Carmody shook his head to clear it. “A hearing aid,” he said. “Someone’s been trying to tell me something all afternoon, but I couldn’t hear it until now.”
A PADLOCK FOR CHARLIE DRAPER, by James Holding
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine July 1967.
Lots of folks around town thought Charlie Draper was just plain nuts to act like he did the day his store was held up last fall—including me. I had a grandstand seat for the whole thing and should’ve known better, because I know Charlie Draper pretty well. We play poker every week, and me and Charlie have been business neighbors for going on twelve years. My hardware store is right next to Charlie’s grocery in the old Stackpoole Building, which is backed up tighter’n a fat lady’s girdle to the face of the north bluff in Cedar Gulch.
Cedar Gulch is not such a big town—we haven’t got any supermarkets yet—but it’s not a poor town, either. A lot of money goes through Charlie’s store on Fridays, because the fellows who work in the smelting plant get paid on Thursdays. I don’t do as good as Charlie—there’s not as much call for hardware items as there is for victuals—but I don’t do bad, at that Anyways, this holdup at Charlie’s happened on a Friday, right around four o’clock in the afternoon.
The thing was, Charlie was always talking about this theory he had, and everybody who heard about how Charlie acted at the holdup thought they had the laugh on him good because ne didn’t stick to his theory. He did just the opposite to what he always said was right. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Charlie talk about his theory—at lunch time at Grogan’s, after church on Sundays sometimes, but mostly at our poker sessions after he’d had a couple of beers and folded his first two stud cards of a bad hand, and don’t have anything else to do until the next deal except talk.
Charlie claims there’s two ways of doing everything, the hard way and the easy way. And a man’s a fool that does anything the hard way if he can do it the easy way. That’s about all there is to Charlie’s theory in a nutshell.
We kid Charlie about it a lot. Least, we used to. Mort Johnson asked Charlie one night, “How about getting married? Was there a hard way to do that and an easy way?” Charlie didn’t bat an eye, just said, “Sure, the hard way was to marry a poor girl you loved, and the easy way was to marry a rich girl who loved you.” Mort pointed out that Charlie’s own wife, Lizabeth, was as poor as a packrat with fleas when he married her, and Charlie said he’d married Lizabeth before he thought up his theory, that was all. Then Deke Sawyer says, “How about playing a busted flush in draw poker, Charlie, what’s the easy way to play that?” And Charlie says, “If you pick up a four flush hand on the deal, the hard way to play it is to draw one card to try and fill, but the easy way is to just sit back and play it as a pat hand.” Then Charlie grinned and said, “Specially if you’re playing with a bunch of guys who are dead easy to bluff, like all you funny fellows here.”
See what I mean? That kind of talk went on whenever Charlie was around, and we never had a chance to shut Charlie up about his theory until his grocery store got stuck up.
The funny thing was, Charlie wasn’t even in the store when the holdup man walked in and pulled out a .38 from inside his coat and told everybody in the store it was a stickup and to keep quiet and drop all their cash money into his hat when he told them to. The store was full of smelters’ wives, like I say, spending the dough that their husbands got paid the day before. It turned out later Charlie was walking back from the post office about then, where he’d been mailing off a money order to his widowed sister in Clutchers Falls.
Anyway, the first I knew anything out of the ordinary was going on was when Charlie comes walking into my store and says to me, “Hi, Herbie, howsa boy?”
“I can t complain,” I told him. “But how come you’re not over taking care of your customers, Charlie? This is your busy day, Friday. I must’ve seen at least a dozen women go in your place the last ten minutes.”
“Casper’ll take care of ‘em,” Charlie says. “He’s an all-right kid for only seventeen, you know it? Best clerk I ever had. I been down to the post office before it closes, that’s why I ain’t over there helpin’ him.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, what can I do for you, Charlie? Sell you a power lawn mower so’s you can cut your grass the easy way?” We often lean on him a little like that. Him and his theory.
He shook his head. “You know darn well I got no grass to cut, Herbie, and even if I did, that would be the hard way to cut it.” He looked at me slantwise, and I knew he wanted me to ask him what would be the easy way, so I did.
