Nightmare Town

by Dashiell Hammett

  The doorway opened into an office building. He searched the corridors, upstairs and down, and did not find the bandaged man. He returned to the ground floor and discovered a sheltered corner near the back door, near the foot of the stairs. The corner was shielded from the stairs and from most of the corridor by a wooden closet in which brooms and mops were kept. The man had entered through the rear of the building; he would probably leave that way; Steve waited.

  Fifteen minutes passed, bringing no one within sight of his hiding-place. Then from the front of the building came a woman’s soft laugh, and footsteps moved toward him. He shrank back in his dusky corner. The footsteps passed—a man and a woman laughing and talking together as they walked. They mounted the stairs. Steve peeped out at them, and then drew back suddenly, more in surprise than in fear of detection, for the two who mounted the stairs were completely engrossed in each other.

  The man was Elder, the insurance and real-estate agent. Steve did not see his face, but the checkered suit on his round figure was unmistakable—“college-boy suit,” Kamp had called it. Elder’s arm was around the woman’s waist as they went up the stairs, and her cheek leaned against his shoulder as she looked coquettishly into his face. The woman was Dr. MacPhail’s feline wife.

  “What next?” Steve asked himself, when they had passed from his sight. “Is the whole town wrong? What next, I wonder?”

  The answer came immediately—the pounding of crazy footsteps directly over Steve’s head—footsteps that might have belonged to a drunken man, or to a man fighting a phantom. Above the noise of heels on wooden floor, a scream rose—a scream that blended horror and pain into a sound that was all the more unearthly because it was unmistakably of human origin.

  Steve bolted out of his corner and up the steps three at a time, pivoted into the second-floor corridor on the newel, and came face to face with David Brackett, the banker.

  Brackett’s thick legs were far apart, and he swayed on them. His face was a pallid agony above his beard. Big spots of beard were gone, as if torn out or burned away. From his writhing lips thin wisps of vapor issued.

  “They’ve poisoned me, the damned—”

  He came suddenly up on the tips of his toes, his body arched, and he fell stiffly backward, as dead things fall.

  Steve dropped on a knee beside him, but he knew nothing could be done—knew Brackett had died while still on his feet. For a moment, as he crouched there over the dead man, something akin to panic swept Steve Threefall’s mind clean of reason. Was there never to be an end to this piling of mystery upon mystery, of violence upon violence? He had the sensation of being caught in a monstrous net—a net without beginning or end, and whose meshes were slimy with blood. Nausea—spiritual and physical—gripped him, held him impotent. Then a shot crashed.

  He jerked erect—sprang down the corridor toward the sound; seeking in a frenzy of physical activity escape from the sickness that had filled him.

  At the end of the corridor a door was labeled ORMSBY NITER CORPORATION, W. W. ORMSBY, PRESIDENT. There was no need for hesitancy before deciding that the shot had come from behind that label. Even as he dashed toward it, another shot rattled the door and a falling body thudded behind it.

  Steve flung the door open—and jumped aside to avoid stepping on the man who lay just inside. Over by a window, Larry Ormsby stood facing the door, a black automatic in his hand. His eyes danced with wild merriment, and his lips curled in a tight-lipped smile. “Hello, Threefall,” he said. “I see you’re still keeping close to the storm centers.”

  Steve looked down at the man on the floor—W. W. Ormsby. Two bullet-holes were in the upper left-hand pocket of his vest. The holes, less than an inch apart, had been placed with a precision that left no room for doubting that the man was dead. Steve remembered Larry’s threat to his father: “I’ll spoil your vest!”

  He looked up from killed to killer. Larry Ormsby’s eyes were hard and bright; the pistol in his hand was held lightly, with the loose alertness peculiar to professional gunmen.

  “This isn’t a—ah—personal matter with you, is it?” he asked.

  Steve shook his head; and heard the trampling of feet and a confusion of excited voices in the corridor behind him.

  “That’s nice,” the killer was saying; “and I’d suggest that you—”

  He broke off as men came into the office. Grant Fernie, the marshal, was one of them.

