Nightmare Town: Stories (26 page)

He took Dick over in a corner and whispered to him. Dick kept nodding his head up and down and looking more and more scared, even if he did try to hide it when he turned around to me. Loney said, “Be seeing you,” and went out.

“What’s the matter?” I asked Dick.

He shook his head and said, “It’s nothing to worry about,” and that was every word I could get out of him.

Five minutes later Bob Kirby’s brother Pudge ran in and yelled, “Jees, they shot Loney!”

I shot Loney. If I was not so dumb he would still be alive any way you figure it. For a long time I blamed it on Mrs. Schiff, but I guess that was just to keep from admitting that it was my own fault. I mean I never thought she actually did the shooting, like the people who said that when he missed the train that they were supposed to go away on together she came back and waited outside the armory and when he came out he told her he had changed his mind and she shot him. I mean I blamed her for lying to him, because it came out that nobody had tipped Big Jake off about her and Loney. Loney had put the idea in her head, telling her about what Pete had said, and she had made up the lie so Loney would go away with her. But if I was not so dumb Loney would have caught that train.

Then a lot of people said Big Jake killed Loney. They said that was why the police never got very far, on account of Big Jake’s pull down at the City Hall. It was a fact that he had come home earlier than Mrs. Schiff had expected and she had left a note for him saying that she was running away with Loney, and he could have made it down to the street near the armory where Loney was shot in time to do it, but he could not have got to the railroad station in time to catch their train, and if I was not so dumb Loney would have caught that train.

And the same way if that Sailor Perelman crowd did it, which is what most people including the police thought even if they did have to let him go because they could not find enough evidence against him. If I was not so dumb Loney could have said to me right out, “Listen, Kid, I’ve got to go away and I’ve got to have all the money I can scrape up and the best way to do it is to make a deal with Perelman for you to go in the tank and then bet all we got against you.” Why, I would have thrown a million fights for Loney, but how could he know he could trust me, with me this dumb?

Or I could have guessed what he wanted and I could have gone clown when Perelman copped me with that uppercut in the fifth. That would have been easy. Or if I was not so dumb I would have learned to box better and, even losing to Perelman like I would have anyway, I could have kept him from chopping me to pieces so bad that Loney could not stand it any more and had to throw away everything by telling me to stop boxing and go in and fight.

Or even if everything had happened like it did up to then he could still have ducked out at the last minute if I was not so dumb that he had to stick around to look out for me by telling those Providence guys that I had nothing to do with double-crossing them.

I wish I was dead instead of Loney.

When I turned around to follow him I saw Wally Shane coming out of the waiting-room. I caught Wally’s eye and nodded at the man carrying the black bag. Wally examined him carefully as he went by. I could not see whether the man noticed the examination. By the time I came up to Wally the man was going down the steps to the street.

Wally rubbed his lips together and his blue eyes were bright and hard. “Look,” he said out of the side of his mouth, “that’s a ringer for the guy we got -“

“That’s the guy,” I said, and we went down the steps behind him.

Our man started toward one of the taxicabs at the curb, then saw the lights of the Deerwood Hotel two blocks away, shook his head at the taxi driver, and went up the street afoot.

“What do we do?” Wally asked. “See what he’s -?”

“It’s nothing to us. We take him. Get my car. It’s at the corner of the alley.”

I gave Wally the few minutes he needed to get the car and then closed in. “Hello, Furman,” I said when I was just behind the tall man.

His face jerked around to me. “How do you -“ He halted. “I don’t believe I -“ He looked up and down the street. We had the block to ourselves.

”You’re Lester Furman, aren’t you?” I asked.

He said, “Yes,” quickly.

“Philadelphia?”

He peered at me in the light that was none too strong where we stood. “Yes.”

“I’m Scott Anderson,” I said. “Chief of police here. I -“

His bag thudded down on the pavement. “What’s happened to her?” he asked hoarsely.

“Happened to whom?”

Wally arrived in my car then, abruptly, skidding into the curb. Furman, his face stretched by fright, leaped back away from me. I went after him, grabbing him with my good hand, jamming him back against the front wall of Henderson’s warehouse. He fought with me there until Wally got out of the car. Then he saw Wally’s uniform and immediately stopped fighting.

