The Man with the Wooden Spectacles

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  Vann raised a hand.

  “Wainwright,” he said, “unless you come out, and pronto, and tell us why you did it, I’m going to lock you and Art here in a cell together and—”

  The little fellow blanched a bit under his rouge.

  “I robbed your safe,” he said, “and killed Reibach while doing it. I slipped out last night, at that dinner at van der Zook’s, and took a cab, and—”

  “Oh come, come, Wainwright,” Vann expostulated wearily. “Listen here, man, now that your actual confession’s in front of me, I can point out one single point in it, that by itself alone, nullifies the whole thing! A most artistic touch all right—that point!—but unfortunately just one of those instances, Wainwright, where the artist gilded the lily—and spoiled both the lily and the gilt! But quite aside from all that, before this paper ever got here—within 5 minutes, in fact, after Captain Congreve called me and said he was sending you over, I knew your confession was baloney by 100 per cent. For I had my investigator’s report showing that of all the persons in Chicago, you—plus 12 others—couldn’t have done that particular crime. And so I knew you must have confessed solely on the basis of that Despatch story which hit the stands at 2:30. And so—if you’d expected your confession to be even at least temporarily ‘confirmed’—you’d have had to work mighty fast to drop a sledge in the river, at or near where some diver was working where Congreve could later pick it right up again! And to get a watch engraved with your initials to slide under that safe. Anyway, Wainwright,” Vann went on patiently, “it just hit me, squarely between the eyes, that 40 feet or so to each side of my old building, the Klondike, there’s a source for all you would have needed—lock store and hardware to one side—watch engraver and secondhand watches to the other—and the story, at least to me, was then complete! In brief, I had Leo Kilgallan, my assistant here, across the street in 1 minute flat; and one minute later he was phoning me that you’d been in both places. Around 2:45. Buying a Copeley master key and a sledge in one—and an engraved watch in the other.

  So, Wainwright, you should be able to see now that your confession is exploded at absolutely every angle. So speak up, now. Why did you do it? Answer, or—or—or—” Vann felt himself to be utterly floundering, in the face of this shrinking and quite unbelligerent captive.

  Leo Kilgallon, however, was speaking up. Hastily.

  “Listen, Boss—when I was sitting next Mayor Sweeney’s elbow, the other day, at the Council Meeting—when he was conducting the meeting, of course—there was one alderman—Alderman Lenn—who was blocking the Traction Settlement by one vote. And Mayor Sweeney said to this bird—”

  “Said what, Leo? What the devil has Mayor Sweeney’s council meetings got to do with this session?”

  “Just,” proclaimed Leo dryly, “that Mayor Sweeney said to this alderman: ‘John, you require logic; and so I’m going to have the rest of the boys here lock you up, for 5 minutes only, in the cloak room with Alderman McGare yonder—who was heavyweight champion in his day—for just a little logical confab. So why don’t you vote now, John?’ And, Boss, Alderman Lenn swallowed several times, looked at the rest of the crowd and voted for the Traction Settlement.”

  “I get it,” said Vann, himself dryly. “However, Leo, the Mayor was fooling—that old ‘cloak-room lockup’ is one of his time-worn council meeting chestnuts—though I dare say Alderman Lenn had a sudden panic that this time it might materialize! But what I’m going to say now—will be no fooling.” And he turned to the prisoner. “Now you answer me why you did this—or you and Kelgrave here go downstairs into a cell together—as I promised you!—but with a piece of rubber hose in lieu of a heavyweight championship!”

  The little fellow looked exceedingly pained.

  “Then—then,” he said, “my confession—won’t even make the papers?”

  “Hell—no! Not when it’s exploded. How could it?”

  The little fellow sighed wearily.

  “Why did you do it,” Vann asked again, for he was more curious than angry. And intensely relieved to find that a certain telephone conversation he had thought he had just had with a presumed “Dr. Miranovski” was now spurious.

