The Willie Klump

by Joe Archibald

  “Satchelfoot,” Willie said. “The one you should suspect the most is the citizen nobody thinks of doin’.”

  “No, you don’t,” Kelly suddenly yelped. “I am not goin’ to let you worm nothin’ more out of me. Git lost!”

  HEN Willie Klump walked into his rooming house that night his landlady was waiting for him in the hall and the look in her eye convinced the president of the Hawkeye there would be

  no good news tonight.

  “Evenin’,” Willie forced out. “I know I am back about a week in the rent but you have t’ admit that for me that ain’t bad.”

  “Leave us forget that, Mr. Klump,” the old doll said. “It is the only reason I don’t feel too bad about evictin’ you. My daughter out in Jersey has been evicted an’ so she an’ her husband have to have your room as of tomorrow this time.”

  Willie was fast becoming a fatalist. He rocked back on his heels for a moment and then stiffened his upper lip.

  “Well, it shouldn’t be bad in the park these days, Mrs. Klipspringer. Hah, I feel the call of the great outdoors.”

  “You could git into a hotel until you got another room, Mr. Klump,” Mrs. Klipspringer suggested. “I hate to do this.” “Well, blood is thicker than the hot water we never got in this flea-bag,”

  Willie said.

  It took Willie about twenty minutes the next afternoon to throw his worldly goods into a straw suitcase. That morning he had noticed a medium class hotel just off Union Square and had been informed that a certain room would be available for at least a week. The bite would be seventeen dollars. It was the Hotel Luxoria.

  “Maybe I could make a deal with ‘em,” Willie sighed. “For the rent I would give them house dick services. Well, I could try.”

  Willie was in Room 660 at the Luxoria at three P.M. At three-thirty Gertrude Mudgett called him on the phone. “I phoned your roomin’ house, Willie Klump,” she said. “So you been holdin’ out on me with a big detainin’ fee from somewheres, huh? Sincet when could you live in a hotel without washin’ dishes? You doublecrosstin’ giraffe!”

  “Look, I got evicted!” Willie yelled. “Stop jumpin’ at inclusions.”

  “Didn’t pay your rent again?” Gertie shot back. “What dizzy dame you been squanderin’ your money on? If I ever find out, you sneak!”

  “I left the water runnin’ in the tub, Gert,” Willie said. “Call me back.” He hung up and then saw a sign tacked up near the phone that said:

  NO COOKING ALLOWED IN THIS ROOM

  “Is that so?” he sniffed. “Neither did Mrs. Klipspringer. As long as I don’t cook cabbage they will know from nothin’.”

  Willie got to his office at four to look through his mail. A mail-order house claimed they had a shoe for such as he that made less sound than rubber, and they had built-in arches. Another letter screamed at him, Come to Morgridge Manor And See Our Houses! Protect You And Yours From Eviction!

  “I wisht a corpse would come in here an’ drop dead at my feet,” Willie griped. “Fats McGlone, huh! No cow ever carried as much tripe as them radio flatfeet. Even what happens to me at times is like readin’ Black Beauty compared to it.”

  The phone rang and Willie eagerly grabbed it off its cradle. “Hawkeye Detective Agency, Incorp. William J. Klump speaking. Missin’ persons found. Skip tracin’ an’—”

  “Mr. Klump, we are takin’ a radio poll,” a dulcet feminine voice cooed. “Do you listen to Fats McGlone on station WHAM on Wednesday evenings?”

  “This is not the observation tower at Bellevue,” Willie snapped. “Do I look that stupid, sister?”

  “You sure do,” the doll said. “An’ drop dead! If I was your sister I would give you rat poison!”

  “An’ if you was, I’d take it!” Willie countered and slammed the phone down. He decided to give up and go back to the hotel. On the way he purchased an evening paper to see if there were any new leads on the murder and robbery at the Pusey Plastic Products Company. Willie chuckled when he read part of a story on page 5. Headquarters had assured the newspaper citizens that an arrest would be made inside forty-eight hours.

  “I wonder when they will stop listenin’ to Satchelfoot,” Willie observed. “Or at least believin’ him. Let’s see now. The cashier’s name was Barnaby an’ might be in the phone book. You stop thinkin’ like that, Willie! What chancet have you got anyway?”