“I’m sorry,” he said weakly. “I thought – for a second I thought maybe you weren’t the police. You’re not in uniform and – It was silly of me. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I told him. “Let’s get going before we have a mob around us.” Two cars had stopped just a little beyond mine and I could see a bellboy and a hatless man coming toward us from the direction of the hotel. Furman picked up his bag and went willingly into my car ahead of me. We sat in the rear. Wally drove. We rode a block in silence, then Furman asked, “You’re taking me to police headquarters?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“Philadelphia.”

“I” – he cleared his throat – “I don’t think I understand you.”

“You understand that you’re wanted in Philadelphia, don’t you, for murder?”

He said indignantly, “That’s ridiculous. Murder! That’s – “ He put a hand on my arm, his face close to mine, and instead of indignation in his voice there was now a desperate sort of earnestness. “Who told you that?”

“I didn’t make it up. Well, here we are. Come on, I’ll show you.”

We took him into my office. George Propper, who had been dozing in a chair in the front office, followed us in. I found the Trans-American Detective Agency circular and handed it to Furman. In the usual form it offered fifteen hundred dollars for the arrest and conviction of Lester Furman, alias Lloyd Fields, alias J. D. Carpenter, for the murder of Paul Frank Dunlap in Philadelphia on the twenty-sixth of the previous month.

Furman’s hands holding the circular were steady and he read it carefully. His face was pale, but no muscles moved in it until he opened his mouth to speak. He tried to speak calmly. “It’s a lie.” He did not look up from the circular.

“You’re Lester Furman, aren’t you?” I asked.

He nodded, still not looking up.

“That’s your description, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“That’s your photograph, isn’t it?”

He nodded, and then, staring at his photograph on the circular, he began to tremble – his lips, his hands, his legs.

I pushed a chair up behind him and said, “Sit down,” and he dropped down on it and shut his eyes, pressing the lids together. I took the circular from his limp hands.

George Propper, leaning against a side of the doorway, turned his loose grin from me to Wally and said, “So that’s that and so you lucky stiffs split a grand and a half reward money. Lucky Wally! If it ain’t vacations in New York at the city’s expense it’s reward money.”

Furman jumped up from the chair and screamed, “It’s a lie. It’s a frame-up. You can’t prove anything. There’s nothing to prove. I never killed anybody. I won’t be framed. I won’t be -“

I pushed him down on the chair again. “Take it easy,” I told him. “You’re wasting your breath on us. Save it for the Philadelphia police. We’re just holding you for them. If anything’s wrong it’s there, not here.”

“But it’s not the police. It’s the Trans-American De-“

“We turn you over to the police.”

He started to say something, broke off, sighed, made a little hopeless gesture with his hands, and tried to smile. “Then there’s nothing I can do now?”

“There’s nothing any of us can do till morning,” I said. “We’ll have to search you, then we won’t bother you any more till they come for you.”

In the black Gladstone bag we found a couple of changes of clothes, some toilet articles, and a loaded.38 automatic. In his pockets we found a hundred and sixty-some dollars, a book of checks on a Philadelphia bank, business cards and a few letters that seemed to show he was in the real-estate business, and the sort of odds and ends that you usually find in men’s pockets. While Wally was putting these things in the vault I told George Propper to lock Furman up.

George rattled keys in his pocket and said, “Come along, darling. We ain’t had anybody in our little hoosegow for three days. You’ll have it all to yourself, just like a suite in the Ritz.”

Furman said, “Good night and thank you,” to me, and followed George out.

When George came back he leaned against the doorframe again and asked, “How about you big-hearted boys cutting me in on a little of that blood money?”

Wally said, “Sure. I’ll forget that two and a half you been owing me three months.”

I said, “Make him as comfortable as you can, George. If he wants anything sent in, O.K.”

“He’s valuable, huh? If it was some bum that didn’t mean a nickel to you – Maybe I ought to take a pillow off my bed for him.” He spat at the cuspidor and missed. “He’s just like the rest of ‘em to me.”

I thought, Any day now I’m going to forget that your uncle is county chairman and throw you back in the gutter. I said, “Do all the talking you want, but do what I tell you.”

It was about four o’clock when I got home – my farm was a little outside the town – and maybe half an hour after that before I went to sleep. The telephone woke me up at five minutes past six.

Wally’s voice: “You better come down, Scott. The fellow Furman’s hung himself.”

“What?”

“By his belt – from a window bar – deader’n hell.”

“All right. I’m on my way. Phone Ben Kamsley I’ll pick him up on my way in.”

“No doctor’s going to do this man any good, Scott.”

“It won’t hurt to have him looked at,” I insisted. “You’d better phone Douglassville, too.” Douglassville was the county seat.

