Nightmare Town

by Dashiell Hammett

  “You knew she killed him?” Alec Rush growled.

  Millar tried twice to speak and made no sound. They were on the second-floor landing before the words came.

  “I saw her on the street that night, going toward his flat!”

  Alec Rush snorted viciously and turned the younger man toward the room where Sara Landow sat.

  “Landow’s out,” he whispered hurriedly. “I’m going out. Stay with her. She’s shot to hell—likely to do anything if she’s left alone. If Landow gets back before I do, tell him to wait for me.”

  Before Millar could voice the confusion in his face they were across the sill and into the room. Sara Landow raised her head. Her body was lifted from the chair as if by an invisible power. She came up tall and erect on her feet. Millar stood just inside the door. They looked eye into eye, posed each as if in the grip of a force pushing them together, another holding them apart.

  Alec Rush hurried clumsily and silently down to the street.

  In Mount Royal Avenue, Alec Rush saw the blue roadster at once. It was standing empty before the apartment building in which Madeline Boudin lived. The detective drove past it and turned his coupé in to the curb three blocks below. He had barely come to rest there when Landow ran out of the apartment building, jumped into his car, and drove off. He drove to a Charles Street hotel. Behind him went the detective.

  In the hotel, Landow walked straight to the writing-room. For half an hour he sat there, bending over a desk, covering sheet after sheet of paper with rapidly written words, while the detective sat behind a newspaper in a secluded angle of the lobby, watching the writing-room exit. Landow came out of the room stuffing a thick envelope in his pocket, left the hotel, got into his machine, and drove to the office of a messenger service company in St. Paul Street.

  He remained in this office for five minutes. When he came out he ignored his roadster at the curb, walking instead to Calvert Street, where he boarded a northbound street car. Alec Rush’s coupé rolled along behind the car. At Union Station, Landow left the street car and went to the ticket-window. He had just asked for a one-way ticket to Philadelphia when Alec Rush tapped him on the shoulder.

  Hubert Landow turned slowly, the money for his ticket still in his hand. Recognition brought no expression to his handsome face.

  “Yes,” he said coolly, “what is it?”

  Alec Rush nodded his ugly head at the ticket-window, at the money in Landow’s hand.

  “This is nothing for you to be doing,” he growled.

  “Here you are,” the ticket-seller said through his grille. Neither of the men in front paid any attention to him. A large woman in pink, red, and violet, jostling Landow, stepped on his foot and pushed past him to the window. Landow stepped back, the detective following.

  “You shouldn’t have left Sara alone,” said Landow. “She’s—”

  “She’s not alone. I got somebody to stay with her.”

  “Not—?”

  “Not the police, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Landow began to pace slowly down the long concourse, the detective keeping step with him. The blond man stopped and looked sharply into the other’s face.

  “Is it that fellow Millar who’s with her?” he demanded.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is he the man you’re working for, Rush?”

  “Yeah.”

  Landow resumed his walking. When they had reached the northern extremity of the concourse, he spoke again.

  “What does he want, this Millar?”

  Alec Rush shrugged his thick, limber shoulders and said nothing.

  “Well, what do you want?” the young man asked with some heat, facing the detective squarely now.

  “I don’t want you going out of town.”

  Landow pondered that, scowling.

  “Suppose I insist on going,” he asked, “how will you stop me?”

  “Accomplice after the fact in Jerome’s murder would be a charge I could hold you on.”

  Silence again, until broken by Landow.

  “Look here, Rush. You’re working for Millar. He’s out at my house. I’ve just sent a letter out to Sara by messenger. Give them time to read it, and then phone Millar there. Ask him if he wants me held or not.”

  Alec Rush shook his head decidedly.

  “No good,” he rasped. “Millar’s too rattle-brained for me to take his word for anything like that over the phone. We’ll go back there and have a talk all around.”

  Now it was Landow who balked.

  “No,” he snapped. “I won’t!” He looked with cool calculation at the detective’s ugly face. “Can I buy you, Rush?”

