Nightmare Town

by Dashiell Hammett

  “He ought to been there long ago,” Dundy growled. “Come here.”

  Spade followed Dundy into the vestibule. A uniformed policeman stood in the outer doorway.

  Dundy brought his hands from behind him. In one was a necktie with narrow diagonal stripes in varying shades of green, in the other was a platinum scarfpin in the shape of a crescent set with small diamonds.

  Spade bent over to look at three small, irregular spots on the tie. “Blood?”

  “Or dirt,” Dundy said. “He found them crumpled up in a newspaper in the rubbish can on the corner.”

  “Yes, sir,” the uniformed man said proudly; “there I found them, all wadded up in—” He stopped because nobody was paying any attention to him.

  “Blood’s better,” Spade was saying. “It gives a reason for taking the tie away. Let’s go in and talk to the people.”

  Dundy stuffed the tie in one pocket, thrust his hand holding the pin into another. “Right—and we’ll call it blood.”

  They went into the living-room. Dundy looked from Bliss to Bliss’s wife, to Bliss’s niece, to the housekeeper, as if he did not like any of them. He took his fist from his pocket, thrust it straight out in front of him, and opened it to show the crescent pin lying in his hand. “What’s that?” he demanded.

  Miriam Bliss was the first to speak. “Why, it’s Father’s pin,” she said.

  “So it is?” he said disagreeably. “And did he have it on to-day?”

  “He always wore it.” She turned to the others for confirmation.

  Mrs. Bliss said, “Yes,” while the others nodded.

  “Where did you find it?” the girl asked.

  Dundy was surveying them one by one again, as if he liked them less than ever. His face was red. “He always wore it,” he said angrily, “but there wasn’t one of you could say, ‘Father always wore a pin. Where is it?’ No, we got to wait till it turns up before we can get a word out of you about it.”

  Bliss said, “Be fair. How were we to know—?”

  “Never mind what you were to know,” Dundy said. “It’s coming around to the point where I’m going to do some talking about what I know.” He took the green necktie from his pocket. “This is his tie?”

  Mrs. Hooper said, “Yes, sir.”

  Dundy said, “Well, it’s got blood on it, and it’s not his blood because he didn’t have a scratch on him that we could see.” He looked narrow-eyed from one to another of them. “Now, suppose you were trying to choke a man that wore a scarfpin and he was wresting with you, and—”

  He broke off and looked at Spade.

  Spade had crossed to where Mrs. Hooper was standing. Her big hands were clasped in front of her. He took her right hand, turned it over, took the wadded handkerchief from her palm, and there was a two-inch-long fresh scratch in the flesh.

  She had passively allowed him to examine her hand. Her mien lost none of its tranquillity now. She said nothing.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “I scratched it on Miss Miriam’s pin fixing her on the bed when she fainted,” the housekeeper said calmly.

  Dundy’s laugh was brief, bitter. “It’ll hang you just the same,” he said.

  There was no change in the woman’s face. “The Lord’s will be done,” she replied.

  Spade made a peculiar noise in his throat as he dropped her hand. “Well, let’s see how we stand.” He grinned at Dundy. “You don’t like that star-T, do you?”

  Dundy said, “Not by a long shot.”

  “Neither do I,” Spade said. “The Talbot threat was probably on the level, but that debt seems to have been squared. Now—Wait a minute.” He went to the telephone and called his office. “The tie thing looked pretty funny, too, for a while,” he said while he waited, “but I guess the blood took care of that.”

  He spoke into the telephone: “Hello, Effie. Listen: Within half an hour or so of the time Bliss called me, did you get any call that maybe wasn’t on the level? Anything that could have been a stall…. Yes, before…. Think now.”

  He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Dundy, “There’s a lot of deviltry going on in this world.”

  He spoke into the telephone again: “Yes?…Yes…Kruger?…Yes. Man or woman?…Thanks…No, I’ll be through in half an hour. Wait for me and I’ll buy your dinner. ‘Bye.”

