The Man with the Crimson Box

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “Here’s your cigarettes, sir,” said a dignified voice at Allstyn’s elbow. And he looked up to see the exceedingly intelligent-looking bootblack.

  “Thank you, lad, and keep the change. And say—just a minute—in that story that appeared at 2:30 today, was there anything about a red-haired man?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. A red-haired man—rather, sir, the paper described him as a ‘reddish-haired’ man—identity unknown—was arrested today near the po—”

  “Just a minute—and then continue,” ordered Allstyn. “What was the complete description of this man?”

  “Just and only, sir, that he was reddish-haired—and about 35 years of age.”

  Allstyn nodded grimly. “Just and only there—just and only here! But don’t mind my cryptic comments, my boy. Go on with what you were telling me.”

  “Well, the story just was that this man—identity unknown—was arrested near Old Post Office today, and immediately stuck incommunicado in the State’s Attorney’s special lockup. He had a crimson-painted shoebox under his arm, and a skull which had been taken from the State’s Attorney’s safe. At least, sir, supposedly so—anyway! It seems that when accosted by some high Churchman, and asked what was in the box, he said ‘Wah Lee’s skull; I cracked Vann’s pete.’”

  “Good—that is, thanks. And—oh, by the way, were there any pictures in that story? Pictures, I mean, of the place that had been robbed?”

  “Indeed there were, sir! Four of them. Showing most everything. Though what puzzled me, if you don’t mind my saying it, was that the pictures had been taken before the robbery!”

  “They were? But how do you know that?”

  “Well, because, sir, under one of them, which showed an old leather couch alongside a wall—and near the end of the same—were some—some descriptive lines which read—well, they read almost exactly like this—you see sir, I’ve an aunt who collects folding screens, and I have—”

  “—a complex on same? I don’t just see anything yet—but go on?”

  “Well, the lines under that particular picture, sir, they read practically exactly like this . . .” And verbally the boy proceeded to reproduce something which obviously, because of a particular object in it, a particular personal relationship, had remained prominently in his memory.

  “‘Old leather couch,’” he repeated slowly, “‘back of black-burlap-covered folding screen partly shielding which murderer may possibly have slipped when he heard German janitor’s footsteps, outside door of office, and from which hiding-place he may have emerged and cut off latter’s retreat after he entered office.’ But,” the boy added, to Allstyn, “the black-burlap covered screen, you see, wasn’t shown in the picture.”

  “Well, my dear lad, the news photographer couldn’t show a couch very well, could he, if he’d proceeded first to screen it off with a black-burlap-covered screen?”

  “But merely to show the couch, sir, that lay back of the screen which itself was the subject of the descriptive matter isn’t—isn’t logic—to me. However, sir, to get down to a better case of what I had reference to, in one of the photos which showed the State’s Attorney’s old safe, the safe door was closed, and a scarf hung partly down over the front of it. Whereas, had the picture been taken after the robbery, the news-photographer would have been sure to have shown the safe with its door wide open—and its dial smashed—and all that, don’t you know?”

  “Right you are, my boy. You’ve a mighty good head on you. Well, I’m as puzzled as you, I fear, as to how such pictures could all have been available in advance. And—but one of them showed a diploma, didn’t it, on one wall?”

  “Why, yes—but—but how, sir, since obviously you never saw the story, could you know—”

  Allstyn smiled. “Oh, I’m seeing the story just now, sort of—of taken apart and put together again—in another story! Which—but now about those pics—well—was there a by-line on that story! Meaning—”

  “Oh, I know what a by-line is, sir. For I’m taking junior journalism in my high school course. But there was. The story was by a man named Hugh Vann.”

  “Named Vann, eh? Well, there we are! Relative of our own State’s Attorney. And probably had the pics all ready—but taken for another purpose. Well, my bop, thanks—and here’s a quarter.”

  “Thank you, ever, ever so much, sir.” And the boy gave a courteous bow, showing that he came from a good family. And moved off.

