Nightmare Town

  “More? You mean more—”

  “More about you and her.”

  “But there is nothing about us!” the man in gray protested. “It is exactly as I have told you. I might add that the young woman is—is married, and that until yesterday I had not seen her since her marriage.”

  “Then your interest in her is—?” The detective let the husky interrogation hang incompleted in the air.

  “Of friendship—past friendship.”

  “Yeah. Now who is this young woman?”

  The man in gray fidgeted again.

  “See here, Rush,” he said, coloring, “I’m perfectly willing to tell you, and shall, of course, but I don’t want to tell you unless you are going to handle this thing for me. I mean I don’t want to be bringing her name into it if—if you aren’t. Will you?”

  Alec Rush scratched his grizzled head with a stubby forefinger.

  “I don’t know,” he growled. “That’s what I’m trying to find out. I can’t take a hold of a job that might be anything. I’ve got to know that you’re on the up-and-up.”

  Puzzlement disturbed the clarity of the younger man’s brown eyes.

  “But I didn’t think you’d be—” He broke off and looked away from the ugly man.

  “Of course you didn’t.” A chuckle rasped in the detective’s burly throat, the chuckle of a man touched in a once-sore spot that is no longer tender. He raised a big hand to arrest his prospective client in the act of rising from his chair. “What you did, on a guess, was to go to one of the big agencies and tell ’em your story. They wouldn’t touch it unless you cleared up the fishy points. Then you ran across my name, remembered I was chucked out of the department a couple of years ago. There’s my man,’ you said to yourself, ‘a baby who won’t be so choicy!’ ”

  The man in gray protested with head and gesture and voice that this was not so. But his eyes were sheepish.

  Alec Rush laughed harshly again and said, “No matter. I ain’t sensitive about it. I can talk about politics, and being made the goat, and all that, but the records show the Board of Police Commissioners gave me the air for a list of crimes that would stretch from here to Canton Hollow. All right, sir! I’ll take your job. It sounds phony, but maybe it ain’t. It’ll cost you fifteen a day and expenses.”

  “I can see that it sounds peculiar,” the younger man assured the detective, “but you’ll find that it’s quite all right. You’ll want a retainer, of course.”

  “Yes, say fifty.”

  The man in gray took five new ten-dollar bills from a pigskin billfold and put them on the desk. With a thick pen Alec Rush began to make muddy ink-marks on a receipt blank.

  “Your name?” he asked.

  “I would rather not. I’m not to appear in it, you know. My name would not be of importance, would it?”

  Alec Rush put down his pen and frowned at his client.

  “Now! Now!” he grumbled good-naturedly. “How am I going to do business with a man like you?”

  The man in gray was sorry, even apologetic, but he was stubborn in his reticence. He would not give his name. Alec Rush growled and complained, but pocketed the five ten-dollar bills.

  “It’s in your favor, maybe,” the detective admitted as he surrendered, “though it ain’t to your credit. But if you were off-color I guess you’d have sense enough to fake a name. Now this young woman—who is she?”

  “Mrs. Hubert Landow.”

  “Well, well, we’ve got a name at last! And where does Mrs. Landow live?”

  “On Charles-Street Avenue,” the man in gray said, and gave a number.

  “Her description?”

  “She is twenty-two or -three years old, rather tall, slender in an athletic way, with auburn hair, blue eyes, and very white skin.”

  “And her husband? You know him?”

  “I have seen him. He is about my age—thirty—but larger than I, a tall, broad-shouldered man of the clean-cut blond type.”

  “And your mystery man? What does he look like?”

  “He’s quite young, not more than twenty-two at the most, and not very large—medium size, perhaps, or a little under. He’s very dark, with high cheek-bones and a large nose. High, straight shoulders, too, but not broad. He walks with small, almost mincing, steps.”

  “Clothes?”

  “He was wearing a brown suit and a tan cap when I saw him on Fayette Street yesterday afternoon. I suppose he wore the same last night, but I’m not positive.”

