Nightmare Town

by Dashiell Hammett

  “I was sure that she would stand up under any sort of an investigation. Nobody knew anything about the doc’s real past; except what he had told them, which would be found false.

  “Edna had really married a Dr. Humbert Estep in Philadelphia in ’96; and the twenty-seven years that had passed since then would do a lot to hide the fact that that Dr. Humbert Estep wasn’t this Dr. Humbert Estep.

  “All I wanted to do was convince the doc’s real wife and her lawyers that she wasn’t really his wife at all. And we did that! Everybody took it for granted that Edna was the legal wife.

  “The next play would have been for Edna and the real wife to have reached some sort of an agreement about the estate, whereby Edna would have got the bulk—or at least half—of it; and nothing would have been made public.

  “If worse came to worst, we were prepared to go to court. We were sitting pretty! But I’d have been satisfied with half the estate. It would have come to a few hundred thousand at the least, and that would have been plenty for me—even deducting the twenty thousand I had promised Edna.

  “But when the police grabbed the doc’s wife and charged her with his murder, I saw my way into the whole roll. All I had to do was sit tight and wait until they convicted her. Then the court would turn the entire pile over to Edna.

  “I had the only evidence that would free the doc’s wife: the note he had written me. But I couldn’t—even if I had wanted to—have turned it in without exposing my hand. When he read that fake piece in the paper, he tore it out, wrote his message to me across the face of it, and sent it to me. So the note is a dead give-away. However, I didn’t have any intention of publishing it, anyhow.

  “Up to this point everything had gone like a dream. All I had to do was wait until it was time to cash in on my brains. And that’s the time that the real Humbert Estep picked out to mess up the works.

  “He shaved his mustache off, put on some old clothes, and came snooping around to see that Edna and I didn’t run out on him. As if he could have stopped us! After you put the finger on him for me, I brought him up here.

  “I intended salving him along until I could find a place to keep him until all the cards had been played. That’s what I was going to hire you for—to take care of him.

  “But we got to talking, and wrangling, and I had to knock him down. He didn’t get up, and I found that he was dead. His neck was broken. There was nothing to do but take him out to the park and leave him.

  “I didn’t tell Edna. She didn’t have a lot of use for him, as far as I could see, but you can’t tell how women will take things. Anyhow, she’ll stick, now that it’s done. She’s on the up and up all the time. And if she should talk, she can’t do a lot of damage. She only knows her own part of the lay.

  “All this long-winded story is so you’ll know just exactly what you’re up against. Maybe you think you can dig up the proof of these things I have told you. You can this far. You can prove that Edna wasn’t the doc’s wife. You can prove that I’ve been blackmailing him. But you can’t prove that the doc’s wife didn’t believe that Edna was his real wife! It’s her word against Edna’s and mine.

  “We’ll swear that we had convinced her of it, which will give her a motive. You can’t prove that the phony news article I told you about ever existed. It’ll sound like a hophead’s dream to a jury.

  “You can’t tie last night’s murder on me—I’ve got an alibi that will knock your hat off! I can prove that I left here with a friend of mine who was drunk, and that I took him to his hotel and put him to bed, with the help of a night clerk and a bellboy. And what have you got against that? The word of two private detectives. Who’ll believe you?

  “You can convict me of conspiracy to defraud, or something—maybe. But, regardless of that, you can’t free Mrs. Estep without my help.

  “Turn me loose and I’ll give you the letter the doc wrote me. It’s the goods, right enough! In his own handwriting, written across the face of the fake newspaper story—which ought to fit the torn place in the paper that the police are supposed to be holding—and he wrote that he was going to kill himself, in words almost that plain.”

  That would turn the trick—there was no doubt of it. And I believed Ledwich’s story. The more I thought it over the better I liked it. It fitted into the facts everywhere. But I wasn’t enthusiastic about giving this big crook his liberty.

  “Don’t make me laugh!” I said. “I’m going to put you away and free Mrs. Estep—both.”