  “No, Landow. Don’t let my looks and my record kid you.”

  “I thought not.” Landow looked at the roof and at his feet, and he blew his breath out sharply. “We can’t talk here. Let’s find a quiet place.”

  “The heap’s outside,” Alec Rush said, “and we can sit in that.”

  Seated in Alec Rush’s coupé, Hubert Landow lighted a cigarette, the detective one of his black cigars.

  “That Polly Bangs you were talking about, Rush,” the blond man said without preamble, “is my wife. My name is Henry Bangs. You won’t find my fingerprints anywhere. When Polly was picked up in Milwaukee a couple of years ago and sent over, I came east and fell in with Madeline Boudin. We made a good team. She had brains in chunks, and if I’ve got somebody to do my thinking for me, I’m a pretty good worker myself.”

  He smiled at the detective, pointing at his own face with his cigarette. While Alec Rush watched, a tide of crimson surged into the blond man’s face until it was as rosy as a blushing school-girl’s. He laughed again and the blush began to fade.

  “That’s my best trick,” he went on. “Easy if you have the gift and keep in practice: fill your lungs, try to force the air out while keeping it shut off at the larynx. It’s a gold mine for a grifter! You’d be surprised how people will trust me after I’ve turned on a blush or two for ’em. So Madeline and I were in the money. She had brains, nerve, and a good front. I have everything but brains. We turned a couple of tricks—one con and one blackmail—and then she ran into Jerome Falsoner. We were going to give him the squeeze at first. But when Madeline found out that Sara was his heiress, that she was in debt, and that she and her uncle were on the outs, we ditched that racket and cooked a juicier one. Madeline found somebody to introduce me to Sara. I made myself agreeable, playing the boob—the shy but worshipful young man.

  “Madeline had brains, as I’ve said. She used ’em all this time. I hung around Sara, sending her candy, books, flowers, taking her to shows and dinner. The books and shows were part of Madeline’s work. Two of the books mentioned the fact that a husband can’t be made to testify against his wife in court, nor wife against husband. One of the plays touched the same thing. That was planting the seeds. We planted another with my blushing and mumbling—persuaded Sara, or rather let her discover for herself, that I was the clumsiest liar in the world.

  “The planting done, we began to push the game along. Madeline kept on good terms with Jerome. Sara was getting deeper in debt. We helped her in still deeper. We had a burglar clean out her apartment one night—Ruby Sweeger, maybe you know him. He’s in stir now for another caper. He got what money she had and most of the things she could have hocked in a pinch. Then we stirred up some of the people she owed, sent them anonymous letters warning them not to count too much on her being Jerome’s heir. Foolish letters, but they did the trick. A couple of her creditors sent collectors to the trust company.

  “Jerome got his income from the estate quarterly. Madeline knew the dates, and Sara knew them. The day before the next one, Madeline got busy on Sara’s creditors again. I don’t know what she told them this time, but it was enough. They descended on the trust company in a flock, with the result that the next day Sara was given two weeks’ pay and discharged. When she came out I met her—by chance—yes, I’d been watching for her since morning. I too
k her for a drive and got her back to her apartment at six o’clock. There we found more frantic creditors waiting to pounce on her. I chased them out, played the big-hearted boy, making embarrassed offers of all sorts of help. She refused them, of course, and I could see decision coming into her face. She knew this was the day on which Jerome got his quarterly check. She determined to go see him, to demand that he pay her debts at least. She didn’t tell me where she was going, but I could see it plain enough, since I was looking for it.

  “I left her and waited across the street from her apartment, in Franklin Square, until I saw her come out. Then I found a telephone, called up Madeline, and told her Sara was on her way to her uncle’s flat.”

  Landow’s cigarette scorched his fingers. He dropped it, crushed it under his foot, lighted another.

  “This is a long-winded story, Rush,” he apologized, “but it’ll soon be over now.”

  “Keep talking, son,” said Alec Rush.

