Nightmare Town

by Dashiell Hammett

  When he was within ten feet of Rip Yust, that man turned as if to walk away, took a step, his big body curved suddenly in a grotesque arc, and he slid down into the sand of the roadway.

  Owen Sack found that the weapon in his own hand was empty, had been empty for some time. He turned around. Dimly he made out the broad doorway of Upshaw’s place. The ground clung to his feet, trying to pull him down, to hold him back, but he gained the doorway, gained the cash register, found the shelf, and returned the automatic to it.

  Voices were speaking to him, arms were around him. He ignored the voices, shook off the arms, reached the street again. More hands to be shaken off. But the air lent him strength. He was indoors again, leaning over the firearm showcase in Jeff Hamline’s store.

  “I want the two biggest handguns you got, Jeff, and a mess of cartridges. Fix ’em up for me and I’ll be back to get ’em in a little while.”

  He knew that Jeff answered him, but he could not separate Jeff’s words from the roaring in his head.

  The warmer air of the street once more. The ankle-deep dust of the roadway pulling at his feet. The opposite sidewalk. Doc Johnstone’s door. Somebody helping him up the narrow stairs. A couch or table under him; he could see and hear better now that he was lying down.

  “Fix me up in a hurry, Doc! I got a lot of things to tend to.”

  The doctor’s smooth professional voice:

  “You’ve nothing to attend to for a while except taking care of yourself.”

  “I got to travel a lot, Doc. Hurry!”

  “You’re all right, Sack. There’s no need of your going away. I saw Yust down you first from my window, and half a dozen others saw it. Self-defense if there ever was a case of it!”

  “ ’Tain’t that!” A nice man was Doc, but there was a lot he didn’t understand. “I got a lot of places to go to, a lot of men I got to see.”

  “Certainly. Certainly. Just as soon as you like.”

  “You don’t understand, Doc!” The doc was talking to him like he was a child to be humored, or a drunk. “My God, Doc! I got to back-track my whole life, and I ain’t young no more. There’s men I got to find in Baltimore, and Australia, and Brazil, and California, and God knows where-all. And some of ’em will take a heap of finding. I got to do a lot of shootin’. I ain’t young no more, and it’s a mighty big job. I got to get going! You got to hurry me up, Doc! You got to…”

  Owen Sack’s voice thickened to a mumble, to a murmur, and subsided.

  TOM, DICK, OR HARRY

  I don’t know whether Frank Toplin was tall or short. All of him I ever got a look at was his round head—naked scalp and wrinkled face, both of them the color and texture of Manila paper—propped up on white pillows in a big four-poster bed. The rest of him was buried under a thick pile of bedding.

  Also in the room that first time were his wife, a roly-poly woman with lines in a plump white face like scratches in ivory; his daughter Phyllis, a smart popular-member-of-the-younger-set type; and the maid who had opened the door for me, a big-boned blond girl in apron and cap.

  I had introduced myself as a representative of the North American Casualty Company’s San Francisco office, which I was in a way. There was no immediate profit in admitting I was a Continental Detective Agency sleuth, just now in the casualty company’s hire, so I held back that part.

  “I want a list of the stuff you lost,” I told Toplin, “but first—”

  “Stuff?” Toplin’s yellow sphere of a skull bobbed off the pillows, and he wailed to the ceiling, “A hundred thousand dollars if a nickel, and he calls it stuff!”

  Mrs. Toplin pushed her husband’s head down on the pillows again with a short-fingered fat hand.

  “Now, Frank, don’t get excited,” she soothed him.

  Phyllis Toplin’s dark eyes twinkled, and she winked at me.

  The man in bed turned his face to me again, smiled a bit shame-facedly, and chuckled.

  “Well, if you people want to call your seventy-five-thousand-dollar loss stuff, I guess I can stand it for twenty-five thousand.”

  “So it adds up to a hundred thousand?” I asked.

  “Yes. None of them were insured to their full value, and some weren’t insured at all.”

