The Willie Klump

by Joe Archibald

  Flossie’s dress clung to her as it negotiated the curves, and she had enough lipstick on to paint the door of a modest cottage.

  She was a blonde all right, but Willie could not help but wonder how many times.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry I caused you so much trouble, Mr. Klump,” she said. “Get the opener, Ferbus, an’ don’t just stand there.”

  “Yes, my pet.”

  It was a very nice dinner at the Grooby’s. After the coffee, Mr. Grooby handed Willie a big cigar, and Willie felt quite reckless and accepted it. Flossie tossed Willie a book of matches, and he touched off the smoke-pole and inhaled deeply.

  “Awright, you boys go in the livin’ room an’ let the dinner settle,” Flossie said. “I’ll clean up the dishes.”

  William Klump discussed world affairs with Mr. Grooby for several minutes and then he began to see spots in front of his eyes that were mostly green. There was a revolution in the region of his equator and a trickle of brine came down off his brow.

  “Er, I don’t feel so good, Mr. Grooby,”

  he said. “Ha, it is my first cigar sincet

  Hardhat Hafey first become a papa. Oh- oh—I must git air.”

  When Willie came back, Flossie gave him a belt of spirits of ammonia, but he could not get close to par.

  “Well, I have a appointment with a client,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I will leave. Don’t git lost no more, Fl—er— Mrs. Grooby.”

  Willie Klump got to his rooming house as fast as possible, and stretched out on his bed.

  After two hours rest Willie was in the pink enough to shift the personal belongings out of the blue serge he was wearing into his second best, which he intended to wear to business the next morning. He came up with a paper of matches and guessed he’d forgotten to give them back to Flossie.

  It was a pretty matchbook, and Willie studied it for a moment. Then the butterflies in his stomach jumped through their routine once more as he read aloud, “Mooger’s Motel & Diner. Gramsby, Vermont.”

  ILLIE went to the washbowl and splashed cold water on his face. He

  lay down for a few minutes and then got up and looked at the match cover again.

  “I don’t believe it,” Willie gulped. “Only I was up there an’ I never got no matches. She is a blonde not a redhead. She’s—huh, there was streaks of—no, Willie, stop romancin’! Things couldn’t even happen to you whicht are not possible.”

  For an hour Willie sat in the dark and stared out through his one window. He thought of poor Elmo Hake in the Vermont pokey, and of his sister, Phoebe. Folks always said Phoebe was never wrong about a hunch, that she was psychic.

  “Well, I will make sure,” Willie finally said. “I will shadow the babe.”

  At noon of the next day the president of the Hawkeye Detective Agency, wearing dark glasses and a false mustache, waited at the corner of Broadway and Seventy-ninth for Flossie to show. He figured that if she went downtown during the afternoon she would use the subway. She seemed like a doll who would sleep until noon at least, and was no home-body any way you could look at her.

  An hour passed, half of another one, and Willie had just decided to go and get a beer and think things out more when he saw her come around the corner. Quickly he spun around and became interested in the pickled herring in the window of a delicatessen. When he looked again the doll was walking up Broadway, ignoring the subway station.

  William Klump dogged the doll to Eighty-third Street where she was met by a male character with a forbidding face and a loud plaid suit. He had a topcoat draped over his arm.

  Willie heard the man say quite irked, “About time y’ showed, you little so-and- so.”

  “Look, stupid!” Flossie hooked back. “I tol’ you t’ throw that rag you got there away, didn’ I? You want someone to see it?”

  “Rag? Listen, Babe, this benny ain’t hardly worn,” the male character replied. “I’m takin’ it to the tailor an’ git it mended. It means I save forty bucks.”

  “I still don’t like it,” Flossie griped, and then started toward Amsterdam with the sharp looking citizen.

  Willie tagged along about twenty feet behind the pair and kept his eyes glued to the dark gray topcoat and wondered just where it needed mending.

  “This has gone about far enough,” Willie told himself. “Lots of characters git

  holes in their coats, and book matches git around. It is all silly. People do git amnesia, an’ there is such a place as Shamokin. But I’ll just make sure of one thing—that the hole in the coat is on the right shoulder just below the sleeve. Huh, there they go in that tailor shop.”

