Nightmare Town

by Dashiell Hammett

  He frowned with sudden anxiety, got to his feet, and moved across the room. Steve pulled a chair and an upset table from his path, and the blind man dropped on his knees in a corner, fumbling beneath the loosened floor boards. His hands came out empty, and he stood up with a tired droop to his shoulders. “Gone,” he said softly.

  Steve remembered the watch then, took it from his pocket, and put it into one of the blind man’s hands.

  “There was a burglar at our house,” the girl explained. “After he had gone we found that on the floor. This is Mr. Threefall.”

  The blind man groped for Steve’s hand, pressed it, then his flexible fingers caressed the watch, his face lighting up happily.

  “I’m glad,” he said, “to have this back—gladder than I can say. The money wasn’t so much—less than three hundred dollars. I’m not the Midas I’m said to be. But this watch was my father’s.”

  He tucked it carefully into his vest, and then, as the girl started to straighten up the room, he remonstrated.

  “You’d better run along home, Nova; it’s late, and I’m all right. I’ll go to bed now, and let the place go as it is until to-morrow.”

  The girl demurred, but presently she and Steve were walking back to the MacPhails’ house, through the black streets; but they did not hurry now. They walked two blocks in silence, Steve looking ahead into dark space with glum thoughtfulness, the girl eyeing him covertly.

  “What is the matter?” she asked abruptly.

  Steve smiled pleasantly down at her.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “There is,” she contradicted him. “You’re thinking of something unpleasant, something to do with me.”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s wrong, wrong on the face of it—they don’t go together.”

  But she was not to be put off with compliments. “You’re—you’re—” She stood still in the dim street, searching for the right word.

  “You’re on your guard—you don’t trust me—that’s what it is!”

  Steve smiled again, but with narrowed eyes. This reading of his mind might have been intuitive, or it might have been something else.

  He tried a little of the truth:

  “Not distrustful—just wondering. You know you did give me an empty gun to go after the burglar with, and you know you wouldn’t let me chase him.”

  Her eyes flashed, and she drew herself up to the last inch of her slender five feet.

  “So you think—” she began indignantly. Then she drooped toward him, her hands fastening upon the lapels of his coat. “Please, please, Mr. Threefall, you’ve got to believe that I didn’t know the revolver was empty. It was Dr. MacPhail’s. I took it when I ran out of the house, never dreaming that it wasn’t loaded. And as for not letting you chase the burglar—I was afraid to be left alone again. I’m a little coward. I—I—Please believe in me, Mr. Threefall. Be friends with me. I need friends. I—”

  Womanhood had dropped from her. She pleaded with the small white face of a child of twelve—a lonely, frightened child. And because his suspicions would not capitulate immediately to her appeal, Steve felt dumbly miserable, with an obscure shame in himself, as if he were lacking in some quality he should have had.

  She went on talking, very softly, so that he had to bend his head to catch the words. She talked about herself, as a child would talk.

  “It’s been terrible! I came here three months ago because there was a vacancy in the telegraph office. I was suddenly alone in the world, with very little money, and telegraphy was all I knew that could be capitalized. It’s been terrible here! The town—I can’t get accustomed to it. It’s so bleak. No children play in the streets. The people are different from those I’ve known—cruder, more brutal. Even the houses—street after street of them without curtains in the windows, without flowers. No grass in the yards, no trees.

  “But I had to stay—there was nowhere else to go. I thought I could stay until I had saved a little money—enough to take me away. But saving money takes so long. Dr. MacPhail’s garden has been like a piece of paradise to me, If it hadn’t been for that I don’t think I could have—I’d have gone crazy! The doctor and his wife have been nice to me; some people have been nice to me, but most of them are people I can’t understand. And not all have been nice. At first it was awful. Men would say things, and women would say things, and when I was afraid of them they thought I was stuck up. Larry—Mr. Ormsby—saved me from that. He made them let me alone, and he persuaded the MacPhails to let me live with them. Mr. Rymer has helped me, too, given me courage; but I lose it again as soon as I’m away from the sight of his face and the sound of his voice.

