Arson Plus

Arson Plus
Dashiell Hammett
First published in the October 1923 issue of Black Mask magazine.
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JIM TARR PICKED up the cigar I rolled across his desk, looked at the band, bit off an
end, and reached for a match.
"Three for a buck," he said. "You must want me to break a couple of laws for you this
time."
I had been doing business with this fat sheriff of Sacramento County for four or five
years -- ever since I came to the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco office --
and I had never known him to miss an opening for a sour crack; but it didn't mean
anything.
"Wrong both times," I told him. "I get them for two bits each, and I'm here to do you a
favor instead of asking for one. The company that insured Thornburgh's house thinks
somebody touched it off."
"That's right enough, according to the fire department. They tell me the lower part of the
house was soaked with gasoline, but the Lord knows how they could tell -- there wasn't a
stick left standing. I've got McClump working on it, but he hasn't found anything to get
excited about yet."
"What's the layout? All I know is that there was a fire."
Tarr leaned back in his chair and bellowed:
"Hey, Mac!"
The pearl push buttons on his desk are ornaments so far as he is concerned. Deputy
sheriffs McHale, McClump, and Macklin came to the door together -- MacNab
apparently wasn't within hearing.
"What's the idea?" the sheriff demanded of McClump. "Are you carrying a bodyguard
around with you?"
The two other deputies, thus informed as to whom "Mac" referred this time, went back to
their cribbage game.
"We got a city slicker here to catch our firebug for us," Tarr told his deputy. "But we got
to tell him what it's all about first."

McClump and I had worked together on an express robbery several months before. He's a
rangy, towheaded youngster of twenty-five or six, with all the nerve in the world -- and
most of the laziness.
"Ain't the Lord good to us?"
He had himself draped across a chair by now -- always his first objective when he comes
into a room.
"Well, here's how she stands: This fellow Thornburgh's house was a couple miles out of
town, on the old county road -- an old frame house. About midnight, night before last,
Jeff Pringle -- the nearest neighbor, a half-mile or so to the east -- saw a glare in the sky
from over that way, and phoned in the alarm; but by the time the fire wagons got there,
there wasn't enough of the house left to bother about. Pringle was the first of the
neighbors to get to the house, and the roof had already fallen in then.
"Nobody saw anything suspicious -- no strangers hanging around or nothing.
Thornburgh's help just managed to save themselves, and that was all. They don't know
much about what happened -- too scared, I reckon. But they did see Thornburgh at his
window just before the fire got him. A fellow here in town -- name of Henderson -- saw
that part of it too. He was driving home from Wayton, and got to the house just before the
roof caved in.
"The fire department people say they found signs of gasoline. The Coonses, Thornburgh's
help, say they didn't have no gas on the place. So there you are."
"Thornburgh have any relatives?"
"Yeah. A niece in San Francisco -- a Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge. She was up yesterday, but
there wasn't nothing she could do, and she couldn't tell us nothing much, so she went
back home."
"Where are the servants now?"
"Here in town. Staying at a hotel on I Street. I told 'em to stick around for a few days."
"Thornburgh own the house?"
"Uh-huh. Bought it from Newning & Weed a couple months ago."
"You got anything to do this morning?"
"Nothing but this."
"Good. Let's get out and dig around."
We found the Coonses in their room at the hotel on I Street. Mr. Coons was a
small-boned, plump man with the smooth, meaningless face and the suavity of the typical

male house-servant.
His wife was a tall, stringy woman, perhaps five years older than her husband -- say,
forty -- with a mouth and chin that seemed shaped for gossiping. But he did all the talking,
while she nodded her agreement to every second or third word.
"We went to work for Mr. Thornburgh on the fifteenth of June I think," he said, in reply
to my first question. "We came to Sacramento, around the first of the month, and put in
applications at the Allis Employment Bureau. A couple of weeks later