  He turned away from the telephone. “About half an hour before Bliss phoned, a man called my office and asked for Mr. Kruger.”

  Dundy frowned. “So what?”

  “Kruger wasn’t there.”

  Dundy’s frown deepened. “Who’s Kruger?”

  “I don’t know,” Spade said blandly. “I never heard of him.” He took tobacco and cigarette papers from his pockets. “All right, Bliss, where’s your scratch?”

  Theodore Bliss said, “What?” while the others stared blankly at Spade.

  “Your scratch,” Spade repeated in a consciously patient tone. His attention was on the cigarette he was making. “The place where your brother’s pin gouged you when you were choking him.”

  “Are you crazy?” Bliss demanded. “I was—”

  “Uh-huh, you were being married when he was killed. You were not.” Spade moistened the edge of his cigarette paper and smoothed it with his forefingers.

  Mrs. Bliss spoke now, stammering a little: “But he—but Max Bliss called—”

  “Who says Max Bliss called me?” Spade said. “I don’t know that. I wouldn’t know his voice. All I know is a man called me and said he was Max Bliss. Anybody could say that.”

  “But the telephone records here show the call came from here,” she protested.

  He shook his head and smiled. “They show I had a call from here, and I did, but not that one. I told you somebody called up half an hour or so before the supposed Max Bliss call and asked for Mr. Kruger.” He nodded at Theodore Bliss. “He was smart enough to get a call from this apartment to my office on the record before he left to meet you.”

  She stared from Spade to her husband with dumbfounded blue eyes.

  Her husband said lightly, “It’s nonsense, my dear. You know—”

  Spade did not let him finish that sentence. “You know he went out to smoke a cigarette in the corridor while waiting for the judge, and he knew there were telephone booths in the corridor. A minute would be all he needed.” He lit his cigarette and returned his lighter to his pocket.

  Bliss said, “Nonsense!” more sharply. “Why should I want to kill Max?” He smiled reassuringly into his wife’s horrified eyes. “Don’t let this disturb you, dear. Police methods are sometimes—”

  “All right,” Spade said, “let’s look you over for scratches.”

  Bliss wheeled to face him more directly. “Damned if you will!” He put a hand behind him.

  Spade, wooden-faced and dreamy-eyed, came forward.

  —

  SPADE AND Effie Perine sat at a small table in Julius’s Castle on Telegraph Hill. Through the window beside them ferryboats could be seen carrying lights to and from the cities’ lights on the other side of the bay.

  “…hadn’t gone there to kill him, chances are,” Spade was saying; “just to shake him down for some more money; but when the fight started, once he got his hands on his throat, I guess, his grudge was too hot in him for him to let go till Max was dead. Understand, I’m just putting together what the evidence says, and what we got out of his wife, and the not much that we got out of him.”

  Effie nodded. “She’s a nice, loyal wife.”

  Spade drank coffee, shrugged. “What for? She knows now that he made his play for her only because she was Max’s secretary. She knows that when he took out the marriage license a couple of weeks ago it was only to string her along so she’d get him the photostatic copies of the records that tied Max up with the Graystone Loan swindle. She knows—Well, she knows she wasn’t just helping an injured innocent to clear his good name.”

  He took another sip of coffee. “So he calls on his brother this afternoon to
hold San Quentin over his head for a price again, and there’s a fight, and he kills him, and gets his wrist scratched by the pin while he’s choking him. Blood on the tie, a scratch on the wrist—that won’t do. He takes the tie off the corpse and hunts up another, because the absence of a tie will set the police to thinking. He gets a bad break there: Max’s new ties are on the front of the rack, and he grabs the first one he comes to. All right. Now he’s got to put it around the dead man’s neck—or wait—he gets a better idea. Pull off some more clothes and puzzle the police. The tie’ll be just as inconspicuous off as on, if the shirt’s off too. Undressing him, he gets another idea. He’ll give the police something else to worry about, so he draws a mystic sign he has seen somewhere on the dead man’s chest.”

