Nightmare Town

by Dashiell Hammett

  “Really,” I said, “you must harbor a poor opinion of my ability if you think I have not also taken cognizance of the fact that if Glenn were standing where he said he was standing, and if, as he says, the bandit did not turn his head, then he could not have seen the scar on the bandit’s left cheek.”

  Despite his evident discomfiture, Sergeant Hooley acknowledged defeat without resentment.

  “I might of known you’d tumble to that,” he admitted, rubbing his chin with a reflective thumb. “Well, I reckon we might as well take him along now as later, unless you’ve got some other notion in your head.”

  Consulting my watch, I saw that it was now twenty-four minutes past noon: my investigation had thus far, thanks to the police detectives’ having assembled all the witnesses, consumed only ten or twelve minutes.

  “If Glenn were stationed at Powell Street to mislead us,” I suggested, “then isn’t it quite likely that the bandit did not escape in that direction at all? It occurs to me that there is a barber shop two doors from here in the opposite direction—toward Stockton Street. That barber shop, which I assume has a door opening into the Bulwer Building, as barber shops similarly located invariably do, may have served as a passageway through which the bandit could have got quickly off the street. In any event, I consider it a possibility that we should investigate.”

  “The barber shop it is!” Sergeant Hooley spoke to his colleague, “Wait here with these folks till we’re back, Strong. We won’t be long.”

  “Right,” Detective Strong replied.

  In the street we found fewer curious spectators than before.

  “Might as well go inside, Tim,” Sergeant Hooley said to the policeman in front as we passed him on our way to the barber shop.

  The barber shop was about the same size as the jewelry store. Five of its six chairs were filled when we went in, the vacant one being that nearest the front window. Behind it stood a short swarthy man who smiled at us and said, “Next,” as is the custom of barbers.

  Approaching, I tendered him one of my cards, from perusal of which he looked up at me with bright interest that faded at once into rather infantile disappointment. I was not unfamiliar with this phenomenon: there are a surprising number of people who, on learning that my name is Thin, are disappointed in not finding me an emaciated skeleton or, what would doubtless be even more pleasing, grossly fat.

  “You know, I assume, that Barnable’s store has been robbed?”

  “Sure! It’s getting tough the way those babies knock ’em over in broad daylight!”

  “Did you by any chance hear the report of the pistol?”

  “Sure! I was shaving a fellow, Mr. Thorne, the real estate man. He always waits for me no matter how many of the other barbers are loafing. He says—Anyhow, I heard the shot and went to the door to look up there, but I couldn’t keep Mr. Thorne waiting, you understand, so I didn’t go up there myself.”

  “Did you see anyone who might have been the bandit?”

  “No. Those fellows move quick, and at lunchtime, when the street’s full of people, I guess he wouldn’t have much trouble losing himself. It’s funny the way—”

  In view of the necessity of economizing on time, I risked the imputation of discourtesy by interrupting the barber’s not very pertinent comments.

  “Did any man pass through here, going from the street into the Bulwer Building, immediately after you heard the shot?”

  “Not that I remember, though lots of men use this shop as a kind of short cut from their offices to the street.”

  “But you remember no one passing through shortly after you heard the shot?”

  “Not going in. Going out, maybe, because it was just about lunchtime.”

  I considered the men the barbers were working on in the five occupied chairs. Only two of these men wore blue trousers. Of the two, one had a dark mustache between an extremely outstanding nose and chin; the other’s face, pink from the shaving it had just undergone, was neither conspicuously thin nor noticeably plump, nor was his profile remarkable for either ugliness or beauty. He was a man of about thirty-five years, with fair hair and, as I saw when he smiled at something his barber said, teeth that were quite attractive in their smooth whiteness.

  “When did the man in the third chair”—the one I have just described—“come in?”

  “If I ain’t mistaken, just before the hold-up. He was just taking off his collar when I heard the shot. I’m pretty sure of it.”

  “Thank you,” I said, turning away.

  “A tough break,” Sergeant Hooley muttered in my ear.

  I looked sharply at him.

