Nightmare Town

by Dashiell Hammett

  “But don’t you see,” he exclaimed when I had finished, “that that won’t do? I know you can find proof of her innocence in time. I’m not complaining—you’ve done all that could be expected, and more! But all that’s no good! I’ve got to have—well—a miracle, perhaps.

  “Suppose that you do finally get the truth out of Ledwich and the first Mrs. Estep or it comes out during their trials for Boyd’s murder? Or that you even get to the bottom of the matter in three or four days? That will be too late! If I can go to Mrs. Estep and tell her she’s free now, she may pull herself together, and come through. But another day of imprisonment—two days, or perhaps even two hours—and she won’t need anybody to clear her. Death will have done it! I tell you, she’s—”

  I left Vance Richmond abruptly again. This lawyer was bound upon getting me worked up; and I like my jobs to be simply jobs—emotions are nuisances during business hours.

  X

  At a quarter to seven that evening, while O’Gar remained down the street, I rang Jacob Ledwich’s bell. As I had stayed with Bob Teal in our apartment the previous night, I was still wearing the clothes in which I had made Ledwich’s acquaintance as Shine Wisher.

  Ledwich opened the door.

  “Hello, Wisher!” he said without enthusiasm, and led me upstairs.

  His flat consisted of four rooms, I found, running the full length and half the breadth of the building, with both front and rear exits. It was furnished with the ordinary none-too-spotless appointments of the typical moderately priced furnished flat—alike the world over.

  In his front room we sat down and talked and smoked and sized one another up. He seemed a little nervous. I thought he would have been just as well satisfied if I had forgotten to show up.

  “About this job you mentioned?” I asked presently.

  “Sorry,” he said, moistening his little lumpy mouth, “but it’s all off.” And then he added, obviously as an afterthought, “For the present, at least.”

  I guessed from that that my job was to have taken care of Boyd—but Boyd had been taken care of for good.

  He brought out some whisky after a while, and we talked over it for some time, to no purpose whatever. He was trying not to appear too anxious to get rid of me, and I was cautiously feeling him out.

  Piecing together things he let fall here and there, I came to the conclusion that he was a former con man who had fallen into an easier game of late years. That was in line, too, with what Porky Grout had told Bob Teal.

  I talked about myself with the evasiveness that would have been natural to a crook in my situation; and made one or two carefully planned slips that would lead him to believe that I had been tied up with the “Jimmy the Riveter” hold-up mob, most of whom were doing long hitches at Walla Walla then.

  He offered to lend me enough money to tide me over until I could get on my feet again. I told him I didn’t need chicken feed so much as a chance to pick up some real jack.

  The evening was going along, and we were getting nowhere.

  “Jake,” I said casually—outwardly casual, that is—“you took a big chance putting that guy out of the way like you did last night.”

  I meant to stir things up, and I succeeded.

  His face went crazy.

  A gun came out of his coat.

  Firing from my pocket, I shot it out of his hand.

  “Now behave!” I ordered.

  He sat rubbing his benumbed hand and staring with wide eyes at the smoldering hole in my coat.

  Looks like a great stunt, this shooting a gun out of a man’s hand, but it’s a thing that happens now and then. A man who is a fair shot (and that is exactly what I am—no more, no less) naturally and automatically shoots pretty close to the spot upon which his eyes are focused. When a man goes for his gun in front of you, you shoot at him—not at any particular part of him. There isn’t time for that—you shoot at him. However, you are more than likely to be looking at his gun, and in that case it isn’t altogether surprising if your bullet should hit his gun—as mine had done. But it looks impressive.

  I beat out the fire around the bullet-hole in my coat, crossed the room to where his revolver had been knocked, and picked it up. I started to eject the bullets from it, but, instead, I snapped it shut again and stuck it in my pocket. Then I returned to my chair, opposite him.

  “A man oughtn’t to act like that,” I kidded him; “he’s likely to hurt somebody.”

  His little mouth curled up at me.

  “An elbow, huh?” putting all the contempt he could in his voice; and somehow any synonym for detective seems able to hold a lot of contempt.

  I might have tried to talk myself back into the Wisher role. It could have been done, but I doubted that it would be worth it; so I nodded my confession.

  His brain was working now, and the passion left his face, while he sat rubbing his right hand, and his little mouth and eyes began to screw themselves up calculatingly.

  I kept quiet, waiting to see what the outcome of his thinking would be. I knew he was trying to figure out just what my place in this game was. Since, to his knowledge, I had come into it no later than the previous evening, then the Boyd murder hadn’t brought me in. That would leave the Estep affair—unless he was tied up in a lot of other crooked stuff that I didn’t know anything about.

  “You’re not a city dick, are you?” he asked finally, and his voice was on the verge of friendliness now: the voice of one who wants to persuade you of something, or sell you something.

  The truth, I thought, wouldn’t hurt.

  “No,” I said, “I’m with the Continental.”

  He hitched his chair a little closer to the muzzle of my automatic.

  “What are you after, then? Where do you come in on it?”

  I tried the truth again.

  “The second Mrs. Estep. She didn’t kill her husband.”