  SUDDENLY Willie felt a tap on the shoulder and turned and looked into

  the face of a very big cop. “Yeah?” Willie inquired.

  “You’re either drunk or crazy,” the cop snapped. “Who you been talkin’ to the last couple minutes? There ain’t nobody with you. Git off my beat ‘fore I run you in.”

  “I will have you know I am a detective,” Willie said indignantly, then knew he had made a very grave mistake and started running. It was a hot day and the cop was fat. There were times when Willie had to admit he got the breaks.

  At ten o’clock that night he peeled off and tumbled into bed and tried not to think of the seventeen bucks he would have to pay at the end of seven days. And then it occurred to him that it would be easy to lower his straw suitcase to the court in back and so he dropped off to sleep.

  It was much later when the president of the Hawkeye suddenly woke and sat straight up in bed. There were sounds in the room that shouldn’t have been there and certainly hadn’t been made by things the exterminators had missed. And a cockroach could not fall over a chair. Willie tried to scream but his throat was as dry as a camel’s foot. Then something heavy fell across the bed and pinned his knees. The cold sweat came out of Willie and trickled down his spine and down his nose.

  Finally he croaked, “Who is it? Answer me or I’ll sh-shoot!”

  All that Willie could hear for the next few seconds were tom-toms and a sound like a kid dragging a stick along the pickets of a fence. Then he gradually realized that his ticker and his teeth were making the racket and he pulled himself together. He reached up and groped for the string to the light that was attached to the wall over his bed. He found it and yanked. Willie’s locks shot up as if he also had pulled the string of a fright wig.

  A big citizen who was a stranger to Willie had fallen across the bed. His hat had dropped off. In the back of the strange intruder’s plaid coat was a hole that had never been chewed out by a moth. In short the citizen looked very, very dead. Willie squirmed and got his legs out from under and swung out of bed.

  “I guess you made a mistake,” he gulped. “You was maybe lookin’ for Fats McGlone on the radio.”

  Willie picked up a snap brim hat and saw the label inside. A Truly Warmer. There were initials, M.F.T.

  “Huh, this skimmer never cost more than three-sixty-five,” Willie said. “But this character’s suit never cost less than a hun’red. Why did he come in here to breathe his last? I better call the night clerk, then the cops.”

  The night clerk was a citizen well past seventy and he had no more hair on his pate than a pickerel. He nearly lost his store choppers when he took a gander at the corpse.

  “Why, he come in just a few minutes ago, Klump,” the old geezer said. “I figgered he had one too many an’ that was why he staggered.”

  “One too many is right,” Willie said, mopping his brow. “Right between the shoulder-blades, pal. Who is he?”

  “Name’s J. L. Cusp,” the clerk nasaled. “Been here about a week. Has Room Six-Hundred. That’s it, Klump. He was all mixed up an’ wasn’t seein’ too good an’ sixes an’ zeros all looked alike so he stumbled in here—”

  Willie suddenly snapped his fingers. “J. T. Cusp? Then why is M.F.T. in his hat huh? Don’t answer that. Just leave me git to the phone to call Homicide oncet more. Ha, he died to git to see me, didn’t he?”

  “I guess I ain’t got a sense of humor,” the old desk tender sniffed.

  Willie called Headquarters. “Yeah, that
’s what I said an’ it ain’t no gag,” he said in part. “He crawled in bed with me an’ expired. Huh, don’t you ever listen to the radio? Be sure Satchelfoot Kelly comes if he happens to be there. This he’s got to see.”

  The night clerk inched out of the room. Willie looked the deceased over more thoroughly. He had been a nice looking citizen who had found life ended at forty and was not a criminal type any way you looked at him. Willie wished that he was heel enough to case the cadaver thoroughly before the legitimate cops arrived.

  “But it is like I always told Gert,” he said aloud. “My conscience ain’t much but my sub-conscience is what makes me layoff temptation at times. I could leave a print in the wrong place an’ Kelly would do his best to send me to the rotisserie. Lay off, Willie.”

