Nightmare Town: Stories (8 page)

He rolled over, got the doctor under him, felt his hot breath on his neck. Sieve raised his head and snapped it back – hard. Raised it again, and snapped it down, hammering MacPhail’s face with the back of his skull. The doctor’s arms fell away and Steve lurched upright to find the fight over.

Larry Ormsby stood in the doorway grinning evilly over his pistol at Mrs. MacPhail, who stood sullenly by the table. The blackjack was on the floor at Larry’s feet.

Against the other side of the table the girl leaned weakly, one hand on her bruised throat, her eyes dazed and blank with fear. Steve went around to her.

“Get going, Steve! There’s no time for playing. You got a car?” Larry Ormsby’s voice was rasping.

“No,” Steve said.

Larry cursed bitterly – an explosion of foul blasphemies. Then:

“We’ll go in mine – it can outrun anything in the state. But you can’t wait here for me to get it. Take Nova over to blind Rymer’s shack. I’ll pick you up there. He’s the only one in town you can trust. Go ahead, damn you!” he yelled.

Steve glanced at the sullen MacPhail woman, and at her husband, now getting up slowly from the floor, his face blood-smeared and battered.

“How about them?”

“Don’t worry about them,” Larry said. “Take the girl and make Rymer’s place. I’ll take care of this pair and be over there with the car in fifteen minutes. Get going!”

Steve’s eyes narrowed and he studied the man in the doorway. He didn’t trust him, but since all Izzard seemed equally dangerous, one place would be as safe as another – and Larry Ormsby might be honest this time.

“All right,” he said, and turned to the girl. “Get a heavy coat.”

Five minutes later they were hurrying through the same dark streets they had gone through on the previous night. Less than a block from the house, a muffled shot came to their ears, and then another. The girl glanced quickly at Steve but did not speak. He hoped she had not understood what the two shots meant.

They met nobody. Rymer had heard and recognised the girl’s footsteps on the sidewalk, and he opened the door before they could knock.

“Come in, Nova,” he welcomed her heartily, and then fumbled for Steve’s hand. “This is Mr. Threefall, isn’t it?”

He led them into the dark cabin, and then lighted the oil lamp on the table. Steve launched at once into a hurried summarising of what Larry Ormsby had told him. The girl listened with wide eyes and wan face; the blind man’s face lost its serenity, and he seemed to grow older and tired as he listened.

“Ormsby said he would come after us with his car,” Steve wound up. “If he does, you will go with us, of course, Mr. Rymer. If you’ll tell us what you want to take with you we’ll get it ready; so that there will be no delay when he comes – if he comes.” He turned to the girl. “What do you think, Nova? Will he come? And can we trust him if he does?”

“I – I hope so -he’s not all bad, I think.”

The blind man went to a wardrobe in the room’s other end.

“I’ve got nothing to take,” he said, “but I’ll get into warmer clothes.”

He pulled the wardrobe door open, so that it screened a corner of the room for him to change in. Steve went to a window, and stood there looking between blind and frame, into the dark street where nothing moved. The girl stood close to him, between his arm and side, her fingers twined in his sleeve.

“Will we -? Will we -?”

He drew her closer and answered the whispered question she could not finish.

“We’ll make it,” he said, “if Larry plays square, or if he doesn’t. We’ll make it.”

A rifle cracked somewhere in the direction of Main Street. A volley of pistol shots. The cream-colored Vauxhall came out of nowhere to settle on the sidewalk, two steps from the door. Larry Ormsby, hatless and with his shirt torn loose to expose a hole under one of his collar-bones, tumbled out of the car and through the door that Steve threw open for him.

Larry kicked the door shut behind him, and laughed.

“Izzard’s frying nicely!” he cried, and clapped his hands together. “Come, come! The desert awaits!”

Steve turned to call the blind man. Rymer stepped out from behind his screening door. In each of Rymer’s hands was a heavy revolver. The film was gone from Rymer’s eyes.

His eyes, cool and sharp now, held the two men and the girl.

“Put your hands up, all of you,” he ordered curtly.

Larry Ormsby laughed insanely.

