I was holding Tony’s automatic down at my side and I didn’t know whether Mrs. Steinlen had seen it or not until she said, still in that gentle, unexcited voice: “Put the gun on the table.”
She still moved towards me slowly; she was no more than six or seven feet from me. I looked at her without turning my body towards her or moving; I didn’t know whether to make a stab at using the gun or to put it on the table. She was in the full light of one of the floor lamps now and there was an expression in her eyes — the hard glitter of ice — that made me figure I’d lose either way.
I took two steps forward so that I could reach the table, but I didn’t put the gun down. I held it down stiff at my side and looked at her and tried to calculate my chances.
She said: “It is too bad so smart a man must die.”
She circled slowly until she was on the other side of the table; we were facing each other squarely across the table.
Then a shadow came silently out of the dark hallway behind her — the hallway that led to the kitchen. Tony moved towards her slowly; he walked like a somnambulist with his arms outstretched; his eyes were glazed, fixed in a blank, meaningless stare on the back of her head.
She raised the revolver slowly and I saw the muscles of her hand tense a little. I think she felt there was someone behind her but she did not trust her feeling enough; she raised the revolver and stared at me with cold, glittering eyes.
Then one of Tony’s arms went around her white throat and his other arm went smoothly, swiftly out along her arm, his hand grasped her hand and the revolver. They moved like one thing. It was like watching the complex, terribly efficient working of a deadly machine; Tony twisted her arm back slowly, steadily, his arm tightened around her throat slowly. Her eyes widened, the white transparent skin of her face grew dark.
Then suddenly the muzzle of the revolver stopped at her temple and I saw Tony’s finger tighten on the trigger. I moved towards them as swiftly as I could around the table and there was a sharp choked roar and I stopped suddenly. Tony released her slowly and she fell forward with the upper half of her body on the table, slid slowly off the table down on to the floor; the revolver with her fingers tightened spasmodically around its butt banged against one of the table legs.
I did not move for several seconds; I stood staring at Tony. He was standing with his legs widespread, looking into space, looking at some place a million miles away. Then, slowly, expression came into his eyes — a curious, almost tender expression. He glanced down at the woman at his feet and smiled a little. She was lying on her back and the small black spot on her temple grew slowly larger.
Tony smiled again and said very softly: “That is for Mae, my beautiful lady.”
I went to him very swiftly. I said: “How the hell did you get out here?”
He did not answer; he stood smiling a little, looking down at the dead woman. I shook his shoulder. He raised his smile to me, said: “I have been following you all day. I saw you from the window, from that girl’s room when you went to the Derby. I went down and got in my car and waited until you came out and followed you to the studio. I have been following you all afternoon — I knew finally you would take me to the one who killed Mae...”
I jerked my head towards the kitchen, asked: “Did the Negro girl see you come in?”
He shook his head. He said: “A woman came out and went upstairs above the garage right after you came in. Maybe that was her — maybe she lives there.”
I shoved his gun into his hands. I said: “Get out of here — quick.”
He shook his head, shrugged, gestured with one hand towards the woman on the floor.
I repeated: “Get out — quick.” I put my hands on his shoulders and shoved him towards the hallway.
He turned his head and stared at me in a puzzled sort of way with his lips pursed. Then he shrugged again and went slowly to the hallway and disappeared into its darkness.
I sat down and called the Post; after a minute or so I got Scheyer. I said: “Here’s your scoop. Sheila Dale murdered Mae Jackman. I think she murdered Steinlen, too, or at least she bulled him into killing himself — we can check on that. She shot herself about two minutes ago — very dead. I saw her do it but I couldn’t stop her. Tell your boss to hold the presses for an extra and grab a load of law and get out here to Steinlen’s. I’ll give you the details when you get here.”
I hung up and went over and looked Mrs. Steinlen over pretty carefully to be sure there weren’t any marks on her throat or any chance of Tony’s prints being on the revolver. Then I went out to the kitchen and got a glass of water to see what I could do about snapping Boehme out of the swoon.
The Negress came in from outside while I was getting the water. Her eyes were big as banjos. She said: “Didn’t ah heah a shot, Mistah?”
I told her she had, that Mrs. Steinlen had shot herself.
Her eyes got bigger. “Daid?”
I said: “Daid.”
I went back to the library and worked on Boehme. She came around in a little while and sat up and stared at Mrs. Steinlen and at the revolver in her clenched outstretched hand, then she put her hands up to her mouth and started moaning.
I told her to shut up and asked her if she knew where the check was. She acted like she didn’t know what I was talking about and I reminded her that if she’d help me all she could I’d see what I could do about forgetting the junk angle — about her acting as go-between and laying herself open to a bad rap on a narcotic charge.
She looked a lot more intelligent when I mentioned that and when I asked her about the check again she said she thought she could find it.
I was out of cigarettes but I found some in a box on the desk. I found an old edition of Stoddard’s Travel Lectures on one of the shelves and I sat down and made myself comfortable and read about Constantinople and waited.
Daniel Mainwaring
(1902–1977)
During the economically ravaged 1930s, proletarian fiction became a favored form of protest among a small but influential group of young writers. Although widely labeled Communists and rabble-rousers, the majority were not political ideologues but earnest social reformers. Benjamin Appel, in an essay in Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties (1968), refers to them as “mostly middle-class college graduates bemused by a vision of the Noble Worker, exploited by the Wicked Capitalists in Silk Hats, toiling away somewhere in Sweatballs County [who], beaten around the ears, hungry in the belly, somehow would become the savior of America.”
A number of factors, in particular World War II and the vehement anti-Communist backlash of the late 1940s and the 1950s, helped to end the proletarian vogue and the careers of such present-day virtual unknowns as Jack Conroy and William Rollins, Jr., who had published a score of nonpolitical crime stories in Black Mask in the 1920s and 1930s. Others, notably John Steinbeck and B. Traven, went on to write other types of fiction with less inflammatory, if no less earnest, subject matter. In the short time that proletarian fiction flourished, it did in fact help bring about some of the social changes championed by its writers. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is a notable example.
The plight of migrant farm workers in the West was a topic embraced by other writers besides Steinbeck. Daniel Mainwaring was one of these writers. Born and raised in California’s fertile Central Valley, he knew its land, people, and labor struggles as well as Steinbeck knew those of the nearby Salinas Valley. His first (and only mainstream) novel, One Against the Earth (1933), while not proletarian fiction, portrays Depression-era social problems in the Central Valley with a prolet’s zeal. “Fruit Tramp,” one of Mainwaring’s few short stories, first published in Harper’s in July 1934, has the same incisive qualities and is proletarian as well as Depression fiction. It is also, given its substance and implication, hard-boiled fiction of the very best kind.