The completed list read like Who’s Who in Crookdom .
    There was the Dis-and-Dat Kid, who had crushed out of Leavenworth only two months before; Sheeny Holmes; Snohomish Whitey, supposed to have died a hero in France in 1919; L. A. Slim, from Denver, sockless and under-wearless as usual, with a thousand-dollar bill sewed in each shoulder of his coat; Spider Girrucci wearing a steel-mesh vest under his shirt and a scar from crown to chin where his brother had carved him years ago; Old Pete Best, once a congressman; Nigger Vojan, who once won $175,000 in a Chicago crap-game— Abacadbra tattooed on him in three places; Alphabet Shorty McCoy; Tom Brooks, Alphabet Shorty’s brother-in-law, who invented the Richmond razzle-dazzle , and bought three hotels with the profits; Red Cudahy, who stuck up a Union Pacific train in 1924; Denny Burke; Bull McGonickle, still