by Jerry eBooks
“Sure!” he said, passing it over. “But I don’t think it will do you any good, if you studied it for a century. Your head ain’t the right shape. Au reservoir, Doc!”
Well, as the oil drillers are wont to remark, after the show that night I took the little red book and prepared to read it in my hotel suite, meaning one room. It was a wow! Before I concluded the third chapter, I began to wonder why birds like Hannibal, Cleopatra, Steve Brody, and Jesse James had anything on me. Why couldn’t I do the same? In fact, the bozo who wrote the book, John Alonzo Wickpick, claimed that I could.
In the next chapter, he told about humble birds who flew to the top branches of the tree of success, via work, nerve, and pluck. They never had any luck, of course. He told about the career of the famous Ebenezer van Murphy.
Van Murphy, it seemed, started out in life with nothing more than a set of legs, a pair of eyes, and the correct amount of hands. At the rare and tender age of ten he was hoofed out of the family mansion, the same being a log cabin in the foothills of the Bozark Mountains. Ebenezer’s pop—meaning father—told the kid to go out and root for himself.
He did! He started off by picking strawberries to earn enough to pay his way to the Great City, which is liable to mean New York, and he reached same in due time. At the age of ten, he was the chief errand boy for the Greater City Canned Parsnip Corporation. At eighteen, he was the third assistant manager and going strong.
He reached twenty and the manager’s job at the same time. After that it was all peaches for little Ebenezer! By paying strict attention to his duties and passing up all forms of pleasure, including crap shooting, he wound up, at the age of twenty-eight, as the chief cook and bottle bather of the company.
Well, after reading the case of Ebenezer van Murphy and the similar successful feats of a number of other great boys and girls, I turned out the light and crawled into the hay. Before morning, believe me, I did some heavy dreaming.
In fact, I spent the entire slumber period in dreaming of empires, millions, fast motah cars, mansions in Newport, butlers, forty blond housemaids, not to mention, though that’s what I’m doing, the Greater City Canned Parsnip Corporation. John Alonzo Wickpick sure had the right dope.
Next morning I dashed down to the lot and observed six of my prize freaks trouping out of the treasury, with the Old Man hurling Mr. Anathema after ’em. Right away I suspected a mice. Nicodemo, the Sword Swallower, was leading the flock, followed by Lulu Little, the spare-flesh lady; after her came Major Malone, the Human Skeleton and the rest.
“S’long, Doc!” opened up Nick. “We’re all through trouping! And we’re gonna start some business for ourselves. You can’t keep good men and girls down, see? Just told Old Man Mackensie that he could blow up and bust. Hope you wake up yourself, some day. By, Doc!”
Away they trouped.
CHAPTER IV
Loud Yells
The next town we played was laboring under the thirst-quenching name of Cider Gap, a jump of twelve miles from Live Stock. I was obliged to open the sideshow with only four freaks, the others having gone west, thanks to a little red book. And maybe the customers didn’t put up a howl! Ten great and distinctive sideshow attractions were advertised on the banners, and when the natives failed to note them on the inside—hot mongrel!—what they told me as they passed out! Not that I blame ’em.
As to the jovial Old Man, he spent most of his waking hours in telling me and the world in general what he would do if he ever laid his paws on the book agent who sold the freaks the printed dynamite. Nothing like that had ever happened to Tim Mackensie before—or since.
On the fourth day business was dead enough to attract the undivided attention of an undertaker. In disgust, I walked down to the treasury wagon to have a chat with the Old Man. As I came near, I heard some loud talking. Somebody was losing his temper and didn’t want anybody to find it for him.
“So you’re the fathead who sold them red books to the kid-show freaks, huh?” It was the voice of the Old Man, and he has some voice when he’s peeved. “D’yer realize that you made a bum outta the show, hey? And then you got the nerve to come around here and ask me to give you a job! Woof—wait till I get a crack at you!”
The next second I saw Mr. Book J. Agent come hurtling out the door, with the boot and fists of the Old Man following closely. The poor mackerel landed in a neat pile on the grass.
“And another thing,” added the Old Man. “If I ever get my mitts on that bird, John Alonzo Wickpick, I’ll ring his neck so he won’t be able to write another book for forty years!”
Before replying, the book agent got off the ground, brushed some assorted sawdust off his clothes, then said to the Old Man with great dignity: “Sir, you now have the honor of beholding the author of the book, John Alonzo Wickpick!”
Oh, Barnum—where is thy sting?
CHAPTER V
Greatest of All
When we arrived at Shin Center, the next show stand, the sideshow was a sorry-looking mess. We certainly missed those six ambitious freaks, no fooling. Then the dark clouds rolled by, the sun came out—and in walked our old friend, John Alonzo Wickpick.
