The Fabulous Clipjoint

by Fredric Brown

  He looked at Kaufman, and the bigger guy looked at Kaufman, too. Kaufman started to get pale, and took another step backwards.

  “Nope,” my uncle said. “We like George. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to George. Give us another shot around, Ed.”

  I filled their glasses with the Highland Cream, and I put out two more shot glasses and solemnly put three-quarters of an ounce of white soda in each of them.

  “Don’t forget George,” Uncle Ambrose said. “Maybe George will drink with us.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I took a fifth shot glass and carefully filled it with white soda. I slid it along the bar toward Kaufman.

  He didn’t pick it up.

  The other four of us drank.

  Horse-face said, “You’re sure you don’t want us to —”

  “Nope,” my uncle said. “We like George. He’s a nice guy when you get to know him. You boys better run along now. The copper on this beat’ll be along soon. He might look in.”

  Horse-face said, “George wouldn’t squawk,” and he looked at Kaufman.

  We had one more drink around, and then the two muscle-boys went out. It was very chummy.

  My uncle grinned at me. He said, “You ring it up for George, Ed. You poured six shots of Scotch — figure it at fifty cents a shot. And five white sodas, counting George’s.” He put a five-dollar bill on the bar. “Ring up three-fifty.”

  “Right,” I said. “We wouldn’t want to be obligated to George.”

  I rang it up and gave Uncle Ambrose a dollar and a half change. I put the five in the register.

  We went back to the table and sat down.

  We sat there fully five minutes before Kaufman got the idea that it was all over and that we were going to make like it never happened.

  At the end of that five minutes a man came in and wanted a beer. Kaufman drew it for him.

  Then he came over to our table. He was still a little green about the gills.

  He said, “Honest to God, I don’t know anything about this Hunter guy’s getting bumped off. Just what I told at the inquest.”

  Neither of us said anything.

  Kaufman stood there a moment, and then he went back of the bar again. He poured himself two fingers of whiskey in a tumbler and drank it. It was the first drink I’d seen him take.

  We sat there, straight through, until eight-thirty that evening.

  A lot of customers came and went. Kaufman didn’t take another drink, but he dropped and broke two glasses.

  We didn’t talk much walking back over Chicago Avenue. While we were eating, my uncle said, “You did swell, Ed. I — Hell, I’ll be honest; I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  I grinned at him. I said, “I’ll be honest, too. I didn’t think so either. Are we going back there tonight?”

  “Nope. He’s softened up pretty well right now, but we’ll skip it till tomorrow. We’ll take it from a different tack then. And maybe by tomorrow night we’ll put the screws on him.”

  “You’re sure he isn’t on the level, that he’s holding back something?”

  “Kid, he’s scared. He was scared at the inquest. I think he knows something; anyway, he’s the only lead we got right now. Look, why don’t you go home and turn in early? Get some sleep for a change.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m seeing Bassett at eleven. Nothing till then.”

  “I’ll wait and see him too. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Uh-huh. After-effect. You put yourself in a tight spot back there. Your hand steady?”

  I nodded. I said, “But my guts are shaking like a leaf. I was scared stiff, all the time I was doing it. I leaned against the end of the bar so I wouldn’t fall over.”

  “You’re probably right about not sleeping,” he said, “but there’s a couple of hours between now and eleven. How do you want to kill it?”

  I said, “Maybe I’ll drop in the Elwood Press. I want to pick up the checks Pop and I have coming — half a week, no, better than half a week, three days is three-fifths of a week.”

  “Can you get them in the evening?”

  “Sure, they’re in the foreman’s desk and the night foreman has a key. And I can get the stuff out of Pop’s locker, and take it home.”

  “Uh-huh. And listen — there couldn’t be any shop angle to your dad’s being killed, could there?”

  I said, “I don’t see how. It’s just a printing shop; I mean they don’t run off any counterfeit money or anything.”

  “Well, keep your eyes and your brain open anyway. He have any enemies there? Everybody like him?”

  “Yeah, everybody liked him. Oh, he didn’t have really close friends there, but he got along all right. He and Bunny Wilson used to see a lot of each other. Not so much since Bunny got put on the night shift and Pop stayed on days. And there’s Jake, the day-side foreman. He and Pop were fairly friendly.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I’m meeting Bassett at the place on Grand Avenue where we saw him the other night. You be there around eleven if you want to join us.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  I walked around to the Elwood, on State Street up near Oak. It seemed funny to be going in there after dark, and not to be going to work.

  I walked up the dimly lit stairs to the third floor and stood at the door of the composing room, looking in. There were the linotypes along the west side of the room, six of them. Bunny was setting type at the nearest one. There were operators at three of the others.

  Pop’s was vacant. Not because he wasn’t there, I mean, but just because there are fewer operators on nights than there are machines and that one wasn’t used. I stood there for a few minutes in the doorway, and nobody noticed me.

  Then I saw Ray Metzner, the night foreman, walk across to his desk and I followed him and got there just as he sat down.

  He looked up and said, “Hi, Ed,” and I said, “Hi,” back and then both of us seemed stuck for something to say.