  Willie loitered outside a fruit and vegetable bazaar for a few minutes and as soon as Flossie and her escort left the tailor shop and walked south on Amsterdam he double-timed to the wardrobe renovator’s and came bluntly to the point.

  “I am a private eye,” Willie said, and flashed his badge. “The couple that just left, they left a coat. I must have a look at it.”

  “All the time it is som’body playin’ detective,” the proprietor yelped. “All right, look at the coat. It is on the top of the pile.”

  Willie quickly examined the topcoat. He saw the hole just exactly where Elmo Hake had said it was.

  “An’ it looks like it was burnt in it, like Hake said!” Willie exclaimed.

  “Who?” the tailor asked Willie.

  But Willie could not get his tongue down from the roof of his mouth. Just inside the door stood the rough looking character in the plaid suit, and Flossie was right behind him. The male held a gun.

  “I thought that shnook looked kinda familiar over on Broadway, Nick!” Flossie snapped. “A good thing I turned around t’ look back at this joint ‘fore we turned the corner. Awright, so that benny goes now, an’ fast!”

  NATCHING up the topcoat, William J. Klump hugged it to him as if it had been an orphan child he’d rescued in a

  fire.

  “Don’t you dast shoot!” he howled. “It’ll bring cops, ha! Of courst you don’t

  dare! No innercent man is goin’ to fry as long as William Klump can stand on one leg.”

  “Look, my fran’,” the tailor yelped. “Give him the topcoat, please. I should get murdered in cold blood for a rag like that?”

  The rough character nodded. “You could easy, pal. Jus’ lift your voice a little too high just oncet more! Oke, everybody in the back room before I start blastin’! Flossie, you lock the door behind you. If we got t’ rub out this dumb lookin’ flatfoot, we will git a good start out the back way. But how in the aitch did he get wise that we was the ones that—”

  “Sha-a-a-d up!” Flossie Grooby yelped at Nick. “We ain’t in the clear yet by a long shot.”

  Willie, the coat held tightly to his bosom, retreated into the back room with the proprietor. A door was slammed shut and locked on the inside.

  “Git up against the wall, you two!” Nick ordered. “Hurry up, as I feel some reefers takin’ holt of me. Once more I ast you nice t’ fling that coat over t’ me, pal! Flossie, leave me have that ol’ flat-iron I see on the shelf. That won’t make much sound when I beat Klump’s brains out.”

  “Make it fast, will ya, stupid?” Flossie threw at her boy friend, then hurried across the small back room and reached for the flat-iron.

  “Okay, Baby, leave him have it over the skull!” Nick told her.

  “Now look, Nick!” Flossie argued. “I

  don’t do things like this.”

  “Yeah? It was me swung that wrench that time up in the sticks, an’ you would turn state’s evidence an’ cross me up if the cops nabbed us. So I want it you should be on even terms with li’l Nickie when it comes t’ homercide. Awright, let him have it!”

  Flossie demurred. She looked daggers at Nick. “Fer two pins,” she yipped, “I’d let you have it instead.”

 
; Willie looked for an opening, but could not find one. Even if one had presented itself, it would have had to wait, for fright had starched Willie quite thoroughly. The proprietor suddenly made a sound like air escaping from a bicycle tire and fell flat on his face.

  “Now look, Baby,” Nick said. “Leave us git together here, huh? Wind up an’ let the punk have it, or I’ll start shootin’ an’ little Nick’ll let you git out of this the best you can. I’ll sit down here in this chair an’ count three.”

  The rough citizen sat down. He rose faster and let out a very painful yell, and Willie saw the paper pattern sticking to Nick’s bottom when the crook did a half spin in the air before making a landing. Willie charged just as Flossie threw the flatiron and it knocked a big chunk of plaster out of the wall where Willie’s noggin had just been.

  “Yeah, it was more’n two pins you give him, Babe,” Willie screeched as he dove for the gun in Nick’s hand.

  He met Nick head-on, and all his marbles flew about the room and exploded all at once. Willie managed to come off the floor like a crowd-pleasing boxer and reel about on a pair of legs that seemed broken in eleven places. He saw something moving toward him through the fog and a little voice told him it was Flossie, and that he was a setup for a skull fracture of multiple proportions. And there was nothing he could do about it.

