Red Harvest

MURDER WHOLESALE I work for the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco. They sent me to Personville to see a client who wanted help. I never saw him--alive. The night I got there, my client was murdered. He was just the first corpse. In less than a week there were a dozen more. Not including me, though somebody tried. It got on my nerves. So I went to see Dinah Brand. We got drunk on gin and laudanum. The last thing I remember was her helping me to bed. The next morning I woke lying face down on the dining-room floor. Dinah was stretched out on her back, dead. My right hand held the round blue and white handle of her ice pick. The pick's six-inch needle-sharp blade was buried in Dinah's left breast.