  “I suppose you’ll drop in here for my reports,” the detective wound up, “since I won’t know where to send them to you?”

  “Yes.” The man in gray stood up and held out his hand. “I’m very grateful to you for undertaking this, Mr. Rush.”

  Alec Rush said that was all right. They shook hands, and the man in gray went out.

  The ugly man waited until his client had had time to turn off into the corridor that led to the elevators. Then the detective said, “Now, Mr. Man!” got up from his chair, took his hat from the clothes-tree in the corner, locked his office door behind him, and ran down the back stairs.

  He ran with the deceptive heavy agility of a bear. There was something bearlike, too, in the looseness with which his blue suit hung on his stout body, and in the set of his heavy shoulders—sloping, limber-jointed shoulders whose droop concealed much of their bulk.

  He gained the ground floor in time to see the gray back of his client issuing into the street. In his wake Alec Rush sauntered. Two blocks, a turn to the left, another block, and a turn to the right. The man in gray went into the office of a trust company that occupied the ground floor of a large office building.

  The rest was the mere turning of a hand. Half a dollar to a porter: the man in gray was Ralph Millar, assistant cashier.

  Darkness was settling in Charles-Street Avenue when Alec Rush, in a modest black coupé, drove past the address Ralph Millar had given him. The house was large in the dusk, spaced from its fellows as from the paving by moderate expanses of fenced lawn.

  Alec Rush drove on, turned to the left at the first crossing, again to the left at the next, and at the next. For half an hour he guided his car along a many-angled turning and returning route until, when finally he stopped beside the curb at some distance from, but within sight of, the Landow house, he had driven through every piece of thoroughfare in the vicinity of that house.

  He had not seen Millar’s dark, high-shouldered young man.

  Lights burned brightly in Charles-Street Avenue, and the night traffic began to purr southward into the city. Alec Rush’s heavy body slumped against the wheel of his coupé while he filled its interior with pungent fog from a black cigar, and held patient, bloodshot eyes on what he could see of the Landow residence.

  Three-quarters of an hour passed, and there was motion in the house. A limousine left the garage in the rear for the front door. A man and a woman, faintly distinguishable at that distance, left the house for the limousine. The limousine moved out into the cityward current. The third car behind it was Alec Rush’s modest coupé.

  Except for a perilous moment at North Avenue, when the interfering cross-stream of traffic threatened to separate him from his quarry, Alec Rush followed the limousine without difficulty. In front of a Howard Street theater it discharged its freight: a youngish man and a young woman, both tall, evening-clad, and assuringly in agreement with the descriptions the detective had got from his client.

  The Landows went into the already dark theater while Alec Rush was buying his ticket. In the light of the first intermission he discovered them again. Leaving his seat for the rear of the auditorium, he found an angle from which he could study them for the remaining five minutes of illumination.

  Hubert Landow’s head was rather small for his stature, and the blond hair with which it was covered threatened each moment to escape from its imposed smoothness into crisp curls. His face, healthily ruddy, was handsome in a muscular, very masculine way, not indicative of any great mental nimble
ness. His wife had that beauty which needs no cataloguing. However, her hair was auburn, her eyes blue, her skin white, and she looked a year or two older than the maximum twenty-three Millar had allowed her.

  While the intermission lasted Hubert Landow talked to his wife eagerly, and his bright eyes were the eyes of a lover. Alec Rush could not see Mrs. Landow’s eyes. He saw her replying now and again to her husband’s words. Her profile showed no answering eagerness. She did not show she was bored.

  Midway through the last act, Alec Rush left the theater to maneuver his coupé into a handy position from which to cover the Landows’ departure. But their limousine did not pick them up when they left the theater. They turned down Howard Street afoot, going to a rather garish second-class restaurant, where an abbreviated orchestra succeeded by main strength in concealing its smallness from the ear.

  His coupé conveniently parked, Alec Rush found a table from which he could watch his subjects without being himself noticeable. Husband still wooed wife with incessant, eager talking. Wife was listless, polite, unkin-dled. Neither more than touched the food before them. They danced once, the woman’s face as little touched by immediate interest as when she listened to her husband’s words. A beautiful face, but empty.