  “I’m scared—scared of everything! Of Larry Ormsby especially! And he’s been wonderfully helpful to me. But I can’t help it. I’m afraid of him—of the way he looks at me sometimes, of things he says when he has been drinking. It’s as if there was something inside of him waiting for something. I shouldn’t say that—because I owe him gratitude for—But I’m so afraid! I’m afraid of every person, of every house, of every doorstep even. It’s a nightmare!”

  Steve found that one of his hands was cupped over the white cheek that was not flat against his chest, and that his other arm was around her shoulders, holding her close.

  “New towns are always like this, or worse,” he began to tell her. “You should have seen Hopewell, Virginia, when the Du Ponts first opened it. It takes time for the undesirables who come with the first rush to be weeded out. And, stuck out here in the desert, Izzard would naturally fare a little worse than the average new town. As for being friends with you—that’s why I stayed here instead of going back to Whitetufts. We’ll be great friends. We’ll—”

  He never knew how long he talked, or what he said; though he imagined afterward that he must have made a very long-winded and very stupid speech. But he was not talking for the purpose of saying anything; he was talking to soothe the girl, and to keep her small face between his hand and chest, and her small body close against his for as long a time as possible.

  So, he talked on and on and on—

  —

  THE MacPHAILS were at home when Nova Vallance and Steve came through the flowered yard again, and they welcomed the girl with evident relief. The doctor was a short man with a round bald head, and a round jovial face, shiny and rosy except where a sandy mustache drooped over his mouth. His wife was perhaps ten years younger than he, a slender blond woman with much of the feline in the set of her blue eyes and the easy grace of her movements.

  “The car broke down with us about twenty miles out,” the doctor explained in a mellow rumbling voice with a hint of a burr lingering around the r’s. “I had to perform a major operation on it before we could get going again. When we got home we found you gone, and were just about to rouse the town.”

  The girl introduced Steve to the MacPhails, and then told them about the burglar, and of what they had found in the blind man’s cabin.

  Dr. MacPhail shook his round naked head and clicked his tongue on teeth. “Seems to me Fernie doesn’t do all that could be done to tone Izzard down,” he said.

  Then the girl remembered Steve’s wounded arm, and the doctor examined, washed, and bandaged it.

  “You won’t have to wear the arm in a sling,” he said, “if you take a reasonable amount of care of it. It isn’t a deep cut, and fortunately it went between the supinator longus and the great palmar without injury to either. Get it from our burglar?”

  “No. Got it in the street. A man named Kamp and I were walking toward the hotel to-night and were jumped. Kamp was killed. I got this.”

  An asthmatic clock somewhere up the street was striking three as Steve passed through the MacPhails’ front gate and set out for the hotel again. He felt tired and sore in every muscle, and he walked close to the curb.

  “If anything else happens to-night,” he told himself, “I’m going to run like hell from it. I’ve had enough for one evening.”

  At the
first cross-street he had to pause to let an automobile race by. As it passed him he recognized it—Larry Ormsby’s cream Vauxhall. In its wake sped five big trucks, with a speed that testified to readjusted gears. In a roar of engines, a cloud of dust, and a rattling of windows, the caravan vanished toward the desert.

  Steve went on toward the hotel, thinking. The factory worked twenty-four hours a day, he knew; but surely no necessity of niter manufacturing would call for such excessive speed in its trucks—if they were factory trucks. He turned into Main Street and faced another surprise. The cream Vauxhall stood near the corner, its owner at the wheel. As Steve came abreast of it Larry Ormsby let its near door swing open, and held out an inviting hand.

  Steve stopped and stood by the door.

  “Jump in and I’ll give you a lift as far as the hotel.”

  “Thanks.”

  Steve looked quizzically from the man’s handsome, reckless face to the now dimly lighted hotel, less than two blocks away. Then he looked at the man again, and got into the automobile beside him.

