THE DAIN CURSE
by Dashiell Hammett
Published July 19, 1929
To Albert S. Samuels
THE DAIN CURSE
Part One: The Dains
I. Eight Diamonds
It was a diamond all right, shining in the grass half a dozen feet from the blue brick walk. It was small, not more than a quarter of a carat in weight, and unmounted. I put it in my pocket and began searching the lawn as closely as I could without going at it on all fours.
I had covered a couple of square yards of sod when the Leggetts' front door opened.
A woman came out on the broad stone top step and looked down at me with good-humored curiosity.
She was a woman of about my age, forty, with darkish blond hair, a pleasant plump face, and dimpled pink cheeks. She had on a lavender-flowered white housedress.
I stopped poking at the grass and went up to her, asking: 'Is Mr. Leggett in?'
'Yes.' Her voice was placid as her face. 'You wish to see him?'
I said I did.
She smiled at me and at the lawn.
'You're another detective, aren't you?'
I admitted that.
She took me up to a green, orange, and chocolate room on the second floor, put me in a brocaded chair, and went to call her husband from his laboratory. While I waited, I looked around the room, deciding that the dull orange rug under my feet was probably both genuinely oriental and genuinely ancient, that the walnut furniture hadn't been ground out by machinery, and that the Japanese pictures on the wall hadn't been selected by a prude.
Edgar Leggett came in saying: 'I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, but I couldn't break off till now. Have you learned something?'
His voice was unexpectedly harsh, rasping, though his manner was friendly enough. He was a dark-skinned erect man in his middle forties, muscularly slender and of medium height. He would have been handsome if his brown face hadn't been so deeply marked with sharp, hard lines across the forehead and from nostrils down across mouth-corners. Dark hair, worn rather long, curled above and around the broad, grooved forehead. Red-brown eyes were abnormally bright behind horn-rimmed spectacles. His nose was long, thin, and high-bridged. His lips were thin, sharp, nimble, over a small, bony chin. His black and white clothes were well made and cared for.
'Not yet,' I said to his question. 'I'm not a police detective--Continental Agency--for the insurance company--and I'm just starting.'
'Insurance company?' He seemed surprised, raising dark eyebrows above the dark tops of his spectacles.
'Yeah. Didn't--?'
'Surely,' he said, smiling, stopping my words with a small flourish of one hand. It was a long, narrow hand with over-developed finger-tips, ugly as most trained hands are. 'Surely. They would have been insured. I hadn't thought of that. They weren't my diamonds, you know; they were Halstead's.'
'Halstead and Beauchamp? I didn't get any details from the insurance company. You had the diamonds on approval?'
'No. I was using them experimentally. Halstead knew of my work with glass--coloring it, staining or dyeing it, after its manufacture--and he became interested in the possibility of the process being adapted to diamonds, particularly in improving off-color stones, removing yellowish and brownish tinges, emphasizing blues. He asked me to try it and five weeks ago gave me those diamonds to work on. There were eight of them, none especially valuable. The largest weighed only a trifle more than half a carat, some of the others only a quarter, and except for two they were all of poor color. They're the stones the burglar got.'
'Then you hadn't succeeded?' I asked.
'Frankly,' he said, 'I hadn't made the slightest progress. This was a more delicate matter, and on more obdurate material.'
'Where'd you keep them?'
'Usually they were left lying around in the open--always in the laboratory, of course--but for several days now they had been locked in the cabinet--since my last unsuccessful experiment.'
'Who knew about the experiments?'
'Anyone, everyone--there was no occasion for secrecy.'
'They were stolen from the cabinet?'
'Yes. This morning we found our front door open, the cabinet drawer forced, and the diamonds gone. The police found marks on the kitchen door. They say the burglar came in that way and left by the front door. We heard nothing last night. And nothing else was taken.'
'The front door was ajar when I came downstairs this morning,' Mrs. Leggett said from the doorway. 'I went upstairs and awakened Edgar, and we searched the house and found the diamonds gone. The police think the man I saw must have been the burglar.'
I asked about the man she had seen.