  Spade emptied his cup, set it down, and went on: “By now he’s getting to be a regular master-mind at bewildering the police. A threatening letter signed with the thing on Max’s chest. The afternoon mail is on the desk. One envelope’s as good as another so long as it’s typewritten and has no return address, but the one from France adds a touch of the foreign, so out comes the original letter and in goes the threat. He’s overdoing it now; see? He’s giving us so much that’s wrong that we can’t help suspecting things that seem all right—the phone call, for instance.

  “Well, he’s ready for the phone calls now—his alibi. He picks my name out of the private detectives in the phone book and does the Mr. Kruger trick; but that’s after he calls the blond Elise and tells her that not only have the obstacles to their marriage been removed, but he’s had an offer to go in business in New York and has to leave right away, and will she meet him in fifteen minutes and get married? There’s more than just an alibi to that. He wants to make sure she is dead sure he didn’t kill Max, because she knows he doesn’t like Max, and he doesn’t want her to think he was just stringing her along to get the dope on Max, because she might be able to put two and two together and get something like the right answer.

  “With that taken care of, he’s ready to leave. He goes out quite openly, with only one thing to worry about now—the tie and pin in his pocket. He takes the pin along because he’s not sure the police mightn’t find traces of blood around the setting of the stones, no matter how carefully he wipes it. On his way out he picks up a newspaper—buys one from the newsboy he meets at the street door—wads tie and pin up in a piece of it, and drops it in the rubbish can at the corner. That seems all right. No reason for the police to look for the tie. No reason for the street cleaner who empties the can to investigate a crumpled piece of newspaper, and if something does go wrong—what the deuce!—the murderer dropped it there, but he, Theodore, can’t be the murderer, because he’s going to have an alibi.

  “Then he jumps in his car and drives to the Municipal Building. He knows there are plenty of phones there and he can always say he’s got to wash his hands, but it turns out he doesn’t have to. While they’re waiting for the judge to get through with a case he goes out to smoke a cigarette, and there you are—‘Mr. Spade, this is Max Bliss and I’ve been threatened.’ ”

  Effie Perine nodded, then asked, “Why do you suppose he picked on a private detective instead of the police?”

  “Playing safe. If the body had been found, meanwhile, the police might’ve heard of it and traced the call. A private detective wouldn’t be likely to hear about it till he read it in the papers.”

  She laughed, then said, “And that was your luck.”

  “Luck? I don’t know.” He looked gloomily at the back of his left hand. “I hurt a knuckle stopping him and the job only lasted an afternoon. Chances are whoever’s handling the estate’ll raise hob if I send them a bill for any decent amount of money.” He raised a hand to attract the waiter’s attention. “Oh, well, better luck next time. Want to catch a movie or have you got something else to do?”

  TOO MANY HAVE LIVED

  The man’s tie was as orange as a sunset. He was a large man, tall and meaty, without softness. The dark hair parted in the middle, flattened to his scalp, his firm, full cheeks, the clothes that fit him with noticeable snugness, even the small pink ears flat against the side of his head—each of these seemed but a differently colored part of one same smooth surface. His age could have been thirty-five or forty-five.

  He sat beside Samuel Spade’s desk, leaning forward a little over his Malacca stick, and said, “No, I want you to find out what happened to him. I hope you never find him.” His protuberant green eyes stared solemnly at Spade.

  Spade rocked back in his chair. His face—given a not unpleasantly satanic cast by the V’s of his bony chin, mouth, nostrils, and thickish brows—was as politely interested as his voice. “Why?”

  The green-eyed man spoke quietly, with assurance, “I can talk to you, Spade. You’ve the sort of reputation I want in a private detective. That’s why I am here.”

  Spade’s nod committed him to nothing.

  The green-eyed man said, “And any fair price is all right with me.”

  Spade nodded as before. “And with me,” he said, “but I’ve got to know what you want to buy. You want to find out what happened to this—uh—Eli Haven, but you don’t care what it is?”