  “You’re trying to dig up enough dope to spring her?”

  “Yes.”

  I waved him back as he tried to hitch his chair still nearer.

  “How do you expect to do it?” he asked, his voice going lower and more confidential with each word.

  I took still another flier at the truth.

  “He wrote a letter before he died.”

  “Well?”

  But I called a halt for the time.

  “Just that,” I said.

  He leaned back in his chair, and his eyes and mouth grew small in thought again.

  “What’s your interest in the man who died last night?” he asked slowly.

  “It’s something on you,” I said, truthfully again. “It doesn’t do the second Mrs. Estep any direct good, maybe; but you and the first wife are stacked up together against her. Anything, therefore, that hurts you two will help her, somehow. I admit I’m wandering around in the dark; but I’m going ahead wherever I see a point of light—and I’ll come through to daylight in the end. Nailing you for Boyd’s murder is one point of light.”

  He leaned forward suddenly, his eyes and mouth popping open as far as they would go.

  “You’ll come out all right,” he said very softly, “if you use a little judgment.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Do you think,” he asked, still very softly, “that you can nail me for Boyd’s murder—that you can convict me of murder?”

  “I do.”

  But I wasn’t any too sure. In the first place, though we were morally certain of it, neither Bob Teal nor I could swear that the man who had got in the machine with Ledwich was John Boyd.

  We knew it was, of course, but the point is that it had been too dark for us to see his face. And, again, in the dark, we had thought him alive; it wasn’t until later that we knew he had been dead when he came down the steps.

  Little things, those, but a private detective on the witness stand—unless he is absolutely sure of every detail—has an unpleasant and ineffectual time of it.

  “I do,” I repeated, thinking these thin
gs over, “and I’m satisfied to go to the bat with what I’ve got on you and what I can collect between now and the time you and your accomplice go to trial.”

  “Accomplice?” he said, not very surprised. “That would be Edna. I suppose you’ve already grabbed her?”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed.

  “You’ll have one sweet time getting anything out of her. In the first place, she doesn’t know much, and in the second—well, I suppose you’ve tried, and have found out what a helpful sort she is! So don’t try the old gag of pretending that she has talked!”

  “I’m not pretending anything.”

  Silence between us for a few seconds, and then—

  “I’m going to make you a proposition,” he said. “You can take it or leave it. The note Dr. Estep wrote before he died was to me, and it is positive proof that he committed suicide. Give me a chance to get away—just a chance—a half-hour start—and I’ll give you my word of honor to send you the letter.”

  “I know I can trust you,” I said sarcastically.

  “I’ll trust you, then!” he shot back at me. “I’ll turn the note over to you if you’ll give me your word that I’m to have half an hour’s start.”

  “For what?” I demanded. “Why shouldn’t I take both you and the note?”

  “If you can get them! But do I look like the kind of sap who would leave the note where it would be found? Do you think it’s here in the room maybe?”

  I didn’t, but neither did I think that because he had hidden it, it couldn’t be found.

  “I can’t think of any reason why I should bargain with you,” I told him. “I’ve got you cold, and that’s enough.”

  “If I can show you that your only chance of freeing the second Mrs. Estep is through my voluntary assistance, will you bargain with me?”

  “Maybe—I’ll listen to your persuasion, anyway.”

  “All right,” he said, “I’m going to come clean with you. But most of the things I’m going to tell you can’t be proven in court without my help; and if you turn my offer down I’ll have plenty of evidence to convince the jury that these things are all false, that I never said them, and that you are trying to frame me.”

  That part was plausible enough. I’ve testified before juries all the way from the city of Washington to the state of Washington, and I’ve never seen one yet that wasn’t anxious to believe that a private detective is a double-crossing specialist who goes around with a cold deck in one pocket, a complete forger’s outfit in another, and who counts that day lost in which he railroads no innocent to the hoosegow.

  XI

  “There was once a young doctor in a town a long way from here,” Ledwich began. “He got mixed up in a scandal—a pretty rotten one—and escaped the pen only by the skin of his teeth. The state medical board revoked his license.

  “In a large city not far away, this young doc, one night when he was drunk—as he usually was in those days—told his troubles to a man he had met in a dive. The friend was a resourceful sort; and he offered, for a price, to fix the doc up with a fake diploma, so he could set up in practice in some other state.

  “The young doctor took him up, and the friend got the diploma for him. The doc was the man you know as Dr. Estep, and I was the friend. The real Dr. Estep was found dead in the park this morning!”

  That was news—if true!

  “You see,” the big man went on, “when I offered to get the phony diploma for the young doc—whose real name doesn’t matter—I had in mind a forged one. Nowadays they’re easy to get—there’s a regular business in them—but twenty-five years ago, while you could manage it, they were hard to get. While I was trying to get one, I ran across a woman I used to work with—Edna Fife. That’s the woman you know as the first Mrs. Estep.

  “Edna had married a doctor—the real Dr. Humbert Estep. He was a hell of a doctor, though; and after starving with him in Philadelphia for a couple of years, she made him close up his office, and she went back to the bunko game, taking him with her. She was good at it, I’m telling you—a real cleaner—and, keeping him under her thumb all the time, she made him a pretty good worker himself.