  Poor Elmo, Willie thought, just as he heard a sound like a mule kicking a bag of cement.

  A voice said, “Try that on for size, gun moll!” and then there was a loud thump accompanied by a painful feminine “ugh!”

  Willie finally picked up his mental migs and agates and the tailor took shape in front of his eyes. The little citizen held a strange looking weapon.

  “My fran’, I settle with the woman for cash,” the tailor explained grimly. “There’s six dollars in pennies in that old sock I been savin’ up for a rainy day.”

  “Bravo!” Willie said, and picked up the crook’s gun that had slipped under a chair. “Help me get these two low-lifes tied up, pal,” he said to the tailor. “Huh, what is this?”

  He picked up an old hunting-case gold watch and found that there was a gold chain attached. There was engraving inside the case.

  It said: “State Corn-husking Champion

  1941-1945. Henry T. Dewbetter, Ogle

  Falls, Vermont.”

  “This is the clincher, this watch,” Willie said. “You hold this gun on these felons while I rope ‘em.”

  “Hi-i-o-o-o-o-o Silverman!” the proprietor said as he took the heater from Willie.

  There came a heavy pounding on the

  door leading into the front of the shop. “Open up in there, dad blast it! In the

  name of all the banshees an’ leprechauns, what the blue blazes is goin’ on in there?”

  R. SILVERMAN finally admitted the big cop.

  “We’ll tell you what’s goin’ on!” Willie yipped. “These two crooks framed a rube up in Vermont who is in the pokey up there waitin’ to be fitted for the hot seat. The doll is the mysterious redhead they claimed never was, and I got a topcoat with a hole burnt in it that can prove it!”

  The cop blinked, brought his hand down over his lumpy face. “Begin ag’in, me boy. My ears fooled me the firs’ time. Let me smell your breath. Anyways, you’re all goin’ t’ git a ride.”

  “Oh, you dumb drip!” Flossie yelped at Nick.

  “Sha-a-ddup! It hadda be you that tipped him off first, you beetle-brained so- and-so!”

  “Yeah? Just leave’ em put us in the same cell, you crumb, an’ I’ll claw you into strips they can French-fry!” Mrs. Grooby howled back.

  One hour later, a D.A. heard the fantastic story as related by the feminine side of the crime team. While a stenog scribbled furiously, Flossie Grooby completely let down her locks.

  “Yeah, me an’ Nick worked a badger game t’gether one time,” Flossie divulged. “I got fed up an’ went straight an’ married that drip Grooby. Well, I got homesick— an’ was I sick of home! I got in touch with Nick an’ he said let’s go on a little hold-up trip through the sticks. We took a train up an’ then stole that jalopy an’ worked back down. I figure we stuck up a dozen joints all told. Yeah, we framed that hay shaker, Elmo Hake. An’ we’d have made it stick if that snerd, Nick, hadn’t kept that topcoat. Of all the dumb stunts—”

  “An’ the stunt of you givin’ me a match to light that cigar, Babe,” Willie sniffed. “Matches you got up at a motel. You sure do a quick dyin’ job, that switch between red hair an’ yeller. So it was Nick Lugat swung the wrench on poor Dewbetter’s head? But you are an excessory. D.A., you’d better wire the bastile up in Vermont before they send Elmo off to the shock rocker. Oh, hello, Satchelfoot. I didn’ see you come in.”

  Aloysius Kelly made no sound. He looked like a character that had been worked on by Svengali.

  “So you vamped Elmo when you got him in the jalopy, huh, Flossie?” Willie went on. “It was too bad for him he liked his hootch so much. Even if he didn’t pass out, he would have tried to drive after you

  an’ Nick lammed an’ would most likely have gone over a bank, huh? How did you an’ that cold-blooded killer git out of Vermont?”

  “We had an old cabin cased beforehand,” Flossie said. “We hid out in it long enough for me to dye my hair back blonde, then took a train. Not bad, huh?”

  “Is it good?” Willie asked. “Look where you are. Crime does not pay.”

