Nightmare Town

by Dashiell Hammett

  Midnight came, and no John Boyd, and I called it a day, and went home.

  Before going to bed, I talked with Dick Foley over the wire. He said that Mrs. Estep had done nothing of any importance all day, and had received neither mail nor phone calls. I told him to stop shadowing her until I solved John Boyd’s game.

  I was afraid Boyd might turn his attention to the woman, and I didn’t want him to discover that she was being shadowed. I had already instructed Bob Teal to simply watch Ledwich’s flat—to see when he came in and went out, and with whom—and now I told Dick to do the same with the woman.

  My guess on this Boyd person was that he and the woman were working together—that she had him watching Ledwich for her, so that the big man couldn’t double-cross her. But that was only a guess—and I don’t gamble too much on my guesses.

  VII

  The next morning I dressed myself up in an army shirt and shoes, an old faded cap, and a suit that wasn’t downright ragged, but was shabby enough not to stand out too noticeably beside John Boyd’s old clothes.

  It was a little after nine o’clock when Boyd left his hotel and had breakfast at the grease-joint where he had eaten the night before. Then he went up to Laguna Street, picked himself a corner, and waited for Jacob Ledwich.

  He did a lot of waiting. He waited all day, because Ledwich didn’t show until after dark. But the little man was well-stocked with patience—I’ll say that for him. He fidgeted, and stood on one foot and then the other, and even tried sitting on the curb for a while, but he stuck it out.

  I took it easy, myself. The furnished apartment Bob Teal had rented to watch Ledwich’s flat from was a ground-floor one, across the street and just a little above the corner where Boyd waited. So we could watch him and the flat with one eye.

  Bob and I sat and smoked and talked all day, taking turns watching the fidgeting man on the corner and Ledwich’s door.

  Night had just definitely settled when Ledwich came out and started up toward the car line. I slid out into the street, and our parade was under way again—Ledwich leading, Boyd following him, and we following him.

  Half a block of this, and I got an idea!

  I’m not what you’d call a brilliant thinker—such results as I get are usually the fruits of patience, industry, and unimaginative plugging, helped out now and then, maybe, by a little luck—but I do have my flashes of intelligence. And this was one of them.

  Ledwich was about a block ahead of me; Boyd half that distance. Speeding up, I passed Boyd, and caught up with Ledwich. Then I slackened my pace so as to walk beside him, though with no appearance from the rear of having any interest in him.

  “Jake,” I said, without turning my head, “there’s a guy following you!”

  The big man almost spoiled my little scheme by stopping dead still, but he caught himself in time, and, taking his cue from me, kept walking.

  “Who the hell are you?” he growled.

  “Don’t get funny!” I snapped back, still looking and walking ahead. “It ain’t my funeral. But I was coming up the street when you came out, and I seen this guy duck behind a pole until you was past, and then follow you up.”

  That got him.

  “You sure?”

  “Sure! All you got to do to prove it is turn the next corner and wait.”

  I was two or three steps ahead of him by this time. I turned the corner, and halted, with my back against the brick building front. Ledwich took up the same position at my side.

  “Want any help?” I grinned at him—a reckless sort of grin, unless my acting was poor.

  “No.”

  His little lumpy mouth was set ugly, and his blue eyes were hard as pebbles.

  I flicked the tail of my coat aside to show him the butt of my gun.

  “Want to borrow the rod?” I asked.

  “No.”

  He was trying to figure me out, and small wonder.

  “Don’t mind if I stick around to see the fun, do you?” I asked mockingly.

  There wasn’t time for him to answer that. Boyd had quickened his steps, and now he came hurrying around the corner, his nose twitching like a tracking dog’s.

  Ledwich stepped into the middle of the sidewalk, so suddenly that the little man thudded into him with a grunt. For a moment they stared at each other, and there was recognition between them.

  Ledwich shot one big hand out and clamped the other by a shoulder.

