The Third Circle. Frank Norris
the windflogged streets, resumed their normal quiet. The incident was closed.
Or was it closed? Judge you now. Next day I was down upon the wharves, gripsack in hand, capped and clothed for a long sea voyage. The "Mary Baker's" boat was not yet come ashore, but the beauty lay out there in the stream, flirting with a bustling tug that circled about her, coughing uneasily at intervals. Idle sailormen, 'longshoremen and stevedores sat upon the stringpiece of the wharf, chewing slivers and spitting reflectively into the water. Across the intervening stretch of bay came the noises from the "Mary Baker's" decks—noises that were small and distinct, as if heard through a telephone, the rattle of blocks, the straining of a windlass, the bos'n's whistle, and once the noise of sawing. A white cruiser sat solidly in the waves over by Alcatraz, and while I took note of her the flag was suddenly broken out and I heard the strains of the ship's band. The morning was fine. Tamalpais climbed out of the water like a rousing lion. In a few hours we would be off on a voyage to the underside of the earth. There was a note of gayety in the nimble air, and one felt that the world was young after all, and that it was good to be young with her.
A bum-boat woman came down the wharf, corpulent and round, with a roll in her walk that shook first one fat cheek and then the other. She was peddling trinkets amongst the wharf-loungers—pocket combs, little round mirrors, shoestrings and collar-buttons. She knew them all, or at least was known to all of them, and in a few moments she was retailing to them the latest news of the town. Soon I caught a name or two, and on the instant was at some pains to listen. The bum-boat woman was telling the story of the house with the blinds:
"Sax of um, an' nobs ivry wan. But that bad wid bug-juice! Whoo! Niver have Oi seen the bate! An' divil a wan as can remimber owt for two days by. Bory-eyed they were; struck dumb an' deef an' dead wid whiskey and bubble-wather. Not a manjack av um can tell the tale, but wan av um used his knife cruel bad. Now which wan was it? Howse the coort to find out?"
It appeared that the house with the blinds was, or had been, a gambling house, and what I had seen had been a raid. Then the rest of the story came out, and the mysteries began to thicken. That same evening, after the arrest of the six inebriates, the house had been searched. The police had found evidences of a drunken debauch of a monumental character. But they had found more. In a closet under the stairs the dead body of a man, a well dressed fellow—beyond a doubt one of the party—knifed to death by dreadful slashes in his loins and at the base of his spine in true evil hand-over-back fashion.
Now this is the mystery of the house with the blinds.
Beyond all doubt, one of the six drunken men had done the murder. Which one? How to find out? So completely were they drunk that not a single one of them could recall anything of the previous twelve hours. They had come out there with their friend the day before. They woke from their orgie to learn that one of them had worried him to his death by means of a short palm-broad dagger taken from a trophy of Persian arms that hung over a divan.
Whose hand had done it? Which one of them was the murdered? I could fancy them—I think I can see them now—sitting there in their cells, each man apart, withdrawn from his fellow-reveler, and each looking furtively into his fellow's face, asking himself, "Was it you? Was it you? or was it I? Which of us, in God's name, has done this thing?"
Well, it was never known. When I came back to San Francisco a year or so later I asked about the affair of the house with the blinds, and found that it had been shelved with the other mysterious crimes: The six men had actually been "discharged for the want of evidence."
But for a long time the thing harassed me. More than once since I have gone to that windy park, with its quivering flagstaff and Geodetic monument, and, sitting on a bench opposite the house, asked myself again and again the bootless questions. Why had the drunken nurse-maid mentioned the house to me in the first place? And why at that particular time? Why had she lied to me in telling me that she lived there? Why was that gilded Indian-club on the sill of the upper window? And whose—here's a point—whose was the hand that drew it inside the house? And then, of course, last of all, the ever recurrent question, which one of those six inebriates should have stood upon the drop and worn the cap—which one of the company had knifed his friend and bundled him into that closet under the stairs? Had he done it during the night of the orgie, or before it? Was his friend drunk at the time, or sober? I never could answer these questions, and I suppose I shall never know the secret of "The House With the Blinds."
A Greek family lives there now, and rent the upper story to a man who blows the organ in the Russian Church, and to two Japanese, who have a photograph gallery on Stockton street. I wonder to what use they have put the little closet under the stairs?
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