  And Allstyn resumed the story. Piffington, he saw now plainly, had grabbed on to the fact that the State’s Attorney’s captive had reddish hair, by bringing him into his own story as one “Red”; and thanks to the latter being some tight-lipped criminal whose best bet for the time being was complete silence, Piffington was enabled to spin beautiful pipe dreams involving the other. And an intelligent bootblack’s description, just now, of the pictures of that office interior—including diploma on wall!—reconstructed completely for Allstyn where the resourceful Piffington had gotten his necessary jigsaw pieces. The story continued:

  This man in talking to Wainwright, told him the identical story detailed earlier today in a contemporary newspaper: which, briefly, was that he had just landed in Chicago after having come from South America, where he had traveled for some years with a professional hypnotist named Max Köneigsberg. And how, in fact, he was subject to so-called hypno-mesmeric amnesia, quite unresolvable, by any means, he told Wainwright, whenever he gazed twice into—or, so far as that goes, when his gaze even fell upon—a revolving-lamp placed at the focus of converging mirrors. This extreme susceptibility—and which susceptibility tallies with the red-headed man’s own description of the condition set forth today in a contemporary newspaper—was caused, he told Wainwright, by uncountable hypnotizations and mesmerizations by such lamps, and repeated hypnotic suggestions therein. It was, in fact, his telling Wainright laughingly how the first thing he happened to see, on striking Chicago, was just such a revolving-lamp as had been used on him countless times, in a drugstore on Van Buren and Dearborn Streets, and that he intended to remain assiduously away from that corner lest, coming face to face with it again, he lose all memory of the events taking place between such gazings, that Wainwright subsequently utilized this fact for one of the most Machiavellian deeds ever done to an innocent man.

  “Let’s see, now?” said Allstyn, meditatively. “There’s three captives in this case! The reddish-haired man, Piffington, and the other suspect picked up this afternoon at the Klondike Building entrance. Now if Piffington, by any fool chance, helps that reddish-haired man to slip out free—and then later gets booted out himself—when his ironclad alibi comes to life—well, I hope that one remaining suspect is worth while!” He shook his head helplessly. And resumed the story.

  When the reddish-haired man asked Wainwright if he could stay there with him for a few days, Wainwright granted him the permission, as the man was clean, and honest-spoken, and there was an extra swing-couch in the once commodious trailer, now disbandoned. The reddish-haired man’s subsequent movements in Chicago were, however, Wainwright says, rather mysterious, and none were ever known to him. With the single exception that, on the man’s second day there, Wainwright saw him reading a piece in the morning paper, and then contemplating him, Wainwright, curiously. A short while later, the reddish-haired man wrote a letter on blue paper, which he went out immediately and mailed. On examining the newspaper, Wainwright found that the story the reddish-haired man had been reading was one to the effect that the State’s Attorney, through a fund granted him by an anonymous politician, would pay $10 reward to all persons notifying him personally of the names of Pansies, if and when such persons were investigated and confirmed to be such, and sentenced in court as such, and if such notification was of record with the State’s Attorney.

  Wainwright was, so he says, horrified at the thought that his name had been sent in, because he utilizes rouge, for purely aesthetic purposes, and his
appearance might be misconstrued. For to be taken up and tried on such a charge would, he said, knock out—and sky-high—a possible marriage he expected to contract, though he will not give the name of the woman in the case. At any rate, going out immediately to a drugstore, he looked up the State’s Attorney’s number, and found him to be located apparently in a Washington Street building; and, calling that number, found that the State’s Attorney himself was out of town, and would be out of town till next morning.

  Troubled, he went downtown to that office, in quite blissful ignorance that the State’s Attorney had bigger and more official offices in the City Hall, and peeped in it as though seeking some other party. The office girl was telephoning, with her back to him—

  “There was a keen stroke!” Allstyn said. “If he’d so much as rung her in—she’d have knocked his confession sky-high by testifying she never saw him in her life.” He went on, a sneaking admiration for P. Wainwright’s inventive powers growing within him.