  “What are you snooping around me for, you rat? Didn’t I tell you to keep away from ’Frisco?”

  “Aw, Jake!” Boyd begged. “I didn’t mean no harm. I just thought that—”

  Ledwich silenced him with a shake that clicked his mouth shut, and turned to me.

  “A friend of mine,” he sneered.

  His eyes grew suspicious and hard again and ran up and down me from cap to shoes.

  “How’d you know my name?” he demanded.

  “A famous man like you?” I asked, in burlesque astonishment.

  “Never mind the comedy!” He took a threatening step toward me. “How’d you know my name?”

  “None of your damned business,” I snapped.

  My attitude seemed to reassure him. His face became less suspicious.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “I owe you something for this trick, and—How are you fixed?”

  “I have been dirtier.” Dirty is Pacific Coast argot for prosperous.

  He looked speculatively from me to Boyd, and back.

  “Know The Circle?” he asked me.

  I nodded. The underworld calls Wop Healey’s joint The Circle.

  “If you’ll meet me there to-morrow night, maybe I can put a piece of change your way.”

  “Nothing stirring!” I shook my head with emphasis. “I ain’t circulating that prominent these days.”

  A fat chance I’d have of meeting him there! Wop Healey and half his customers knew me as a detective. So there was nothing to do but to try to get the impression over that I was a crook who had reasons for wanting to keep away from the more notorious hang-outs for a while. Apparently it got over. He thought a while, and then gave me his Laguna Street number.

  “Drop in this time to-morrow and maybe I’ll have a proposition to make you—if you’ve got the guts.”

  “I’ll think it over,” I said noncommittally, and turned as if to go down the street.

  “Just a minute,” he called, and I faced him again. “What’s your name?”

  “Wisher,” I said. “Shine, if you want a front one.”

  “Shine Wisher,” he repeated. “I don’t remember ever hearing it before.”

  It would have surprised me if he had—I had made it up only about fifteen minutes before.

  “You needn’t yell it,” I said sourly, “so that everybody in the burg will remember hearing it.”

  And with that I left him, not at all dissatisfied with myself. By tipping him off to Boyd, I had put him under obligations to me, and had led him to accept me, at least tentatively, as a fellow crook. And by making no apparent effort to gain his good graces, I had strengthened my hand that much more.

  I had a date with him for the next day, when I was to be given a chance to earn—illegally, no doubt—“a piece of change.”

  There was a chance that this proposition he had in view for me had nothing to do with the Estep affair, but then again it might; and whether it did or not, I had my entering wedge at least a little way into Jake Ledwich’s business.

  I strolled around for about half an hour, and then went back to Bob Teal’s apartment.

  “Ledwich come back?”

  “Yes,” Bob said, “with that little guy of yours. They went in about half an hour ago.”

  “Good! Haven’t seen a woman go in?”

  “No.”

  I expected to see the first Mrs. Estep arrive sometime during the evening, but she didn’t. Bob and I sat around and talked and watched Ledwich’s doorway, and the hours passed.

  At one o’clock Ledwich came out alon
e.

  “I’m going to tail him, just for luck,” Bob said, and caught up his cap.

  Ledwich vanished around a corner, and then Bob passed out of sight behind him.

  Five minutes later Bob was with me again.

  “He’s getting his machine out of the garage.”

  I jumped for the telephone and put in a rush order for a fast touring car.

  Bob, at the window, called out, “Here he is!”

  I joined Bob in time to see Ledwich going into his vestibule. His car stood in front of the house. A very few minutes, and Boyd and Ledwich came out together. Boyd was leaning heavily on Ledwich, who was supporting the little man with an arm across his back. We couldn’t see their faces in the dark, but the little man was plainly either sick, drunk, or drugged!

  Ledwich helped his companion into the touring car. The red tail-light laughed back at us for a few blocks, and then disappeared. The automobile I had ordered arrived twenty minutes later, so we sent it back unused.