  That was very usual. I don’t remember ever having anybody admit that anything stolen from them was insured to the hilt—always it was half, or at most, three-quarters covered by the policy.

  “Suppose you tell me exactly what happened,” I suggested, and added, to head off another speech that usually comes, “I know you’ve already told the police the whole thing, but I’ll have to have it from you.”

  “Well, we were getting dressed to go to the Bauers’ last night. I brought my wife’s and daughter’s jewelry—the valuable pieces—home with me from the safe-deposit box. I had just got my coat on and had called to them to hurry up when the doorbell rang.”

  “What time was this?”

  “Just about half-past eight. I went out of this room into the sitting-room across the passageway and was putting some cigars in my case when Hilda”—nodding at the blond maid—“came walking into the room, backward. I started to ask her if she had gone crazy, walking around backward, when I saw the robber. He—”

  “Just a moment.” I turned to the maid. “What happened when you answered the bell?”

  “Why, I opened the door, of course, and this man was standing there, and he had a revolver in his hand, and he stuck it against my—my stomach, and pushed me back into the room where Mr. Toplin was, and he shot Mr. Toplin, and—”

  “When I saw him and the revolver in his hand”—Toplin took the story away from his servant—“it gave me a fright, sort of, and I let my cigar case slip out of my hand. Trying to catch it again—no sense in ruining good cigars even if you are being robbed—he must have thought I was trying to get a gun or something. Anyway, he shot me in the leg. My wife and Phyllis came running in when they heard the shot and he pointed the revolver at them, took all their jewels, and had them empty my pockets. Then he made them drag me back into Phyllis’s room, into the closet, and he locked us all in there. And mind you, he didn’t say a word all the time, not a word—just made motions with his gun and his left hand.”

  “How bad did he bang your leg?”

  “Depends on whether you want to believe me or the doctor. He says it’s nothing much. Just a scratch, he says, but it’s my leg that’s shot, not his!”

  “Did he say anything when you opened the door?” I asked the maid.

  “No, sir.”

  “Did any of you hear him say anything while he was here?”

  None of them had.

  “What happened after he locked you in the closet?”

  “Nothing that we knew about,” Toplin said, “until McBirney and a policeman came and let us out.”

  “Who’s McBirney?”

  “The janitor.”

  “How’d he happen along with a policeman?”

  “He heard the shot and came upstairs just as the robber was starting down after leaving here. The robber turned around and ran upstairs, then into an apartment on the seventh floor, and stayed there—keeping the woman who lives there, a Miss Eveleth, quiet with his revolver—until he got a chance to sneak out and get away. He knocked her unconscious before he left, and—and that’s all. McBirney called the police right after he saw the robber, but they got here too late to be any good.”

  “How long were you in the closet?”

  “Ten minutes—maybe fifteen.”

  “What sort of looking man was the robber?”

  “Short and thin and—”

  “How short?”

  “About your height, or maybe shorter.”

  “About five feet five or six, say? What would he weigh?”

  “Oh, I don’t know—maybe a hundred and fifteen or twenty. He was kind of puny.”

  “How old?”

  “Not more than twenty-two or -three.”

  “Oh, Papa,” Phyllis objected,
“he was thirty, or near it!”

  “What do you think?” I asked Mrs. Toplin.

  “Twenty-five, I’d say.”

  “And you?” to the maid.

  “I don’t know exactly, sir, but he wasn’t very old.”

  “Light or dark?”

  “He was light,” Toplin said. “He needed a shave and his beard was yellowish.”

  “More of a light brown,” Phyllis amended.

  “Maybe, but it was light.”

  “What color eyes?”

  “I don’t know. He had a cap pulled down over them. They looked dark, but that might have been because they were in the shadow.”

  “How would you describe the part of his face you could see?”

  “Pale, and kind of weak-looking—small chin. But you couldn’t see much of his face; he had his coat collar up and his cap pulled down.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “A blue cap pulled down over his eyes, a blue suit, black shoes, and black gloves—silk ones.”

  “Shabby or neat?”

