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Black Lives
THE DAIN CURSE
By DASHIELL HAMMETT
Author of “The Cleansing of Poisonville” and other stories of the “Continental” detective.
It was a diamond, all right, sparkling in the grass half a dozen feet from the blue brick walk. It was small—not more than a quarter of a carat—and unmounted. I put it in my pocket and began examining the lawn as thoroughly as I could without going at it on hands and knees.
I had covered a couple of square yards of sod when the Leggetts’ front door opened. A woman stepped out on the broad stone top step and looked down at me with good-natured curiosity.
She was a woman of about my age—forty—with darkish blonde hair, a pleasant, plump face, and dimpled pink cheeks. She had on a lavender-flowered white house dress.
I called off my search for the time and went up to her, asking:
"Is Mr. Leggett in?"
"Yes," Her voice was as pleasant and placid as her face. She smiled from me to the lawn. “You're another detective, aren't you?”
I admitted it. She led me up to a green, orange and chocolate room on the second floor, put me in a brocaded chair, and told me she would call her husband from his laboratory.
While I waited for him I looked around the room, deciding that the dull orange rug under my feet was probably both genuinely Oriental and genuinely ancient, that the carved walnut furniture hadn't been ground out by machinery, and that the Japanese prints on the walls hadn't been selected by a puritan.
Edgar Leggett came in, saying:
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