Nightmare Town: Stories (52 page)

“Been away. Is Chris home?”

“I’d let you in anyhow,” she said as she pushed the door farther open.

They went back to a square, bookish room where a thick-set man with rumpled sandy hair was half buried in an immense shabby chair. He put his book down, reached for the tall glass of beer at his elbow, and said jovially: “Enter the sleuth. Get some more beer, Kay. I’ve been wanting to see you, John. What do you say you do some detective-story reviews for my page – you know – ‘The Detective Looks at Detective Fiction’?”

“You asked me that before,” Guild said. “Nuts.”

“It’s a good idea, though,” the thick-set man said cheerfully. “And I’ve got another one. I was going to save it till I got around to writing a detective story, but you might be able to use it in your work sometime, so I’ll give it to you free.”

Guild took the glass of beer Kay held out to him, said, “Thanks,” to her and then to the man: “Do I have to listen to it?”

“Yes. You see, this fellow’s suspected of a murder that requires quite a bit of courage. All the evidence points right at him – that kind of thing. But he’s a great lover of Sam Johnson – got his books all over the place – so you know he didn’t do it, because only timid men – the kind that say, ‘Yes, sir,’ to their wives and, ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ to the policemen – love Johnson. You see, he’s only loved for his boorishness and the boldness of his rudeness and bad manners and that’s the kind of thing that appeals to -“

“So I look for a fellow named Sam Johnson and he’s guilty?” the dark man said.

Kay said: “Chris has one of his nights.”

Chris said: “Sneer at me and be damned to you, but there’s a piece of psychology that might come in handy some day. Remember it. It’s a law. Love of Doctor Johnson is the mark of the pathologically meek.”

Guild made a face. “God knows I’m earning me beer,” he said and drank. “If you’ve got to talk, talk about Walter Irving Wynant. That’ll do me some good maybe.”

“Why?” Chris asked. “How?”

“I’m hunting for him. He slaughtered his secretary this afternoon and lit out for parts unknown.”

Kay exclaimed: “Not really!”

Chris said: “The hell he did!”

Guild nodded and drank more beer. “He only paused long enough to take a shot at the fellow his secretary was supposed to marry tomorrow.”

Chris and Kay looked at each other with delighted eyes.

Chris lay back in his chair. “Can you beat that? But, you know, I’m not nearly as surprised as I ought to be. The last time I saw him I thought there was something wrong there, though he always was a bit on the goofy side. Remember I said something to you about it, Kay? And it’s a cinch this magazine stuff he’s been doing lately is woozy. Even parts of his last book – No, I’m being smart-alecky now. I’ll stick to what I wrote about his book when it came out: in spite of occasional flaws his ‘departmentalization’ comes nearer to supplying an answer to Pontius Pilate’s question than anything ever offered by anybody else.”

“What kind of writing does he do?” Guild asked.

“This sort of thing.” Chris rose grunting, went to one of his bookcases, picked out a bulky black volume entitled, in large gold letters,
Knowledge and Belief,
opened it at random, and read:

“’Science is concerned with percepts. A percept is a defined, that is, a limited, difference. The scientific datum that white occurs means that white is the difference between a certain perceptual field and the rest of the perceiver. If you look at an unbroken expanse of white you perceive white because your perception of it is limited to your visual field: the surrounding, contrasting, extra-visual area of non-white gives you your percept of white. These are not scientific definitions. They cannot be. Science cannot define, cannot limit, itself. Definitions of science must be philosophical definitions. Science cannot know what it cannot know. Science cannot know there is anything it does not know. Science deals with percepts and not with non-percepts. Thus, Einstein’s theory of relativity – that the phenomena of nature will be the same, that is, not different, to two observers who move with any uniform velocity whatever relative to one another – is a philosophical, and not a scientific, hypothesis.