  “I hear you’re a more or less permanent fixture among us,” Ormsby said, proffering Steve cigarettes in a lacquered leather case, and shutting off his idling engine.

  “For a while.”

  Steve declined the cigarettes and brought out tobacco and papers from his pocket, adding, “There are things about the place I like.”

  “I also hear you had a little excitement to-night.”

  “Some,” Steve admitted, wondering whether the other meant the fight in which Kamp had been killed, the burglary at the MacPhails’, or both.

  “If you keep up the pace you’ve set,” the factory owner’s son went on, “it won’t take you long to nose me out of my position as Izzard’s brightest light.”

  Tautening nerves tickled the nape of Steve’s neck. Larry Ormsby’s words and tones seemed idle enough, but underneath them was a suggestion that they were not aimless—that they were leading to some definite place. It was not likely that he had circled around to intercept Steve merely to exchange meaningless chatter with him. Steve, lighting his cigarette, grinned and waited.

  “The only thing I ever got from the old man, besides money,” Larry Ormsby was saying, “is a deep-rooted proprietary love for my own property. I’m a regular burgher for insisting that my property is mine and must stay mine. I don’t know exactly how to feel about a stranger coming in and making himself the outstanding black sheep of the town in two days. A reputation—even for recklessness—is property, you know; and I don’t feel that I should give it up—or any other rights—without a struggle.”

  There it was. Steve’s mind cleared. He disliked subtleties. But now he knew what the talk was about. He was being warned to keep away from Nova Vallance.

  “I knew a fellow once in Onehunga,” he drawled, “who thought he owned all of the Pacific south of the Tropic of Capricorn—and had papers to prove it. He’d been that way ever since a Maori bashed in his head with a stone mele. Used to accuse us of stealing our drinking water from his ocean.”

  Larry Ormsby flicked his cigarette into the street and started the engine.

  “But the point is”—he was smiling pleasantly—“that a man is moved to protect what he thinks belongs to him. He may be wrong, of course, but that wouldn’t affect the—ah—vigor of his protecting efforts.”

  Steve felt himself growing warm and angry.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said slowly, with deliberate intent to bring this thing between them to a crisis, “but I’ve never had enough experience with property to know how I’d feel about being deprived of it. But suppose I had a—well, say—a white vest that I treasured. And suppose a man slapped my face and threatened to spoil the vest. I reckon I’d forget all about protecting the vest in my hurry to tangle with him.”

  Larry laughed sharply.

  Steve caught the wrist that flashed up, and pinned it to Ormsby’s side with a hand that much spinning of a heavy stick had muscled with steel.

  “Easy,” he said into the slitted, dancing eyes; “easy now.”

  Larry Ormsby’s white teeth flashed under his mustache.

  “Righto,” he smiled. “If you’ll turn my wrist loose, I’d like to shake hands with you—a sort of ante-bellum gesture. I like you, Threefall; you’re going to add materially to the pleasures of Izzard.”

  In his room on the third floor of the Izzard Hotel, Steve Threefall undressed slowly, hampered by a stiff left arm and much thinking. Matter for thought he had in abundance. Larry Ormsby slapping his father’s face and threatening him with an automatic; Larry Ormsby and the girl in confidential conversation; Kamp dying in a dark street, his last words lost in the noise of the marshal’s arrival; Nova Vallance giving him an empty revolver, and persuading him to let a burglar escape; the watch on the floor and the looting of the blind man’s savings; the caravan Larry Ormsby had led toward the desert; the talk in the Vauxhall, with its exchange of threats.

  Was there any connection between each of these things and the others? Or were they simply disconnected happenings? If there was a connection—and the whole of that quality in mankind which strives toward simplification of life’s phenomena, unification, urged him to belief in a connection—just what was it? Still puzzling, he got into bed; and then out again quickly. An uneasiness that had been vague until now suddenly thrust itself into his consciousness. He went to the door, opened and closed it. It was a cheaply carpentered door, but it moved easily and silently on well-oiled hinges.

