The Dead Ringer

by Fredric Brown

  I handed it back. “No,” I said. “I don’t know him. I never saw him before.”

  “Just one more question then, Ed. Notice anything at all last night that was out of the ordinary? Anything that wasn’t strictly routine and kosher?”

  “Nothing,” I said, “except the lightning fritzing the generator. That doesn’t happen every night.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “we know about that. Okay, Ed, thanks.” It sounded like a dismissal, but I didn’t feel like moving on, especially as I had no place to go, in particular. I asked him, “You been here straight through? Don’t you sleep?”

  “Once in a while. Don’t talk about it, or I’ll start yawning. And I haven’t even got a start at making the world safe for midgets. What time does your chow top open?”

  “About ten, usually.”

  He pulled out a big gold pocket watch and looked at it. “Guess I’ll live till then. Maybe after then, if they don’t put arsenic in my eggs. Will they?”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it,” I told him. “One of the cooks is a two-time loser. Well, be seeing you.”

  I strolled on toward the front gate. His talking about breakfast made me realize I wanted some myself, and I didn’t want to wait till ten. There was a bus waiting at the end of the line, only a block from the carney lot. I got on it and pretty soon it started in to town.

  On the bus I could think of some good answers to a lot of nasty cracks he’d taken at the carney. You can always think of good answers when it’s too late.

  One other thing I realized; right or wrong in his slant on carneys, he wasn’t a dumb cop. And he wasn’t a bad guy.

  Evansville, when I got off the car downtown, turned out to be bigger than I’d thought. Not anything like Chicago, of course, and not even as large as Louisville, but it was more than a crossroads, at that. I had breakfast in a cafeteria and got a shine to get the mud off my shoes and then strolled along the main drag, looking things over.

  It was only eleven o’clock and none of the movies were open yet. So I strolled around looking in windows; music store windows, haberdashery windows, even lingerie windows.

  But it didn’t work. Not even the lingerie could take my mind off what I was trying not to think about—the face of that dead midget.

  After a while I told myself, okay, think about it, then, and get it over with. It’s none of your business; you didn’t even know him. But buy a paper and read about it if it’ll make you any happier; that’s what you’ve been waiting to do, isn’t it?

  So I bought a paper. It had the story, all right. The banner head was MIDGET MURDERED AT CARNIVAL.

  I went in the lobby of a hotel and sat down to read the story. I read it all and didn’t learn anything new, except the names of the policemen working on it. The chief of police was named Harry Stratford and the captain of detectives was Armin Weiss. That might have been interesting to somebody.

  There were two pictures, a little one mitered into a big one. The little one was the picture of the dead midget—his head and shoulders, that is—lying on the grass, the same picture the cop at the carney had shown me. The big picture was a flashlight shot of the inside of the freak show top. It had been taken after the body had been moved, but the usual X marked the spot. It was taken from just inside the entrance, and you could see the empty platforms, and the grass and canvas and poles, and nothing else. No people, I mean. Either the police had cleared the top by then, or the carneys had got out of the way when the photographer had set up his camera.

  I looked back at the streamer head, MIDGET MURDERED AT CARNIVAL. It sounded so simple. I mean, what more logical place is there for a midget to be murdered? Only it wasn’t right; there was a word missing. It should have read MIDGET MURDERED AT WRONG CARNIVAL.

  One little word that took it out of the plane of the ordinary and made it screwball.

  I got to wondering what it would be like to be a midget. You wouldn’t seem like a midget to yourself, I thought. Everybody around you would be giants. Every one of them big enough to pick you up and break you in two. Or stick a knife in you—

  I remembered the way his dead face looked and I thought again, he knew that knife was coming. But he hadn’t yelled, or nobody had heard him yell. Maybe some giant, somebody twice his height and four times his weight, had held him and held a hand over his mouth and—

  I didn’t want to think about it. To get my mind off it, I read the rest of the paper. There’d been a holdup at a filling station, and a burglary. Neither of them sounded very interesting.

