Free Nightmare Town: Stories by Dashiell Hammett

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.
    Suppose he had told the truth? Would it have helped justice? Would anything help justice in Izzard? If he had known what lay behind this piling-up of crime, he could have decided what to do; but he did not know – did not even know that there was anything behind it. So he had kept silent. The inquest would not be held until the following day – time enough to talk then, after a night’s consideration.
    He could not grasp more than a fragment of the affair at a time now; disconnected memories made a whirl of meaningless images in his brain. Elder and Mrs. MacPhail going up the stairs – to where? What had become of them? What had become of the man with the bandages on throat and jaw? Had those three any part in the double murder? Had Larry killed the hanker as well as his father? By what chance did the marshal appear on the scene immediately after murder had been done?
    Steve carried his jumbled thoughts back to the hotel, and lay across his bed for perhaps an hour. Then he got up and went to the Bank of Izzard, drew out the money he had there, put it carefully in his pocket, and returned to his hotel room to lie across the bed again.
    Nova Vallance, nebulous in yellow crepe, was sitting on the lower step of the