Nightmare Town

sunburned, as if he does not ordinarily wear gloves. Both men and the woman told stories that fitted together in every detail, which, as you know, would be little less than a miracle in the case of honest witnesses. But since I knew Glenn, the man on the corner, had prevaricated, it was obvious that if the others’ stories agreed with his, then they too were deviating from the truth.”

I thought it best not to mention to Papa that immediately prior to going to Barnable’s, and perhaps subconsciously during my investigation, my mind had been occupied with finding another couplet to replace the one the editor of The Jongleur had disliked; incongruity, therefore, being uppermost in my brain, Mrs. Dolan’s shopping-bag had seemed a quite plausible hiding place for the diamonds and money.

“Good shooting!” Papa was saying. “Pull it by yourself?”

“I cooperated with Detectives Hooley and Strong. I am sure the subterfuge was as obvious to them as to me.”

But even as I spoke a doubt arose in my mind. There was, it seemed to me, a possibility, however slight, that the police detectives had not seen the solution as clearly as I had. At the time I had assumed that Sergeant Hooley was attempting to conceal his knowledge from me; but now, viewing the situation in retrospect, I suspected that what the sergeant had been concealing was his lack of knowledge.

However, that was not important. What was important was that, in the image of jewels among vegetables, I had found a figure of incongruity for my sonnet.

Excusing myself, I left Papa’s office for my own, where, with rhyming dictionary, thesaurus, and carbon copy on my desk again, I lost myself in the business of clothing my new simile with suitable words, thankful indeed that the sonnet had been written in the Shakespearean rather than the Italian form, so that a change in the rhyme of the last two lines would not necessitate similar alterations in other lines.

Time passed, and then I was leaning back in my chair, experiencing that unique satisfaction that Papa felt when he had apprehended some especially elusive criminal. I could not help smiling when I reread my new concluding couplet.

And shining there, no less inaptly shone

Than diamonds in a spinach garden sown.

That, I fancied, would satisfy the editor of The Jongleur.

THE FIRST THIN MAN

Hammett wrote these ten chapters in 1930, some three years before he wrote and published The Thin Man. Although the story line of these chapters bears clear similarities to that of the novel, when published the latter was a completely rewritten work. The style in this roughly first fifth of a novel is much more akin to the hard-edged work Hammett published in Black Mask. And Nick and Nora Charles do not appear here.

One

The train went north among the mountains. The dark man crossed tracks to the ticket-window and said: “Can you tell me how to get to Mr. Wynant’s place? Mr. Walter Irving Wynant’s.”

The man within stopped writing on a printed form. His eyes became brightly inquisitive behind tight rimless spectacles. His voice was eager. “Are you a newspaper reporter?”

“Why?” The dark man’s eyes were very blue. They looked idly at the other. “Does it make any difference?”

“Then you ain’t,” the ticket-agent said. He was disappointed. He looked at a clock on the wall. “Hell, I ought to’ve known that. You wouldn’t’ve had time to get here.” He picked up the pencil he had put down.

“Know where his place is?”

“Sure. Up there on the hill.” The ticket-agent waved his pencil vaguely westward. “All the taxi drivers know it, but if it’s Wynant you want to see you’re out of luck.”

“Why?”

The ticket-agent’s mien brightened. He put his forearms on the counter, hunching his shoulders, and said: “Because the fact is he went and murdered everybody on the place and jumped in the river not more than an hour ago.”

The dark man exclaimed, “No!” softly.

The ticket-agent smacked his lips. “Uh-huh – killed all three of them – the whole shooting match – chopped them up in pieces with an axe and then tied a weight around his own neck and jumped in the river.”

The dark man asked solemnly: “What’d he do that for?”

A telephone bell began to ring behind the ticket-agent. “You don’t know him or you wouldn’t have to ask,” he replied as he reached for the telephone. “Crazy as they make them and always was. The only wonder is he didn’t do it long before this.” He said, ‘Hello,’ into the telephone.

The dark man went through the waiting-room and downstairs to the street. The half a dozen automobiles parked near the station were apparently private cars. A large red and white sign in the next block said TAXI. The dark man walked under the sign into a small, grimy office where a bald fat man was reading a newspaper.

“Can I get a taxi?” the dark man asked.

“All out now, brother, but I’m expecting one of them back any minute. In a hurry?”

“A little bit.”

The bald man brought his chair down on all its legs and lowered his newspaper. “Where do you want to go?”

“Wynant’s.”

The bald man dropped his newspaper and stood up, saying heartily: “Well, I’ll run you up there myself.” He covered his baldness with a sweat-stained brown hat.

They left the office and – after the fat man had paused at the real-estate office next door to yell, “Take care of my phone if it rings, Toby” – got into a dark sedan, took the left turn at the first crossing, and rode uphill toward the west.

When they had ridden some three hundred yards the fat man said in a tone whose casualness was belied by the shine in his eyes: “That must be a hell of a mess up there and no fooling.”

The dark man was lighting a cigarette. “What happened?” he asked.

The fat man looked sharply sidewise at him. “Didn’t you hear?”

“Only what the ticket-agent told me just now” – the dark man leaned forward to return the lighter to its hole in the dashboard – “that Wynant had killed three people with an axe and then drowned himself.”

The fat man laughed scornfully. “Christ, you can’t beat Lew,” he said. “If you sprained your ankle he could get a broken back out of it. Wynant didn’t kill but two of them – the Hopkins woman got away because it was her that phoned – and he choked them to death and then shot himself. I bet you if you’d go back there right now Lew’d tell you there was a cool half a dozen of them killed and likely as not with dynamite.”

The dark man took his cigarette from his mouth. “Then he wasn’t right about Wynant being crazy?”

“Yes,” the fat man said reluctantly, “but nobody could go wrong on that.”

“No?”

“Nope. Holy hell! Didn’t he used to come down to town in his pyjamas last summer? And then when people didn’t like it and got Ray to say something to him about it didn’t he get mad and stop coming in at all? Don’t he make as much fuss about people trespassing on his place as if he had a gold mine there? Didn’t I see him with my own eyes heave a rock at a car that had gone past him raising dust once?”

The dark man smiled meagrely. “I don’t know any of the answers,” he said. “I didn’t know him.”

Beside a painted warning against trespass they left their gravelled road for an uneven, narrow crooked one of dark earth running more steeply uphill to the right. Protruding undergrowth brushed the sedan’s sides and now and then an overhanging tree-branch its top. Their speed made their ride rougher than it need have been.

“This is his place,” the fat man said. He sat stiffly at the wheel fighting the road’s unevenness. His eyes were shiny, expectant.

The house they presently came to was a rambling structure of gray native stone and wood needing gray paint under low Dutch roofs. Five cars stood in the clearing in front of the house. The man who sat at the wheel of one of them, and the two men standing beside it, stopped talking and watched the sedan draw up.

“Here we are,” the fat man said and got out. His manner had suddenly become important. He put importance