  A hundred miles away, in Louisville, there’d been a kidnapping. The seven-year-old son of James R. Porley, of the Porley Cosmetics Co., had been stolen from his bed and a note demanding fifty grand ransom had been left pinned to his pillow. Almost as nasty a crime, I thought, as murder. And—like murdering a midget—a case of somebody not picking on someone his size.

  There’d been a riot in Calcutta. And a defeated candidate for the Illinois legislature was charging an election fraud and making quite a stink about it.

  I did what I should have done in the first place, leafed over to the comic section. After that I read the movie ads.

  I wondered if it was going to rain some more. If so, I might as well see a movie, now that I was in town. If not, I ought to go back to the lot to help Uncle Am.

  I walked over to the window of the lobby and looked out. I could see the sky between the two buildings across the street, but it didn’t tell me anything. It was the color of old type metal, like it had been all morning. No clouds, just solid gray nothingness. It could be going to rain the rest of the month, or never again all summer.

  Damn, I thought. I felt restless; I wanted to do something and I didn’t know what. You get in those moods once in a while, when nothing seems to have any meaning and you don’t know what you’re hanging around for. I wanted to go back to the carney, and I didn’t want to.

  I turned around and looked at the clock over the desk of the hotel to see if it was noon yet. It was a quarter to.

  There was a girl standing at the desk speaking to the clerk, handing him a key. From a back view, anyway, she didn’t look like anything you’d expect to see in Evansville. She looked like a million dollars in gold. That’s the color her hair was, and it was in a sort of page-boy bob that hung down to her shoulders. She wore a mauve silk dress that fitted her curves like a bathing suit on a Petty girl. She was as far out of this world as a Louis Armstrong trumpet ride.

  So I let the view out of the window take care of itself; I wanted to wait until she turned around, to see if the front view matched the back.

  Not that I had any ideas, understand; I was just a carney punk with eighteen bucks in my pocket and to my name, and even outside of money I wasn’t in her class. You know what I mean.

  Let me put it this way: The hotel lobby had been a fairly nice one, with good furniture and decent decorations, until she stood there in it—and then by contrast she made it look like a shabby, down-at-the-heel flophouse. And she did the same thing to me; I mean, until then I’d been a fairly well dressed, fairly good-looking guy, but if I was with her I’d feel like a high-school kid and look like I’d slept in my clothes.

  Anyway, that’s what I was thinking, and then she turned around and I guess I did a double-take.

  From the front, she was exactly what I’d expected and hoped for, except for one thing: I knew her. It was Rita.

  I wouldn’t know, but probably my mouth fell open. I felt that way.

  She started toward the street door and then she saw me and smiled at me. She changed direction a little and came over to me. She said, “Hi, Eddie.” Her voice, at least, was the same as last night.

  I stammered something.

  “How did you know where I was staying, Eddie?” she asked.

  “I didn’t.” I said. “I came in out of the rain, only it didn’t rain. Look, could I buy you a drink, or something?”

  She hesitated just a second. “Breakfast, maybe. Have you eaten yet?”

/>   “No,” I said.

  We had coffee and doughnuts in the coffee shop off the hotel lobby. I kept looking at her across the table. I still couldn’t believe it. It didn’t seem possible that muddy shoes and ankles and a shapeless slicker and hair being tucked up under a beret could have made that much difference.

  Over the coffee, she asked, “Have they found out anything, Eddie, about the midget?”

  I shook my head. “Not according to the newspaper. They don’t even know who he is.”

  “But that ought to be easy to find out. There can’t be so awfully many midgets, can there?”

  I’d happened to have talked about that with Major Mote once, and I had the answer. I said, “There are a couple of thousand in the United States. Real midgets, that is. There are about fifty thousand dwarfs.”

  “What’s the difference, Eddie? The midgets are smaller than the dwarfs?”

  “Well—I guess most of them are, but that isn’t the difference. A midget is perfectly proportioned. A dwarf has a head as big, or almost as big, as a full-sized person. And their bodies, their torsos, are long. They have very short legs and arms.”