  “Go ahead and try it! You’re up against it without the letter; and you don’t think a man with brains enough to plan a job like this one would be foolish enough to leave the note where it could be found, do you?”

  I wasn’t especially impressed with the difficulty of convicting this Ledwich and freeing the dead man’s widow. His scheme—that cold-blooded zigzag of treachery for everybody he had dealt with, including his latest accomplice, Edna Estep—wasn’t as air-tight as he thought it. A week in which to run out a few lines in the East, and—But a week was just what I didn’t have!

  Vance Richmond’s words were running through my head: “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!”

  If I was going to do Mrs. Estep any good, I had to move quick. Law or no law, her life was in my fat hands. This man before me—his eyes bright and hopeful now and his mouth anxiously pursed—was thief, blackmailer, double-crosser, and at least twice a murderer. I hated to let him walk out. But there was the woman dying in a hospital….

  XII

  Keeping my eye on Ledwich, I went to the telephone, and got Vance Richmond on the wire at his residence.

  “How is Mrs. Estep?” I asked.

  “Weaker! I talked with the doctor half an hour ago, and he says—”

  I cut in on him; I didn’t want to listen to the details.

  “Get over to the hospital, and be where I can reach you by phone. I may have news for you before the night is over.”

  “What—Is there a chance? Are you—”

  I didn’t promise him anything. I hung up the receiver and spoke to Ledwich. “I’ll do this much for you. Slip me the note, and I’ll give you your gun and put you out the back door. There’s a bull on the corner out front, and I can’t take you past him.”

  He was on his feet, beaming.

  “Your word on it?” he demanded.

  “Yes—get going!”

  He went past me to the phone, gave a number (which I made a note of), and then spoke hurriedly into the instrument.

  “This is Shuler. Put a boy in a taxi with that envelope I gave you to hold for me, and send him out here right away.”

  He gave his address, said “Yes” twice, and hung up.

  There was nothing surprising about his unquestioning acceptance of my word. He couldn’t afford to doubt that I’d play fair with him. And, also, all successful bunko men come in time to believe that the world—except for themselves—is populated by a race of human sheep who may be trusted to conduct themselves with true sheeplike docility.

  Ten minutes later the doorbell rang. We answered it together, and Ledwich took a large envelope from a messenger boy, while I memorized the number on the boy’s cap. Then we went back to the front room.

  Ledwich slit the envelope and passed its contents to me: a piece of rough-torn newspaper. Across the face of the fake article he had told me about was written a message in a jerky hand.

  I wouldn’t have suspected you, Ledwich, of such profound stupidity. My last thought will be—this bullet that ends my life also ends your years of leisure. You’ll have to go to work now.

  Estep.

  The doctor had died game!

  I took the envelope from the big man, put the death note in it, and put them in my pocket. Then I went to a front window, flattening a cheek against the glass until I could see O’Gar, dimly outlined in the night, patiently standing where I had left him hours before.


  “The city dick is still on the corner,” I told Ledwich. “Here’s your gat”—holding out the gun I had shot from his fingers a little while back—“take it, and blow through the back door. Remember, that’s all I’m offering you—the gun and a fair start. If you play square with me, I’ll not do anything to help find you—unless I have to keep myself in the clear.”

  “Fair enough!”

  He grabbed the gun, broke it to see that it was still loaded, and wheeled toward the rear of the flat. At the door he pulled up, hesitated, and faced me again. I kept him covered with my automatic.

  “Will you do me one favor I didn’t put in the bargain?” he asked.

  “What is it?”

  “That note of the doc’s is in an envelope with my handwriting and maybe my fingerprints on it. Let me put it in a fresh envelope, will you? I don’t want to leave any broader trail behind than I have to.”

  With my left hand—my right being busy with the gun—I fumbled for the envelope and tossed it to him. He took a plain envelope from the table, wiped it carefully with his handkerchief, put the note in it, taking care not to touch it with the balls of his fingers, and passed it back to me; and I put it in my pocket.

