The Dead Ringer

by Fredric Brown

  “A nice town,” I said.

  “We try to keep it that way.” He pulled out cigarettes and offered me one, and we lighted up. He said, “Ed, my wife is the best cook in forty miles. You like dumplings?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then you’ve never eaten any good ones, or you wouldn’t guess so. My wife makes them so light you have to weight ‘em down to keep ‘em on your plate. And she makes gravy that’s just what you need to weight ‘em down. I’ll bet all the dumplings you ever ate were soggy.”

  I said, “I guess they were.”

  He shook his head sadly. “The world is going to the dogs. Look, Ed, this is Friday and we have pot roast and dumplings every Friday night for supper. ‘Ain’t far from here; walking distance. How’d you like to have supper with us?”

  I said, “Mr. Weiss, I don’t know anything about the midget, or about the murder. What you could pump out of me wouldn’t pay for the gravy, let alone the pot roast and dumplings. Honest to God.”

  He grinned. “I know that, Ed. Or I think so, anyway. But there are other angles. First, you and Am are the only people around here who don’t treat me like I got something catching. And then Am tells me you play trombone. I thought you might bring it around and we could make some noise together, kind of. I got a trumpet myself that I played in a band once when I was younger, and my wife doesn’t do as good on the piano as on the stove, but she can play some.”

  I said, “I’m weakening. But there’s no ulterior motive?”

  “Sure there’s an ulterior motive, son, only it ain’t ulterior. You know the people around here, most of them, and the setup. You can tell me who’s who and the general background, and give me something to get my teeth into. You can help plenty.”

  “Well—” I said.

  “Good. It’s thirty-two sixteen Arlington, only six-seven blocks from here, toward town. We eat at six and my wife’ll be mad if you’re late, and don’t forget the trombone.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  He eased himself down off the edge of the platform, said, “So long, then,” and lumbered off toward the main gate.

  I stood there wondering what I’d said yes for. I didn’t want to get mixed up in it. It wasn’t my business.

  Somebody was looking at me; I felt it on the back of my neck. I turned around. Skeets Geary, who runs the freak show, was standing there in the entrance looking at me. He had a grin on his face, but it wasn’t a nice grin. It wasn’t a nice face, either, for that matter. Skeets looks like a caricature of a race track tout. But as far as I knew, he didn’t have anything against me. I put my hands in my pockets and walked over. I said, “Hi, Skeets,” and he straightened his face out. It went sour when it straightened out. He said, “Listen, Ed, for your own good. Sucking up to coppers won’t get you anything around here.”

  “The hell,” I said, “I thought it might get me red lighted.” People were walking past us; the barker was grinding now, and he was pulling them in. Practically all the adults that had been in the tip for the bally.

  I stepped away from Skeets and walked in with them. There was something new inside the top, I saw right away. It was a wooden railing about five or six feet square. The marks were gathering around it.

  I walked over. Inside the railing was a spot of grass where the body had been lying last night. The body wasn’t there, but it had been outlined, like the police outline a body in chalk before they move it.

  Only the outline was with a piece of heavy string, because you can’t mark with chalk on grass. And a knife with dried blood on the blade was lying inside the string, just where the heart of the body had been. It wasn’t the real knife, of course —the police would have taken that. But it was another of Australia’s throwing knives, just like the one that had been used for the murder. I don’t know where Skeets got the blood, but it wouldn’t have been his own.

  A couple of marks shouldered up beside me along the railing and I stepped back. I was mad. It probably showed in my face when I walked over to Skeets.

  When I got there, there wasn’t anything I wanted to say. Not a damn thing. Instead, I just put my hand against his chest and pushed, and he went down backward over a guy rope.

  I stood there and waited while he got up, hoping to hell he’d want to make something of it. My knuckles were itching for him to.

  Instead, he got up slowly and didn’t say a word. He looked at me and his eyes were like little marbles. He turned and went back inside.

  The minute it was over, I knew I shouldn’t have done it. And, because he hadn’t fought back, I even felt a little foolish, a little out on a limb.