  —with her back to him, but he saw a safe of the most ancient type. And realized, with a terrible shock, that his name—contained within a blue letter penned by “Red”—was in that safe—for inves­tigation, arrest and publicity. And that it must—it must!—be gotten out somehow! Before the State’s Attorney got back.

  And right afterwards he made up his mind. If criminals could do it, he could! And would! For a score of pulp-paper magazine stories he had read had said that all that had to be done to a safe like that, to open it, was to hit its dials with a sledge. And as for the door of the office, a score more of such stories had said that the principle of Archimedes—commonly called a jimmy!—was the simple answer.

  “Which little paragraph in Piffington’s ‘confession,’” Allstyn commented dryly, “means that all the pulp-paper magazines will be ordered off the stands tonight by our Mayor! And an injunction suit by the publishers thereof filed—to get back on! This confounded clown has even started a fire in the circus grounds of the next town up the road—New York!” And with a sigh Allstyn went on with the story.

  And so last evening, Wainwright says—after, that is, “Red” had vanished from the trailer for parts unknown—he went downtown and entered the Klondike Building before it closed, carrying a sledge, which had been in the toolbox of the trailer, wrapp—

  “Ah!” said Allstyn. “I wondered how he was going to make the sledge materialize! His story was up the flue—if he’d tried to say he’d bought it.” And went on:

  —wrapped in a sheet of heavy wrapping paper tied with twine. And a crowbar, from the same tool chest, under his coat. He concealed himself, he says, in the washroom of the building, and, when all was quiet, jimmied the old door easily with one pry of the crowbar. He wore leather gloves, he says, as did the hyper-professionals in the pulp-paper magazine stories he had read. Once inside—the door shoved snugly to behind him—and the lights on—he had, he says, a profound and almost overpowering illusion that another person was in the room with him—for he distinctly heard the “thump, thump, thump” of a human heart; and, practically convinced that the office girl must have remained down late, curled up on the couch that lay partly back of the black-burlap-covered folding screen—

  “Long live news-pictures—but especially their captions!” Allstyn half nodded. “For the identical cap that our little newsboy friend just expatiated on has supplied couch and folding black-burlap-covered screen—and given Piffington a beautiful pair of highlights for confessional purposes.” And he went on:

  —practically convinced that the office girl must have remained late, curled up on the couch that lay partly back of the black-burlap-covered folding screen, and gone to sleep, he crossed the room cautiously—step by step—till suddenly, when three-quarters of the way across, the outlines of the couch loomed up between the interstice of the burlap as one hundred per cent empty—and quite devoid of human burden! And then only, Wainwright says, did he learn that the “thump, thump, thump” in his ears was only the beating of his own heart!

  “An artistic touch, that,” commented Allstyn—and truly sincerely. “And one which only an ex-burlap specialist—‘lapilist,’ I think he called it?—as he once was in New York—and inventor of a weave formula based on burlap’s ‘transparency’ could ever have fabricated.” And realizing—and strangely, too, for the first time in his life, since Allstyn had never been much of a reader of fiction, much less analyzer thereof—what a single touch of “authoritative” concrete “detail” could do for a document such as Piffington’s creation must have been, Allstyn went on, more than exceedingly impressed now.

  And finding thus that he was alone, he became, Wainwright says, suddenly calm. And went to work. And strictly according to pulp-paper lines. And the safe door swung open, Wainwright also avers, more easily—

  “And now, of details we get—none!” Allstyn commented, now momentarily the severe critic. “He should have elaborated just a bit here, and—but it’s expecting too much I dare say for a ‘burlapalist’ and bedtime-story writer to be able to expatiate on the knobknocking phase of this penny-dreadful. And besides, the results of this document—down New York way!—are all that count, anyway.” And now the pragmatist, instead of the lit’ry critic, Allstyn pressed on.

