He was already, he found, on the main street; the business district, about four blocks long, started immediately to his left. He went into the first store he came to and asked about Chapman Wilson. He drew a blank. And in the second, the third, and the fourth. Not to mention the fifth and sixth.
The seventh place was a tavern and he ordered a drink before he asked his question. When the drink came, he asked.
The drink was good but the answer wasn’t.
Sweeney swore to himself as the bartender moved off.
Could he have misunderstood the man he’d talked to at the Ganslen Art Company? No, he’d said it clearly enough:
“Fellow by the name of Chapman Wilson, lives in Brampton, Wisconsin. He modeled it in clay.”
At least he was sure of the Chapman Wilson. Could he have misunderstood the Brampton part?
He motioned the bartender over. He asked, “Is there another town in Wisconsin that has a name that sounds like Brampton?”
“Huh? Oh, I see what you mean. Let’s see. There’s Boyleston, up near Duluth.”
“Not close enough.”
“Stoughton? Burlington? Appleton? And there’s a Milton, but the full name is Milton Junction.” Sweeney shook his head sadly. He said, “You forgot Wisconsin Rapids and Stevens Point.”
“They don’t sound like Brampton.”
“That’s what I mean,” Sweeney said. “Have a drink.”
“Sure, thanks.”
“But you’ve never heard of a Chapman Wilson?”
“No.”
Sweeney took a meditative sip from his glass. He wondered if he could raise anyone by phone at the Ganslen Art Company in Louisville. Probably not, on a Saturday afternoon. He might possibly manage to locate the man he’d talked to there – Burke? Yes, Burke was the name. But it wasn’t too good a chance.
Sweeney, the rest of his life, was never proud of it, but it was the bartender who saved the day. He asked,
“What’s this Chapman Wilson do?”
“Sculptor. Artist and sculptor.”
For seconds nothing happened. Then the bartender said, “I’ll be damned. You must mean Charlie Wilson.” Sweeney stared at him. He said, “Don’t stop there, Esmeralda. Go on.”
“Go on where?”
“To pour us another drink. And then tell me about Charlie Wilson. Does he model little statuettes?” The bartender laughed. “That’s the guy. Crazy Charlie.”
Sweeney gripped the edge of the bar. He said, “What do you mean, Crazy Charlie? Crazy, as in razor?”
“Huh? Razor? Oh, you mean what started him. It was a knife, not a razor.”
“A blonde,” said Sweeney. “A beautiful blonde?”
“You mean the dame? Yeah, mister, she was both of those. Purtiest thing in town. Until she got attackted with that knife.”
Sweeney closed his eyes and counted up to two slowly. It was too good to be true, and he had been about to leave town and go back to Chicago.
It had to be too good to be true; things didn’t happen like this. He said, “You mean attackted, as in Ripper?”
“Yeah. Like that Chicago business on the radio.”
“You are not referring, by any chance, to a small black statuette? You mean a real woman was attacked up here?”
“Sure. A blonde, like the radio said all the dames in Chicago were.”
“When?”
“Three years ago. While I was sheriff.”
“While you were sheriff?”
“Yeah. I was sheriff up to two years ago. Bought this place then and couldn’t keep up both, so two years ago I didn’t run.”
“And you handled the Ripper case?”
“Yeah.”
Sweeney said, “I am proud to meet you. My name is Bill Sweeney.”
The bartender stuck a big paw across the bar. “Glad to know you. My name’s Henderson.”
Sweeney shook the hand. “Sweeney,”he said, “of the Chicago Blade. You’re just the man I was looking for, Sheriff.”
“Ex-sheriff.”
“Look, Sheriff, is there any way we can talk privately for a little while without you having to interrupt yourself?”
“Well – I don’t know. Saturday afternoon and all that.”
“I’ll buy a bottle of the most expensive champagne you got, and we’ll split it while we talk.”
“Well – I guess I can get the frau to take over for ten or fifteen minutes. We live upstairs. Only let’s split a pint of Haig and Haig instead; the champagne I got isn’t very good and anyway it’d take time to ice it.”
