Дэшил Хэммет - The Collected Dashiell Hammett

“All right,” the coroner told Steve when this conference was over; “that’s all.”

From the inquest Steve walked slowly back to the hotel, his mind puzzled by this newest addition to Izzard’s mysteries. What was the explanation of the certain fact that the man the marshal had produced at the inquest was not the man he had taken from the gutter the previous night? Another thought: the marshal had arrived immediately after the fight with the men who had attacked him and Kamp, had arrived noisily, drowning the dying man’s last words. That opportune arrival and the accompanying noise — were they accidental? Steve didn’t know; and because he didn’t know he strode back to the hotel in frowning meditation.

At the hotel he found that his bag had arrived from Whitetufts. He took it up to his room and changed his clothes. Then he carried his perplexity to the window, where he sat smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring into the alley below, his forehead knotted beneath his tawny hair. Was it possible that so many things should explode around one man in so short a time, in a small city of Izzard’s size, without there being a connection between them — and between them and him? And if he was being involved in a vicious maze of crime and intrigue, what was it all about? What had started it? What was the key to it? The girl?

Confused thoughts fell away from him. He sprang to his feet.

Down the other side of the alley a man was walking — a thick-set man in soiled blue — a man with bandaged throat and chin. What was visible of his face was the face Steve had seen turned skyward in the fight — the face of the man he had knocked out.

Steve sprang to the door, out of the room, down three flights of stairs, past the desk, and out of the hotel’s back door. He gained the alley in time to see a blue trouser-leg disappearing into a doorway in the block below. Thither he went.

The doorway opened into an office building. He searched the corridors, upstairs and down, and did not find the bandaged man. He returned to the ground floor and discovered a sheltered corner near the back door, near the foot of the stairs. The corner was shielded from the stairs and from most of the corridor by a wooden closet in which brooms and mops were kept. The man had entered through the rear of the building; he would probably leave that way; Steve waited.

Fifteen minutes passed, bringing no one within sight of his hiding-place. Then from the front of the building came a woman’s soft laugh, and footsteps moved toward him. He shrank back in his dusky corner. The footsteps passed — a man and a woman laughing and talking together as they walked. They mounted the stairs. Steve peeped out at them, and then drew back suddenly, more in surprise than in fear of detection, for the two who mounted the stairs were completely engrossed in each other.

The man was Elder, the insurance and real-estate agent. Steve did not see his face, but the checkered suit on his round figure was unmistakable — “college-boy suit,” Kamp had called it. Elder’s arm was around the woman’s waist as they went up the stairs, and her cheek leaned against his shoulder as she looked coquettishly into his face. The woman was Dr. MacPhail’s feline wife.

“What next?” Steve asked himself, when they had passed from his sight. “Is the whole town wrong? What next, I wonder?”

The answer came immediately — the pounding of crazy footsteps directly over Steve’s head — footsteps that might have belonged to a drunken man, or to a man fighting a phantom. Above the noise of heels on wooden floor, a scream rose — a scream that blended horror and pain into a sound that was all the more unearthly because it was unmistakably of human origin.

Steve bolted out of his corner and up the steps three at a time, pivoted into the second-floor corridor on the newel, and came face to face with David Brackett, the banker.

Brackett’s thick legs were far apart, and he swayed on them. His face was a pallid agony above his beard. Big spots of beard were gone, as if torn out or burned away. From his writhing lips thin wisps of vapor issued.

“They’ve poisoned me, the damned—”

He came suddenly up on the tips of his toes, his body arched, and he fell stiffly backward, as dead things fall.

Steve dropped on a knee beside him, but he knew nothing could be done — knew Brackett had died while still on his feet. For a moment, as he crouched there over the dead man, something akin to panic swept Steve Threefall’s mind clean of reason. Was there never to be an end to this piling of mystery upon mystery, of violence upon violence? He had the sensation of being caught in a monstrous net — a net without beginning or end, and whose meshes were slimy with blood. Nausea — spiritual and physical — gripped him, held him impotent. Then a shot crashed.

He jerked erect — sprang down the corridor toward the sound; seeking in a frenzy of physical activity escape from the sickness that had filled him.

At the end of the corridor a door was labeled ORMSBY NITER CORPORATION, W. W. ORMSBY, PRESIDENT. There was no need for hesitancy before deciding that the shot had come from behind that label. Even as he dashed toward it, another shot rattled the door and a falling body thudded behind it.

Steve flung the door open — and jumped aside to avoid stepping on the man who lay just inside. Over by a window, Larry Ormsby stood facing the door, a black automatic in his hand. His eyes danced with wild merriment, and his lips curled in a tight-lipped smile. “Hello, Threefall,” he said. “I see you’re still keeping close to the storm centers.”

Steve looked down at the man on the floor — W. W. Ormsby. Two bullet-holes were in the upper left-hand pocket of his vest. The holes, less than an inch apart, had been placed with a precision that left no room for doubting that the man was dead. Steve remembered Larry’s threat to his father: “I’ll spoil your vest!”

He looked up from killed to killer. Larry Ormsby’s eyes were hard and bright; the pistol in his hand was held lightly, with the loose alertness peculiar to professional gunmen.

“This isn’t a — ah — personal matter with you, is it?” he asked.

Steve shook his head; and heard the trampling of feet and a confusion of excited voices in the corridor behind him.

“That’s nice,” the killer was saying; “and I’d suggest that you—”

He broke off as men came into the office. Grant Fernie, the marshal, was one of them.

“Dead?” he asked, with a bare glance at the man on the floor.

“Rather,” Larry replied.

“How come?”

Larry Ormsby moistened his lips, not nervously, but thoughtfully. Then he smiled at Steve, and told his story.

“Threefall and I were standing down near the front door talking, when we heard a shot. I thought it had been fired up here, but he said it came from across the street. Anyhow, we came up here to make sure — making a bet on it first; so Threefall owes me a dollar. We came up here, and just as we got to the head of the steps we heard another shot, and Brackett came running out of here with this gun in his hand.”

He gave the automatic to the marshal, and went on: “He took a few steps from the door, yelled, and fell down. Did you see him out there?”

“I did,” Fernie said.

“Well, Threefall stopped to look at him while I came on in here to see if my father was all right — and found him dead. That’s all there is to it.”

Steve went slowly down to the street after the gathering in the dead man’s office had broken up, without having either contradicted or corroborated Larry Ormsby’s fiction. No one had questioned him. At first he had been too astonished by the killer’s boldness to say anything; and when his wits had resumed their functions, he had decided to hold his tongue for a while.