  “There were some people in Madeline’s place when I phoned her—people trying to persuade her to go down the country on a party. She agreed now. They would give her an even better alibi than the one she had cooked up. She told them she had to see Jerome before she left, and they drove her over to his place and waited in their car while she went in with him.

  “She had a pint bottle of cognac with her, all doped and ready. She poured out a drink of it for Jerome, telling him of the new bootlegger she had found who had a dozen or more cases of this cognac to sell at a reasonable price. The cognac was good enough and the price low enough to make Jerome think she had dropped in to let him in on something good. He gave her an order to pass on to the bootlegger. Making sure his steel paper-knife was in full view on the table, Madeline rejoined her friends, taking Jerome as far as the door so they would see he was still alive, and drove off.

  “Now I don’t know what Madeline had put in that cognac. If she told me, I’ve forgotten. It was a powerful drug—not a poison, you understand, but an excitant. You’ll see what I mean when you hear the rest. Sara must have reached her uncle’s flat ten or fifteen minutes after Madeline’s departure. Her uncle’s face, she says, was red, inflamed, when he opened the door for her. But he was a frail man, while she was strong, and she wasn’t afraid of the devil himself, for that matter. She went in and demanded that he settle her debts, even if he didn’t choose to make her an allowance out of his income.

  “They were both Falsoners, and the argument must have grown hot. Also the drug was working on Jerome, and he had no will with which to fight it. He attacked her. The paper-knife was on the table, as Madeline had seen. He was a maniac. Sara was not one of your corner-huddling, screaming girls. She grabbed the paper-knife and let him have it. When he fell, she turned and ran.

  “Having followed her as soon as I’d finished telephoning to Madeline, I was standing on Jerome’s front steps when she dashed out. I stopped her and she told me she’d killed her uncle. I made her wait there while I went in, to see if he was really dead. Then I took her home, explaining my presence at Jerome’s door by saying, in my boobish, awkward way, that I had been afraid she might do something reckless and had thought it best to keep an eye on her.

  “Back in her apartment, she was all for giving herself up to the police. I pointed out the danger in that, arguing that, in debt, admittedly going to her uncle for money, being his heiress, she would most certainly be convicted of having murdered him so she would get the money. Her story of his attack, I persuaded her, would be laughed at as a flimsy yarn. Dazed, she wasn’t hard to convince. The next step was easy. The police would investigate her, even if they didn’t especially suspect her. I was, so far as we knew, the only person whose testimony could convict her. I was loyal enough, but wasn’t I the clumsiest liar in the world? Didn’t the mildest lie make me blush like an auctioneer’s flag? The way around that difficulty lay in what two of the books I had given her, and one of the plays we had seen, had shown: if I was her husband I couldn’t be made to testify against her. We were married the next morning, on a license I had been carrying for nearly a week.

  “Well, there we were. I was married to her. She had a couple of million coming when her uncle’s affairs were straightened out. She couldn’t possibly, it seemed, escape arrest and conviction. Even if no one had seen her entering or leaving her uncle’s flat, everything still pointed to her guilt, and the foolish course I had persuaded her to follow would simply ruin her chance of pleading self-defense. If they hanged her, the two million would come to me. If she got a long term in prison, I’d have the handling of the money at least.”

  Landow dropped and crushed his second cigarette and stared for a moment straight ahead into distance.

  “Do you believe in God, or Providence, or Fate, or any of that, Rush?” he asked. “Well, some believe in one thing and some in another, but listen. Sara was never arrested, never even really suspected. It seems there was some sort of Finn or Swede who had had a run-in with Jerome and threatened him. I suppose he couldn’t account for his whereabouts the night of the killing, so he went into hiding when he heard of Jerome’s murder. The police suspicion settled on him. They looked Sara up, of course, but not very thoroughly. No one seems to have seen her in the street, and the people in her apartment house, having seen her come in at six o’clock with me, and not having seen her—or not remembering if they did—go out or in again, told the police she had been in all evening. The police were too much interested in the missing Finn, or whatever he was, to look any further into Sara’s affairs.