  “It was shortly after that that I met her, and when she told me all this, I offered to buy her husband’s medical diploma and other credentials. I don’t know whether he wanted to sell them or not—but he did what she told him, and I got the papers.

  “I turned them over to the young doc, who came to San Francisco and opened an office under the name of Humbert Estep. The real Esteps promised not to use that name any more—not much of an inconvenience for them, as they changed names every time they changed addresses.

  “I kept in touch with the young doctor, of course, getting my regular rake-off from him. I had him by the neck, and I wasn’t foolish enough to pass up any easy money. After a year or so, I learned that he had pulled himself together and was making good. So I jumped on a train and came to San Francisco. He was doing fine; so I camped here, where I could keep my eye on him and watch out for my own interests.

  “He got married about then, and, between his practice and his investments, he began to accumulate a roll. But he tightened up on me—damn him! He wouldn’t be bled. I got a regular percentage of what he made, and that was all.

  “For nearly twenty-five years I got it—but not a nickel over the percentage. He knew I wouldn’t kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, so no matter how much I threatened to expose him, he sat tight, and I couldn’t budge him. I got my regular cut, and not a nickel more.

  “That went along, as I say, for years. I was getting a living out of him, but I wasn’t getting any big money. A few months ago I learned that he had cleaned up heavily in a lumber deal so I made up my mind to take him for what he had.

  “During all these years I had got to know the doc pretty well. You do when you’re bleeding a man—you get a pretty fair idea of what goes on in his head, and what he’s most likely to do if certain things should happen. So I knew the doc pretty well.

  “I knew, for instance, that he had never told his wife the truth about his past; that he had stalled her with some lie about being born in West Virginia. That was fine—for me! Then I knew that he kept a gun in his desk, and I knew why. It was kept there for the purpose of killing himself if the truth ever came out about his diploma. He figured that if, at the first hint of exposure, he wiped himself out, the authorities, out of respect for the good reputation he had built up, would hush things up.

  “And his wife—even if she herself learned the truth—would be spared the shame of a public scandal. I can’t see myself dying just to spare some woman’s feelings, but the doc was a funny guy in some ways—and he was nutty about his wife.

  “That’s the way I had him figured out, and that’s the way things turned out.

  “My plan might sound complicated, but it was simple enough. I got hold of the real Esteps—it took a lot of hunting, but I found them at last. I brought the woman to San Francisco, and told the man to stay away.

  “Everything would have gone fine if he had done what I told him; but he was afraid that Edna and I were going to double-cross him, so he came here to keep an eye on us. But I didn’t know that until you put the finger on him for me.

  “I brought Edna here and, without telling her any more than she had to know, drilled her until she was letter-perfect in her part.

  “A couple days before she came I had gone to see the doc, and had demanded a hundred thousand cool smacks. He laughed at me, and I left, pretending to be as hot as hell.

  “As soon as Edna arrived, I sent her to call on him. She asked him to perform an illegal operation on her daughter. He, of course, refused. Then she pleaded with him, loud enough for the nurse or whoever else was in the reception room to hear. And when she raised her voice she was careful to stick to words that could be interpreted the way we wanted them to. She ran off her end to perfection, leaving in tears.

  “Then I sprung my other trick! I had a fellow—a f
ellow who’s a whiz at that kind of stuff—make me a plate: an imitation of newspaper printing. It was all worded like the real article, and said that the state authorities were investigating information that a prominent surgeon in San Francisco was practicing under a license secured by false credentials. This plate measured four and an eighth by six and three-quarter inches. If you’ll look at the first inside page of the Evening Times any day in the week you’ll see a photograph just that size.

  “On the day after Edna’s call, I bought a copy of the first edition of the Times—on the street at ten in the morning. I had this scratcher friend of mine remove the photograph with acid, and print this fake article in its place.

  “That evening I substituted a ‘home edition’ outer sheet for the one that had come with the paper we had cooked up, and made a switch as soon as the doc’s newsboy made his delivery. There was nothing to that part of it. The kid just tossed the paper into the vestibule. It’s simply a case of duck into the doorway, trade papers, and go on, leaving the loaded one for the doc to read.”

  I was trying not to look too interested, but my ears were cocked for every word. At the start, I had been prepared for a string of lies. But I knew now that he was telling me the truth! Every syllable was a boast; he was half-drunk with appreciation of his own cleverness—the cleverness with which he had planned and carried out his program of treachery and murder.

  I knew that he was telling the truth, and I suspected that he was telling more of it than he had intended. He was fairly bloated with vanity—the vanity that fills the crook almost invariably after a little success, and makes him ripe for the pen.

  His eyes glistened, and his little mouth smiled triumphantly around the words that continued to roll out of it.

  “The doc read the paper, all right—and shot himself. But first he wrote and mailed a note—to me. I didn’t figure on his wife’s being accused of killing him. That was plain luck.

  “I figured that the fake piece in the paper would be overlooked in the excitement. Edna would then go forward, claiming to be his first wife; and his shooting himself after her first call, with what the nurse had overheard, would make his death seem a confession that Edna was his wife.