  I had a hard time to keep from grinning in his face.

  That fumbling with the handkerchief told me that the envelope in my pocket was empty, that the death note was in Ledwich’s possession—though I hadn’t seen it pass there. He had worked one of his bunko tricks upon me.

  “Beat it!” I snapped, to keep from laughing in his face.

  He spun on his heel. His feet pounded against the floor. A door slammed in the rear.

  I tore into the envelope he had given me. I needed to be sure he had double-crossed me.

  The envelope was empty.

  Our agreement was wiped out.

  I sprang to the front window, threw it wide open, and leaned out. O’Gar saw me immediately—clearer than I could see him. I swung my arm in a wide gesture toward the rear of the house. O’Gar set out for the alley on the run. I dashed back through Ledwich’s flat to the kitchen, and stuck my head out of an already open window.

  I could see Ledwich against the white-washed fence—throwing the back gate open, plunging through it into the alley.

  O’Gar’s squat bulk appeared under a light at the end of the alley.

  Ledwich’s revolver was in his hand. O’Gar’s wasn’t—not quite.

  Ledwich’s gun swung up—the hammer clicked.

  O’Gar’s gun coughed fire.

  Ledwich fell with a slow, revolving motion over against the white fence, gasped once or twice, and went down in a pile.

  I walked slowly down the stairs to join O’Gar; slowly, because it isn’t a nice thing to look at a man you’ve deliberately sent to his death. Not even if it’s the surest way of saving an innocent life, and if the man who dies is a Jake Ledwich—altogether treacherous.

  “How come?” O’Gar asked, when I came into the alley, where he stood looking down at the dead man.

  “He got out on me,” I said simply.

  “He must’ve.”

  I stooped and searched the dead man’s pockets until I found the suicide note, still crumpled in the handkerchief. O’Gar was examining the dead man’s revolver.

  “Lookit!” he exclaimed. “Maybe this ain’t my lucky day! He snapped at me once, and his gun missed fire. No wonder! Somebody must’ve been using an ax on it—the firing pin’s broke clean off!”

  “Is that so?” I asked; just as if I hadn’t discovered, when I first picked the revolver up, that the bullet which had knocked it out of Ledwich’s hand had made it harmless.

  THE ASSISTANT MURDERER

  Gold on the door, edged with black, said ALEXANDER RUSH, PRIVATE DETECTIVE. Inside, an ugly man sat tilted back in a chair, his feet on a yellow desk.

  The office was in no way lovely. Its furnishings were few and old with the shabby age of second-handdom. A shredding square of dun carpet covered the floor. On one buff wall hung a framed certificate that licensed Alexander Rush to pursue the calling of private detective in the city of Baltimore in accordance with certain red-numbered regulations. A map of the city hung on another wall. Beneath the map a frail bookcase, small as it was, gaped emptily around its contents: a yellowish railway guide, a smaller hotel directory, and street and telephone directories for Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia. An insecure oaken clothes-tree held up a black derby and a black overcoat beside a white sink in one corner. The four chairs in the room were unrelated to one another in everything except age. The desk’s scarred top held, in addition to the proprietor’s feet, a telephone, a black-clotted inkwell, a disarray of papers having generally to do with criminals who had escaped from one prison or another, and a grayed ashtray that held as much ash and as many black cigar stumps as a tray of its size could expect to hold.

  An ugly office—the proprietor was uglier.

  His head was squatly pear-shaped. Excessively heavy, wide, blunt at the jaw, it narrowed as it rose to the close-cropped, erect grizzled hair that sprouted above a low, slanting forehead. His complexion was of a rich darkish red, his skin tough in texture and rounded over thick cushions of fat. These fundamental inelegancies were by no means all his ugliness. Things had been done to his features.