It was the third day at Shin Center, and the Old Man and me were feeling a shade bluer than ten acres of Cuban sky. While we both sat in the treasury wagon, thinking deep-indigo thoughts, the door opened and in bobbed the author of “It’s Great to Be Great.” When the Old Man got one peek at him, he made a lurch with clenched fists, but I held him back.
“What!” snorted Tim Mackensie. “Have you got the crust to come here again? For two cents—”
“Gentlemen,” began Wickpick, using a well-modulated voice, “I came to ask your pardon, not to antagonize. I have made a grievous mistake and have done, I’m afraid, incalculable harm to some of your show folk.”
“I’ll say you did!” howled the Old Man. “And why I don’t beat—”
“Bear with me a moment, I beg of you,” he pleaded. “I promise to be brief. My mission here today is not in behalf of myself, but in the interests of the ladies and gentlemen who, after reading my unfortunate book, were lured away to disastrous pastures. Gentlemen, they have appointed me as their spokesman, and I am here to beg you to reinstate them to their former positions.”
“Never!” yelped the Old Man. “First in war, last in peace—slam, bang, bing!—yours for trouble, Tim Mackensie!”
“Wait a minute, boss,” I whispered in his ear. “We need those attractions like we need our noses. If this dizzy clown can lure ’em back—for the love of Pete, take them!”
“It seems that they did not find success quite as easy as I had pictured it,” went on Wickpick. “I met them at the railroad station about an hour ago, and they held me responsible for their plight. Gentlemen, they are right! Therefore, I think it is my duty to use my powers of forensic oratory to the end that they get their former berths back again. Remember, gentlemen, that Antony forgave Brutus, Josephine forgave the Emperor Napoleon, Nero forgave—”
Well, to make a short story shorter, he kept up a wonderful flow of language for the next fifteen minutes. Talk about the late Mr. Demosthenes wielding a wicked tongue! Demosthenes be blowed—John Alonzo Wickpick would have made that old Greek look tongue-tied.
“Aw right,” grunted the Old Man, at the end of the oratory. “Bring the chumps around; maybe I’ll talk to ’em!”
Wickpick went to the door, extracted a trick whistle from his pocket, then gave three sharp blasts. From beyond a hedge, a hundred yards away, six familiar heads bobbed up and smiled sheepishly. Led by Nicodemo and Major Malone, they trouped up silently to the Old Man with heads bowed.
For a moment, Tim Mackensie looked at his meek and humble freaks, a whimsical expression on his tanned face. “So you’re back again, you rambling rovers!” he growled. Then he smiled faintly. “Aw right—I’ll give you another chance. And you can thank the great tongue of Mr. Wickpick for it all. If it wasn’t for the way he talked—”
“Three cheers for Mr.
Wickpick!” shouted Nicodemo.
They gave him forty, not three. “I thank you all!” Wickpick blushed. “Especially you, Mr. Mackensie.” Then, in a softer voice, he said: “And now I must leave you all. In fact, I intend to look for a position.”
“Wait a minute, kid,” remarked the Old Man, a twinkle in his eye. “So you’re gonna look for a job, hey? Well, speaking of jobs, I have a idea that you’ll make the greatest ballyhoo talker the show world has ever known. How’ll fifty a week to start suit you, what?”
“Fine!” Wickpick beams. “This is, indeed, a pleasant turn of affairs. Thanks awfully!”
Did he make good? Listen! Ask any showman who is the greatest ballyhoo orator in the game, and he’ll say, “John Alonzo Wickpick, of The World of Fun Carnival!”
THE ASSISTANT MURDERER
Dashiel Hammett
Gold on the door, edged with black, said:
ALEXANDER RUSH
PRIVATE DETECTIVE
Inside, an ugly man sat tilted back in a chair, his feet on a yellow desk.
The office was in no way lovely. Its furnishings were few and old with the shabby age of second-handdom. A shredding square of dun carpet covered the floor. On one buff wall hung a framed certificate that licensed Alexander Rush to pursue the calling of private detective in the city of Baltimore in accordance with certain red-numbered regulations. A map of the city hung on another wall. Beneath the map a frail bookcase, small as it was, gaped emptily around its contents: a yellowish railway guide, a smaller hotel directory, and street and telephone directories for Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia. An insecure oaken clothes-tree held up a black derby and a black overcoat beside a white sink in one corner. The four chairs in the room were unrelated to one another in everything except age. The desk’s scarred top held, in addition to the proprietor’s feet, a telephone, a black-clotted inkwell, a disarray of papers having generally to do with criminals who had escaped from one prison or another, and a grayed ashtray that held as much ash and as many black cigar stumps as a tray of its size could expect to hold.
