Nightmare Town Read online

  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 to-night 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 parlor.”

  I said, “Not now. You’d better go home and get some more sleep, so your insomnia won’t keep you awake to-night.”

  He said, “I feel almost as bad about you and Wally losing all that dough as you do,” and went out chuckling.

  Ted Carroll came back from lunch with the notion that perhaps there was some connection between Furman and the two men who had robbed Heck Jones. That didn’t seem to make much sense, but I promised to look into it. Naturally, we never did find any such connection.

  That evening a fellow named Rising, assistant manager of the Trans-American Detective Agency’s Philadelphia branch, arrived. He brought the dead man’s lawyer, a scrawny, asthmatic man named Wheelock, with him. After they had identified the body we went back to my office for a conference.

  It didn’t take me long to tell them all I knew, with the one additional fact I had picked up during the afternoon, which was that the police in most towns in our corner of the state had received copies of the reward circular. Rising examined the circular and called it an excellent forgery: paper, style, type were all almost exactly those used by his agency.

  They told m
e the dead man was a well-known, respectable, and prosperous citizen of Philadelphia. In 1938 he had married a twenty-two-year-old girl named Ethel Brian, the daughter of a respectable, if not prosperous, Philadelphia family. They had a child born in 1940, but it lived only a few months. In 1941 Furman’s wife had disappeared and neither he nor her family had heard of her since, though he had spent a good deal of money trying to find her. Rising showed me a photograph of her, a small-featured, pretty blonde with a weak mouth and large, staring eyes.

  “I’d like to have a copy made,” I said.

  “You can keep that. It’s one of them that we had made. Her description’s on the back.”

  “Thanks. And he didn’t divorce her?”

  Rising shook his head with emphasis. “No, sir. He was a lot in love with her and he seemed to think the kid’s dying had made her a little screwy and she didn’t know what she was doing.” He looked at the lawyer. “That right?”

  Wheelock made a couple of asthmatic sounds and said, “That is my belief.”

  “You said he had money. About how much, and who gets it?”

  The scrawny layer wheezed some more, said, “I should say his estate will amount to perhaps half a million dollars, left in its entirety to his wife.” That gave me something to think about, but the thinking didn’t help me out then.

  They couldn’t tell me why he had come to Deerwood. He seemed to have told nobody where he was going, had simply told his servants and his employees that he was leaving town for a day or two. Neither Rising nor Wheelock knew of any enemies he had. That was the crop.

  And that was still the crop at the inquest the next day. Everything showed that somebody had framed Furman into our jail and that the frame-up had driven him to suicide. Nothing showed anything else. And there had to be something else, a lot else.

  Some of the else began to show up immediately after the inquest. Ben Kamsley was waiting for me when I left the undertaking parlor, where the inquest had been held. “Let’s get out of the crowd,” he said. “I want to tell you something.”

  “Come on over to the office.”

  We went over there. He shut the door, which usually stayed open, and sat on a corner of my desk. His voice was low. “Two of those bruises showed.”

  “What bruises?”

  He looked curiously at me for a second, then put a hand on the top of his head. “Furman—up under the hair—there were two bruises.”

  I tried to keep from shouting. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I am telling you. You weren’t here that morning. This is the first time I’ve seen you since.”

  I cursed the two hoodlums who had kept me away by sticking up the Red Top Diner and demanded, “Then why didn’t you spill it when you were testifying at the inquest?”

  He frowned. “I’m a friend of yours. Do I want to put you in a spot where people can say you drove this chap to suicide by third-degreeing him too rough?”

  “You’re nuts,” I said. “How bad was his head?”

  “That didn’t kill him, if that’s what you mean. There’s nothing the matter with his skull. Just a couple of bruises nobody would notice unless they parted the hair.”

  “It killed him just the same,” I growled. “You and your friendship—”

  The telephone rang. It was Fritz. “Listen, Scott,” he said, “there’s a couple ladies here that want a look at that fellow. Is it all right?”

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know ’em—strangers.”

  “Why do they want to see him?”

  “I don’t know. Wait a minute.”

  A woman’s voice came over the wire: “Can’t I please see him?” It was a very pleasant, earnest voice.

  “Why do you want to see him?” I asked.

  “Well, I”—there was a long pause—“I am”—a shorter pause, and when she finished the sentence her voice was not much more than a whisper—“his wife.”

  “Oh, certainly,” I said. “I’ll be right over.”

  I hurried out.

  Leaving the building, I ran into Wally Shane. He was in civilian clothes, since he was off duty. “Hey, Scott?” He took my arm and dragged me back into the vestibule, out of sight of the street. “A couple of dames came into Fritz’s just as I was leaving. One of ’em’s Hotcha Randall, a baby with a record as long as your arm. You know she’s one of that mob you had me working on in New York last summer.”

  “She know you?”

  He grinned. “Sure. But not by my right name, and she thinks I’m a Detroit hoodlum.”

  “I mean did she know you just now?”

  “I don’t think she saw me. Anyway, she didn’t give me a tumble.”

  “You don’t know the other one?”

