Well this is a grim pinch of business.  After the breezy Perfect Crime, I was not expecting this.

Apparently Montreal had a seedy underbelly in 1922.  Since it is specified as “to the east”, Montreal must be lying on its side. ^[1]  In a single-room apartment, a family of five is sweltering despite it snowing outside.  I don’t know, crack a window maybe?  Did that technology not exist in 1922?

Paterfamilias Armand is chugging a beer, taking stock of his life and wanting to sell short.  He sees his “youngest brat”, who they can’t afford to name, has run out of milk the same time he ran out of gin.  He sees his wife Gabrielle “bony, hollow-chested with bent shoulders, reproachful eyes, and mute lips — a hag at 30.”  Daughter Irene, diagnosed as undernourished, is looking for crumbs in an empty breadbox.  Maybe he keeps the window shut to avoid being tempted to jump.

At 9 pm, Armand grabs his jacket and leaves.  He is going to rob the “wholesale provision warehouse.”  He is so poor that he has to “beg an empty sack” from the corner grocery store to carry the loot in.  Not only does this dolt instantly provide a direct evidence trail back to the clerk who can identify him — please, career criminals, for the sake of the environment, get a reusable bag.

Armand is not the first person to hit this warehouse so a patrolman spots him immediately.  Armand takes off running.  The officer pursues him, and shoots him in the leg.  Despite this injury, the cop is unable to catch up to him before he arrives back home 20 minutes later.  He collapses in the arms of his crying wife.  Finally the cop arrives and trips over a gin bottle.  Armand tries to choke him, but is interrupted by what seems to be a gas explosion.

The passage is so clumsily written, I’m not sure what happened.  There did not seem to be much damage, but it was enough to finish off Armand.  Gabrielle “crossed the floor to her man . . . and stood above him.”  So I guess she is OK.  No, wait, “she clutches her chest” and keels over dead, I guess with a heart attack.  A policeman carries out Armand’s two baby daughters, but Irene just slips away into the crowd

Irene manages to walk a few miles and “that night she fell in with a crippled beggar.”  Wow, that is doubly un-PC; lucky he was white or the description could have taken a really ugly turn.  Irene tells him her story.  Rather than, say, calling Child Protective Services, the man tells his own amusing anecdote to the child.  He had stolen some loot.  Running from the police, he fell on the train tracks where his legs were sliced off by a freight train.  Sadly this did not happen in the US where he could have sued for millions.  The bum offers to kill the cop who shot her father.  She says if he will find the name, she will kill him herself.

Irene hangs out with the legless homeless man for 3 years until she is 16 because who wouldn’t?  He taught her all manner of crime — shoplifting, purse-snatching, burglary — though her education is woefully deficient in the art of quick getaways.  And he gave her the name of the cop who shot her father — Jean Duret.  After the beggar’s death, she put together a gang and established a headquarters at the abandoned snuff factory.

One day, a friend of her fence shows up looking for a place to hide out.  Irene feels obligated to take him in.  Once he commits a murder, however, her hospitality wanes.  She goes to the crime scene and leaves a clue that will lead Detective Duret — her father’s killer — to the snuff factory.

Her plan gets bollixed up in a way that would make a pretty good movie.  There is even sort of a happy ending.

Although it started out depressing and grim, after Armand’s death, it got a lot more fun.

Footnotes:

• [1] This made sense at 3 am.
• First published in the June 1929 issue of Black Mask.