  When I knocked on the door of Hoagy’s trailer, his voice called out for me to come in. He and Marge were sitting one on each side of the breakfast nook that was built into the trailer. Hoagy hadn’t been in the trailer company’s mind when they’d designed that nook; he more than filled his half of it, and looked uncomfortable.

  He grinned at me and said, “Hi, Ed. Pull up a chair. Don’t talk loud, though.”

  He nodded toward the back of the trailer and I saw that Rita was taking a nap on the bunk back there. She’d taken off the mauve silk dress so as not to muss it, and wore only a cream-colored slip. The outlines under the slip were so beautiful that I caught my breath a little.

  “Some coffee, Ed?” Marge asked me.

  I didn’t really want any, but I said “Sure” and got myself a cup and a spoon from the cupboard before I pulled a chair up to the end of the breakfast table. Facing that way, I couldn’t see the bunk and the cream-colored slip and maybe that was just as well.

  Marge poured coffee. Her eyes looked tired, and for the first time I noticed that there was gray starting to show in her black hair. It wasn’t combed very well, and she didn’t have any make-up on yet.

  She must have read my mind. She said, “Don’t look at me, Ed. I know I look like hell.”

  “Not quite,” I told her, and she grinned.

  She said, “Anyway, don’t compare me with Angelface.”

  “Angelface?”

  “Rita. That’s what my husband calls her. That’s why I don’t worry about him.”

  “Oh,” I said. Hoagy chuckled. “Wonderful to have a trusting wife. You can get away with murder.”

  He didn’t mean it that way, of course, but the word grated, somehow. I saw Marge look up sharply, too. I thought she was going to bawl him out, so I changed the subject. I asked, “Is the posing show going to run this afternoon?”

  “Maury said he’d open a little after three if it hadn’t started to rain by then. We’re supposed to wake Rita at three. Guess the poor kid didn’t get too much sleep last night. You’ve been out, Ed. Is it going to rain?”

  I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know, but Uncle Am doesn’t seem so think so, and he’s pretty good at guessing. How’s Susie?”

  Hoagy shook his head. “Not so good. I guess maybe I didn’t get a bargain on her after all. She’s a pretty sick little chimp.”

  “For a hundred and fifty bucks,” Marge said, “I could have bought a lot of clothes, and with the season about over—”

  Hoagy spread his hands. “So maybe we’re out one and a half C’s, and a little more on fancy foods and medicines. But if I get her well, we’re in the bucks. Know what she’d be worth, Ed?”

  “How much?”

  “Five hundred, easy. That’s a nice profit, but that’s not what I’m shooting for. I spend the winter training her and if I’m lucky at that, five grand wouldn’t get you a slice of her. Next season I take her with the Big Top, and we’re in the money.”

  “You’d sell her, or go with her?”

  “I’m not crazy about the carney, Ed. Give me the circus any day. We’d go with her. I got a trained-chimp routine figured out that’d knock their eyes out. A new angle, and easier to teach a chimp than the regular stuff.” I asked, “Have you had Susie to a vet?” Hoagy chuckled.

  Marge said, “Don’t you know Clarence is a vet, Ed?” It took me a minute to f
igure out who Clarence was; it was almost the first time I’d heard Hoagy called anything else than Hoagy.

  “No kidding?” I asked him.

  “Any time you get distemper, Ed, just call on me. Sure, I got a degree. Want to see my diploma? It’s around somewhere. Only instead of going into practice, I got with the circus; that’s where I met Marge. That’s where I picked up what I know about chimps. And dogs. I never got on too well with the cat animals.”

  “You mean you did vetting or training with the circus?” I asked him.

  “A little of both. For a while I ran a dog act.”

  Marge said, “That’s where he picked up his stuff he uses in his sex lectures with the side show, Ed. Only instead of talking about women, he’s really talking about bitches.”

  Hoagy said, “I won’t say it.”