  “Kind of cheap-looking clothes, awfully wrinkled.”

  “What sort of gun?”

  Phyllis Toplin put in her word ahead of her father.

  “Papa and Hilda keep calling it a revolver, but it was an automatic—a thirty-eight.”

  “Would you folks know him if you saw him again?”

  “Yes,” they agreed.

  I cleared a space on the bedside table and got out a pencil and paper.

  “I want a list of what he got, with as thorough a description of each piece as possible, and the price you paid for it, where you bought it, and when.” I got the list half an hour later.

  “Do you know the number of Miss Eveleth’s apartment?” I asked.

  “702, two floors above.”

  I went up there and rang the bell. The door was opened by a girl of twenty-something, whose nose was hidden under adhesive tape. She had nice clear hazel eyes, dark hair, and athletics written all over her.

  “Miss Eveleth?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m from the insurance company that insured the Toplin jewelry, and I’m looking for information about the robbery.”

  She touched her bandaged nose and smiled ruefully.

  “This is some of my information.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “A penalty of femininity. I forgot to mind my own business. But what you want, I suppose, is what I know about the scoundrel. The doorbell rang a few minutes before nine last night and when I opened the door he was there. As soon as I got the door opened he jabbed a pistol at me and said, ‘Inside, kid!’

  “I let him in with no hesitancy at all; I was quite instantaneous about it and he kicked the door to behind him.

  “ ‘Where’s the fire escape?’ he asked.

  “The fire escape doesn’t come to any of my windows, and I told him so, but he wouldn’t take my word for it. He drove me ahead of him to each of the windows; but of course he didn’t find his fire escape, and he got peevish about it, as if it were my fault. I didn’t like some of the things he called me, and he was such a little half-portion of a man so I tried to take him in hand. But—well, man is still the dominant animal so far as I’m concerned. In plain American, he busted me in the nose and left me where I fell. I was dazed, though not quite all the way out, and when I got up he had gone. I ran out into the corridor then, and found some policemen on the stairs. I sobbed out my pathetic little tale to them and they told me of the Toplin robbery. Two of them came back here with me and searched the apartment. I hadn’t seen him actually leave, and they thought he might be foxy enough or desperate enough to jump into a closet and stay there until the coast was clear. But they didn’t find him here.”

  “How long do you think it was after he knocked you down that you ran out into the corridor?”

  “Oh, it couldn’t have been five minutes. Perhaps only half that time.”

  “What did Mr. Robber look like?”

  “Small, not quite so large as I; with a couple of days’ growth of light hair on his face; dressed in shabby blue clothes, with black cloth gloves.”

  “How old?”

  “Not very. His beard was thin, patchy, and he had a boyish face.”

  “Notice his eyes?”

  “Blue; his hair, where it showed under the edge of his cap, was very light yellow, almost white.”

  “What sort of voice?”

  “Very deep bass, though he may have been putting that on.”

  “Know him if you’d see him again?”

  “Yes, indeed!” She put a gentle finger on her bandaged nose. “My nose would know, as the ads say, anyway!”

  From Miss Eveleth’s apartment I went down to the office on the first floor, where I found McBirney, the janitor, and his wife, who managed the apartment building. She was a scrawny little woman with the angular mouth and nose of a nagger; he was big, broad-shouldered, with sandy hair and mustache, good-humored, shiftless red face, and genial eyes of a pale and watery blue.

  He drawled out what he knew of the looting.

  “I was fixin’ a spigot on the fourth floor when I heard the shot. I went up to see what was the matter, an’ just as I got far enough up the front stairs to see the Toplins’ door, the fella came out. We seen each other at the same time, an’ he aims his gun at me. There’s a lot o’ things I might of done, but what I did do was to duck down an’ get my head out o’ range. I heard him run upstairs, an’ I got up just in time to see him make the turn between the fifth and sixth floors.

