Nightmare Town

  “Mostly always.”

  “You must have some idea of what she went to the city for,” Guild insisted.

  “No, I haven’t,” the woman said earnestly. “We never did know, did we, Willie? Jealous like he was, I guess if she was going in to see some fellow she wouldn’t be likely to tell anybody that might tell him, though the Lord knows I can keep my mouth shut as tight as anybody. I’ve seen the—”

  Guild stopped lighting a fresh cigarette to ask: “How about her mail? You must’ve seen that sometimes.”

  “No, Mr. Gould, we never did, and that’s a funny thing, because all the time we’ve been here I never saw any mail for her except magazines and never knew her to write any.”

  Guild frowned. “How long had she been here?”

  “She was here when we came. I don’t know how long she’d been here, but it must’ve been a long time.”

  Boyer said: “Three years. She came here in March three years ago.”

  “How about her relatives, friends?”

  The Hopkinses shook their heads. Boyer shook his head.

  “His?”

  Mrs. Hopkins shook her head again. “He didn’t have any. That’s what he would always say, that he didn’t have a relative or a friend in the world.”

  “Who’s his lawyer?”

  Mrs. Hopkins looked blank. “If he’s got one I don’t know it, Mr. Gould. Maybe you could find something like that in his letters and things.”

  “That’ll do,” Guild said abruptly around the cigarette in his mouth, and opened the door for the Hopkinses. They left the room.

  —

  HE SHUT THE DOOR behind them and with his back against it looked around the room, at the blanketed dead figure on the bed, at the clothing scattered here and there, at the three traveling bags, and finally at the bloodstained center of the light blue rug.

  Boyer watched him expectantly.

  Staring at the bloodstain, Guild asked: “You’ve notified the police in San Francisco?”

  “Oh, yes, we’ve sent his description and the description and license number of his car all over—from Los Angeles to Seattle and as far east as Salt Lake.”

  “What is the number?” Guild took a pencil and an envelope from his pockets.

  Boyer told him, adding: “It’s a Buick coupé, last year’s.”

  “What does he look like?”

  “I’ve never seen him, but he’s very tall—well over six feet—and thin. Won’t weigh more than a hundred and thirty, they say. You know, he’s tubercular: that’s how he happened to come up here. He’s about forty-five years old, sunburned, but sallow, with brown eyes and very dark brown hair and whiskers. He’s got whiskers—maybe five or six inches long—thick and shaggy, and his eyebrows are thick and shaggy. There’s a lot of pictures of him in his room. You can help yourself to them. He had on a baggy gray tweed suit and a soft gray hat and heavy brown shoes. His shoulders are high and straight and he walks on the balls of his feet with long steps. He doesn’t smoke or drink and he has a habit of talking to himself.”

  Guild put away his pencil and envelope. “Had your fingerprint people go over the place yet?”

  “No, I—”

  “It might help in case he’s picked up somewhere and we’re doubtful. I suppose we can get specimens of his handwriting. Anyway we’ll be able to get them from the bank. We’ll try to—”

  Someone knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” Boyer called.

  The door opened to admit a man’s head. He said: “They want you on the phone.”

  The district attorney followed the man downstairs. During his absence Guild smoked and looked somberly around the room.

  The district attorney came back saying: “The car belongs to a Charles Fremont, on Guerrero Street, in San Francisco.”

  “What number?” Guild brought out his pencil and envelope again. Boyer told him the number and he wrote it down. “I think I’ll trot back right now and see him.”

  The district attorney looked at his watch. “I wonder if I couldn’t manage to get away to go with you,” he said.

  Guild pursed his lips. “I don’t think you ought to. One of us ought to be here looking through his stuff, gathering up the loose ends. I haven’t seen anybody else we ought to trust with it.”

  Though Boyer seemed disappointed he said, “Righto,” readily enough. “You’ll keep in touch with me?”

  “Sure. Let me have that card I gave you and I’ll put my home address and phone number on it.” Guild’s eyes became drowsy. “What do you say I drive Fremont’s car in?”

  The district attorney wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It might—Oh, sure, if you want. You’ll phone me as soon as you’ve seen him—let me know what’s what?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  III

  A red-haired girl in white opened the door.