“If you got grass,” Charlie says, “let ‘er grow a while till she’s rich and ripe, and then buy yourself a couple goats. They’d eat it down neater’n you could cut it. Cheaper’n a lawn mower, too. That’s the easy way, Herbie,”
“All right. I’m sorry I asked. What do you need?”
“I thought I might buy a padlock,” Charlie said.
“Okay. I got a good selection. Big or little?”
“Oh, about medium, I’d say, Herbie. Maybe two bucks and a quarter, two and a half, in there somewhere. It ought to be pretty strong, though.”
“What you going to use it for, Charlie? Tell me that, and I can tell you better what kind to buy.” I got four padlocks of different sizes out of my padlock drawer behind the counter. The cheapest one was made of laminated steel plates.
Charlie says, “I figured to use it on my store curtain.”
“This laminated job is the one, then,” I pointed to it. “Its plenty strong for that, and only a buck ninety-five. It’s what I use on my own curtain.” Charlie’s grocery and my hardware store both got one of those roll-up steel curtains that you pull down out of the storefront ceiling and padlock to a staple in the sidewalk when you close up the store, you know?
“Okay,” Charlie says. “I’ll take it.” He threw two singles on the counter, and I gave him his nickel change.
“Want me to wrap it up?”
“Don’t bother, Herbie.” He took the padlock and the keys for it, and started out “Hey!” I said. “I just thought, you already got a lock for your curtain, Charlie. How come you need another? D you lose it?”
“Nope,” Charlie said, stopping in my doorway. “Its inside my store, laying beside the cash register.”
“Well, then ,..”
“I don’t want to go in my store right this minute.”
“Why not?” I wanted to know.
“It’s bein’ held up by a gunman,” Charlie says.
I thought he was out of his mind. “You sure it wasn’t Danny’s Bar you was at, instead of the post office?” I asked him.
He laughed. “No, it’s a fact, Herbie. I come back from the post office just now and start to go in my store. When I look in through the window, there’s a tall skinny guy in there with a gun, lining up my customers to shower down their money in his hat, one at a time. How about that?”
I gulped a little and stared at him. “Is he still there?” I yelped.
“Hope so,” says Charlie. “Bound to be, I should think. There’s at least fifteen, twenty women in there to rob, not countin’ my cash register and my clerk, Casper. And you know how long it takes women to find anything in their handbags!”
“I’ll call the cops!” I turned around and made a move for my telephone.
“Hold it!” Charlie says. He comes back into my store and grabs my arm. “No police, Herbie, you hear? It’s my store bein’ robbed, so I’ll handle this my own way. Okay?” He grinned at me. “The easy way, that is.”
I said okay to the dope, wondering what he was up to. I followed him as far as the front door of my store and stood in the doorway and watched him stroll the few steps to his own grocery store next door, batting his eyes just once at his store window when he come to it. He turned his head and winked at me and gave a nod, so I knew the gunman was still in there, all right Charlie had the new padlock I sold him in one hand, open, and he was putting
on a big innocent customer act as he got to the door of his store.
He didn’t go in. He just reached up over his head, gave a little jump, and grabbed the ring of his steel store curtain and yanked it down across the storefront, all in one motion. Then he slapped the curtain fastener over the staple in the sidewalk, threaded his new padlock through it and snapped it shut as casual as if he was only shutting up shop for the night, as usual.
Inside three seconds, you could hear a real gabble of voices coming from behind Charlie’s steel curtain. His women customers were kinda surprised to have all the daylight from outdoors suddenly shut off, I guess, in the middle of a first-class holdup.
Anyway, Charlie comes back to my store, calm as you please, and says, “Okay if I use your phone, Herbie?”
“Go ahead,” I said. “Help yourself. You handled that pretty smart, Charlie, I got to admit it. Now you got the fellow sealed up in there, it’s a lead pipe cinch the cops can take him easy. Go ahead and phone them.”
“Thanks. Lucky thing our stores don’t have no back doors, ‘count, of bein’ built so tight against the bluff, ain’t it?” Charlie says, grinning at me. “That boy in my place can’t come out now except we let him out the front, through the curtain.” He picked the receiver off my telephone hook and asked for a number from Maisie Jordan, our day operator.