“Did you ever see a damned fool do his stuff, Rymer?” he asked.

“Put your hands up!”

“Rymer,” Larry said, “I’m dying now. To hell with you!”

And without haste he took a black automatic pistol from an inside coat pocket.

The guns in Rymer’s hands rocked the cabin with explosion after explosion.

Knocked into a sitting position on the floor by the heavy bullets that literally tore him apart, Larry steadied his back against the wall, and the crisp, sharp reports of his lighter weapon began to punctuate the roars of the erstwhile blind man’s guns.

Instinctively jumping aside, pulling the girl with him, at the first shot, Sieve now hurled himself upon Rymer’s flank. But just as he reached him the shooting stopped. Rymer swayed, the very revolvers in his hands seemed to go limp. He slid out of Steve’s clutching hands – his neck scraping one hand with the brittle dryness of paper – and became a lifeless pile on the floor.

Steve kicked the dead man’s guns across the floor a way, and then went over to where the girl knelt beside Larry Ormsby. Larry smiled up at Steve with a flash of white teeth.

“I’m gone, Steve,” he said. “That Rymer-fooled us all – phoney films on eyes – painted on – spy for rum syndicate.”

He writhed, and his smile grew stiff and strained.

“Mind shaking hands, Steve?” he asked a moment later.

“You’re a good guy, Larry,” was the only thing he could think to say.

The dying man seemed to like that. His smile became real again.

“Luck to you – you can get a hundred and ten out of the Vauxhall,” he managed to say.

And then, apparently having forgotten the girl for whom he had given up his life, he flashed another smile at Steve and died.

The front door slammed open – two heads looked in. The heads’ owners came in.

Steve bounded upright, swung his stick. A bone cracked like a whip, a man reeled back holding a hand to his temple.

“Behind me -close!” Steve cried to the girl, and felt her hands on his back.

Men filled the doorway. An invisible gun roared and a piece of the ceiling flaked down. Steve spun his stick and charged the door. The light from the lamp behind him glittered and glowed on the whirling wood. The stick whipped backward and forward, from left to right, from right to left. It writhed like a live thing – seemed to fold upon its grasped middle as if spring-hinged with steel. Flashing half-circles merged into a sphere of deadliness. The rhythm of incessant thudding against flesh and clicking on bone became a tune that sang through the grunts of fighting men, the groans and oaths of stricken men. Steve and the girl went through the door.

Between moving arms and legs and bodies the cream of the Vauxhall showed. Men stood upon the automobile, using its height for vantage in the fight. Steve threw himself forward, swinging his stick against shin and thigh, toppling men from the machine. With his left hand he swept the girl around to his side. His body shook and rocked under the weight of blows from men who were packed too closely for any effectiveness except the smothering power of sheer weight.

His stick was suddenly gone from him. One instant he held and spun it; the next, he was holding up a clenched fist that was empty – the ebony had vanished as if in a puff of smoke. He swung the girl up over the car door, hammered her down into the car – jammed her down upon the legs of a man who stood there – heard a bone break, and saw the man go down. Hands gripped him everywhere; hands pounded him. He cried aloud with joy when he saw the girl, huddled on the floor of the car, working with ridiculously small hands at the car’s mechanism.

The machine began to move. Holding with his hands, he lashed both feet out behind. Got them back on the step. Struck over the girl’s head with a hand that had neither thought nor time to make a fist – struck stiff-fingered into a broad red face.

The car moved. One of the girl’s hands came up to grasp the wheel, holding the car straight along a street she could not see. A man fell on her. Steve pulled him off – tore pieces from him – tore hair and flesh. The car swerved, scraped a building; scraped one side clear of men. The hands that held Steve fell away from him, taking most of his clothing with them. He picked a man off the back of the seat, and pushed him down into the street that was flowing past them. Then he fell into the car beside the girl.

Pistols exploded behind them. From a house a little ahead a bitter-voiced riflw emptied itself at them, sieving a mudguard. Then the desert – white and smooth as a gigantic hospital bed – was around them. Whatever pursuit there had been was left far behind.