  At a little after three that morning, Ledwich, alone and afoot, returned from the direction of his garage. He had been gone exactly two hours.

  VIII

  Neither Bob nor I went home that night, but slept in the Laguna Street apartment.

  Bob went down to the corner grocer’s to get what we needed for breakfast in the morning, and he brought a morning paper back with him.

  I cooked breakfast while he divided his attention between Ledwich’s front door and the newspaper.

  “Hey!” he called suddenly, “look here!”

  I ran out of the kitchen with a handful of bacon.

  “What is it?”

  “Listen! ‘Park Murder Mystery!’ ” he read. “ ‘Early this morning the body of an unidentified man was found near a driveway in Golden Gate Park. His neck had been broken, according to the police, who say that the absence of any considerable bruises on the body, as well as the orderly condition of the clothes and the ground near by, show that he did not come to his death through falling, or being struck by an automobile. It is believed that he was killed and then carried to the park in an automobile, to be left there.’ ”

  “Boyd!” I said.

  “I bet you!” Bob agreed.

  And at the morgue a very little while later, we learned that we were correct. The dead man was John Boyd.

  “He was dead when Ledwich brought him out of the house,” Bob said.

  I nodded.

  “He was! He was a little man, and it wouldn’t have been much of a stunt for a big bruiser like Ledwich to have dragged him along with one arm the short distance from the door to the curb, pretending to be holding him up, like you do with a drunk. Let’s go over to the Hall of Justice and see what the police have got on it—if anything.”

  At the detective bureau we hunted up O’Gar, the detective-sergeant in charge of the Homicide Detail, and a good man to work with.

  “This dead man found in the park,” I asked, “know anything about him?”

  O’Gar pushed back his village constable’s hat—a big black hat with a floppy brim that belonged in vaudeville—scratched his bullet-head, and scowled at me as if he thought I had a joke up my sleeve.

  “Not a damned thing except that he’s dead!” he said at last.

  “How’d you like to know who he was last seen with?”

  “It wouldn’t hinder me any in finding out who bumped him off, and that’s a fact.”

  “How do you like the sound of this?” I asked. “His name was John Boyd and he was living at a hotel down in the next block. The last person he was seen with was a guy who is tied up with Dr. Estep’s first wife. You know—the Dr. Estep whose second wife is the woman you people are trying to prove a murder on. Does that sound interesting?”

  “It does,” he said. “Where do we go first?”

  “This Ledwich—he’s the fellow who was last seen with Boyd—is going to be a hard bird to shake down. We better try to crack the woman first—the first Mrs. Estep. There’s a chance that Boyd was a pal of hers, and in that case when she finds out that Ledwich rubbed him out, she may open up and spill the works to us.

  “On the other hand, if she and Ledwich are stacked up against Boyd together, then we might as well get her safely placed before we tie into him. I don’t want to pull him before night, anyway. I got a date with him, and I want to try to rope him first.”

  Bob Teal made for the door.

  “I’m going up and keep my eye on him until you’re ready for him,” he called over his shoulder.

  “Good,” I said. “Don’t let him get out of town on us. If he tries to blow, have him chucked in the can.”

  In the lobby of the Montgomery Hotel, O’Gar and I talked to Dick Foley first. He told us that the woman was still in her room—had had her breakfast sent up. She had received neither letters, telegrams, nor phone calls since we began to watch her.

  I got hold of Stacey again.

  “We’re going up to talk to this Estep woman, and maybe we’ll take her away with us. Will you send up a maid to find out whether she’s up and dressed yet? We don’t want to announce ourselves ahead of time, and we don’t want to burst in on her while she’s in bed, or only partly dressed.”

  He kept us waiting about fifteen minutes, and then told us that Mrs. Estep was up and dressed.

  We went up to her room, taking the maid with us.

  The maid rapped on the door.

  “What is it?” an irritable voice demanded.