“’Philosophy, like science, cannot define, cannot limit, itself. Definitions of philosophy must be made from a viewpoint that will bear somewhat the same relation to philosophy that the philosophical viewpoint bears to science. These definitions may be -‘”

“That’ll be enough of that,” Guild said.

Chris shut the book with a bang. “That’s the kind of stuff he writes,” he said cheerfully and went back to his chair and beer.

“What do you know about him?” Guild asked. “I mean outside his writing. Don’t start that again. I want to know if he was only crazy with jealousy or has blown his top altogether -and how to catch up with him either way.”

“I haven’t seen him for six or seven months or maybe longer,” Chris said. “He always was a little cracked and unsociable as hell. Maybe just erratic, maybe worse than that.”

“What do you know about him?”

“What everybody knows,” Chris said depreciatively. “Born somewhere in Devonshire. Went to Oxford. Went native in India and came out with a book on economics – a pretty good book, but visionary. Married an actress named Hana Drix – or something like that – in Paris and lived with her there for three or four years and came out of it with his second book. I think they had a couple of children. After she divorced him he went to Africa and later, I believe, to South America. Anyway he did a lot of travelling and then settled down in Berlin long enough to write his
Speculative Anthropology
and to do some lecturing. I don’t know where he was during the war. He popped up over here a couple of years later with a two-volume piece of metaphysics called
Consciousness Drifting.
He’s been in America ever since – the last five or six years up in the mountains here doing that
Knowledge and Belief.”

“How about relatives, friends?”

Chris shook his tousled head. “Maybe his publishers would know – Dale and Dale.”

“And as a critic you think -“

“I’m no critic,” Chris said. “I’m a reviewer.”

“Well, as whatever you are, you think his stuff is sane?” Chris moved his thick shoulders in a lazy shrug. “Parts of his books I know are damned fine. Other parts – maybe they’re over my head. Even that’s possible. But the magazine stuff he’s been doing lately – since
Knowledge and Belief
–
I
know is tripe and worse. The paper sent a kid up to get an interview out of him a couple of weeks ago – when everybody was making the fuss over that Russian anthropologist – and he came back with something awful. We wouldn’t have run it if it hadn’t been for the weight Wynant’s name carries and the kid’s oaths that he had written it exactly as it was given to him. I’d say it was likely enough his mind’s cracked up.”

“Thanks,” Guild said, and reached for his hat, but both the others began questioning him then, so they sat there and talked and smoked and drank beer until midnight was past.

In his hotel room Guild had his coat off when the telephone bell rang. He went to the telephone. “Hello… Yes… Yes…” He waited. “Yes?… Yes, Boyer… He showed up at Fremont’s and took a shot at him… No, no harm done except that he made a clean sneak… Yes, but we found his car… Where?… Yes, I know where it is… What time?… Yes, I see… Tomorrow? What time?… Fine. Suppose you pick me up here at my hotel… Right.”

He left the telephone, started to unbutton his vest, stopped, looked at the watch on his wrist, put his coat on again, picked up his hat, and went out.

At California Street he boarded an eastbound cable car and rode over the top of the hill and down it to Chinatown, leaving the car at Grant Avenue. Rain nearly as fine as mist was beginning to blow down from the north. Guild went out beyond the curb to avoid a noisy drunken group coming out of a Chinese restaurant, walked a block, and halted across the street from another restaurant. This was a red-brick building that tried to seem oriental by means of much gilding and coloured lighting, obviously pasted-on corbelled cornices and three-armed brackets marking its stories – some carrying posts above in the shape of half-pillars – and a tent-shaped terra-cotta roof surmounted by a mast bearing nine aluminised rings. There was a huge electric sign – MANCHU.

He stood looking at this gaudy building until he had a lit a cigarette. Then he went over to it. The girl in the cloakroom would not take his hat. “We close at one,” she said.

He looked at the people getting into an elevator, at her again. “They’re coming in.”

“That’s upstairs. Have you a card?”

