Red Harvest Read Online Free PDF Page A

cost you plenty. I hear she likes
dinero.”
    “She’s money-mad, all right, but somehow you don’t mind it. She’s so thoroughly mercenary, so frankly greedy, that there’s nothing disagreeable about it. You’ll understand what I mean when you know her.”
    “Maybe. Mind telling me how you happened to part with her?”
    “No, I don’t mind. I spent it all, that’s how.”
    “Cold-blooded like that?”
    His face flushed a little. He nodded.
    “You seem to have taken it well,” I said.
    “There was nothing else to do.” The flush in his pleasant young face deepened and he spoke hesitantly. “It happens I owe her something for it. She—I’m going to tell you this. I want you to see this side of her. I had a little money. After that was gone—You must remember I was young and head over heels. After my money was gone there was the bank’s. I had—You don’t care whether I had actually done anything or was simply thinking about it. Anyway, she found it out. I never could hide anything from her. And that was the end.”
    “She broke off with you?”
    “Yes, thank God! If it hadn’t been for her you might be looking for me now—for embezzlement. I owe her that!” He wrinkled his forehead earnestly. “You won’t say anything about this—you know what I mean. But I wanted you to know she has her good side too. You’ll hear enough about the other.”
    “Maybe she has. Or maybe it was just that she didn’t think she’d get enough to pay for the risk of being caught in a jam.”
    He turned this over in his mind and then shook his head.
    “That may have had something to do with it, but not all.”
    “I gathered she was strictly pay-as-you-enter.”
    “How about Dan Rolff?” he asked.
    “Who’s he?”
    “He’s supposed to be her brother, or half-brother, or something of the sort. He isn’t. He’s a down-and-outer—t. b. He lives with her. She keeps him. She’s not in love with him or anything. She simply found him somewhere and took him in.”
    “Any more?”
    “There was that radical chap she used to run around with. It’s not likely she got much money out of him.”
    “What radical chap?”
    “He came here during the strike—Quint is his name.”
    “So he was on her list?”
    “That’s supposed to be the reason he stayed here after the strike was over.”
    “So he’s still on her list?”
    “No. She told me she was afraid of him. He had threatened to kill her.”
    “She seems to have had everybody on her string at one time or another,” I said.
    “Everybody she wanted,” he said, and he said it seriously.
    “Donald Willsson was the latest?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I had never heard anything about them, had never seen anything. The chief of police had us try to find any checks he may have issued to her before yesterday, but we found nothing. Nobody could remember ever having seen any.”
    “Who was her last customer, so far as you know?”
    “Lately I’ve seen her around town quite often with a chap named Thaler—he runs a couple of gambling houses here. They call him Whisper. You’ve probably heard of him.”
    At eight-thirty I left young Albury and set out for the Miners’ Hotel in Forest Street. Half a block from the hotel I met Bill Quint.
    “Hello!” I hailed him. “I was on my way down to see you.”
    He stopped in front of me, looked me up and down, growled:
    “So you’re a gum-shoe.”
    “That’s the bunk,” I complained. “I come all the way down here to rope you, and you’re smarted up.”
    “What do you want to know now?” he asked.
    “About Donald Willsson. You knew him, didn’t you?”
    “I knew him.”
    “Very well?”
    “No.”
    “What did you think of him?”
    He pursed his gray lips, by forcing breath between them made a noise like a rag tearing, and said:
    “A lousy liberal.”
    “You know Dinah Brand?” I asked.
    “I know her.” His neck was shorter and thicker than it had been.
    “Think she killed