  “Dead?” he asked, with a bare glance at the man on the floor.

  “Rather,” Larry replied.

  “How come?”

  Larry Ormsby moistened his lips, not nervously, but thoughtfully. Then he smiled at Steve, and told his story.

  “Threefall and I were standing down near the front door talking, when we heard a shot. I thought it had been fired up here, but he said it came from across the street. Anyhow, we came up here to make sure—making a bet on it first; so Threefall owes me a dollar. We came up here, and just as we got to the head of the steps we heard another shot, and Brackett came running out of here with this gun in his hand.”

  He gave the automatic to the marshal, and went on: “He took a few steps from the door, yelled, and fell down. Did you see him out there?”

  “I did,” Fernie said.

  “Well, Threefall stopped to look at him while I came on in here to see if my father was all right—and found him dead. That’s all there is to it.”

  —

  STEVE WENT slowly down to the street after the gathering in the dead man’s office had broken up, without having either contradicted or corroborated Larry Ormsby’s fiction. No one had questioned him. At first he had been too astonished by the killer’s boldness to say anything; and when his wits had resumed their functions, he had decided to hold his tongue for a while.

  Suppose he had told the truth? Would it have helped justice? Would anything help justice in Izzard? If he had known what lay behind this piling-up of crime, he could have decided what to do; but he did not know—did not even know that there was anything behind it. So he had kept silent. The inquest would not be held until the following day—time enough to talk then, after a night’s consideration.

  He could not grasp more than a fragment of the affair at a time now; disconnected memories made a whirl of meaningless images in his brain. Elder and Mrs. MacPhail going up the stairs—to where? What had become of them? What had become of the man with the bandages on throat and jaw? Had those three any part in the double murder? Had Larry killed the banker as well as his father? By what chance did the marshal appear on the scene immediately after murder had been done?

  Steve carried his jumbled thoughts back to the hotel, and lay across his bed for perhaps an hour. Then he got up and went to the Bank of Izzard, drew out the money he had there, put it carefully in his pocket, and returned to his hotel room to lie across the bed again.

  Nova Vallance, nebulous in yellow crêpe, was sitting on the lower step of the MacPhails’ porch when Steve went up the flowered walk that evening. She welcomed him warmly, concealing none of the impatience with which she had been waiting for him. He sat on the step beside her, twisting around a little for a better view of the dusky oval of her face.

  “How is your arm?” she asked.

  “Fine!” He opened and shut his left hand briskly. “I suppose you heard all about to-day’s excitement?”

  “Oh, yes! About Mr. Brackett’s shooting Mr. Ormsby, and then dying with one of his heart attacks.”

  “Huh?” Steve demanded.

  “But weren’t you there?” she asked in surprise.

  “I was, but suppose you tell me just what you heard.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard all sorts of things about it! But all I really know is what Dr. MacPhail, who examined both of them, said.”

  “And what was that?”

  “That Mr. Brackett killed Mr. Ormsby—shot him—though nobody seems to know why; and then, before he could get out of the building, his heart failed him and he died.”

  “And he was s
upposed to have a bad heart?”

  “Yes. Dr. MacPhail told him a year ago that he would have to be careful, that the least excitement might be fatal.”

  Steve caught her wrist in his hand.

  “Think now,” he commanded. “Did you ever hear Dr. MacPhail speak of Brackett’s heart trouble until to-day?”

  She looked curiously into his face, and a little pucker of bewilderment came between her eyes.

  “No,” she replied slowly. “I don’t think so; but, of course, there was never any reason why he should have mentioned it. Why do you ask?”

  “Because,” he told her, “Brackett did not shoot Ormsby; and any heart attack that killed Brackett was caused by poison—some poison that burned his face and beard.”

  She gave a little cry of horror.

  “You think—” She stopped, glanced furtively over her shoulder at the front door of the house, and leaned close to him to whisper: “Didn’t—didn’t you say that the man who was killed in the fight last night was named Kamp?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the report, or whatever it was that Dr. MacPhail made of his examination, reads Henry Cumberpatch.”