“Haig and Haig it is.” Sweeney put a bill on the bar.
Henderson rang up money and gave Sweeney a little back. He took a bottle from the backbar, put it in his hip pocket, and said, “Come on; I’ll get Ma.” He led the way to a door at the back that opened to a flight of stairs. He called up them. “Hey, Ma! Can you come down a few minutes?”
A voice called out, “Okay, Jake,” and a few seconds later a tall, thin woman came down the stairs. Henderson said,
“This is Mr. Sweeney, Ma, from Chicago. We want to talk a while, upstairs. Can you take over?”
“All right, Jake. But don’t you get started drinking. This is Saturday, with Saturday night coming up.”
“Won’t touch a drop, Ma.”
He led Sweeney up the stairs and into a kitchen. He said, “Guess we can talk best here, and glasses and everything are handy. Want anything to mix it with?”
“Haig and Haig? Don’t be silly, Sheriff.” Henderson grinned. “Sit down. I’ll get glasses and open this.”
He came back with glasses and the opened bottle and poured a generous shot for each of them. Sweeney lifted his.
“To crime.”
“To crime,” Henderson said. “How’re things in Chicago?”
“Ripping,” Sweeney said. “But let’s get to Brampton. First, let’s make sure this Chapman Wilson I’m talking about and your Crazy Charlie are one and the same person. Tell me something about him.”
“His name is Charlie Wilson. He’s an artist and a sculptor; guess what money he makes out of it is mostly from the stuff he models. He sells them to some companies that make statuettes and stuff. Arty little things. Guess he doesn’t sell many paintings.”
“That’s the guy,” Sweeney said. “Probably uses Chapman as a professional first name; Chapman Wilson sounds better than Charlie Wilson. But how crazy is he?”
“Not really. When he’s sober, he’s just – what you call it? – eccentric. He’s pretty much of a lush, though, and when he gets tanked up – well, I’ve had to kick him out of my place half a dozen times. Mostly for trying to pick fights.” Henderson grinned. “And he’s about five feet two and weighs about a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. Anybody take a real poke at him, they’d probably kill him, and yet he’s always wanting to start a fight when he gets tanked. A real screwball.”
“Does he make a good thing out of his work?”
“Hell, no. Doubt if he makes five hundred bucks in a year. He lives in a little shack out at the edge of town that nobody else’d live in; gets it for a few bucks a month. And proud as hell; thinks he’s a great artist.”
“Maybe he is.”
“Then why doesn’t he make some money out of it?” Sweeney opened his mouth to mention Van Gogh and Modigliani and a few others who’d been great artists and had made less than five hundred bucks a year out of it; then he remembered his audience and that time was flying.
He asked, instead, “And Charlie Wilson is now running around loose? In Brampton?”
“Sure. Why not? He’s harmless.”
“Well, this Ripper business. How does Charlie Wilson tie in with that?”
“He shot him.”
“You mean Charlie shot the Ripper or the Ripper shot Charlie?”
“Charlie shot the Ripper.”
Sweeney took a deep breath. “But the Ripper got away?”
“Hell, no. Killed him dead as hell. Charlie got him with a shotgun from ab
out two yards away. Blew a hole through him you could stick your head through. Only good thing Charlie ever did in his life. He was kind of a hero around town for a while.”
“Oh,” said Sweeney. He felt disappointed. A dead ripper wasn’t going to be much help to him. He took another sip of the Scotch. “Let’s start it from the other end. Who was the Ripper?”
“His name was Pell, Howard Pell. A homicidal maniac who broke out of the county insane asylum – that’s about twenty miles from here. Let’s see, it was four years ago; I told you wrong when I said three because it was in the first year of my second two-year term and that would’ve been at least four years ago, maybe a few months more than that even. Yeah, a few months more because it was in spring, I remember, and it’s August now. Think it was in May.”
“And what happened?”
“Well, this Pell broke out of the asylum. Killed two guards with his bare hands; he was a big guy, built like an ox. Bigger than I am. Outside, the siren hadn’t gone off yet and he flagged a car and the damn fool driver stopped to pick him up. Guy named Rogers. Pell got in the car and killed Rogers. Strangled him.”