  “You forget or, rather, you think I have forgotten, Knight’s gloves.”

  Sergeant Hooley laughed shortly. “I forgot ’em for a fact. I must be getting absent-minded or something.”

  “I know of nothing to be gained by dissembling, Sergeant Hooley. The barber will be through with our man presently.” Indeed, the man rose from the chair as I spoke. “I suggest that we simply ask him to accompany us to the jeweler’s.”

  “Fair enough,” the sergeant agreed.

  We waited until our man had put on his collar and tie, his blue jacket, gray coat, and gray hat. Then, exhibiting his badge, Sergeant Hooley introduced himself to the man.

  “I’m Sergeant Hooley. I want you to come up the street with me.”

  “What?”

  The man’s surprise was apparently real, as it may well have been.

  Word for word, the sergeant repeated his statement.

  “What for?”

  I answered the man’s question in as few words as possible.

  “You are under arrest for robbing Barnable’s jewelry store.”

  The man protested somewhat truculently that his name was Brennan, that he was well-known in Oakland, that someone would pay for this insult, and so on. For a minute it seemed that force would be necessary to convey our prisoner to Barnable’s, and Sergeant Hooley had already taken a grip on the man’s wrist when Brennan finally submitted, agreeing to accompany us quietly.

  Glenn’s face whitened and a pronounced tremor disturbed his legs as we brought Brennan into the jewelry store, where Mrs. Dolan and Messrs. Barnable, Julius, Knight, and Strong came eagerly to group themselves around us. The uniformed man the Sergeant had called Tim remained just within the street door.

  “Suppose you make the speeches,” Sergeant Hooley said, offering me the center of the stage.

  “Is this your bandit, Mr. Barnable?” I began.

  The jeweler’s brown eyes achieved astonishing width.

  “No, Mr. Thin!”

  I turned to the prisoner.

  “Remove your hat and coat, if you please. Sergeant Hooley, have you the cap that the bandit dropped? Thank you, Sergeant Hooley.” To the prisoner, “Kindly put this cap on.”

  “I’m damned if I will!” he roared at me.

  Sergeant Hooley held a hand out toward me.

  “Give it to me. Here, Strong, take a hold on this baby while I cap him.”

  Brennan subsided. “All right! All right! I’ll put it on!”

  The cap was patently too large for him, but, experimenting, I found it could be adjusted in such a manner that its lack of fit was not too conspicuous, while its size served to conceal his hair and alter the contours of his head.

  “Now will you please,” I said, stepping back to look at him, “take out your teeth?”

  This request precipitated an extraordinary amount of turmoil. The man Knight hurled himself on Detective Strong, while Glenn dashed toward the front door, and Brennan struck Sergeant Hooley viciously with his fist. Hastening to the front door to take the place of the policeman who had left it to struggle with Glenn, I saw that Mrs. Dolan had taken refuge in the corner, while Barnable and Julius avoided being drawn into the conflict only by exercising considerable agility.

  Order was at length restored, with Detective Strong and the policeman handcuffing Knight and Glenn together, while Sergeant Hooley, s
itting astride Brennan, waved aloft the false teeth he had taken from his mouth.

  Beckoning to the policeman to resume his place at the door, I joined Sergeant Hooley, and we assisted Brennan to his feet, restoring the cap to his head. He presented a villainous appearance: his mouth, unfilled by teeth, sank in, thinning and aging his face, causing his nose to lengthen limply and flatly.

  “Is this your baby?” Sergeant Hooley asked, shaking the prisoner at the jeweler.

  “It is! It is! Its the same fellow!” Triumph merged with puzzlement on the jeweler’s face. “Except he’s got no scar,” he added slowly.

  “I think we shall find his scar in his pocket.”

  We did—in the form of a brown-stained handkerchief still damp and smelling of alcohol. Besides the handkerchief, there were in his pockets a ring of keys, two cigars, some matches, a pocket-knife, $36, and a fountain pen.

  The man submitted to our search, his face expressionless until Mr. Barnable exclaimed, “But the stones? Where are my stones?”