  One way you looked at his nose, you said it was crooked. Another way, you said it could not be crooked; it had no shape at all. Whatever your opinion of its form, you could not deny its color. Veins had broken to pencil its already florid surface with brilliant red stars and curls and puzzling scrawls that looked as if they must have some secret meanings. His lips were thick, tough-skinned. Between them showed the brassy glint of two solid rows of gold teeth, the lower row lapping the upper, so undershot was the bulging jaw. His eyes—small, deep-set, and pale blue of iris—were bloodshot to a degree that made you think he had a heavy cold. His ears accounted for some of his earlier years: they were the thickened, twisted cauliflower ears of the pugilist.

  A man of forty-something, ugly, sitting tilted back in his chair, feet on desk.

  The gilt-labeled door opened and another man came into the office. Perhaps ten years younger than the man at the desk, he was, roughly speaking, everything that one was not. Fairly tall, slender, fair-skinned, brown-eyed, he would have been as little likely to catch your eye in a gambling-house as in an art gallery. His clothes—suit and hat were gray—were fresh and properly pressed, and even fashionable in that inconspicuous manner which is one sort of taste. His face was likewise unobtrusive, which was surprising when you considered how narrowly it missed handsomeness through the least meagerness of mouth—a mark of the too-cautious man.

  Two steps into the office he hesitated, brown eyes glancing from shabby furnishings to ill-visaged proprietor. So much ugliness seemed to disconcert the man in gray. An apologetic smile began on his lips, as if he were about to murmur, “I beg your pardon, I’m in the wrong office.”

  But when he finally spoke it was otherwise. He took another step forward, asking uncertainly:

  “You are Mr. Rush?”

  “Yeah.” The detective’s voice was hoarse with a choking harshness that seemed to corroborate the heavy-cold testimony of his eyes. He put his feet down on the floor and jerked a fat, red hand at a chair. “Sit down, sir.”

  The man in gray sat down, tentatively upright on the chair’s front edge.

  “Now what can I do for you?” Alec Rush croaked amiably.

  “I want—I wish—I would like—” and further than that the man in gray said nothing.

  “Maybe you’d better just tell me what’s wrong,” the detective suggested. “Then I’ll know what you want of me.” He smiled.

  There was kindliness in Alec Rush’s smile, and it was not easily resisted. True, his smile was a horrible grimace out of a nightmare, but that was its charm. When your gentle-countenanced man smiles there is small gain: his smile expresses little more than his reposed face. But when Alec Rush distorted his ogre’s mask so that
jovial friendliness peeped incongruously from his savage red eyes, from his brutal metal-studded mouth—then that was a heartening, a winning thing.

  “Yes, I daresay that would be better.” The man in gray sat back in his chair, more comfortably, less transiently. “Yesterday on Fayette Street, I met a—a young woman I know. I hadn’t—we hadn’t met for several months. That isn’t really pertinent, however. But after we separated—we had talked for a few minutes—I saw a man. That is, he came out of a doorway and went down the street in the same direction she had taken, and I got the idea he was following her. She turned into Liberty Street and he did likewise. Countless people walk along that same route, and the idea that he was following her seemed fantastic, so much so that I dismissed it and went on about my business.

  “But I couldn’t get the notion out of my head. It seemed to me there had been something peculiarly intent in his carriage, and no matter how much I told myself the notion was absurd, it persisted in worrying me. So last night, having nothing especial to do, I drove out to the neighborhood of—of the young woman’s house. And I saw the same man again. He was standing on a corner two blocks from her house. It was the same man—I’m certain of it. I tried to watch him, but while I was finding a place for my car he disappeared and I did not see him again. Those are the circumstances. Now will you look into it, learn if he is actually following her, and why?”

  “Sure,” the detective agreed hoarsely, “but didn’t you say anything to the lady or to any of her family?”

  The man in gray fidgeted in his chair and looked at the stringy dun carpet.

  “No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to disturb her, frighten her, and still don’t. After all, it may be no more than a meaningless coincidence, and—and—well—I don’t—That’s impossible! What I had in mind was for you to find out what is wrong, if anything, and remedy it without my appearing in the matter at all.”

  “Maybe, but, mind you, I’m not saying I will. I’d want to know more first.”