  Guild said: “I want to see Mr. Charles Fremont.”

  “Yes, sir,” the girl said amiably in a resonant throaty voice. “Come in.”

  She took him into a comfortably furnished living-room to the right of the entrance. “Sit down. I’ll call my brother.” She went through another doorway and her voice could be heard singing: “Charley, a gentleman to see you.”

  Upstairs a hard, masculine voice replied: “Be right down.”

  The red-haired girl came back to the room where Guild was. “He’ll be down in a minute,” she said.

  Guild thanked her.

  “Do sit down,” she said, sitting on an end of the sofa. Her legs were remarkably beautiful.

  He sat in a large chair facing her across the room, but got up again immediately to offer her a cigarette and to hold his lighter to hers. “What I wanted to see your brother about,” he said as he sat down again, “was to ask if he knows a Miss Columbia Forrest.”

  The girl laughed. “He probably does,” she said. “She’s—They’re going to be married to-morrow.”

  Guild said: “Well, that’s—” He stopped when he heard footsteps running downstairs from the second floor.

  A man came into the room. He was a man of perhaps thirty-five years, a little above medium height, trimly built, rather gaily dressed in gray with lavender shirt, tie, and protruding pocket-handkerchief. His face was lean and good-looking in a shrewd, tight-lipped fashion.

  “This is my brother,” the girl said.

  Guild stood up. “I’m trying to get some information about Miss Columbia Forrest,” he said, and gave Charles Fremont one of his cards.

  The curiosity that had come into Fremont’s face with Guild’s words became frowning amazement when he had read Guild’s card. “What—?”

  Guild was saying: “There’s been some trouble up at Hell Bend.”

  Fremont’s eyes widened in his paling face. “Wynant has—?”

  Guild nodded. “He shot Miss Forrest this afternoon.”

  The Fremonts stared at each other’s blank, horrified faces. She said through the fingers of one hand, trembling so she stuttered: “I t-t-told you, Charley!”

  Charles Fremont turned savagely on Guild. “How bad is she hurt? Tell me!”

  The dark man said: “She’s dead.”

  Fremont sobbed and sat down with his face in his hands. His sister knelt beside him with her arms around him. Guild stood watching them.

  Presently Fremont raised his head. “Wynant?” he asked.

  “Gone.”

  Fremont let his breath out in a low groan. He sat up straight, patting one of his sister’s hands, freeing himself from her arms. “I’m going up there now,” he told her, rising.

  Guild had finished lighting a cigarette. He said: “That’s all right, but you’ll do most good by telling me some things before you go.”

  “Anything I can,” Fremont promised readily.

  “You were to be married to-morrow?”

  “Yes. She was down here last night and stayed with us and I persuaded her. We were going to leave here to-morrow morning and drive up to Por
tland—where we wouldn’t have to wait three days for the license—and then go up to Banff. I’ve just wired the hotel there for reservations. So she took the car—the new one we were going in—to go up to Hell Bend and get her things. I asked her not to—we both tried to persuade her—because we knew Wynant would make trouble, but—but we never thought he would do anything like this.”

  “You know him pretty well?”

  “No, I’ve only seen him once—about three weeks ago—when he came to see me.”

  “What’d he come to see you for?”

  “To quarrel with me about her—to tell me to stay away from her.”

  Guild seemed about to smile. “What’d you say to that?”

  Fremont drew his thin lips back tight against his teeth. “Do I look like I’d tell him anything except to go to hell?” he demanded.

  The dark man nodded. “All right. What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing.”

  Guild frowned. “You must know something. She’d’ve talked about him.” Anger went out of Fremont’s lean face, leaving it gloomy. “I didn’t like her to,” he said, “so she didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Jesus!” Fremont exclaimed. “She was living up there. I was nuts about her. I knew he was. What the hell?” He bit his lip. “Do you think that was something I liked to talk about?”

  Guild stared thoughtfully at the other man for a moment and then addressed the girl: “What’d she tell you?”

  “Not anything. She didn’t like to talk about him any more than Charley liked to have her.”

  Guild drew his brows together. “What’d she stay with him for, then?”

  Fremont said painfully: “She was going to leave. That’s why he killed her.”