Presently the girl slowed down, stopped.

“Are you all right?” Steve asked.

“Yes; but you’re -“

“All in one piece,” he assured her. “Let me take the wheel.”

“No! No!” she protested. “You’re bleeding. You’re -“

“No! No!” he mocked her. “We’d better keep going until we hit something. We’re not far enough from Izzard yet to call ourselves safe.”

He was afraid that if she tried to patch him up he would fall apart in her hands. He felt like that.

She started the car, and they went on. A great sleepiness came to him. What a fight! What a fight!

“Look at the sky!” she exclaimed.

He opened his heavy eyes. Ahead of them, above them, the sky was lightening – from blue-black to violet, to mauve, to rose. He turned his head and looked back. Where they had left Izzard, a monstrous bonfire was burning, painting the sky with jewelled radiance.

“Goodbye, Izzard,” he said drowsily, and settled himself more comfortably in the seat.

He looked again at the glowing pink in the sky ahead.

“My mother has primroses in her garden in Delaware that look like that sometimes,” he said dreamily. “You’ll like ‘em.”

His head slid over against her shoulder, and he went to sleep.

The Montgomery is a quiet hotel of the better sort, and so I had a very restful time of it – until the third and last day. Then things changed.

I came down into the lobby that afternoon to find Stacey, the assistant manager, hunting for me.

“One of the maids just phoned that there’s something wrong up in 906,” he said.

We went up to that room together. The door was open. In the centre of the floor stood a maid, staring goggle-eyed at the closed door of the clothes-press. From under it, extending perhaps a foot across the floor toward us, was a snake-shaped ribbon of blood.

I stepped past the maid and tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it. Slowly, rigidly, a man pitched out into my arms – pitched out backward – and there was a six-inch slit down the back of his coat, and the coat was wet and sticky.

That wasn’t altogether a surprise: the blood on the floor had prepared me for something of the sort. But when another followed him – facing me, this one, with a dark, distorted face – I dropped the one I had caught and jumped back.

And as I jumped a third man came tumbling out after the others.

From behind me came a scream and a thud as the maid fainted. I wasn’t feeling any too steady myself. I’m no sensitive plant, and I’ve looked at a lot of unlovely sights in my time, but for weeks afterward I could see those three dead men coming out of that clothespress to pile up at my feet: coming out slowly – almost deliberately – in a ghastly game of ‘follow your leader.’

Seeing them, you couldn’t doubt that they were really dead. Every detail of their falling, every detail of the heap in which they now lay, had a horrible certainty of lifelessness in it.

I turned to Stacey, who, deathly white himself, was keeping on his feet only by clinging to the foot of the brass bed.

“Get the woman out! Get doctors – police!”

I pulled the three dead bodies apart, laying them out in a grim row, faces up. Then I made a hasty examination of the room.

A soft hat, which fitted one of the dead men, lay in the centre of the unruffled bed. The room key was in the door, on the inside. There was no blood in the room except what had leaked out of the clothespress, and the room showed no signs of having been the scene of a struggle.

The door to the bathroom was open. In the bottom of the bathtub was a shattered gin bottle, which, from the strength of the odour and the dampness of the tub, had been nearly full when broken. In one corner of the bathroom I found a small whisky glass and another under the tub. Both were dry, clean, and odourless.

The inside of the clothespress door was stained with blood from the height of my shoulder to the floor, and two hats lay in the puddle of blood on the closet floor. Each of the hats fitted one of the dead men.

That was all. Three dead men, a broken gin bottle, blood.

Stacey returned presently with a doctor, and while the doctor was examining the dead men, the police detectives arrived.

The doctor’s work was soon done.

“This man,” he said, pointing to one of them, “was struck on the back of the head with a small blunt instrument, and then strangled. This one” – pointing to another – “was simply strangled. And the third was stabbed in the back with a blade perhaps five inches long. They have been dead for about two hours – since noon or a little after.”

The assistant manager identified two of the bodies. The man who had been stabbed – the first to fall out of the clothespress – had arrived at the hotel three days before, registering as Tudor Ingraham of Washington, D.C., and had occupied room 915, three doors away.