“Didn’t he use a knife at all?”
“Didn’t have one yet. But he got one all right, then and there. This Rogers was a canvasser selling a line of aluminum kitchenware. But he had some sidelines and one of them was a carving set. The knife in it was a beauty, ten inches long and an inch wide, sharp as hell. Don’t know exactly what he was searching the car for, but he found that. And liked it. He tried it out on Rogers, even though Rogers was already dead. Want the details on that?”
“Not right now,” Sweeney said. “But I could use another drink. A short one.”
“Sorry.” Henderson poured it. “Well, he operated on Rogers and threw his body out of the car into the ditch. Not all at once, y’understand.”
Sweeney shuddered slightly and took a quick sip of the Scotch. He said, “I’d just as soon not understand too thoroughly. Go on.”
“Well, this was about eight o’clock in the evening, just after dark. Anyway, that’s when they found the two guards dead and Pell gone from the asylum. They called me quick-along with sheriffs of other counties around, and local police officers and everybody and meanwhile what guards they could spare fanned outward from the asylum in cars to start the search.
“Well, right off they found what was left of this guy Rogers, and the car tracks showed ‘em what’d happened, so they knew Pell had a car. They cut back to the asylum and phoned me and everybody that Pell would be in a car and to set up roadblocks and get him.
“We got the roadblocks up quick, but he fooled us. He did head toward Brampton all right, but a little outside of town he turned the car into a side road and left it there. And he came in across the fields on foot so he got through us. Even though between us, me and the police chief here in Brampton, we had every road guarded by that time. Within fifteen minutes of the time we got the call from the asylum.”
“Fast work,” Sweeney said, approvingly.
“Goddam tooting it was fast work, but it didn’t do any good, because he got through us on foot. The next day we could trace back exactly the way he went from the car because he had so much blood on him. Y’see he cut up Rogers right in the driver’s seat of the car and then had to get there himself to drive the car, and he was kind of covered with blood all over. God, he even had it in his hair and on his face and his shoes were soaked with it. And looking like that, and with the bloody knife in his hand, was how he come across Bessie taking a shower.”
“Who is Bessie?”
“Who was Bessie. Bessie Wilson, Charlie’s younger sister. She was about eighteen, then, maybe nineteen. She was staying with him then because she was sick. She didn’t live in Brampton; she had a job in St Louis, hatcheck girl in a night club or something, but she got sick and broke and came back to stay with Charlie; their parents had been dead ten years or so.
“Guess she didn’t know, when she came back, how broke he was or she wouldn’t’ve come, but she probably, through the letters he’d written her, thought he was doing pretty good. Anyway she was sick and needed help, and what happened to her here in Brampton didn’t help her any, I guess. Maybe it’d been better if she’d been killed right out.”
“This Pell attacked her?”
“Well, yeah and no. He didn’t actually lay a hand on her, but it drove her nuts and she died later. It was this way. That shack of Charlie’s is just one fair-sized room that he uses to live in and work in both and that’s where they lived. But there’s another littler shack, sort of like a tool shed, out in back of it on the lot. The can’s in there, and Charlie fixed up a shower in there, too. In one corner, just a makeshift kind of shower.
“Anyway, this would’ve been about half-past eight, the kid sister, Bessie, decides to take a shower and goes out of the shack and along the path to the shed, in a bathrobe and slippers, see? And that must’ve been just about the time Pell is coming to their yard, cutting into town and keeping off the streets and the road, so he sees her go into the shed.
“And with the carving knife in his hand, he goes up and yanks the shed door open.”
“Wouldn’t there be a catch on it?”
“I told you he was big as an ox; he just yanks it open so hard the hook pulls off. And Bessie is standing there naked under the shower getting ready to reach up and turn it on. And he takes a step inside toward her, waving the knife. How’s about another drink?”
“An inspiration,” said Sweeney.
Henderson poured two.