An ugly office—the proprietor was uglier.
His head was squatly pear-shaped. Excessively heavy, wide, blunt at the jaw, it narrowed as it rose to the close-cropped, erect grizzled hair that sprouted above a low, slanting forehead. His complexion was of a rich darkish red, his skin tough in texture and rounded over thick cushions of fat.
These fundamental inelegancies were by no means all his ugliness. Things had been done to his features.
One way you looked at his nose, you said it was crooked. Another way, you said it could not be crooked; it had no shape at all. Whatever your opinion of its form, you could not deny its color. Veins had broken to pencil its already florid surface with brilliant red stars and curls and puzzling scrawls that looked as if they must have some secret meanings. His lips were thick, tough-skinned. Between them showed the brassy glint of two solid rows of gold teeth, the lower row lapping the upper, so undershot was the bulging jaw. His eyes—small, deep-set, and pale blue of iris—were bloodshot to a degree that made you think he had a heavy cold. His ears accounted for some of his earlier years: they were the thickened, twisted cauliflower ears of the pugilist.
A man of forty-something, ugly, sitting tilted back in his chair, feet on desk.
The gilt-labelled door opened and another man came into the office. Perhaps ten years younger than the man at the desk, he was, roughly speaking, everything that one was not. Fairly tall, slender, fair-skinned, brown-eyed, he would have been as little likely to catch your eye in a gambling-house as in an art gallery. His clothes—suit and hat were gray—were fresh and properly pressed, and even fashionable in that inconspicuous manner which is one sort of taste. His face was likewise unobtrusive, which was surprising when you considered how narrowly it missed handsomeness through the least meagerness of mouth—a mark of the too-cautious man.
Two steps into the office he hesitated, brown eyes glancing from shabby furnishings to ill-visaged proprietor. So much ugliness seemed to disconcert the man in gray. An apologetic smile began on his lips, as if he were about to murmur, “I beg your pardon, I’m in the wrong office.”
But when he finally spoke it was otherwise. He took another step forward, asking uncertainly:
“You are Mr. Rush?”
“Yeah.” The detective’s voice was hoarse with a choking harshness that seemed to corroborate the heavy-cold testimony of his eyes. He put his feet down on the floor and jerked a fat, red hand at a chair. “Sit down, sir.”
The man in gray sat down, tentatively upright on the chair’s front edge.
“Now what can I do for you?” Alec Rush croaked amiably.
“I want—I wish—I would like—” and further than that the man in gray said nothing.
“Maybe you’d better just tell me what’s wrong,” the detective suggested. “Then I’ll know what you want of me.” He smiled.
There was kindliness in Alec Rush’s smile, and it was not easily resisted. True, his smile was a horrible grimace out of a nightmare, but that was its charm. When your gentle-countenanced man smiles there is small gain: his smile expresses little more than his reposed face. But when Alec Rush distorted his ogre’s mask so that jovial friendliness peeped incongruously from his savage red eyes, from his brutal metal-studded mouth—then that was a heartening, a winning thing.
“Yes, I daresay that would be better.” The man in gray sat back in his chair, more comfortably, less transiently. “Yesterday on Fayette Street, I met—a young woman I know. I hadn’t—we hadn’t met for several months. That isn’t really pertinent, however. But after we separated—we had talked for a few minutes—I saw a man. That is, he came out of a doorway and went down the street in the same direction she had taken, and I got the idea he was following her. She turned into Liberty Street and he did likewise. Countless people walk along that same route, and the idea that he was following her seemed fantastic, so much so that I dismissed it and went on about my business.
“But I couldn’t get the notion out of my head. It seemed to me there had been something peculiarly intent in his carriage, and no matter how much I told myself the notion was absurd, it persisted in worrying me. So last night, having nothing especial to do, I drove out to the neighborhood of—of the young woman’s house. And I saw the same man again. He was standing on a corner two blocks from her house. It was the same man—I’m certain of it. I tried to watch him, but while I was finding a place for my car he disappeared and I did not see him again. Those are the circumstances. Now will you look into it, learn if he is actually following her, and why?”
“Sure,” the detective agreed hoarsely, “but didn’t you say anything to the lady or to any of her family?”
The man in gray fidgeted in his chair and looked at the stringy dun carpet.
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t want to disturb her, frighten her, and still don’t. After all, it may be no more than a meaningless coincidence, and—and—well—I don’t—That’s impossible! What I had in mind was for you to find out what is wrong, if anything, and remedy it without my appearing in the matter at all.”
“Maybe, but, mind you, I’m not saying I will. I’d want to know more first.”
“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 phoney, 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.