  “The maid; I want to—”

  The key turned on the inside, and an angry Mrs. Estep jerked the door open. O’Gar and I advanced, O’Gar flashing his “buzzer.”

  “From headquarters,” he said. “We want to talk to you.”

  O’Gar’s foot was where she couldn’t slam the door on us, and we were both walking ahead, so there was nothing for her to do but to retreat into the room, admitting us—which she did with no pretense of graciousness.

  We closed the door, and then I threw our big load at her.

  “Mrs. Estep, why did Jake Ledwich kill John Boyd?”

  The expressions ran over her face like this: Alarm at Ledwich’s name, fear at the word “kill,” but the name John Boyd brought only bewilderment.

  “Why did what?” she stammered meaninglessly, to gain time.

  “Exactly,” I said. “Why did Jake kill him last night in his flat, and then take him in the park and leave him?”

  Another set of expressions: Increased bewilderment until I had almost finished the sentence, and then the sudden understanding of something, followed by the inevitable groping for poise. These things weren’t as plain as billboards, you understand, but they were there to be read by anyone who had ever played poker—either with cards or people.

  What I got out of them was that Boyd hadn’t been working with or for her, and that, though she knew Ledwich had killed somebody at some time, it wasn’t Boyd and it wasn’t last night. Who, then? And when? Dr. Estep? Hardly! There wasn’t a chance in the world that—if he had been murdered—anybody except his wife had done it—his second wife. No possible reading of the evidence could bring any other answer.

  Who, then, had Ledwich killed before Boyd? Was he a wholesale murderer?

  These things were flitting through my head in flashes and odd scraps while Mrs. Estep was saying:

  “This is absurd! The idea of your coming up here and—”

  She talked for five minutes straight, the words fairly sizzling from between her hard lips; but the words themselves didn’t mean anything. She was talking for time—talking while she tried to hit upon the safest attitude to assume.

  And before we could head her off, she had hit upon it—silence!

  We got not another word out of her; and that is the only way in the world to beat the grilling game. The average suspect tries to talk himself out of being arrested; and it doesn’t matter how shrewd a man is, or how good a liar, if he’ll talk to you, and you play your cards right, you can hook him—can make him help
you convict him. But if he won’t talk you can’t do a thing with him.

  And that’s how it was with this woman. She refused to pay any attention to our questions—she wouldn’t speak, nod, grunt, or wave an arm in reply. She gave us a fine assortment of facial expressions, true enough, but we wanted verbal information—and we got none.

  We weren’t easily licked, however. Three beautiful hours of it we gave her without rest. We stormed, cajoled, threatened, and at times I think we danced; but it was no go. So in the end we took her away with us. We didn’t have anything on her, but we couldn’t afford to have her running around loose until we nailed Ledwich.

  At the Hall of Justice we didn’t book her; but simply held her as a material witness, putting her in an office with a matron and one of O’Gar’s men, who were to see what they could do with her while we went after Ledwich. We had had her frisked as soon as she reached the Hall, of course; and, as we expected, she hadn’t a thing of importance on her.

  O’Gar and I went back to the Montgomery and gave her room a thorough overhauling—and found nothing.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re talking about?” the detective-sergeant asked as we left the hotel. “It’s going to be a pretty joke on somebody if you’re mistaken.”

  I let that go by without an answer.

  “I’ll meet you at six-thirty,” I said, “and we’ll go up against Ledwich.”

  He grunted an approval, and I set out for Vance Richmond’s office.

  IX

  The attorney sprang up from his desk as soon as his stenographer admitted me. His face was leaner and grayer than ever; its lines had deepened, and there was a hollowness around his eyes.

  “You’ve got to do something!” he cried huskily. “I have just come from the hospital. Mrs. Estep is on the point of death! A day more of this—two days at the most—and she will—”

  I interrupted him, and swiftly gave him an account of the day’s happenings, and what I expected, or hoped, to make out of them. But he received the news without brightening, and shook his head hopelessly.