  “So there we were again. I was married into the money, but I wasn’t fixed so I could hand Madeline her cut. Madeline said we’d let things run along as they were until the estate was settled up, and then we could tip Sara off to the police. But by the time the money was settled up there was another hitch. This one was my doing. I—I—well, I wanted to go on just as we were. Conscience had nothing to do with it, you understand? It was simply that—well—that living on with Sara was the only thing I wanted. I wasn’t even sorry for what I’d done, because if it hadn’t been for that I would never have had her.

  “I don’t know whether I can make this clear to you, Rush, but even now I don’t regret any of it. If it could have been different—but it couldn’t. It had to be this way or none. And I’ve had those six months. I can see that I’ve been a chump. Sara was never for me. I got her by a crime and a trick, and while I held on to a silly hope that some day she’d—she’d look at me as I did at her, I knew in my heart all the time it was no use. There had been a man—your Millar. She’s free now that it’s out about my being married to Polly, and I hope she—I hope—Well, Madeline began to howl for action. I told Sara that Madeline had had a child by Jerome, and Sara agreed to settle some money on her. But that didn’t satisfy Madeline. It wasn’t sentiment with her. I mean, it wasn’t any feeling for me, it was just the money. She wanted every cent she could get, and she couldn’t get enough to satisfy her in a settlement of the kind Sara wanted to make.

  “With Polly, it was that too, but maybe a little more. She’s fond of me, I think. I don’t know how she traced me here after she got out of the Wisconsin big house, but I can see how she figured things. I was married to a wealthy woman. If the woman died—shot by a bandit in a hold-up attempt—then I’d have money, and Polly would have both me and money. I haven’t seen her, wouldn’t know she was in Baltimore if you hadn’t told me, but that’s the way it would work out in her mind. The killing idea would have occurred just as easily to Madeline. I had told her I wouldn’t stand for pushing the game through on Sara. Madeline knew that if she went ahead on her own hook and hung the Falsoner murder on Sara I’d blow up the whole racket. But if Sara died, then I’d have the money and Madeline would draw her cut. So that was it.

  “I didn’t know that until you told me, Rush. I don’t give a damn for your opinion of me, but it’s God’s truth that I didn’t know that either Polly or Madeline was trying to have Sara killed. Well, that’s about all. Were you
shadowing me when I went to the hotel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought so. That letter I wrote and sent home told just about what I’ve told you, spilled the whole story. I was going to run for it, leaving Sara in the clear. She’s clear, all right, but now I’ll have to face it. But I don’t want to see her again, Rush.”

  “I wouldn’t think you would,” the detective agreed. “Not after making a killer of her.”

  “But I didn’t,” Landow protested. “She isn’t. I forgot to tell you that, but I put it in the letter. Jerome Falsoner was not dead, not even dying, when I went past her into the flat. The knife was too high in his chest. I killed him, driving the knife into the same wound again, but downward. That’s what I went in for, to make sure he was finished!”

  Alec Rush screwed up his savage bloodshot eyes, looked long into the confessed murderer’s face.

  “That’s a lie,” he croaked at last, “but a decent one. Are you sure you want to stick to it? The truth will be enough to clear the girl, and maybe won’t swing you.”

  “What difference does it make?” the younger man asked. “I’m a gone baby anyhow. And I might as well put Sara in the clear with herself as well as with the law. I’m caught to rights and another rap won’t hurt. I told you Madeline had brains. I was afraid of them. She’d have had something up her sleeve to spring on us—to ruin Sara with. She could out-smart me without trying. I couldn’t take any chances.”

  He laughed into Alec Rush’s ugly face and, with a somewhat theatrical gesture, jerked one cuff an inch or two out of his coat-sleeve. The cuff was still damp with a maroon stain.

  “I killed Madeline an hour ago,” said Henry Bangs, alias Hubert Landow.

  HIS BROTHER’S KEEPER

  I knew what a lot of people said about Loney but he was always swell to me. Ever since I remember he was swell to me and I guess I would have liked him just as much even if he had been just somebody else instead of my brother; but I was glad he was not just somebody else.