  Nick Lugat cut loose with some very uncouth expletives and then complicated matters with a surprising statement. “T’ think I ever married that dumb canary. I shoulda croaked first.”

  “Shut your big mouth!” Flossie howled. “Oh, now you done it!”

  “Bigamy also,” Willie sighed. “Can we git arson in here?”

  Satchelfoot Kelly finally found voice. “D.A.,” he said, “About twenty years ago, a story was goin’ around nobody could make me believe. They found a life preserver off the Lusitania, which was

  sunk about that time—about two years after—floatin’ on a lake upstate.”

  “Er, so what?” the D.A. asked.

  “Now I believe it,” Kelly said. “A murder takes place in Vermont and a citizen is tried an’ found guilty. Willie Klump finds the real murderer up on Amsterdam Avenue here in New York. And he also finds the doll the D.A. up there proved was a figurement of imagination. I could be persuaded right now that I did git found under a cabbage leaf by a stork an’ brought to my ma.”

  “That is too far-fetched,” Willie Klump scoffed. “Only a vulture would have picked you up. You won’t never be a good loser, lemonhead. Why, isn’t there a thousand dollars reward for Flossie? It slipped my mind until this minute. Well, well, I’ll bet Gertie won’t be mad this time even though she knows I’ve been chastin’ a dame.”

  And she wasn’t.

  OF DICE AND MEN!

  Originally published in 10-Story Detective, Aug. 1949.

  One brisk morning me and Hambone Noonan chance to meet a character named Cornelius Meany who used to be a flatfoot like ourselves, but he is as prosperous-looking as a heavy underwear salesman in Little America. Meany looks at us with great pity in his eyes and shakes his noggin, all the while tossing a pair of galloping dominoes up into the air.

  “Well,” Meany says, “when are you two flea brains going to prove crime does not pay? I intended, as you know, to devote my life to doing just that, but I got smart quick. Would you care to risk your pittances on a roll of the dice?”

  “A crook who never was a cop is bad enough,” Hambone sniffs. “But a crook who used to be a cop should git what Axis Sally got. Let’s git away from this awful smell, Alvin.”

  Meany pulls out a roll that would clog a viaduct. “This smells, huh? It’s mint, Noonan. Gover’—mint! And I hope to triple it by tomorrer night. So long, boy scouts.”

  “How I would like to git somethin’
on that snook,” Hambone says. “He went bad faster’n a raw trout left out in the sun. . . . Ah, let’s play some rummy when we git to the precinct house. I could use two bucks.”

  “Gamblin’!” I snap at Hambone, “That would be sinkin’ to Meany’s level. Anyway, you have not paid back the three clams I took from you last week.”

  It is quite disturbing to me, I have to admit, as I stroll along with Noonan. More profit can be made with a pair of educated dice than a pair of handcuffs, anyway you look at it, and I feel very envious of Cornelius Meany. I stop and lift a foot and take a gander at the sole of my shoe.

  “Does it look to you like they are gettin’ flat, Hambone?” I ask timidly.

  “In about another year they will look like mine, Alvin. Be patient.”

  “Huh?” I gulp. “Well, I must make a very important decision before long.”

  “Alvin Hinkey,” Hambone says, aghast, “you are not thinkin’ of—”

  “I was not even thinkin’ of Meany,” I says, “Who cares what he’s got that I haven’t?”

  “I do,” Hambone says. “Alvin, I was offered twenty bucks the other day not to case a bookie joint, an’ it is rumored there are at least three hundred in our vicinity. Twenty times three hundred— Look, we got to git hold of ourselves.”

  “Let’s go downtown some afternoon and see the criminal persons in jail and we’ll feel much better,” I says.

  * * * *

  Just two days later Cornelius Meany is found very defunct in front of a rooming house on McClean Avenue, and me and Hambone hurry to the scene with the homicide boys. Meany has been shot through the neck, and the corpse diagnostician says the deed was committed from behind.

  “Been dead for about five hours,” the medical brain says. “Lot of citizens out late must have walked right past him. Guess they figured he was drunk the way he was slumped down on that step. Small bullet hole an’ it got his jugular. Why— er—what is this?”