Free Who Killed Bob Teal? and Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett

coward-like, terribly. And even becoming accustomed— It is my husband, or he who was my husband. I should tell you. Your gallantry deserves the explanation, and I do not wish you should think a thing that is not so.”
    I tried to look trusting and credulous. I expected to disbelieve everything she said.
    â€œHe is most crazily jealous,” she went on in her low-pitched, soft voice, with a peculiar way of saying words that just missed being marked enough to be called a foreign accent. “He is an old man, and incredibly wicked. These men he has sent to me! A woman there was once—tonight’s men are not first. I don’t know what—what they mean. To kill me, perhaps—to maim, to disfigure—I do not know.”
    â€œAnd the man in the taxi with you was one of them?” I asked. “I was driving down the street behind you when you were attacked, and I could see there was a man with you. He was one of them?”
    â€œYes! I did not know it, but it must have been that he was. He does not defend me. A pretense, that is all.”
    â€œEver try sicking the cops on this hubby of yours?”
    â€œIt is what?”
    â€œEver notify the police?”
    â€œYes, but”—she shrugged her brown shoulders—“I would as well have kept quiet, or better. In Buffalo it was, and they—they bound my husband to keep the peace, I think you call it. A thousand dollars! Poof! What is that to him in his jealousy? And I—I cannot stand the things the newspapers say—the jesting of them. I must leave Buffalo. Yes, once I do try sicking the cops on him. But not more.”
    â€œBuffalo?” I explored a little. “I lived there for a while—on Crescent avenue.”
    â€œOh, yes. That is out by the Delaware Park.”
    That was right enough. But her knowing something about Buffalo didn’t prove anything about the rest of her story.
    VI
    She poured more brandy. By speaking quick I held my drink down to a size suitable for a man who has work to do. Hers was as large as before. We drank, and she offered me cigarettes in a lacquered box—slender cigarettes, hand-rolled in black paper.
    I didn’t stay with mine long. It tasted, smelt and scorched like gunpowder.
    â€œYou don’t like my cigarettes?”
    â€œI’m an old-fashioned man,” I apologized, rubbing its fire out in a bronze dish, fishing in my pocket for my own deck. “Tobacco’s as far as I’ve got. What’s in these fireworks?”
    She laughed. She had a pleasant laugh, with a sort of coo in it.
    â€œI am so very sorry. So many people do not like them. I have a Hindu incense mixed with the tobacco.”
    I didn’t say anything to that. It was what you would expect of a woman who would dye her dog purple.
    The dog moved under its chair just then, scratching the floor with its nails.
    The brown woman was in my arms, in my lap, her arms wrapped around my neck. Close-up, opened by terror, her eyes weren’t dark at all. They were gray-green. The blackness was in the shadow from her heavy lashes.
    â€œIt’s only the dog,” I assured her, sliding her back on her own part of the bench. “It’s only the dog wriggling around under the chair.”
    â€œAh!” she blew her breath out with enormous relief.
    Then we had to have another shot of brandy.
    â€œYou see, I am most awfully the coward,” she said when the third dose of liquor was in her. “But, ah, I have had so much trouble. It is a wonder that I am not insane.”
    I could have told her she wasn’t far enough from it to do much bragging, but I nodded with what was meant for sympathy.
    She lit another cigarette to replace the one she had dropped in her excitement. Her eyes became normal black slits again.
    â€œI do not think it is nice”—there was a suggestion of a dimple in her brown cheek when she smiled like that—“that I throw myself into