  Brennan sneered nastily. “I hope you hold your breath till you find ’em,” he said.

  “Mr. Strong, will you kindly search the two men you have handcuffed together?” I requested.

  He did so, finding, as I expected, nothing of importance on their persons.

  “Thank you, Mr. Strong,” I said, crossing to the corner in which Mrs. Dolan was standing. “Will you please permit me to examine your shopping-bag?”

  Mrs. Dolan’s humorous brown eyes went blank.

  “Will you please permit me to examine your shopping-bag?” I repeated, extending a hand toward it.

  She made a little smothered laughing sound in her throat, and handed me the bag, which I carried to a flat-topped showcase on the other side of the room. The bag’s contents were the celery and lettuce I have already mentioned, a package of sliced bacon, a box of soap chips, and a paper sack of spinach, among the green leaves of which glowed, when I emptied them out on the showcase, the hard crystal facets of unset diamonds. Less conspicuous among the leaves were some banknotes.

  Mrs. Dolan was, I have said, a woman who impressed me as being capable, and that adjective seemed especially apt now: she behaved herself, I must say, in the manner of one who would be capable of anything. Fortunately, Detective Strong had followed her across the store; he was now in a position to seize her arms from behind, and thus incapacitate her, except vocally—a remaining freedom of which she availed herself to the utmost, indulging in a stream of vituperation which it is by no means necessary for me to repeat.

  It was a few minutes past two o’clock when I returned to our offices.

  “Well, what?” Papa ceased dictating his mail to Miss Queenan to challenge me. “I’ve been waiting for you to phone!”

  “It was not necessary,” I said, not without some satisfaction. “The operation has been successfully concluded.”

  “Cleaned up?”

  “Yes, sir. The thieves, three men and a woman, are in the city prison, and the stolen property has been completely recovered. In the detective bureau we were able to identify two of the men, ‘Reader’ Keely, who seems to have been the principal, and a Harry McMeehan, who seems to be well-known to the police in the East. The other man and the woman, who gave their names as George Glenn and Mrs. Mary Dolan, will doubtless be identified later.”

  Papa bit the end off a cigar and blew the end across the office.

  “What do you think of our little sleuth, Florence?” he fairly beamed on her, for all the world as if I were a child of three who had done something precocious.

  “Spiffy!” Miss Queenan replied. “I think we’ll do something with the lad yet.”

  “Sit down, Robin, and tell us about it,” Papa invited. “The mail can wait.”

  “The woman secured a position as manager of a small apartment house on Ellis Street,” I explained, though without sitting down. “She used that as reference to open an account with Barnable, buying a watch, for which she paid in small weekly installments. Keely, whose teeth were no doubt drawn while he was serving his last sentence in Walla Walla, removed his false teeth, painted a scar on his cheek, put on an ill-fitting cap, and, threatening Barnable and his assistant with a pistol, took the unset stones and money that were in the safe.

  “As he left the store he collided with Mrs. Dolan, dropping the plunder into a bag of spinach which, with other groceries, was in her shopping-bag. McMeehan, pretending to come to the woman’s assistance, handed Keely a hat and coat, and perhaps his false teeth and a handkerchief with which to wipe off the scar, and took Keely’s pistol.

  “Keely, now scarless, and with his appearance altered by teeth and hat, hurried to a barber shop two doors away, while McMeehan, after firing a shot indoors to discourage curiosity on the part of Barnable, dropped the pistol beside the cap and pretended to chase the bandit up toward Powell Street. At Powell Street another accomplice was stationed to pretend he had seen the bandit drive away in an automobile. These three confederates attempted to mislead us further by adding fictitious details to Barnable’s description of the robber.”

  “Neat!” Papa’s appreciation was, I need hardly point out, purely academic—a professional interest in the cunning the thieves had shown and not in any way an approval of their dishonest plan as a whole. “How’d you knock it off?”