  The minute hand of Alec Rush’s nickel-plated watch had scarcely begun its last climb of the day from where VI is inferred to XII when the Landows left the restaurant. The limousine—against its side a young Norfolk-jacketed Negro smoking—was two doors away. It bore them back to their house. The detective having seen them into the house, having seen the limousine into the garage, drove his coupé again around and around through the neighboring thoroughfares. And saw nothing of Millar’s dark young man.

  Then Alec Rush went home and to bed.

  At eight o’clock the next morning ugly man and modest coupé were stationary in Charles-Street Avenue again. Male Charles-Street Avenue went with the sun on its left toward its offices. As the morning aged and the shadows grew shorter and thicker, so, generally, did the individuals who composed this morning procession. Eight o’clock was frequently young and slender and brisk, Eight-thirty less so, Nine still less, and rear-guard Ten o’clock was preponderantly neither young nor slender, and more often sluggish than brisk.

  Into this rear guard, though physically he belonged to no later period than eight-thirty, a blue roadster carried Hubert Landow. His broad shoulders were blue-coated, his blond hair gray-capped, and he was alone in the roadster. With a glance around to make sure Millar’s dark young man was not in sight, Alec Rush turned his coupé in the blue car’s wake.

  They rode swiftly into the city, down into its financial center, where Hubert Landow deserted his roadster before a Redwood Street stockbroker’s office. The morning had become noon before Landow was in the street again, turning his roadster northward.

  When shadowed and shadower came to rest again they were in Mount Royal Avenue. Landow got out of his car and strode briskly into a large apartment building. A block distant, Alec Rush lighted a black cigar and sat still in his coupé. Half an hour passed. Alec Rush turned his head and sank his gold teeth deep into his cigar.

  Scarcely twenty feet behind the coupé, in the doorway of a garage, a dark young man with high cheek-bones, high, straight shoulders, loitered. His nose was large. His suit was brown, as were the eyes with which he seemed to pay no especial attention to anything through the thin blue drift of smoke from the tip of a drooping cigarette.

  Alec Rush took his cigar from his mouth to examine it, took a knife from his pocket to trim the bitten end, restored cigar to mouth and knife to pocket, and thereafter was as indifferent to all Mount Royal Avenue as the dark youth behind him. The one drowsed in his doorway. The other dozed in his car. And the afternoon crawled past one o’clock, past one-thirty.

  Hubert Landow came out of the apartment building, vanished swiftly in his blue roadster. His going stirred neither of the motionless men, scarcely their eyes. Not until another fifteen minutes had gone did either of them move.

  Then the dark youth left his doorway. He moved without haste, up the street, with short, almost mincing, steps. The back of Alec Rush’s black-derbied head was to the youth when he passed the coupé, which may have been chance, for none could have said that the ugly man had so much as glanced at the other since his first sight of him. The dark young man let his eyes rest on the detective’s back without interest as he passed. He went on up the street toward the apartment building Landow had visited, up its steps, and out of sight into it.

  When the dark young man had disappeared, Alec Rush threw away his cigar, stretched, yawned, and awakened the coupé’s engine. Four blocks and two turnings from Mount Royal Avenue, he got out of the automobile, leaving it locked and empty in front of a graystone church. He walked back to Mount Royal Avenue, to halt on a corner two blocks above his earlier position.

  He had another half-hour of waiting before the dark young man appeared. Alec Rush was buying a cigar in a glass-fronted cigar store when the other passed. The young man boarded a street car at North Avenue and found a seat. The detective boarded the same car at the next corner and stood on the rear platform. Warned by an indicative forward hitching of the young man’s shoulders and head, Alec Rush was the first passenger off the car at Madison Avenue, and the first aboard a southbound car there. And again, he was off first at Franklin Street.

  The dark youth went straight to a rooming-house in this street, while the detective came to rest beside the window of a corner drug store specializing in theatrical make-up. There he loafed until half-past three. When the dark young man came into the street again it was to walk—Alec Rush behind him—to Eutaw Street, board a car, and ride to Camden Station.