  —swung open, Wainwright also avers, more easily than those safe doors did in the various stories he had read. But he found, in this particular safe, not a letter. And only later did he realize that such letter would be in some more official City Hall office of the State’s Attorney. At any rate, interrupted by Reibach, he felled him—then killed him, as has already been related. And, to cover up the motive for his crime, he took from the safe the only thing of importance it apparently held, which was a paper-wrapped object on which, on the bottom, was penciled lightly “Wah Lee’s skull, evidence; case unknown.”

  “And there,” commented Allstyn, “is the probable flaw of the entire beautiful structure he’s reared! For he gets the identity of the stolen goods from a newspaper story—but attributes his knowledge of them to a penciled notation! I’ll bet one million dollars the girl secretary never bothered to write, on that wrapping, the contents. For—but why, I wonder, didn’t the Department check that by a phone call to her? Well—we’ll see. Now where the devil will Piffington dispose of that sledge?”

  But the next two sentences disposed of that question. With the paper-wrapped skull under his arm, the jimmy under his coat, and the sledge crudely re-wrapped, Wainwright slipped from the building. Straight to the river he went, down on the lower embankment, and thence toward Dearborn Street. Far out into the middle of the river somewhere he flung the jimmy. The heavy sledge he got rid of simply by tearing off the end of the paper wrapping, and letting the tool slip silently forth into the dark river at Piling NO. 37—NO. 37, according, at least, to the electric light on the upper Wacker Drive level. The paper he then tossed onto the water, where it floated rapidly away.

  Allstyn couldn’t help now but laugh aloud. Even a passer-by looked curiously at him.

  “Goes Mr. Jimmy,” Allstyn said to himself, “out somewhere in the bosom of dark Madame River. And goes Mr. Sledge down into no less than to feet of sludge and slime and murk and mud! And quite unfindable! And I—I told this bird he couldn’t do crime stories! Alack and alas!” Shaking his head—but only at himself!—he continued:

  Once back home at his trailer, with the stolen skull, Wainwright realized that “Red,” reading the story next morning of that safe burglary, and reflecting on it, might put two and two together—go to the State’s Attorney—and his testimony might result in his, Wainwright’s, arrest, at least as a suspect. And Wainwright was worrying more and more about those possible fingerprints he thought he might have left on the wall under the diploma. But morning came—and no story in the particular paper that is flung daily over the billboards at the door of his trailer . . . And no “Red” either. Wainwright wanted to go downtown badly, he says, to see the later editions, but
dared not leave the skull there, lest “Red,” returning in his absence—for he had shown the latter how to open the door without any key!—might prowl the trailer and find the skull; and so, tearing off the paper wrappings, and burning them, he put the skull in a white shoebox which he tied as though it contained merely a pair of shoes, and went downtown with it under his arm. Downtown, he found that the robbery had apparently not yet been discovered. Perhaps—so he figured—the secretary was late to work that day. But he knew the crime would be discovered any moment. And it was only downtown there that, remembering “Red’s” case of recurring hypno-mesmeric amnesia—and also a certain thing that “Red” had conveyed to him—that Wainwright conceived, so he says, a Machiavellian plot to not only erase from “Red’s” mind the single incident that might focus suspicion on him, Wainwright, but also save him, Wainwright, by sending “Red” to the chair!

  “Wow!” said Allstyn. “How the papers must have loved this! The newspaper boys owe Piffington one fine dinner, I’m thinking!” He went on:

  For Wainwright knew, he says, that all State’s Attorney’s captures are, when arrested, taken straight to the State’s Attorney’s special lockup in the City Hall. For he had once patiently stood by the famous door “from which no man returneth,” and where also, he had noted, was the window of some drugstore calling itself also “The Little Revolving Lamp Drugstore.” And he knew that if he could get “Red” picked up on a State’s Attorney’s case—and what case could be more a States’ Attorney’s case than the robbery of the State’s Attorney’s own safe?—”Red” would he hustled straight to that door, and would, on seeing that revolving lamp, lose all memory of all events centering about himself in Chicago—though such story would never, never be believed by the police.