He smiled. “Of course I have. I left it in my other suit.”

She looked severely blank.

He said, “Oh, all right, sister,” gave her a silver dollar, took his hat-check, and squeezed himself into the crowded elevator.

At the fourth floor he left the elevator with the others and went into a large, shabby, oblong room where, running out from a small stage, an oblong dance-floor was a peninsula among tables waited on by Chinese in dinner clothes. There were forty or fifty people in the place. Some of them were dancing to music furnished by a piano, a violin, and a French horn.

Guild was given a small table near a shuttered window. He ordered a sandwich and coffee.

The dance ended and a woman with a middle-aged harpy’s face and beautiful satin-skinned body sang a modified version of
Christopher Colombo.
There was another dance after that. Then Elsa Fremont came out to the centre of the dance-floor and sang
Hollywood Papa.
Her low-cut green gown set off the red of her hair and brought out the greenness of her narrowly lanceolate eyes. Guild smoked, sipped coffee, and watched her. When she was through he applauded with the others.

She came straight to his table, smiling, and said: “What are you doing here?” She sat down facing him.

He sat down again. “I didn’t know you worked here.”

“No?” Her smile was merry, her eyes sceptical.

“No,” he said, “but maybe I should have known it. A man named Lane, who lives near Wynant in Hell Bend, saw him coming in this place this evening.”

“That would be downstairs,” the girl said. “We don’t open up here till midnight.”

“Lane didn’t know about the murder till he got home late tonight. Then he phoned the district attorney and told him he’d seen Wynant and the D.A. phoned me. I thought I’d drop in just on the off-chance that I might pick up something.”

Frowning a little, she asked: “Well?”

“Well, I found you here.”

“But I wasn’t downstairs earlier this evening,” she said. “What time was it?”

“Half an hour before he took his shot at your brother.”

“You see” – triumphantly – “you know I was home then talking to you.”

“I know that one,” Guild said.

Five

At ten o’clock next morning Guild went into the Seaman’s National Bank, to a desk marked M R. COLER, ASSISTANT CASHIER. The sunburned blond man who sat there greeted Guild eagerly.

Guild sat down and said: “Saw the papers this morning, I suppose.”

“Yes. Thank the Lord for insurance.”

“We ought to get him in time to get some of it back,” Guild said. “I’d like to get a look at his account and whatever cancelled checks are on hand.”

“Surely.” Coler got up from his desk and went away. When he came back he was carrying a thin pack of checks in one hand, a sheet of typed paper in the other. Sitting down, he looked at the sheet and said: “This is what happened: on the second of the month Wynant deposited that ten-thousand-dollar check on -“

“Bring it in himself?”

“No. He always mailed his deposits. It was a Modern Publishing Company check on the Madison Trust Company of New York. He had a balance of eleven hundred sixty-two dollars and fifty-five cents: the check brought it up to eleven thousand and so on. On the fifth a check” – he took one from the thin pack – “for nine thousand dollars to the order of Laura Porter came through the clearing house.” He looked at the check. “Dated the third, the day after he deposited his check.” He turned the check over. “It was deposited in the Golden Gate Trust Company.” He passed it across the desk to Guild. “Well, that left him with a balance of twenty-one hundred sixty-two dollars and fifty-five cents. Yesterday we received a wire telling us the New York check had been raised from one thousand to ten.”

“Do you let your customers draw against out-of-town checks like that before they’ve had time to go through?”

Coler raised his eyebrows. “Old accounts of the standing of Mr. Wynant – yes.”

“He’s got a swell standing now,” Guild said. “What other checks are there in there?”

Coler looked through them. His eyes brightened. He said: “There are two more Laura Porter ones – a thousand and a seven hundred and fifty. The rest seem to be simply salaries and household expenses.” He passed them to Guild.

Guild examined the checks slowly one by one. Then he said: “See if you can find out how long this has been going on and how much of it.”