  There, in the waiting-room, the dark young man met a young woman who frowned and asked:

  “Where in the hell have you been at?”

  Passing them, the detective heard the petulant greeting, but the young man’s reply was pitched too low for him to catch, nor did he hear anything else the young woman said. They talked for perhaps ten minutes, standing together in a deserted end of the waiting-room, so that Alec Rush could not have approached them without making himself conspicuous.

  The young woman seemed to be impatient, urgent. The young man seemed to explain, to reassure. Now and then he gestured with the ugly, deft hands of a skilled mechanic. His companion became more agreeable. She was short, square, as if carved economically from a cube. Consistently, her nose also was short and her chin square. She had, on the whole, now that her earlier displeasure was passing, a merry face, a pert, pugnacious, rich-blooded face that advertised inexhaustible vitality. That advertisement was in every feature, from the live ends of her cut brown hair to the earth-gripping pose of her feet on the cement flooring. Her clothes were dark, quiet, expensive, but none too gracefully worn, hanging just the least bit bunchily here and there on her sturdy body.

  Nodding vigorously several times, the young man at length tapped his cap-visor with two careless fingers and went out into the street. Alec Rush let him depart unshadowed. But when, walking slowly out to the iron train-shed gates, along them to the baggage window, thence to the street door, the young woman passed out of the station, the ugly man was behind her. He was still behind her when she joined the four o’clock shopping crowd at Lexington Street.

  The young woman shopped with the whole-hearted air of one with nothing else on her mind. In the second department store she visited, Alec Rush left her looking at a display of laces while he moved as swiftly and directly as intervening shoppers would permit toward a tall, thick-shouldered, gray-haired woman in black, who seemed to be waiting for someone near the foot of a flight of stairs.

  “Hello, Alec!” she said when he touched her arm, and her humorous eyes actually looked with pleasure at his uncouth face. “What are you doing in my territory?”

  “Got a booster for you,” he mumbled. “The chunky girl in blue at the lace counter. Make her?”

  The store detective look
ed and nodded.

  “Yes. Thanks, Alec. You’re sure she’s boosting, of course?”

  “Now, Minnie!” he complained, his rasping voice throttled down to a metallic growl. “Would I be giving you a bum rumble? She went south with a couple of silk pieces, and it’s more than likely she’s got herself some lace by now.”

  “Um-hmm,” said Minnie. “Well, when she sticks her foot on the sidewalk, I’ll be with her.”

  Alec Rush put his hand on the store detective’s arm again.

  “I want a line on her,” he said. “What do you say we tail her around and see what she’s up to before we knock her over?”

  “If it doesn’t take all day,” the woman agreed. And when the chunky girl in blue presently left the lace counter and the store, the detectives followed, into another store, ranging too far behind her to see any thieving she might have done, content to keep her under surveillance. From this last store their prey went down to where Pratt Street was dingiest, into a dingy three-story house of furnished flats.

  Two blocks away a policeman was turning a corner.

  “Take a plant on the joint while I get a copper,” Alex Rush ordered.

  When he returned with the policeman the store detective was waiting in the vestibule.

  “Second floor,” she said.

  Behind her the house’s street door stood open to show a dark hallway and the foot of a tattered-carpeted flight of steps. Into this dismal hallway appeared a slovenly thin woman in rumpled gray cotton, saying whiningly as she came forward, “What do you want? I keep a respectable house, I’ll have you understand, and I—”

  “Chunky, dark-eyed girl living here,” Alec Rush croaked. “Second floor. Take us up.”

  The woman’s scrawny face sprang into startled lines, faded eyes wide, as if mistaking the harshness of the detective’s voice for the harshness of great emotion.

  “Why—why—” she stammered, and then remembered the first principle of shady rooming-house management—never to stand in the way of the police. “I’ll take you up,” she agreed, and, hitching her wrinkled skirt in one hand, led the way up the stairs.