  “I didn’t go after him. I didn’t have a gun or nothin’, an’ I figured we had him cooped. A man could get out o’ this buildin’ to the roof of the next from the fourth floor, an’ maybe from the fifth, but not from any above that; an’ the Toplins’ apartment is on the fifth. I figured we had this fella. I could stand in front of the elevator an’ watch both the front an’ back stairs; an’ I rang for the elevator, an’ told Ambrose, the elevator boy, to give the alarm an’ run outside an’ keep his eye on the fire escape until the police came.

  “The missus came up with my gun in a minute or two, an’ told me that Martinez—Ambrose’s brother, who takes care of the switchboard an’ the front door—was callin’ the police. I could see both stairs plain, an’ the fella didn’t come down them; an’ it wasn’t more’n a few minutes before the police—a whole pack of ’em—came from the Richmond Station. Then we let the Toplins out of the closet where they were, an’ started to search the buildin’. An’ then Miss Eveleth came runnin’ down the stairs, her face an’ dress all bloody, an’ told about him bein’ in her apartment; so we were pretty sure we’d land him. But we didn’t. We searched every apartment in the buildin’, but didn’t find hide nor hair of him.”

  “Of course you didn’t!” Mrs. McBirney said unpleasantly. “But if you had—”

  “I know,” the janitor said with the indulgent air of one who has learned to take his pannings as an ordinary part of married life, “if I’d been a hero an’ grabbed him, an’ got myself all mussed up. Well, I ain’t foolish like old man Toplin, gettin’ himself plugged in the foot, or Blanche Eveleth, gettin’ her nose busted. I’m a sensible man that knows when he’s licked—an’ I ain’t jumpin’ at no guns!”

  “No! You’re not doing anything that—”

  This Mr. and Mrs. stuff wasn’t getting me anywhere, so I cut in with a question to the woman. “Who is the newest tenant you have?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Jerald—they came the day before yesterday.”

  “What apartment?”

  “704—next door to Miss Eveleth.”

  “Who are these Jeralds?”

  “They come from Boston. He told me he came out here to open a branch of a manufacturing company. He’s a man of at least fifty, thin and dyspeptic-looking.”

  “Just him and his wife?”

  “Yes. She’s poorly too—been in a sanatorium for a year or two.”

  “Who’s the next newest tena
nt?”

  “Mr. Heaton, in 535. He’s been here a couple of weeks, but he’s down in Los Angeles right now. He went away three days ago and said he would be gone for ten or twelve days.”

  “What does he look like and what does he do?”

  “He’s with a theatrical agency and he’s kind of fat and red-faced.”

  “Who’s the next newest?”

  “Miss Eveleth. She’s been here about a month.”

  “And the next?”

  “The Wageners in 923. They’ve been here going on two months.”

  “What are they?”

  “He’s a retired real-estate agent. The others are his wife and son Jack—a boy of maybe nineteen. I see him with Phyllis Toplin a lot.”

  “How long have the Toplins been here?”

  “It’ll be two years next month.”

  I turned from Mrs. McBirney to her husband.

  “Did the police search all these people’s apartments?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We went into every room, every alcove, an’ every closet from cellar to roof.”

  “Did you get a good look at the robber?”

  “Yeah. There’s a light in the hall outside of the Toplins’ door, an’ it was shinin’ full on his face when I saw him.”

  “Could he have been one of your tenants?”

  “No, he couldn’t.”

  “Know him if you saw him again?”

  “You bet.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “A little runt, a light-complected youngster of twenty-three or -four in an old blue suit.”

  “Can I get hold of Ambrose and Martinez—the elevator and door boys who were on duty last night—now?”

  The janitor looked at his watch.

  “Yeah. They ought to be on the job now. They come on at two.”

  I went out into the lobby and found them together, matching nickels. They were brothers, slim, bright-eyed Filipino boys. They didn’t add much to my dope.

  Ambrose had come down to the lobby and told his brother to call the police as soon as McBirney had given him his orders, and then he had to beat it out the back door to take a plant on the fire escapes. The fire escapes ran down the back and one side wall. By standing a little off from the corner of those walls, the Filipino had been able to keep his eyes on both of them, as well as on the back door.