  The green-eyed man lowered his voice, but there was no other change in his mien. “In a way I do. For instance, if you found him and fixed it so he stayed away for good, it might be worth more money.”

  “You mean even if he didn’t want to stay away?”

  The green-eyed man said, “Especially.”

  Spade smiled and shook his head. “Probably not enough more money—the way you mean it.” He took his long, thick-fingered hands from the arms of his chair and turned their palms up. “Well, what’s it all about, Colyer?”

  Colyer’s face reddened a little, but his eyes maintained their unblinking cold stare. “This man’s got a wife. I like her. They had a row last week and he blew. If I can convince her he’s gone for good, there’s a chance she’ll divorce him.”

  “I’d want to talk to her,” Spade said. “Who is this Eli Haven?”

  “He’s a bad egg. He doesn’t do anything. Writes poetry or something.”

  “What can you tell me about him that’ll help?”

  “Nothing Julia, his wife, can’t tell you. You’re going to talk to her.” Colyer stood up. “I’ve got connections. Maybe I can get something for you through them later.”

  —

  A SMALL-BONED woman of twenty-five or -six opened the apartment door. Her powder-blue dress was trimmed with silver buttons. She was full-bosomed but slim, with straight shoulders and narrow hips, and she carried herself with a pride that would have been cockiness in one less graceful.

  Spade said, “Mrs. Haven?”

  She hesitated before saying, “Yes.”

  “Gene Colyer sent me to see you. My name’s Spade. I’m a private detective. He wants me to find your husband.”

  “And have you found him?”

  “I told him I’d have to talk to you first.”

  Her smile went away. She studied his face gravely, feature by feature, then she said, “Certainly,” and stepped back, drawing the door back with her.

  When they were seated in facing chairs in a cheaply furnished room overlooking a playground where children were noisy, she asked, “Did Gene tell you why he wanted Eli found?”

  “He said if you knew he was gone for good maybe you’d listen to reason.” She said nothing.

  “Has he ever gone off like this before?”

  “Often.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “He’s a swell man,” she said dispassionately, “when he’s sober; and when he’s drinking he’s all right except with women and money.”

  “That leaves him a lot of room to be all right in. What does he do for a living?”

  “He’s a poet,” she replied, “but nobody makes a living at that.”

  “Well?”

  “Oh, he pops in with a little money now and then. Poker, races, he says. I don’t kno
w.”

  “How long’ve you been married?”

  “Four years, almost.” She smiled mockingly.

  “San Francisco all the time?”

  “No, we lived in Seattle the first year and then came here.”

  “He from Seattle?”

  She shook her head. “Some place in Delaware.”

  “What place?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Spade drew his thickish brows together a little. “Where are you from?”

  She said sweetly, “You’re not hunting for me.”

  “You act like it,” he grumbled. “Well, who are his friends?”

  “Don’t ask me!”

  He made an impatient grimace. “You know some of them,” he insisted.

  “Sure. There’s a fellow named Minera and a Louis James and somebody he calls Conny.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Men,” she replied blandly. “I don’t know anything about them. They phone or drop by to pick him up, or I see him around town with them. That’s all I know.”

  “What do they do for a living? They can’t all write poetry.”

  She laughed. “They could try. One of them, Louis James, is a—member of Gene’s staff, I think. I honestly don’t know any more about them than I’ve told you.”

  “Think they’d know where your husband is?”

  She shrugged. “They’re kidding me if they do. They still call up once in a while to see if he’s turned up.”

  “And these women you mentioned?”

  “They’re not people I know.”

  Spade scowled thoughtfully at the floor, asked, “What’d he do before he started not making a living writing poetry?”

  “Anything—sold vacuum cleaners, hoboed, went to sea, dealt blackjack, railroaded, canning houses, lumber camps, carnivals, worked on a newspaper—anything.”

  “Have any money when he left?”

  “Three dollars he borrowed from me.”

  “What’d he say?”

  She laughed. “Said if I used whatever influence I had with God while he was gone he’d be back at dinnertime with a surprise for me.”