  Bunny Wilson saw me then and came walking over. He said, “Coming back to work, Ed?”

  “Pretty soon,” I told him.

  Ray Metzner was opening the locked drawer of the desk. He found the checks and I stuck them in my pocket. He said, “You sure look like a million bucks, Ed.”

  I’d forgotten how I was dressed; it embarrassed me a little, here.

  Bunny said, “Look, kid, when you’re ready to come back, why don’t you ask them to put you on the night shift instead of days? We can use you here, can’t we, Ray?”

  Metzner nodded. He said, “It’s an idea, Ed. It’s a good shift,pays a little more. And — you’re learning keyboard, aren’t you?” I nodded.

  He said, “You can get more practice, nights. I mean, a couple of machines are always idle. Any time it’s slack and we can spare you half an hour or so, you can go over and set for practice.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. “Maybe I’ll do it.”

  I saw what they meant; I’d miss Pop more on the day side, where I was used to working with him. Maybe they were right, I thought. Anyway, they were nice guys.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m going back to the lockers; then I guess I’ll run along. You got a master key that’ll open Pop’s, haven’t you, Ray?”

  “Sure,” he said. He took it off his ring of keys and gave it to me.

  Bunny said, “Fifteen minutes to lunch time, Ed. I’m going to have a sandwich and coffee down at the corner. Wait and have something with me.”

  “Just ate,” I told him. “But, sure, I’ll have a cup of Java.”

  Metzner said, “Go ahead now, Bunny. I’ll punch your card for you. I’d join you, but I bring my lunch.”

  We went back to the lockers. There wasn’t anythi
ng I wanted out of mine. I opened Pop’s. There wasn’t anything in it except an old sweater, his line-gauge, and the little black suitcase.

  The sweater wasn’t worth taking home, but I didn’t want to throw it away. I put it and the pica stick in my own locker and took the little suitcase. It was locked, so I didn’t try to open it there.

  When I got home, I’d find out what was in it. I’d always been mildly curious. It was just a dime-store type of cardboard case, about four inches thick and about twelve by eighteen inches. It had stood on end at the back of his locker ever since I’d been working at Elwood with him.

  I’d asked him once what was in it and he’d said, “Just some old junk of mine, Ed, I don’t want to leave around home.Nothing important.” He hadn’t volunteered anything beyond that, and I hadn’t asked again.

  We went downstairs and to the little greasy spoon on the corner of State and Oak. We didn’t talk much while he ate a sandwich and a piece of pie.

  Then we lighted cigarettes and Bunny asked, “Have they — uh — got the guy yet? The guy that killed your dad?”

  I shook my head.

  “They don’t — uh — They don’t suspect anybody, do they, Ed?”

  I looked at him.

  It was such a hell of a funny way for him to say it. It took me maybe a minute to take that sentence apart and to see through it.

  Then I said, “They don’t suspect Mom, if that’s what you mean, Bunny.”

  “I didn’t mean —”

  “Dont’t be a dope, Bunny. That’s what you had to mean, asking it that way. Well, Mom didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “I know she didn’t, Ed. That’s what I — Oh, hell, I’m putting my foot in it worse all the time. I should have kept my trap shut completely. I haven’t got brains enough to be subtle. I was trying to get information out of you without giving any, and it’s going to be the other way around.”

  “All right, then,” I said, “Give.”

  “Look, Ed, when a guy gets killed, they always suspect his wife unless she’s in the clear. Don’t make me explain why; they just do. Some when a women’s killed; they automatically suspect her husband first.”

  I said, “I guess maybe they would. But this was different; this was a straight holdup.”

  “Sure, but they’ll invetigate other angles, too. Just in case it isn’t what it looks like, see? Well, I know where Madge — your mom — was between twelve and half past one, so she’s in the clear. If she’d need an alibi, I could give her one. That’s what I meant when I said I knew she didn’t do it.”

  “Where did you see her?”

  Bunny said, “I was having a drink or two Wednesday, my night off, and I called up your place about ten to see if Wally was around. And he —”

  “I remember now,” I said. “I answered the phone and told you he’d already gone out.”

  “Yeah. So I dropped in several places, thinking I might run into him. I didn’t. Only about midnight I was in a place near Grand Avenue; I don’t know the name of it. And Madge came in. Said she’d just decided to come down for a nightcap before she went to bed; that Wally hadn’t come home yet.”

  I asked, “Was she mad about it, or anything?”

  “I dunno, kid. She didn’t seem to be, but you can’t tell with a woman. Women are funny. Anyway we had a few drinks and talked, and it was about half past one when I walked her home and then went home myself. I know because I got home at a little before two o’clock.”

  I said, “It’s a good alibi, if she needed one. Only she doesn’t, Bunny. Say, was that why you came to the inquest? I wondered at the time why you were there.”

  “Sure. I wanted to know what time it happened. And everything. At the inquest they didn’t even ask Madge whether she’d been in or out that evening. So I knew it was all right, up to then. Haven’t they asked her?”