“That’s not the police number,” I said to him, “I know it. I’m not callin’ the police. I’m callin’ Casper.”
“Your store clerk?”
“Sure,” Charlie says. “Casper’s right in there behind the curtain where the action is. I want to find out what’s happenin’.”
The phone rang for quite a while before somebody answered it Charlie says, “Hello, is that you, Casper?”
I guess it was Casper, all right, because I could hear a big rush of talk coming over the wire. Casper started to tell Charlie there was a holdup going on over there, but Charlie cut him off.
“I know there’s a gunman in there,” he says. “That’s why I pulled down the steel curtain, Casper, to seal him in. What’s he doin’ now?”
I got up close so’s I could hear Casper s part of the talk coming over the wire. “He’s wavin’ his gun around,” Casper says. “He’s gonna shoot everybody in the joint, he says.”
“Listen, Casper,” Charlie says, “you tell him he’s locked in the store by that curtain and come hell or highwater, nothin’ will get him out except me raisin’ the curtain from the outside. You tell him I’m callin’ from Herbie Purdom’s hardware store right next door, and nobody knows yet he’s in there except me and Herbie. Not even the cops.” Charlie winked at me. “Go on, now. Tell that holdup man what I said, Casper.” Charlie drummed his fingers on my counter till Casper come back on.
“I told him,” Casper says.
“What’d he say?” Charlie asks.
“He says he’s still gonna kill every dame in the place, and me too, unless you open the curtain mighty quick, Mr. Draper.” I thought Casper was on the gunman’s side. He wanted the curtain opened too, and no more waiting.
“Ask him what good he thinks that’ll do,” Charlie says to Casper, “killin’ everybody? Then I will call the cops. And no matter how many dames he kills, the cops’ll get him easy because he’s sealed in, tell him. Instead of just an itty-bitty holdup, the cops’ll nail him for a flock of murders. He ought to know you don’t get well from a murder charge, Casper. So whatever he does, he’s hooked, ’less I raise that curtain. Tell him that now, will you?”
We could hear Casper’s seventeen-year-old voice, with a tremble in it like he was seventy, telling the gunman what Charlie said. Pretty soon he comes back on the phone and his voice sounds a little stronger. “He wants to know what’s your deal?”
“Deal?” Charlie says, kind of hurt, “I didn’t offer no deal to the son-of-a-gun! But you tell him if he leaves my customers alone, and gives ’em back their money, and hands over his gun to you, Casper, I might let him out.”
“His gun?” Casper’s voice went into a kinda squeaky tenor. “I don’t want his gun, Mr. Draper! Listen, can’t you...”
“You listen,” Charlie tells him. “If I open up the curtain and leave him out, I got to be sure he won’t start shootin’ the minute he sees daylight, don’t I? And the only way I can be sure of that is if you got his gun. Don’t that stand to reason? Sink his gun in the sugar barrel if you’re scared of it, Casper.”
“Okay, Mr. Draper, I’ll tell him.” Casper did so. After a minute, he says, “The feller wants to know if you’ll let him go free after you unlock the curtain?”
“Nope,” Charlie says. “He’s a holdup man, ain’t he? He’s got to take what’s comin’ to him.” He paused. Then, “Oh-oh! Wait a minute, Casper!” He holds his hand over the phone for a couple of minutes, then takes it away and says into it, acting real excited, “Listen, Casper, I just looked out the door. And you know what? There’s a crowd of miners from the smelter comin’ down the street with fire in their eyes! I thought I heard somethin’! Looks a little bit like a lynch party. Probably figurin’ to teach that holdup man a lesson about scarin’ respectable wives when they’re doin’ the family shoppin’.”
Casper was kicking this piece of news around in his mind for a while. You could tell by his heavy breathing and no talking. Then he put his finger smack on the weak spot in Charlie’s lie. “Gee, Mr. Draper,” Casper says, “if nobody but you and Mr. Purdom knows about this holdup, not even the cops, then how come all them miners...”