  TWENTY minutes later the appraiser of the violently departed snapped his

  bag shut and announced that the stiff had been one for at least forty minutes. Satchelfoot Kelly eyed Willie askance after the private eye had told his story.

  “It ain’t possible,” he sniffed. “Truth can’t be stranger than Willie Klump. What you doin’ livin’ in a hotel, Willie? You got mixed up in some racket, I bet.”

  “Oh, I just peddle a little opium at times,” Willie said sourly. “An’ don’t you think we could git more dope on the corpse if we went to the room he lived in, Satchelfoot? It is six-hundred. Follow me.”

  There was a nice leather suitcase in the late J. L. Cusp’s room. The initials J. L. C. were on it. Inside it were a few articles of clothing that told the gendarmes nothing.

  “It looks like he was held up somewheres is all,” Satchelfoot opined. “There wa’n’t no poke on him as I frisked him. Looks like he never got no mail while he was there. Well, I can’t waste too much time on this rubout unlest somebody identifies him in the morgue as some big shot. With that Pusey case still to be solved—”

  Willie wondered if he should mention the hat with the initials M.F.T. in it, then told himself the late J. L. Cusp might have grabbed it off a rack in a barber shop by mistake. Anyway, why should he do what the cops were getting paid for? It was silly. “Awright,” Kelly said. “If you boys have every thin’ covered we’ll call it a night. An’ don’t you dast leave town, Willie!”

  “You got nothin’ on me, flatfoot,” Willie replied. “I t’rowed the gat where no radar could find it, ha!”

  Willie Klump returned to Room 660 and was quite relieved to discover the cadaver had been removed to the deep freeze. He was wracking his brains for a plausible explanation to all this when his phone rang. He answered it and recognized the voice of the night clerk.

  “Mr. Klump, there is a cab driver down here,” the old character wheezed. “He has got a pocketbook belongs to J. L. Cusp, I am sure. You’d better come down.”

  Willie did. The cabby said he found the wallet in his jalopy after coming out of a beanery. “Yeah, I thought I’d clean up the heap a little an’ I found this wallet. I was sure it belonged to my last fare whicht was a drunk in a plaid suit. He hails me at the corner of Second Avenya an’ Forty- third. I took him to this dump an’ he han’s me a five he has crumpled in his fist. He says I should keep the change.”

  “It is easy to figure out why he was easy with his lettuce,” Willie sniffed. “The citizen is dead, pal.”

  “Huh? Look, I don’t know from nothin’,” the hackie yelped. “You think if I rubbed him out I’d come back with the wallet I stole from him which I did not!”

  “You are in the clear, Mac,” Willie said. “You are the kind of citizen makes things tough for dishonest persons. Just leave your name an’ address in case we need a witness.”

  “Okay, pal.”

  A few minutes later William J. Klump, in the privacy of his room, made a startling discovery that put buzzing sounds inside his noggin. There was not a single bit of legal tender left in the late J. L. Cusp’s poke but tucked away in a little cubicle were one or two old business cards. They said: J. Luscomb Crump. Burpson Safe Co., Inc., Grand Rapids, Mich.

  Willie went to the washstand and splashed cold water on his face. He pinched himself on a tender part of his anatomy to make sure he was not dreaming that he was listening to a Fats McGlone radio can of corn. But the wallet was still there on the bed. He took an old notebook and a pencil from a dresser drawer and scribbled down the things that came briefly to mind.

  “The corpse lost a hat marked with the initials M.F.T. He registered at the Luxoria as J. L. Cusp. Why?”

  “But the deceased was really named J. Luscomb Crump so why the pseudronim? It was a Burpson safe knocked off at the Pusey Plastered Novelties Company and it looks like this rub out has a string attached to the assassination of that watchman. Willie, you ain’t that lucky!

  “An honest gee don’t lead no double life. If this J. Luscomb Crump was crooked what kind of underworld characters would he make deals with? Of courst they should be safe crackers. I wonder is there one in the files with the initials M.F.T.?”

  ABRUPTLY Willie put his pencil down. He had a headache too big

  even for a horse for he was quite allergic to such large scale thinking. He pocketed the notes and then looked for his bottle of aspirin.