“O.K.”

Wally phoned me back while I was dressing to tell me that Ben Kamsley had been called out on an emergency case and was somewhere on the other side of town, but that his wife would get in touch with him and tell him to stop at headquarters on his way home.

When, riding into town, I was within fifty or sixty feet of the Red Top Diner, Heck Jones ran out with a revolver in his hand and began to shoot at two men in a black roadster that had just passed me.

I leaned out and yelled, “What’s it?” at him while I was turning my car.

“Hold-up,” he bawled angrily. “Wait for me.” He let loose another shot that couldn’t have missed my front tire by more than an inch, and galloped up to me, his apron flapping around his fat legs. I opened the door for him, he squeezed his bulk in beside me, and we set off after the roadster.

“What gets me,” he said when he had stopped panting, “is they done it like a joke. They come in, they don’t want nothing but ham and eggs and coffee and then they get kind of kidding together under their breath and then they put the guns on me like a joke.”

“How much did they take?”

“Sixty or thereabouts, but that ain’t what gripes me so much. It’s them doing it like a joke.”

“Never mind,” I said. “We’ll get ‘em.”

We very nearly didn’t, though. They led us a merry chase. We lost them a couple of times and finally picked them up more by luck than anything else, a couple of miles over the state line.

We didn’t have any trouble taking them, once we had caught up to them, but they knew they had crossed the state line and they insisted on a regular extradition or nothing, so we had to carry them on to Badington and stick them in the jail there until the necessary papers could be sent through. It was ten o’clock before I got a chance to phone my office.

Hammill answered the phone and told me Ted Carroll, our district attorney, was there, so I talked to Ted – though not as much as he talked to me.

“Listen, Scott,” he asked excitedly, “what is all this?”

“All what?”

“This fiddlededee, this hanky-panky.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “Wasn’t it suicide?”

“Sure it was suicide, but I wired the Trans-American and they phoned me just a few minutes ago and said they’d never sent out any circulars on Furman, didn’t know about any murder he was wanted for. All they knew about him was he used to be a client of theirs.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say except that I would be back in Deerwood by noon. And I was.

Ted was at my desk with the telephone receiver clamped to his ear, saying, “Yes… Yes… Yes,” when I went into the office. He put down the receiver and asked, “What happened to you?”

“A couple of boys knocked over the Red Top Diner and I had to chase ‘em almost to Badington.”

He smiled with one side of his mouth. “The town getting out of your hands?” He and I were on opposite sides of the fence politically and we took our politics seriously in Candle County.

I smiled back at him. “Looks like it – with one felony in six months.”

“And this.” He jerked a thumb toward the rear of the building, where the cells were.

“What about this? Let’s talk about this.”

“It’s plenty wrong,” he said. “I just finished talking to the Philly police. There wasn’t any Paul Frank Dunlap murdered there that they know about; they’ve got no unexplained murder on the twenty-sixth of last month.” He looked at me as if it were my fault. “What’d you get out of Furman before you let him hang himself?”

“That he was innocent.”

“Didn’t you grill him? Didn’t you find out what he was doing in town? Didn’t you -“

“What for?” I asked. “He admitted his name was Furman, the description fitted him, the photograph was him, the Trans-American’s supposed to be on the level. Philadelphia wanted him, I didn’t. Sure, if I’d known he was going to hang himself. You said he’d been a client of the Trans-American. They tell you what the job was?”

“His wife left him a couple of years ago and he had them hunting for her for five or six months, but they never found her. They’re sending a man up tonight to look it over.” He stood up. “I’m going to get some lunch.” At the door he turned his head over his shoulder to say, “There’ll probably be trouble over this.”

I knew that; there usually is when somebody dies in a cell.

George Propper came in grinning happily. “So what’s become of that fifteen hundred fish?”

“What happened last night?” I asked.

“Nothing. He hung hisself.”

“Did you find him?”

He shook his head. “Wally took a look in there to see how things was before he went off duty, and found him.”

“You were asleep, I suppose.”

“Well, I was catching a nap, I guess,” he mumbled, “but everybody does that sometimes – even Wally sometimes when he comes in off his beat between rounds – and I always wake up when the phone rings or anything. And suppose I had been awake. You can’t hear a guy hanging hisself.”

“Did Kamsley say how long he’d been dead?”

“He done it about five o’clock, he said he guessed. You want to look at the remains? They’re over at Fritz’s undertaking parlour.”