  “No. She’s a blonde, kind of pretty.”

  “O.K.,” I said. “Stick around a while, but out of sight. Maybe I’ll be bringing them back with me.” I crossed the street to the undertaking parlor.

  Ethel Furman was prettier than her photograph had indicated. The woman with her was five or six years older, quite a bit larger, handsome in a big, somewhat coarse way. Both of them were attractively dressed in styles that hadn’t reached Deerwood yet.

  The big woman was introduced to me as Mrs. Crowder. I said, “I thought your name was Randall.”

  She laughed. “What do you care, Chief? I’m not hurting your town.”

  I said, “Don’t call me Chief. To you big-city slickers I’m the town whittler. We go back through here.”

  Ethel Furman didn’t make any fuss over her husband when she saw him. She simply looked gravely at his face for about three minutes, then turned away and said, “Thank you,” to me.

  “I’ll have to ask you some questions,” I said, “so if you’ll come across the street…”

  She nodded. “And I’d like to ask you some.” She looked at her companion. “If Mrs. Crowder will—”

  “Call her Hotcha,” I said. “We’re all among friends. Sure, she’ll come along, too.”

  The Randall woman said, “Aren’t you the cut-up?” and took my arm.

  —

  IN MY OFFICE I gave them chairs and said, “Before I ask you anything I want to tell you something. Furman didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”

  Ethel Furman opened her eyes wide. “Murdered?”

  Hotcha Randall said, as if she had had the words on the tip of her tongue right along, “We’ve got alibis. We were in New York. We can prove it.”

  “You’re likely to get a chance to, too,” I told her. “How’d you people happen to come down here?”

  Ethel Furman repeated, “Murdered?” in a dazed tone.

  The Randall woman said, “Who’s got a better right to come down here? She was still his wife, wasn’t she? She’s entitled to some of his estate, isn’t she? She’s got a right to look out for her own interests, hasn’t she?”

  That reminded me of something. I picked up the telephone and told Hammill to have somebody get hold of the lawyer Wheelock—he had stayed over for the inquest, of course—before he left town, and tell him I wanted to see him. “And is Wally around?”

  “He’s not here. He said you told him to keep out of sight. I’ll find him, though.”

  “Right. Tell him I want him to go to New York to-night. Send Mason home to get some sleep. He’ll have to take over Wally’s night trick.”

  Hammill said, “Oke,” and I turned back to my guests.

  Ethel Furman had come out of her daze. She leaned forward and asked, “Mr. Anderson, do you think I had—had anything to do with Lester’s—with his death?”

  “I don’t know. I know he was killed. I know he left you something like half a million.”

  The Randall woman whistled softly. She came over and put a diamond-ringed hand on my shoulder. “Dollars?”

  When I nodded, the delight went out of her face, leaving it serious. “All right, Chief,” she said, “now don’t be a clown. The kid didn’t have a thing to do with whatever you think happened.
We read about him committing suicide in yesterday morning’s paper, and about there being something funny about it, and I persuaded her to come down and—”

  Ethel Furman interrupted her friend. “Mr. Anderson, I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt Lester. I left him because I wanted to leave him, but I wouldn’t have done anything to him for money or anything else. Why, if I’d wanted money from him all I’d’ve had to do would’ve been to ask him. Why, he used to put ads in papers telling me if I wanted anything to let him know, but I never did. You can—his lawyer—anybody who knew anything about it can tell you that.”

  The Randall woman took up the story. “That’s the truth, Chief. I’ve been telling her she was a chump not to tap him, but she never would. I had a hard enough time getting her to come for her share now he’s dead and got nobody else to leave it to.”

  Ethel Furman said, “I wouldn’t’ve hurt him.”

  “Why’d you leave him?”

  She moved her shoulders. “I don’t know how to say it. The way we lived wasn’t the way I wanted to live. I wanted—I don’t know what. Anyway, after the baby died I couldn’t stand it any more and cleared out, but I didn’t want anything from him and I wouldn’t’ve hurt him. He was always good to me. I was—I was the one that was wrong.”

  The telephone rang. Hammill’s voice. “I found both of ’em. Wally’s home. I told him. The old guy Wheelock is on his way over.”

  I dug out the phony reward circular and showed it to Ethel Furman. “This is what got him into the can. Did you ever see that picture before?”

  She started to say “No,” then a frightened look came into her face. “Why, that’s—it can’t be. It’s—it’s a snapshot I had—have. It’s an enlargement of it.”

  “Who else has one?”

  Her face became more frightened, but she said, “Nobody that I know of. I don’t think anybody else could have one.”

  “You’ve still got yours?”

  “Yes. I don’t remember whether I’ve seen it recently—it’s with some old papers and things—but I must have it.”

  I said, “Well, Mrs. Furman, it’s stuff like that that’s got to be checked up, and neither of us can dodge it. Now there are two ways we can play it. I can hold you here on suspicion till I’ve had time to check things up, or I can send one of my men back to New York with you for the check-up. I’m willing to do that if you’ll speed things up by helping him all you can and if you’ll promise me you won’t try any tricks.”