  “Well,” said Mr. Piffington Wainwright—that being, it seemed, the prisoner’s full name—with a deep sigh, “it does look, all right, as though my perfect edifice is crumbling at my feet—has crumbled! And so—but see here, Mr. Vann, I—I think I have a right at least to drive a bargain. About—well, you see, Mr. Vann, your statements as to the very facts which seem to conflict utterly with my confession of this affair don’t appall me really so much as your statement that there is—or was—an artistic flaw in it. I feel that you must be wrong on that. And I think I have a right to demand that you tell me exactly what such flaw is, before I—”

  “Ordinarily,” said Vann dryly, “we don’t make bargains around here—certainly not when we have people like Art Kelgrave here, of the Narcotics Squad, with such nice big fists as he has!—to go into a cell, for a little while, with would-be bargainers! On the other hand, we are able to see when a simple bargain expedites things for everybody concerned. And so—to play ball with you, Wainwright—let me say, in brief, that your flaw dealt with the black-burlap-covered folding screen that cuts off—or rather partially cuts off—the old couch in my office, and the existence and description of which screen you got, of course, from the caption under that left uppermost picture in today’s Despatch story. Your flaw, in fact, lay in the very burlap of that screen!”

  “Then—then there could be no flaw,” Mr. Wainwright insisted courteously. “For I once worked, in New York City, as a burlap clerk—and rose so high that I became what is known as a lapilist—which is a specialist on burlaps. I even created a mathematical formula that is used today among burlap workers to calculate roughly the weave of a piece of burlap. By stretching a length of it vertically. And putting something in back of it. And then ascertaining the number of feet from it at which the full outlines of the object behind it can be discerned, and applying the formul—”

  “And right there, Wainwright,” put in Vann, a bit amused in spite of himself, “is where you fell down. A fact! For you state here—” and Vann turned and referred to the paper. “—you state here that after you got into my office, and closed the door, and put on the lights, you heard a definite ‘thump-thump-thump’ which later on you found was the beat of your own heart but which just then you were positive was the heart-beat of another individual in the room; that you felt almost certain that my office girl must have stayed downtown, curled up on the couch—with her feet, of course, drawn away from the part of the couch you could see—and dropped off to sleep. And that you advanced catlike across the room until you could see, through the burlap weave, the outlines of the couch, and that it was empty—”

  “But burlap is transparent,” the little man almost cried. “At certain ranges.”

  “Yea bo!” conceded Vann agreeably. “But not the burlap on my folding screen! Wainwright, that black burlap has had applied to the back of it, only, no less than four coats of heavy black paint, till the screen is absolutely opaque. Till every interstice between warp and woof is filled up. The reason therefore is that now and then I have occasion to sneak back over there to steal a brief snooze—and when I want light cut off from me—I want it cut off well—and entirely! Wainwright, you could, in actuality, have gone over and placed your nose squarely against that black burlap—and still you couldn’t have looked through it—there isn’t so much as a pore for a fly to look through; the only single point that you could have peered through you didn’t mention in this document: that was a knifehole that I made myself only last week by plunging through that thick-painted burlap a stiletto taken off of that murderer Spinelli, who claims he couldn’t have killed Borgiotti because Borgiotti wore a painted burlap vest, and because Spinelli’s stiletto was too dull. Well, it wasn’t—for it went through my screen—and left a quit
e evident hole, but which hole is itself even too far above the outline of that couch to reveal anything. So all that you claimed you elicited, Wainwright, through looking through that burlap, was zero, and—well, are you satisfied now that sometimes an artistic touch is too artistic?”

  The little fellow smiled ruefully.

  “Well, at that,” he said, “it was only an artistic flaw with respect to your inside knowledge of things.” He sighed again. “Well, I guess the jig is up—as they used to say in the old melodramas. And I’ll have to speak. So all right. I will. And am. I confessed J. D.’s crime—in order to get a contract broken.”

  “A contract brok—but here?—J. D.?—you know the man—who did the crime?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “But—J. D.? Why—”

  “John Doe,” explained the little fellow. “That’s what the Despatch story called him. So to myself, since I read it, I’ve just been referring to him as J. D.”