  “Oh. Then just the midgets would be in show business, huh?”

  “Generally speaking, yes. No side show would exhibit a dwarf as a midget. But some circuses have dwarf clowns. And some of the troupes of midgets, in vaudeville or in the bigger carney shows, have a dwarf as a comedian—and, I guess, for contrast with the real midgets. Some dwarfs make pretty good clowns.”

  “Can I have another cup of coffee, Eddie?”

  “I guess I can afford it. I told you last night I had nineteen dollars. I’ve still got eighteen of it.”

  “Eddie! Have you been spending it on other women?”

  “Not yet. And if we stick to coffee, that much money will go a long way.”

  “Umm-hmm. Then we’ll stick to coffee. With maybe a doughnut now and then. I can’t get over it, Eddie.”

  “Over what? The doughnut?”

  “No, over how different you look dressed up, from the way you looked last night.”

  I couldn’t help it. I leaned back and laughed. I had to explain, of course, and then she laughed too. She was beautiful when she laughed, and even her laughter was beautiful. It was funny, too, that I hadn’t even noticed what a nice voice she had.

  “You didn’t stay the rest of the night with Darlene?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “Yes, but here at the hotel instead of the trailer. After the cops questioned me, I found Darlene up and dressed, and neither of us wanted to stay there. We came in to town and slept in my room here. Only Darlene went back to the lot earlier because she expected her man back this morning.”

  After the second cup of coffee, Rita looked at her wrist watch. “We’ve got to get out to the lot,” she said. “That is, I have to. And I’ve got an errand first, at a bank. It’s next door. Will you wait here for me; that is, if you’re going out to the lot too—?”

  “I’m going out,” I told her. “Sure, I’ll wait here.”

  Coffee was practically running out of my ears by then, what with the two cups I’d had with my first breakfast an hour before. But I had another cup while I waited.

  Then we took a bus out to the lot. She told me we had to watch my eighteen dollars, and wouldn’t let me take a cab.

  CHAPTER III

  Uncle Am was up and dressed when I got back. He’d dug up some shavings somewhere and was spreading them on the ground in front of our booth.

  He said. “Hi, kid. Been in town?”

  “Yeah. Woke up early and couldn’t sleep. What do you think about the weather?”

  “Might drizzle a little. But there ought to be some business, with the town coming out to see the spot marked X.”

  “You saw a paper, then?” I asked him.

  “Nope. But I remember my high-school algebra; X always marks the spot. And the police wonder Y.”

  I winced. “They’re still wondering this time,” I told him. “If you were all the way in town, why didn’t you stay for a movie?”

  “I ran into Rita in town—accidentally. She was coming out to the lot, so I trailed along.”

  He said, “Oh,” and looked at me. “Careful, kid.”

  “You didn’t warn me last night when you told me to take her for a ride.” I grinned at him. “Anyway, I’m safe. She wouldn’t look at me twice.”

  “Once might be enough, if she looked at you the right way. And don’t underestimate yourself, Ed. You may not be good looking, but you’re romantic looking. Any one of these days now, you’ll have to start using a baseball bat to chase the women off you.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “Anything new, otherwise?”

  He knew what I meant. He said, “Not much. Weiss was around a little while ago.”

  “Weiss?”

  “Armin Weiss, captain of detectives or something. I judge he talked to you earlier in the morning.”

  I nodded.

  Uncle Am said, “He’s a thorough sort of cuss. Wanted to know if you’d been awake when I turned in last night I told him you were. What’d you do, cross yourself up by knowing something you shouldn’t have known?”

  “That’s it,” I told him. “I knew he was a midget—and I’d told him I’d gone back to sleep before the cops came and hadn’t talked to anybody this morning.”

  “I figured it was something like that. You’d make a hell of a criminal.”

  “Okay, then, I’ll stay honest. Weiss, by the way, thinks all of us carneys are a bunch of crooks.”