  “You sure? Sure it’s the same man?”

  “Yes. The wind blew it off the doctor’s desk, and when I handed it back to him, he made some joke”—she colored with a little laugh—“some joke about it nearly being your death certificate instead of your companion’s. I glanced down at it then, and saw that it was for a man named Henry Cumberpatch. What does it all mean? What is—”

  The front gate clattered open, and a man swayed up the walk. Steve got up, picked up his black stick, and stepped between the girl and the advancing man. The man’s face came out of the dark. It was Larry Ormsby; and when he spoke his words had a drunken thickness to match the unsteadiness—not quite a stagger, but nearly so—of his walk.

  “Lis’en,” he said; “I’m dam’ near—”

  Steve moved toward him. “If Miss Vallance will excuse us,” he said, “we’ll stroll to the gate and talk.”

  Without waiting for a reply from either of them, Steve linked an arm through one of Ormsby’s and urged him down the path. At the gate Larry broke away, pulling his arm loose and confronting Steve.

  “No time for foolishness,” he snarled. “Y’ got to get out! Get out o’ Izzard!”

  “Yes?” Steve asked. “And why?”

  Larry leaned back against the fence and raised one hand in an impatient gesture.

  “Your lives are not worth a nickel—neither of you.”

  He swayed and coughed. Steve grasped him by the shoulder and peered into his face.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  Larry coughed again and clapped a hand to his chest, up near the shoulder.

  “Bullet—up high—Fernie’s. But I got him—the big tramp. Toppled him out a window—down like a kid divin’ for pennies.” He laughed shrilly, and then became earnest again. “Get the girl—beat it—now! Now! Now! Ten minutes’ll be too late. They’re comin’!”

  “Who? What? Why?” Steve snapped. “Talk turkey! I don’t trust you. I’ve got to have reasons.”

  “Reasons, my God!” the wounded man cried. “You’ll get your reasons. You think I’m trying to scare you out o’ town b’fore th’ inquest.” He laughed insanely. “Inquest! You fool! There won’t be any inquest! There won’t be any to-morrow—for Izzard! And you—”

  He pulled himself sharply together and caught one of Steve’s hands in both of his.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’ll give it to you, but we’re wasting time! But if you’ve got to have it—listen.

  —

  “IZZARD IS a plant! The whole damned town is queer. Booze—that’s the answer. The man I knocked off this afternoon—the one you thought was my father—originated the scheme. You make soda niter by boiling the nitrate in tanks with heated coils. He got the idea that a niter plant would make a good front for a moonshine factory. And he got the idea that if you had a whole town working together it’d be impossible for the game ever to fall down.

  “You can guess how much money there is in this country in the hands of men who’d be glad to invest it in a booze game that was air-tight. Not only crooks, I mean, but men who consider themselves honest. Take your guess, whatever it is, and double it, and you still won’t be within millions of the right answer. There are men with—But anyway, Ormsby took his scheme east and got his backing—a syndicate that could have raised enough money to build a dozen cities.

  “Ormsby, Elder, and Brackett were the boys who managed the game. I was here to see that they didn’t double-cross the syndicate; and then there’s a flock of trusty lieutenants, like Fernie, and MacPhail, and Heman—he’s postmaster—and Harker—another doctor, who got his last week—and Leslie, who posed as a minister. There was no trouble to getting the population we wanted. The word went around that the new town was a place where a crook would be safe so long as he did what he was told. The slums of all the cities of America, and half of ’em out of it, emptied themselves here. Every crook that was less than a step ahead of the police, and had car fare here, came and got cover.

  “Of course, with every thug in the world blowing in here we had a lot of sleuths coming, too; but they weren’t hard to handle, and if worse came to worst, we could let the law take an occasional man; but usually it wasn’t hard to take care of the gumshoes. We have bankers, and ministers, and doctors, and postmasters, and prominent men of all sorts either to tangle the sleuths up with bum leads, or, if necessary, to frame them. You’ll find a flock of men in the state pen who came here—most of them as narcotics agents or prohibition agents—and got themselves tied up before they knew what it was all about.