He said, “You can’t blame her for going nuts, can you? Sick to begin with, and seeing that. Guy over six feet, two-twenty pounds, in a nuthouse uniform that started out being gray but that ended up being red, with blood in his hair and on his face, and coming at her with a ten-inch carving knife. God.”
Sweeney could picture it. He’d seen Mimi.
He took a sip of Scotch. He asked, “What happened?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Henderson said, “Well, I was two blocks away and I heard her scream and keep on screaming. It was maybe five minutes before I got there – and of course it was all over long before that – but she was still screaming then.
“What happened was that the first scream she let out, Charlie grabbed for his shotgun – he’s got one because he does a lot of hunting, not so much for fun like most of us but because he gets some of his eating that way. And he ran out the back door of the shack and saw the guy with the knife in the doorway of the shed and past him he could see Bessie back in the corner under the shower that wasn’t turned on yet, screaming her head off.
“So he runs toward the door; it’s only about ten feet from the shack to the shed, and runs a little to one side so he can shoot Pell without shooting Bessie too, and from right outside the door he lets go with the shotgun and, like I said, puts a hole through Pell that you could stick your head through.”
“But must I?” Sweeney asked. At the blank look on the ex-sheriff’s face, he changed his question. “And Bessie Wilson went crazy?”
“Yeah, and died about six-seven months later. Crazy as a bedbug. No, not in the asylum near here; that’s for incurables. And for a while they thought they could cure Bessie. It was in some little private sanitarium downstate near Beloit. There was a lot of publicity on the case and one of the doctors down there got interested. He had a new treatment and thought he could cure Bessie and took her on as a charity case. But it didn’t work; she died six-seven months later.” Sweeney asked, “And Charlie? Did he go off the beam then, or was he crazy before that?”
“Like I told you, he isn’t really crazy. But he was off the beam before that, and I guess that didn’t make him any worse. He’s an artist. That’s crazy to begin with, isn’t it?” Sweeney said, “I guess it is. Where is this shack of his?”
“On Cuyahoga Street; that’s eight blocks west of here, al most at the edge of town in that direction. I dunno the number, if there’s a number on it, but it’s a
block and a half north of Main Street – that’s the street you’re on now – and there are only a few houses in that block and his is the only one-room shack and it’s painted green; you can’t miss it. Another drink? There’s still a couple left in here.”
Sweeney said, “Why not?” There didn’t seem to be any reason why not, so Henderson poured them and they killed the bottle.
Sweeney stared moodily into his. This had looked so good, less than half an hour ago. He’d found a Ripper. Only the Ripper was dead, four and a quarter years dead, with a hole in him that Sweeney could stick his head through if he wanted to, only he didn’t want to, especially with the Ripper four and a quarter years dead.
Sweeney took a sip of his drink and glared at Henderson as though it was Henderson’s fault.
Then he thought of a new angle. It didn’t seem likely.
He asked, “This Charlie Wilson. He ever out of town?”
“Charlie? Not that I know of. Why?”
“Just wondering if he ever got to Chicago.”
“Naw, he couldn’t afford train fare to Chicago. And besides, he didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Didn’t commit your three Ripper murders. Our new sheriff – Lanny Pedersen – was talking about them the other night downstairs. Naturally, we thought of the coincidence of our having had a Ripper here, even if he was dead, and I asked Lanny what about Charlie, if maybe Charlie could have – uh – sort of got the idea from what he saw, or something, and he said he’d thought of that and that he hadn’t thought so or anything but that he’d checked with Charlie’s next-door neighbors out on Cuyahoga Street, and Charlie hadn’t been out of town at all. They see him every day and most of the day because he does most of his painting or sculpting outdoors in his yard.”
Sweeney took another sip. “And this Pell,” he asked. “There’s no doubt but that it was Pell that Charlie shot? I mean, the shotgun didn’t mess him up so he couldn’t be recognized or anything?”
“Nope, didn’t touch his face. No doubt about identification at all, even if he didn’t have the bloody uniform on and everything. Shotgun blast hit him in the chest; guess he must have heard Charlie at the door and turned around. Blew a hole in his chest that you could put your head through.”
The Screaming Mimi Page 17