The last man to fall out – the one who had been simply choked – was the occupant of this room. His name was Vincent Develyn. He was an insurance broker and had made the hotel his home since his wife’s death, some four years before.

The third man had been seen in Develyn’s company frequently, and one of the clerks remembered that they had come into the hotel together at about five minutes after twelve this day. Cards and letters in his pockets told us that he was Homer Ansley, a member of the law firm of Lankershim and Ansley, whose offices were in the Miles Building – next door to Develyn’s office.

Develyn’s pockets held between $150 and $200; Ansley’s wallet contained more than $100; Ingraham’s pockets yielded nearly $300, and in a money-belt around his waist we found $2,200 and two medium-sized unset diamonds. All three had watches – Develyn’s was a valuable one – in their pockets, and Ingraham wore two rings, both of which were expensive ones. Ingraham’s room key was in his pocket.

Beyond this money – whose presence would seem to indicate that robbery hadn’t been the motive behind the three killings – we found nothing on any of the persons to throw the slightest light on the crime. Nor did the most thorough examination of both Ingraham’s and Develyn’s rooms teach us anything.

In Ingraham’s room we found a dozen or more packs of carefully marked cards, some crooked dice, and an immense amount of data on race-horses. Also we found that he had a wife who lived on East Delavan Avenue in Buffalo, and a brother on Crutcher Street in Dallas; as well as a list of names and addresses that we carried off to investigate later. But nothing in either room pointed, even indirectly, at murder.

Phels, the Police Department Bertillon man, found a number of fingerprints in Devetyn’s room, but we couldn’t tell whether they would be of any value or not until he had worked them up. Though Develyn and Ansley had apparently been strangled by hands, Phels was unable to get prints from either their necks or their collars.

The maid who had discovered the blood said that she had straightened up Develyn’s room between ten and eleven that morning, but had not put fresh towels in the bathroom. It was for this purpose that she had gone to the room in the afternoon. She had gone there earlier – between 10:20 and 10:45 – for that purpose, but Ingraham had not then left it.

The elevator man who had carried Ansley and Develyn up from the lobby at a few minutes after twelve remembered that they had been laughingly discussing their golf scores of the previous day during the ride. No one had seen anything suspicious in the hotel around the time at which the doctor had placed the murders. But that was to be expected.

The murderer could have left the room, closing the door behind him, and walked away secure in the knowledge that at noon a man in the corridors of the Montgomery would attract little attention. If he was staying at the hotel he would simply have gone to his room; if not, he would have either walked all the way down to the street, or down a floor or two and then caught an elevator.

None of the hotel employees had ever seen Ingraham and Develyn together. There was nothing to show that they had even the slightest acquaintance. Ingraham habitually stayed in his room until noon, and did not return to it until late at night. Nothing was known of his affairs.

At the Miles Building we – that is, Marty O’Hara and George Dean of the Police Department Homicide Detail, and I – questioned Ansley’s partner and Develyn’s employees. Both Develyn and Ansley, it seemed, were ordinary men who led ordinary lives: lives that held neither dark spots nor queer kinks. Ansley was married and had two children; he lived on Lake Street. Both men had a sprinkling of relatives and friends scattered here and there through the country; and, so far as we could learn, their affairs were in perfect order.

They had left their offices this day to go to luncheon together, intending to visit Develyn’s room first for a drink apiece from a bottle of gin someone coming from Australia had smuggled in to him.

“Well,” O’Hara said, when we were on the street again, “this much is clear. If they went up to Develyn’s room for a drink, it’s a cinch that they were killed almost as soon as they got in the room. Those whisky glasses you found were dry and clean. Whoever turned the trick must have been waiting for them. I wonder about this fellow Ingraham.”

“I’m wondering, too,” I said. “Figuring it out from the positions I found them in when I opened the closet door, Ingraham sizes up as the key to the whole thing. Develyn was back against the wall, with Ansley in front of him, both facing the door. Ingraham was facing them, with his back to the door. The clothespress was just large enough for them to be packed in it – too small for them to slip down while the door was closed.