Charlie looks me straight in the eye and says, “Herbie Purdom musta spread the news at the smelter, Casper. He run out of here like a fox with sore feet the minute I started talkin’ to you. He’s kind of an old lady for gossip anyway, Casper, You know that.”
I made a fist and was half of a mind to slug Charlie for that crack. I’m a bigger man than he is by a good sight, but I wanted to find out what would happen, so I didn’t.
Charlie ’went right on. “So you tell that gunman, Casper, that I will do one thing for him, if he does like I say with the gun and all. I’ll personally guarantee to keep the miners from jumpin’ him when he comes out. I’ll get him to the jail safe and sound. That’s a promise, Casper. It might be kinda touchy, but I’ll do it. Tell him that, Casper.”
In a minute, Casper’s voice comes back, “He says okay, Mr. Draper. Unlock the curtain.”
“Are our customers all right?” Charlie asks, “You sure nobody’s hurt?”
“They’re fine,” Casper says.
“Did he give ’em their money back, the ones he robbed so far?”
“Yep. He sure give it all back.”
“You got his gun?”
“It’s buried in the sugar barrel about a foot down, Mr. Draper.”
“Swell,” says Charlie. “Then I’ll come right over and unlock the curtain. Tell him to come out slow and easy.” Charlie hung up.
“Now call the cops,” I said.
Charlie shakes his head. “Lend me a gun for a few minutes, will you, Herbie?” He points to a double-barreled 12-gauge in my gun case. “That’ll do,” he says. “That’s just the ticket I won’t even get a speck of dust on it, Herbie. Won’t even need any shells. How about it? If I bring it back good as new in ten minutes?”
I just gave him a dirty look without saying anything. He had no call to tell Casper I was a big-mouth.
Then he says, “I was only kidding about you bein’ a gossip, Herbie. Honest.”
Well, it was a pretty good apology for Charlie, so finally I handed him the shotgun. He took it and went on over to his own store and put the gun on the pavement while he unlocked the padlock on his store curtain. Then he pushed up the curtain, and pointed my empty shotgun at the tall skinny guy who came walking out, and waltzed him off to the police station all by himself with the gunman looking all around him like crazy for the lynch mob Casper had told him about. Of course, there wasn’t any.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that if this was Char
lie’s idea of the easy way to handle a holdup in his store, the guy was just plain nuts, right? Reason I know is, a lot of people around Cedar Gulch was thinking exactly the same thing when they heard about it, including me. Most of us figured this was a prime chance to shove Charlie’s theory down his throat and make him choke on it, and shut him up for good, you know what I mean?
Wednesday night after the holdup, we had our regular poker session, and Charlie was there. After a few hands and a couple of beers, Mort Johnson begins the treatment.
“Well, Charlie,” he says, “from now on we won’t have to listen to you nattering about that bloody theory of yours any more.” Mort’s half English, and he talks funny sometimes.
“Why not?” says Charlie, folding his first two stud cards to wait for a better start.
“After the way you handled that holdup of yours last Friday? If ever I heard of doing something the hard way, that was it. And you telling us for years anybody does anything the hard way is a bloody fool!”
“He is,” says Charlie, sticking out his jaw a little. “I ain’t backin’ off from that.”
“Then why didn’t you handle your holdup the easy way?” Mort jerks his thumb at me and says, “Herbie told us all about you buying the padlock and borrowing a gun, and taking a chance on getting yourself and a lot of women killed, and sweet-talkin’ the holdup man into surrendering on the phone. You call that the easy way to handle a simple holdup when all you had to do was call the cops on Herbie’s phone, sit back and relax, and let them take over?”
“Wait, Mort, you got it wrong,” says Charlie, not taking any back seat that you could notice. He waits till Deke Sawyer rakes in a four dollar pot on a couple of wired kings, and then goes on, “Depends on what you’re tryin’ to do, which is the easy way and which is the hard way. Right?”
I said, “Right And you was trying to stop that holdup man from robbing your store, wasn’t you?”
“That was part of it,” Charlie admits, nodding his head. “But that wasn’t all of it.”
The Cutthroats and Criminals Megapack Page 6