  —

  THE DARK MAN put his hands in his pockets and walked down the room to the front windows and back, squinting a little in the smoke rising from his cigarette. “You don’t know where he’s likely to go? Who he’s likely to connect with? How we’re likely to find him?”

  Fremont shook his head. “Don’t you think I’d tell you if I knew?” he asked bitterly.

  Guild did not reply to that. He asked: “Where are her people?”

  “I don’t know. I think she’s got a father still alive in Texas somewhere. I know she’s an only child and her mother’s dead.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “Four—nearly five months.”

  “Where’d you meet her?”

  “In a speakeasy on Powell Street, a couple of blocks beyond the Fairmont. She was in a party with some people I know—Helen Robier—I think she lives at the Cathedral—and a fellow named MacWilliams.”

  Guild walked to the windows again and back. “I don’t like this,” he said aloud, but apparently not to the Fremonts. “It doesn’t make sense. It’s—Look here.” He halted in front of them and took some photographs from his pocket. “Are these good pictures of her?” He spread three out fanwise. “I’ve only seen her dead.”

  The Fremonts looked and nodded together. “The middle one especially,” the girl said. “You have one of those, Charley.”

  Guild put the dead girl’s photographs away and displayed two of a bearded man. “Are they good of him?”

  The girl said, “I’ve never seen him,” but her brother nodded and said: “They look like him.”

  Guild seemed dissatisfied with the answers he had been given. He put the photographs in his pocket again. “Then it’s not that,” he said, “but there’s something funny somewhere.” He scowled at the floor, looked up quickly. “You people aren’t putting up some kind of game on me, are you?”

  Charles Fremont said: “Don’t be a sap.”

  “All right, but there’s something wrong somewhere.”

  The girl spoke: “What? Maybe if you’d tell us what you think is wrong—”

  Guild shook his head. “If I knew what was wrong I could find out for myself what made it wrong. Never mind, I’ll get it. I want the names and addresses of all the friends she had, the people she knew that you know of.”

  “I’ve told you Helen Robier lives—I’m pretty sure—at the Cathedral,” Fremont said. “MacWilliams works in the Russ Building, for a stockbroker, I think. That’s all I know about him and I don’t believe Columbia knows”—he swallowed—“knew him very well. They’re the only ones I know.”

  “I don’t believe they’re all you know,” Guild said.

  “Please, Mr. Guild,” the girl said, coming around to his side, “don’t be unfair to Charley. He’s trying to help you—we’re both trying—but—” She stamped her foot and cried angrily, tearfully: “Can’t you have some consideration for him now?”

  Guild said: “Oh, all right.” He reached for his hat. “I drove your car down,” he told Fremont. “It’s out front now.”

  “Thank you, Guild.”

  Something struck one of the front windows, knocking a triangle of glass from its lower left-hand corner in on the floor. Charles Fremont, facing the window, yelled inarticulately and threw himself down on the floor. A pistol was fired through the gap in the pane. The bullet went over Fremont’s head and made a small hole in the green plastered wall there.

  Guild was moving toward the street door by the time the bullet-hole appeared in the wall. A black pistol came into his right hand. Outside, that block of Guerrero Street was deserted. Guild went swiftly, though with many backward glances, to the nearest corner. From there he began to retrace his steps slowly, stopping to peer into shadowy doorways and the dark basement entrances under the high front steps.

  Charles Fremont came out to join him. Windows were being raised along the street and people were looking out.

  “Get inside,” Guild said curtly to Fremont. “You’re the one he’s gunning for. Get inside and phone the police.”

  “Elsa’s doing that now. He’s shaved his whiskers off, Guild.”

  “That’d be the first thing he did. Go back in the house.”

  Fremont said, “No,” and went with Guild as he searched the block. They were still at it when the police arrived. They did not find Wynant. Around a corner two blocks from the Fremonts’ house they found a year-old Buick coupé bearing the license numbers Boyer had given Guild—Wynant’s car.

  IV

  After dinner, which Guild ate alone at Solari’s in Maiden Lane, he went to an apartment in Hyde Street. He was admitted by a young woman whose pale, tired face lighted up as she said: “Hello, John. We’ve been wondering what had become of you.”

  “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 to-morrow.”

  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 nonwhite 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.