“Then there was no blood in the room except what had come from the clothespress. Ingraham, with that gaping slit in his back, couldn’t have been stabbed until he was inside the closet, or he’d have bled elsewhere. He was standing close to the other men when he was knifed, and whoever knifed him closed the door quickly afterward.

“Now, why should he have been standing in such a position? Do you dope it out that he and another killed the two friends, and that while he was stowing their bodies in the closet his accomplice finished him off?”

“Maybe,” Dean said.

And that “maybe” was still as far as we had gone three days later.

We had sent and received bales of telegrams, having relatives and acquaintances of the dead men interviewed; and we had found nothing that seemed to have any bearing upon their deaths. Nor had we found the slightest connecting link between Ingraham and the other two. We had traced those other two back step by step almost to their cradles. We had accounted for every minute of their time since Ingraham had arrived in San Francisco – thoroughly enough to convince us that neither of them had met Ingraham.

Ingraham, we had learned, was a bookmaker and all around crooked gambler. His wife and he had separated, but were on good terms. Some fifteen years before, he had been convicted of “assault with intent to kill” in Newark, N.J., and had served two years in the state prison. But the man he had assaulted had died of pneumonia in Omaha in 1914.

Ingraham had come to San Francisco for the purpose of opening a gambling club, and all our investigations had tended to show that his activities while in the city had been toward that end alone.

The fingerprints Phels had secured had all turned out to belong to Stacey, the maid, the police detectives, or myself. In short, we had found nothing!

So much for our attempts to learn the motive behind the three murders.

We now dropped that angle and settled down to the detail – studying, patience-taxing grind of picking up the murderer’s trail. From any crime to its author there is a trail. It may be – as in this case – obscure; but, since matter cannot move without disturbing other matter along its path, there always is – there must be – a trail of some sort. And finding and following such trails is what a detective is paid to do.

In the case of a murder it is possible sometimes to take a short-cut to the end of the trail, by first finding the motive. A knowledge of the motive often reduces the field of possibilities; sometimes points directly to the guilty one.

So far, all we knew about the motive in the particular case we were dealing with was that it hadn’t been robbery; unless something we didn’t know about had been stolen – something of sufficient value to make the murderer scorn the money in his victims’ pockets.

We hadn’t altogether neglected the search for the murderer’s trail, of course, but – being human – we had devoted most of our attention to trying to find a short-cut. Now we set out to find our man, or men, regardless of what had urged him or them to commit the crimes.

Of the people who had been registered at the hotel on the day of the killing there were nine men of whose innocence we hadn’t found a reasonable amount of proof. Four of these were still at the hotel, and only one of that four interested us very strongly. That one – a big raw-boned man of forty-five or fifty, who had registered as J. J. Cooper of Anaconda, Montana – wasn’t, we had definitely established, really a mining man, as he pretended to be. And our telegraphic communications with Anaconda failed to show that he was known there. Therefore we were having him shadowed – with few results.

Five men of the nine had departed since the murders; three of them leaving forwarding addresses with the mail clerk. Gilbert Jacquemart had occupied room 946 and had ordered his mail forwarded to him at a Los Angeles hotel. W. F. Salway, who had occupied room 1022, had given instructions that his mail be readdressed to a number on Clark Street in Chicago. Ross Orrett, room 609, had asked to have his mail sent to him care of General Delivery at the local post office.

Jacquemart had arrived at the hotel two days before, and had left on the afternoon of the murders. Salway had arrived the day before the murders and had left the day after them. Orrett had arrived the day of the murders and had left the following day.

Sending telegrams to have the first two found and investigated, I went after Orrett myself. A musical comedy named
What For?
was being widely-advertised just then with gaily printed plum-coloured handbills. I got one of them and, at a stationery store, an envelope to match, and mailed it to Orrett at the Montgomery Hotel. There are concerns that make a practice of securing the names of arrivals at the principal hotels and mailing them advertisements. I trusted that Orrett, knowing this, wouldn’t be suspicious when my gaudy envelope, forwarded from the hotel, reached him through the General Delivery window.