  “I don’t believe it,” he mumbled. “Maybe I’ll be awright in the mornin’

  an’ find it is all a figurement of the imagination. They don’t even happen to me.” At ten o’clock of the same day Willie walked into an office downtown and conversed earnestly with a citizen in charge of the rogues gallery.

  “I hate to bother you,” Willie said, “but I have to make a livin’ the same as anybody. I have been on the trail of a missin’ person for a client an’ I got reasons to believe he was either in the can or out of it. I git paid even if I just find out where the missin’ person is as his wife says she can git a divorce if she can prove her husband is a ex-convict or one now in good standin’. Of courst us private eyes have to hold our clients in strict confidents. I can only say the initials of the character I am huntin’ is M.F.T.”

  “Klump, you get worse every day,” the headquarters specialist sniffed. “Just initials. Git lost.”

  “My client said he would be in for safe-crackin’ if anythin’,” Willie coaxed.

  “All right, follow me, Klump. We’ll have a look in that category.”

  A few minutes later William J. Klump was getting a gander at the pedigree of an incurable incorrigle named Melvin F. Trumbo. Melvin had worked out a rap back in Joliet and had once gone over the wall out in Kansas. He had a moon face and a pair of eyes Willie thought should be grafted onto a blind buzzard in the event of his demise.

  “This guy, Klump? If that’s the mug he is now on parole I am quite certain. I can get where he lives an’ where he works.”

  “Do that,” Willie said.

  The president of the Hawkeye Detective Agency left the bastile a few moments later with the address of Melvin F. Trumbo. The parolee was now employed as a mechanic with the Dairymaid Milk Company on Third Avenue.

  “I might be able to milk somethin’ out of the gee,” he mumbled just as a familiar voice pulled him back on his heels.

  “What you doin’ here at headquarters, knucklehead?” Satchelfoot Kelly yipped.

  “You don’t expect a civil answer an’ you know it, Satchelfoot,” Willie grinned. “You caught that bunch of crooks yet who knocked off the Pusey Nov—”

  “You would laugh on the other side of your silly kisser, Willie,” Kelly snapped back, “if I should happen to pin it on the vice-president, hah?”

  “Truman know about it?”

  “I mean the v.p. of the Pusey Pl—aw, shuddup!” Satchelfoot Kelly snarled.

  “They indentify who J. L. Cusp is yet?” Willie asked.

  “Why should they when they know what his name is, beetlebrain?”

  “That is right, Kelly. Silly of me, huh? Well, I can’t waste time with the
likes of you.”

  At five-thirty that evening William Klump rapped the wood of a certain door of a room above a pawnshop on Second Avenue near Thirty-Sixth Street. Melvin F. Trumbo admitted him and asked what in the aitch he wanted.

  “I am a private eye,” Willie said. “Seein’ you wish to make up for things you did to society I thought you might give me some info on a character named Boogoo McFoody who is wanted by the cops.”

  “Never heard of the punk!”

  WILLIE was not surprised. Neither had he. It was quite evident that Melvin Trumbo was slicking up for some

  smooching for the ex-con wore a nice white shirt and slacks no baseball bat ever came with.

  “Look, flatfoot, I got a date with a dame an’ I ain’t got much time. How long do you think I could keep goin’ straight unlest it was to the morgue if I sang on everybody I knew, huh? Why don’t cops try usin’ their own brains?”

  “A good question,” Willie admitted just as the phone rang out in the hall.

  “That’s the doll,” Trumbo yelped, and hurried out. Willie quickly cased the room and then he saw something on the dresser that made his ears twitch. He tip-toed across the room and picked up the expensive olive-green skimmer. He looked inside and saw that little gilt letters had been torn from the band only Melvin had not been able to get rid of the prints they had left. Willie made out the initials J and C and then dropped the hat as if it had suddenly caught fire. He was sitting in a chair and examining his nails when Trumbo hopped back inside.

  “Nice room here,” Willie said. “Ain’t it swell goin’ straight, pal?”

  “Nothin’ like it, copper. Look, some other time, huh?”

  “Okay,” Willie said. “I hate stool pigeons anyway, Trumbo. I jus’ wanted to see if you was one.”