  Uncle Am grunted and went back to spreading the shavings.

  “Can I help?” I asked him.

  “Not in those clothes.”

  I went in and changed, but by the time I got back, he’d finished all the work there was to be done and was sitting on the low counter, juggling three of the baseballs in a tight little circle.

  I tried it, but spent most of my time picking them up. “Kid,” Uncle Am said, after about the tenth time I’d dropped one, “you just aren’t cut out to be a juggler. Better give up.”

  “What am I cut out to be?”

  “I dunno. A trombone, maybe.”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t got what it takes. I can learn to play the spots, if I struggle hard enough. But I can’t think on a tram, like a real player. When somebody takes a ride, I can go along, but I can’t drive the car.”

  “A lot of musicians can’t, and make a living.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be that kind. Oh, I’m going to keep on playing, but I don’t want to make my living at it. I want it to be for fun.”

  He nodded, and after a while I asked it again; what he thought I was cut out to be.

  “Maybe you’re cut out to be Ed Hunter. Ever think of that?”

  I thought it over. I said, “There’s no money in it.”

  He stopped juggling the baseballs and looked at me. “You want some money, Ed? We’ve been doing all right. I can let you have some. What do you want? Fifty? A hundred?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve got some left. Look, Uncle Am, you sure you won’t need me for a while? I might take a walk around.”

  “Go ahead.”

  I walked the long way around, past the entrance gate. There were a few people beginning to trickle in, not many. The sky still looked as though it might let go any minute.

  I found myself thinking about the copper, Armin Weiss, and his cracks about the carney. Down inside of me, they rankled.

  I looked over the concessions as I walked by them. On plenty of them, he was pretty near right. Like the shooting game I was passing. Spud Reynolds charged two bits for three shots—at fairly short range—with a twenty-two rifle at a card with a red diamond printed on it. If you shot all the red diamond out of the card, you got a prize. A big one, your choice of a lot of flashy stuff he had standing around. But nobody had won a prize yet by shooting all the red out of the card. It was theoretically possible maybe, but just not practical. It looked easy—that was the gimm
ick—but the best marksman in the country would have to have God sitting in his lap to do it.

  I had to give Weiss that one. And plenty of the others: the game where you tried to pitch your coin so it stayed in a floating dish, the cork-guns with which you tried to knock a pack of cigarettes off a rack, the disk game. They were all pretty heavily loaded against the sucker.

  But our own game wasn’t so bad. For one thing, we didn’t offer expensive flash that the mark couldn’t win. About one out of twenty-five could knock all three milk bottles off the box with the three baseballs and win a kewpie doll that cost us fourteen cents, sure.

  But what the hell, he was paying his dime for the fun of trying, the fun of showing off in front of his girl or the other fellows, the physical fun of whaling those three baseballs as hard and straight as he could. The damn kewpie doll didn’t mean anything to him, except as a symbol, so it wasn’t really a gambling game. And there was skill involved, even if you had to have some luck besides the skill.

  I walked past the mitt camp and the unborn show and the loop-a-plane and the terminus of the scenic railway and the jig show.

  When I got to the freak show, Harry Stulz, the talker, was starting a spiel. He had a small tip, mostly kids, but every sentence or so he’d interrupt himself to thump hurry-hurry— hurry on the bass drum, and more people were gathering.

  I walked around the crowd, intending to go on past. But when I got even with the far end of the bally platform, somebody said, “Hi, Ed,” and I looked around.

  It was the copper, Armin Weiss, and he was still, or again, sitting on the end of the bally platform. I went over.

  I said, “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  He laughed. “Tonight, maybe. I’m good for the rest of the day, with coffee now and then.”

  “But what are you doing?”

  “Sitting here waiting for the lightning to strike me, I guess. Like it struck the generator last night, if it did.”

  “Huh? You mean—it didn’t?”

  “That’s on my list. A talk with the electrician who fixed it. As soon as I get back to town. How do you like Evansville?”