  “I reckon I’m getting to be an old woman,” he growled to himself; “but I’ve had all I want to-night.”

  He blocked the door with the dresser, put his stick where he could reach it quickly, got into bed again, and went to sleep.

  —

  A POUNDING on the door awakened Steve at nine o’clock the next morning. The pounder was one of Fernie’s subordinates, and he told Steve that he was expected to be present at the inquest into Kamp’s death within an hour. Steve found that his wounded arm bothered him little; not so much as a bruised area on one shoulder—another souvenir of the fight in the street.

  He dressed, ate breakfast in the hotel café, and went up to Ross Amthor’s “undertaking parlor,” where the inquest was to be held.

  The coroner was a tall man with high, narrow shoulders and a sallow, puffy face, who sped proceedings along regardless of the finer points of legal technicality. Steve told his story; the marshal told his, and then produced a prisoner—a thick-set Austrian who seemingly neither spoke nor understood English. His throat and lower face were swathed in white bandages.

  “Is this the one you knocked down?” the coroner asked.

  Steve looked at as much of the Austrian’s face as was visible above the bandages.

  “I don’t know. I can’t see enough of him.”

  “This is the one I picked out of the gutter,” Grant Fernie volunteered; “whether you knocked him there or not. I don’t suppose you got a good look at him. But this is he all right.”

  Steve frowned doubtfully. “I’d know him,” he said, “if he turned his face up and I got a good look at him.”

  “Take off some of his bandages so the witness can see him,” the coroner ordered. Fernie unwound the Austrian’s bandages, baring a bruised and swollen jaw.

  Steve stared at the man. This fellow may have been one of his assailants, but he most certainly wasn’t the one he had knocked into the street. He hesitated. Could he have confused faces in the fight?

  “Do you identify him?” the coroner asked impatiently.

  Steve shook his head.

  “I don’t remember ever seeing him.”

  “Look here, Threefall”—the giant marshal scowled down at Steve—“this is the man I hauled out of the gutter—one of the men you said jumped you and Kamp. Now what’s the game? What’s the idea of forgetting?”

  Steve answered slowly, stubbornly:

  “I don’t know. All I know is that this isn’t the first one I hit, the one I knock
ed out. He was an American—had an American face. He was about this fellow’s size, but this isn’t he.”

  The coroner exposed broken yellow teeth in a snarl, the marshal glowered at Steve, the jurors regarded him with frank suspicion. The marshal and the coroner withdrew to a far corner of the room, where they whispered together, casting frequent glances at Steve.

  “All right,” the coroner told Steve when this conference was over; “that’s all.”

  From the inquest Steve walked slowly back to the hotel, his mind puzzled by this newest addition to Izzard’s mysteries. What was the explanation of the certain fact that the man the marshal had produced at the inquest was not the man he had taken from the gutter the previous night? Another thought: the marshal had arrived immediately after the fight with the men who had attacked him and Kamp, had arrived noisily, drowning the dying man’s last words. That opportune arrival and the accompanying noise—were they accidental? Steve didn’t know; and because he didn’t know he strode back to the hotel in frowning meditation.

  At the hotel he found that his bag had arrived from Whitetufts. He took it up to his room and changed his clothes. Then he carried his perplexity to the window, where he sat smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring into the alley below, his forehead knotted beneath his tawny hair. Was it possible that so many things should explode around one man in so short a time, in a small city of Izzard’s size, without there being a connection between them—and between them and him? And if he was being involved in a vicious maze of crime and intrigue, what was it all about? What had started it? What was the key to it? The girl?

  Confused thoughts fell away from him. He sprang to his feet.

  Down the other side of the alley a man was walking—a thick-set man in soiled blue—a man with bandaged throat and chin. What was visible of his face was the face Steve had seen turned skyward in the fight—the face of the man he had knocked out.

  Steve sprang to the door, out of the room, down three flights of stairs, past the desk, and out of the hotel’s back door. He gained the alley in time to see a blue trouser-leg disappearing into a doorway in the block below. Thither he went.