  “I see. Well, what’s this—about you trying to get a contract broken? Who is the contract with?”

  “With a big radio-program purveying firm in New York City called Adlai, Collerman and Grimshawster.”

  “I’ve heard of them. And the contract was between them and one, Piffington Wainwright, I take it?”

  “That—is right—yes. Except, of course, that my name on the contract is my legal name.”

  “Your—legal name? Well—isn’t Piffington Wainwright your right name?”

  “Well—it is—and it isn’t! My legal name is just ‘P. Wainwright.’ No more—no less. Just P. Wainwright. In short, the way I was christened. You see, I—I had a grandfather, now dead, who financed one of his daughters—my mother—also now dead!—through childbirth, providing she would christen her first son just ‘P.’ And allow him later to select his own first name. Grandfather hoped, you see, that that grand­son—myself, of course—would later voluntarily take his own first name. Which I did not! For—for his name was Pepperduff. I simply tossed Grandfather’s name completely aside, for a less freakish one. I—I took Piffington, for mine. It was from an English novel that I’d read—and re-read—about a dozen times. I—I liked the name. And so I took it.”

  Vann stared. “Well,” he commented dryly, “it does, to say the least, smell of dank castles—and tea at four in the drawing room! Personally, I’d rather have Pepperduff. Or Just Peter.” He continued to stare puzzledly at the other.

  “And so,” he mused, “ ’twas no dice, eh, for Grandfather—when it came to seeing his ‘P. Wainwright’ grandchild taking his own first name?”

  Mr. Piffington—by self-admitted selection!—Wainwright —by birth!—nodded.

  “Well, where, now,” asked Vann, “is this contract now? The one signed just ‘P. Wainwright’? Your copy, that is?”

  “I had just mailed it—to a cousin of mine who—well, he has some ideas on such things as—as breaking contracts—when I picked up that Despatch.”

  “Well, we don’t need the contract. Just the circumstances. Exactly what do you do for Adlai, Collerman and Grimshawster?”

  “I write—well I write the Bedtime Animal Tales for Tiny Tots—which ‘Uncle Griffy’ tells two nights a week.”

  “The devil you say, Wainwright!” And Vann’s face lighted up. “My little girl can’t be torn away from our radio on the nights that goes on. And we can’t even fool her as to the nights, either. She knows! So—you write those tales?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Wainwright, scornfully, “I write those tales—all about how the Big Gray Rabbit said to the Little Brown Mouse—” He broke off, apparently disgusted.

  Vann was puzzled.

  “Well—why did you want this contract broken? Which I suppose was breakable at the option of the other parties only?”

  Mr. Wainwright nodded confirmation to the last question.

  “But why—” Vann repeated.

  “Because,” Piffington Wainwright explained, “the contract was for 20 years’ exclusive services—writing the—the goddamned things!”

  “That is,” Vann inquired, legalistically, “I take it that the party of the first part, one P. Wainwright, wasn’t actually compelled to turn out copy if he didn’t feel in the mood, but wasn’t permitted by the contract to—”

  “—to,” put in Mr. Wainwright, “write for any other similar firm—or for any magazine—or for the stage—or for any book publisher—or for television—or even for the screen!”

  “Whoops!” commented Vann. “That was an exclusive contract all right! But—all your Bedtime Tales—were accepted?”

  “Hell yes,” said the berouged Mr. Wainwright.

  “Well,” put in Vann, “it seems—but see here, a living’s a living, isn’t it? Was the rate of payment wrong?”

  “Oh no. It was fair enough—considering the microscopic size of the damn fool scripts.”

  “Fair, eh? Hm. Well—well, what did you want the contract broken for?”

  “Why? Why, so I can write other stuff, of course. For the radio.”

  “Other stuff? Such as—what?”

  “Why—crime-story stuff—fast action stuff—plot stuff—you know?—G-men—sinister Chinese villains—detectives—heroines being whisked along dark roads at midnight—mysterious objects that are the key to the location of vast fortunes—clashes in dark underground dens—in short, drama—and not—not god-damned conversational twaddle between moron rabbits and half-wit mice.”