  “God, there never was a bigger game! It couldn’t flop—unless we spoiled it for ourselves. And that’s what we’ve done. It was too big for us! There was too much money in it—it went to our heads! At first we played square with the syndicate. We made booze and shipped it out—shipped it in carload lots, in trucks, did everything but pipe it out, and we made money for the syndicate and for ourselves. Then we got the real idea—the big one! We kept on making the hooch; but we got the big idea going for our own profit. The syndicate wasn’t in on that.

  “First, we got the insurance racket under way. Elder managed that, with three or four assistants. Between them they became agents of half the insurance companies in the country, and they began to plaster Izzard with policies. Men who had never lived were examined, insured, and then killed—sometimes they were killed on paper, sometimes a real man who died was substituted, and there were times when a man or two was killed to order. It was soft! We had the insurance agents, the doctors, the coroner, the undertaker, and all the city officials. We had the machinery to swing any deal we wanted! You were with Kamp the night he was killed! That was a good one. He was an insurance company sleuth—the companies were getting suspicious. He came here and was foolish enough to trust his reports to the mail. There aren’t many letters from strangers that get through the post office without being read. We read his reports, kept them, and sent phony ones out in their places. Then we nailed Mr. Kamp, and changed his name on the records to fit a policy in the very company he represented. A rare joke, eh?

  “The insurance racket wasn’t confined to men—cars, houses, furniture, everything you can insure was plastered. In the last census—by distributing the people we could count on, one in a house, with a list of five or six names—we got a population on the records of at least five times as many as are really here. That gave us room for plenty of policies, plenty of deaths, plenty of property insurance, plenty of everything. It gave us enough political influence in the county and state to strengthen our hands a hundred per cent, make the game safer.

  “You’ll find street after street of houses with nothing in them out of sight of the front windows. They cost money to put up, but we’ve made the money right along, and they’ll show a wonderful profit when the clean-up comes.

  �
��Then, after the insurance stunt was on its feet, we got the promotion game going. There’s a hundred corporations in Izzard that are nothing but addresses on letterheads—but stock certificates and bonds have been sold in them from one end of these United States to the other. And they have bought goods, paid for them, shipped them out to be got rid of—maybe at a loss—and put in larger and larger orders until they’ve built up a credit with the manufacturers that would make you dizzy to total. Easy! Wasn’t Brackett’s bank here to give them all the financial references they needed? There was nothing to it; a careful building-up of credit until they reached the highest possible point. Then, the goods shipped out to be sold through fences, and—bingo! The town is wiped out by fire. The stocks of goods are presumably burned; the expensive buildings that the out-of-town investors were told about are presumably destroyed; the books and records are burned.

  “What a killing! I’ve had a hell of a time stalling off the syndicate, trying to keep them in the dark about the surprise we’re going to give them. They’re too suspicious as it is for us to linger much longer. But things are about ripe for the blow-off—the fire that’s to start in the factory and wipe out the whole dirty town—and next Saturday was the day we picked. That’s the day when Izzard becomes nothing but a pile of ashes—and a pile of collectable insurance policies.

  “The rank and file in town won’t know anything about the finer points of the game. Those that suspect anything take their money and keep quiet. When the town goes up in smoke there will be hundreds of bodies found in the ruins—all insured—and there will be proof of the death of hundreds of others—likewise insured—whose bodies can’t be found.

  “There never was a bigger game! But it was too big for us! My fault—some of it—but it would have burst anyway. We always weeded out those who came to town looking too honest or too wise, and we made doubly sure that nobody who was doubtful got into the post office, railroad depot, telegraph office, or telephone exchange. If the railroad company or the telegraph or telephone company sent somebody here to work, and we couldn’t make them see things the way we wanted them seen, we managed to make the place disagreeable for them—and they usually flitted elsewhere in a hurry.