  “That man on the corner couldn’t have seen the scar unless the bandit had turned his head, which the man denied. McMeehan wore gloves to avoid leaving prints on the pistol when he fired it, and his hands are quite sunburned, as if he does not ordinarily wear gloves. Both men and the woman told stories that fitted together in every detail, which, as you know, would be little less than a miracle in the case of honest witnesses. But since I knew Glenn, the man on the corner, had prevaricated, it was obvious that if the others’ stories agreed with his, then they too were deviating from the truth.”

  I thought it best not to mention to Papa that immediately prior to going to Barnable’s, and perhaps subconsciously during my investigation, my mind had been occupied with finding another couplet to replace the one the editor of The Jongleur had disliked; incongruity, therefore, being uppermost in my brain, Mrs. Dolan’s shopping-bag had seemed a quite plausible hiding place for the diamonds and money.

  “Good shooting!” Papa was saying. “Pull it by yourself?”

  “I cooperated with Detectives Hooley and Strong. I am sure the subterfuge was as obvious to them as to me.”

  But even as I spoke a doubt arose in my mind. There was, it seemed to me, a possibility, however slight, that the police detectives had not seen the solution as clearly as I had. At the time I had assumed that Sergeant Hooley was attempting to conceal his knowledge from me; but now, viewing the situation in retrospect, I suspected that what the sergeant had been concealing was his lack of knowledge.

  However, that was not important. What was important was that, in the image of jewels among vegetables, I had found a figure of incongruity for my sonnet.

  Excusing myself, I left Papa’s office for my own, where, with rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, and carbon copy on my desk again, I lost myself in the business of clothing my new simile with suitable words, thankful indeed that the sonnet had been written in the Shakespearean rather than the Italian form, so that a change in the rhyme of the last two lines would not necessitate similar alterations in other lines.

  Time passed, and then I was leaning back in my chair, experiencing that unique satisfaction that Papa felt when he had apprehended some especially elusive criminal. I could not help smiling when I reread my new concluding couplet.

  And shining there, no less inaptly shone

  Than diamonds in a spinach garden sown.

  That, I fancied, would satisfy the editor of The Jongleur.

  THE FIRST THIN MAN

  Hammett wrote these ten chapters in 1930, some three years before he wrote and published The Thin Man. Although the story line of these chapters bears clear similarities to that of the novel, when published t
he latter was a completely rewritten work. The style in this roughly first fifth of a novel is much more akin to the hard-edged work Hammett published in Black Mask. And Nick and Nora Charles do not appear here.

  I

  The train went north among the mountains. The dark man crossed tracks to the ticket-window and said: “Can you tell me how to get to Mr. Wynant’s place? Mr. Walter Irving Wynant’s.”

  The man within stopped writing on a printed form. His eyes became brightly inquisitive behind tight rimless spectacles. His voice was eager. “Are you a newspaper reporter?”

  “Why?” The dark man’s eyes were very blue. They looked idly at the other. “Does it make any difference?”

  “Then you ain’t,” the ticket-agent said. He was disappointed. He looked at a clock on the wall. “Hell, I ought to’ve known that. You wouldn’t’ve had time to get here.” He picked up the pencil he had put down.

  “Know where his place is?”

  “Sure. Up there on the hill.” The ticket-agent waved his pencil vaguely westward. “All the taxi drivers know it, but if it’s Wynant you want to see you’re out of luck.”

  “Why?”

  The ticket-agent’s mien brightened. He put his forearms on the counter, hunching his shoulders, and said: “Because the fact is he went and murdered everybody on the place and jumped in the river not more than an hour ago.”

  The dark man exclaimed, “No!” softly.

  The ticket-agent smacked his lips. “Uh-huh—killed all three of them—the whole shooting match—chopped them up in pieces with an ax and then tied a weight around his own neck and jumped in the river.”

  The dark man asked solemnly: “What’d he do that for?”

  A telephone bell began to ring behind the ticket-agent. “You don’t know him or you wouldn’t have to ask,” he replied as he reached for the telephone. “Crazy as they make them and always was. The only wonder is he didn’t do it long before this.” He said, “Hello,” into the telephone.