  “Not that I know of,” I told him. “It just didn’t come up at all. I knew she’d been out, because she was still dressed that morning when I went in to wake up Pop, but —”

  “Still dressed? Good Lord, Ed, why would she be —”

  I wished now I’d kept my yap shut. I’d have to tell him now. I said, “She had a bottle at home and must have kept on drinking, waiting for Pop to come home. Only she went to sleep without undressing.”

  “Don’t the cops know that?”

  “I don’t know, Bunny.” I told him what had happened that morning. I said, “She was starting to get up when I left the place; I heard her. Well, if she changed dresses or had that one off and a bathrobe on when they came, they wouldn’t know. If she answered the door the way she was when I left, well, they’d be pretty dumb if they didn’t know.”

  “That’s okay then,” Bunny said. “If they don’t know she was out at all, all right. If they — Well, you see what I mean.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I was a little relieved myself, I found, to know where Mom had been that night and that there really wasn’t anything to worry about.

  Bunny tried again to lend me money when I left him.

  When I went into the tavern, Uncle Ambrose was sitting alone in the booth we had occupied a few nights ago. It still lacked a few minutes of eleven o’clock.

  He glanced at me, and then at the suitcase, and his eyes asked the question for him. I told him what it was.

  He put it on the table in front of him and then started rummaging in his pockets. He came out with a paper clip and bent part of it straight, then put a little hook on the end.

  “You don’t mind, Ed?”

  “Of course not,” I told him. “Go ahead.”

  The lock was easy. He lifted the lid.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  At first glance, it was a puzzling hodgepodge. Then one item after another began to make sense. They wouldn’t have made sense to me before my uncle had told me some of the things Pop had done when he was younger.

  There was a black, fuzzy wig, the kind that went with a minstrel’s blackface make-up. Half a dozen bright-red balls about two and a half inches in diameter, the size for juggling. A dagger, in a sheath, of Spanish workmanship. A beautifully balanced single-shot target pistol. A black mantilla. A little clay figure of an Aztec idol.

  There were other things. You couldn’t take them all in at a glance.

  There was a sheaf of papers with handwriting on them. There was something wrapped in tissue paper. There was a battered harmonica.

  It was Pop’s life, I thought, stuffed into a little suitcase. Anyway, one phase of his life. They were things he’d wanted to keep, but not to keep at home where they might have been kicked around or lost, or where he might have to answer questions about them.

  A sound made me look up, and Bassett was standing there looking down. “Where’d this stuff come from?” he asked.

  “Sit down,” my uncle told him. He’d picked up one of the bright-red juggling balls and was looking at it like a man might look into a crystal. His eyes looked kind of funny. Not crying, exactly, but kind of not quite not-crying, either.

  Without looking at either me or Bassett, he said, “Tell him, kid,” and I told Bassett about the suitcase and where it had been.

  Bassett reached over and picked up the sheaf of papers. He turned it around and said, “I’ll be damned. It’s Spanish.”

  “Looks like poetry,” I said. “The way it’s divided into lines. Uncle Am, did Pop ever write poetry in Spanish?”

  He nodded without taking his eyes off the red ball.

  Bassett was shuffling through the stack and a smaller paper fell out. A little rectangle of new crisp paper, about three by four inches. It was a printed form, but filled in with typewriting and a scribbled signature in ink.

  Bassett was sitting
next to me and I read it while he did.

  It was a premium receipt from an insurance company, the Central Mutual. It was dated less than two months ago and was a quarterly premium receipt on a policy in the name of Wallace Hunter.

  I looked at the amount and whistled. The policy was for five thousand bucks. A little notation under “Straight Life Policy” read “Double Indemnity.” Ten thousand bucks — or is murder an accidental death?

  The name of the beneficiary was shown, too. Mrs. Wallace Hunter.

  Bassett cleared his throat and Uncle Ambrose looked up. Bassett passed the premium receipt across the table to him.

  “Afraid it’s all we need,” he said. “A motive. She told me he didn’t carry insurance.”

  Uncle Ambrose read it slowly. He said, “You’re crazy. Madge didn’t do it.”

  “She was out that night. She had a motive. She’s lied on two counts. I’m sorry, Hunter, but —”

  The bartender was standing by the table. He asked, “What’s yours, gents?”

  | Go to Contents |

  Chapter 8

  “Listen,” I said, when the guy had taken our order and had left. “Mom couldn’t have done it. She’s got an alibi.”

  They both looked at me, and Uncle Am’s left eyebrow went up half a pica.

  I told them about Bunny.

  I watched Bassett’s face while I told it, but I couldn’t tell anything. When I got done, he said, “Maybe. I’ll look up the guy. Know where he lives?”

  “Sure,” I said. I gave him Bunny Wilson’s address. “Gets off work at one-thirty in the morning. He might or might not go right home. I dunno.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll hold off till I talk to this Bunny guy. It might not mean anything, though. He’s a friend of the family’s — that means of hers, too. He could’ve stretched the hour a bit to do her a favor.”

  “Why would he?”

  Bassett shrugged. The kind of a shrug that doesn’t mean you don’t know, but that it’s nothing you want to talk about.