  Vann had to grin in spite of himself.

  “Well, did you ever try getting your contract broken legitimately—that is, canceled?”

  “Yes. And they refused.”

  “They? Well, every firm is usually the expression of the personality and individuality of the head man of the firm. Which, in this case I take it, would be the first of those three names? Or Adlai?”

  “Yes. Adlai—Sanford Adlai is his full name—is the grand mogul of A. C. and G.”

  “Well—what kind of a man is Sanford Adlai?”

  “An A No. 1 son-of-a-bitch, from what I gather,” declared Mr. Wainwright coolly.

  “From what you gather? You have never met him?”

  “No, I—”

  “Then you haven’t contacted him—on getting a cancellation?”

  “Oh, yes, I have—but by letter only. You see, Adlai, though he is the firm—he owns 62 per cent of the stock in it —Adlai runs the firm from Pittsburgh, where his own products are manufactured. He—”

  “His own products? Being what?”

  “Why—he owns Shavene! And Glisteno Toothpaste! And I’ve inside information that he’s practically full owner of a marvelous new electric safety razor that’s to be put on the market very soon—The Morning Glider, it’s to be called—and the factory for the manufacture of it is being filled just now with the automatic machinery. Some bird with a head full of hackneyed ideas, of course, will get the job of writing the radio stuff for it—which being for men, is to be—so I understand—like that an the Magic Honeless Razor. While I—I will continue manufacturing rabbits—with all kinds of ears!”

  “And Adlai runs his firm from Pittsburgh?” Vann inquired.

  “Yes. He fancies himself to be—from what I understand—another James Gordon Bennett and Joseph Pulitzer combined. Likes to fire—hire—order—and countermand by wire. Listens to all the programs his firm controls, and often jacks them up by wire before the program is even signed off. He shuttles back and forth between Pittsburgh and Miami—and during such times as I’ve shuttled back and forth between the midwest and the East, the—”

  “—the shuttlecocks didn’t meet?” commented Vann, dryly. “But you at least took up with him, by letter, the cancellation of this contract?” Mr. Wainwright nodded.

  “And he refused?” Mr. Wainwright again nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because he said
nobody who could write such good stories about rabbits and mice could ever do the other kind of stuff.”

  “Hoist by your own perfect petard, eh? Well, how did you ever happen to sign this contract in the first place! Tying you up for 20 long years?”

  “Oh it’s a long long story,” declared Mr. Wainwright, spiritlessly. “You see, I’d stumbled accidentally into this line of writing by getting a bedtime animal tale accepted—and then continuing to turn them out. And then there came a time—but I won’t go into details. Sufficient to say that I needed a thousand dollars. In a lump sum. And they gave it to me. In a lump sum. But for consideration of that contract. And the pay-back of the thousand at the rate of $1 out of every subsequently used script.”

  “I see. An old method—but quite legitimate—for tying up a satisfactory creative worker.” Vann paused. “And so—when you saw that Despatch story—it occurred to you that if word was wired to New York that you were a brutal murderer—they themselves would announce cancellation?”

  “So I felt absolutely certain. For if they didn’t, every one of their sponsors buying programs from them would rise up and cancel their own contracts. And—well, you see, I had just been up to the office of a lawyer here—a foremost contract specialist1—asking whether that contract could be broken. And he told me no. But he—he dropped a sort of hint that if I could make myself the bee in Adlai, Collerman and Grimshawster’s pants—they might cancel.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I—I refuse to drag him into it. He said it wasn’t ethical for him even to suggest such things.”

  “All right. We’re not advertising other attorneys here, anyway.” Vann paused puzzledly, half turned in his chair now, his eye on that typed “confession.”

  “And your grandfather was Pepperduff Wainwright, the lock expert and inventor?”

  “He was—yes. And when I saw that Paddington padlock on the door of your office, I knew that the key for a Copeley Master Padlock, Type B would open it.”