  I got up and strolled to the front end of the trailer to take a look through the slats of the makeshift cage Hoagy had built across the front, from wall to wall and about three feet deep.

  Susie, the chimp, was curled up asleep in the middle, on a pile of straw. At least I hoped she was asleep; she lay as still as though she were dead. Then, in the dimness inside the cage, I could see there was a slight movement of her chest that showed she was still breathing.

  Hoagy said, “Be quiet, Ed. Don’t wake her.”

  As I straightened up, the sound of bedsprings made me turn around. Rita was sitting up on the edge of the bed, yawning, stretching her arms high.

  She said sleepily, “Hi, Eddie. Turn around again till I slip my dress on, huh?”

  I turned back toward the wooden cage, but this time I wasn’t thinking about Susie.

  By three o’clock the sun was out. I walked with Rita to the posing show top, and then went back to our booth to see if Uncle Am could use me.

  He was getting a fair play, as good as you could expect from an afternoon crowd. He was glad I’d come back, because he was getting hungry and hadn’t wanted to run down the front. So I took over while he went to the chow top.

  When he came back, I told him about Captain Weiss’s inviting me over for dinner and duets. Uncle Am laughed. He said, “So the Cap doubles in brass! He did get interested when I mentioned you played trombone, but I didn’t know why. Sure, Ed, take the whole evening. I’ll get Marge to help me for a change. The joint can use a little sex appeal.”

  “Marge?”

  “Sure, why not? She’s always glad to pick up a few bucks. I guess Hoagy’s a little tight with her on clothes.”

  “Okay by me,” I said. Then I remembered something else and told him about my run-in with Skeets Geary at the side show.

  Uncle Am grinned first, and then looked serious. He said, “Kid, you got to watch that Irish temper of yours. Sure, it’s a lousy stunt to cash in on murder that way, but you aren’t arbiter of Skeets’ morals, as long as they don’t step on your toes. And even if you don’t like something he does, you don’t have to push him over a guy rope to prove it.”

  I said, “It was one of those things that seem like a good idea at the time. I guess I was a sap.”

  “I guess you were. Only, damn it, I wish I could have seen it. All right, folks, step right up. Knock over the milk bottles and win a beautiful kewpie doll …”

  I stuck around until almost half-past five. Then I got dressed, took my tram, and hunted up the address Weiss had given me.

  It was a nice-looking little cottage on a big lot, well back from the street, and with trees around it. It was the kind of place that makes a carney wonder for a minute whether he’s a sucker instead of the other guy.

  Weiss opened the door. He said, “Hi, kid. Come on in. Ma, this is Ed Hunter.”

  Ma was one of those bird-like little women. Around forty, I guess; Weiss was a little older than that. She fluttered over me for a minute, and then went out to the kitchen.

  Weiss hadn’t been kidding about the trumpet. He got it out right away and set up some easy duet stuff on the piano. I put my trombone together and limbered it up, and we played for a while.

  It wasn’t anything for Carnegie Hall, but it went pretty well at that. The music was strictly off the cob, of course, but it’s funny; you don’t mind corn when you’re playing it yourself. The stuff was all written for two trumpets and that gave me a disadvantage; I had to read treble clef instead of bass and play it an octave down to fit trombone range. But we were both in B flat, so it didn’t take any transposing.

  Once in a while Ma would come to the door and tell us how good we sounded, as though she really meant it.

  Then we got called out into the kitchen to eat. It was a swell big kitchen and I liked the fact that she didn’t—like most people would—apologize for eating there. Kitchens should, I think, be eaten in. Food tastes better there.

  Anyway, that food did. Weiss hadn’t exaggerated a bit. It was just plain grub—meat and spuds and dumplings and gravy —but it tasted out of this world. That gravy would have made sawdust taste good, and we didn’t put it on sawdust.

  I stuffed myself so thoroughly I had to turn down the mince pie for dessert. Weiss called me a sissy and had two pieces himself, even though he’d been a helping ahead of me on the other stuff.

  Ma Weiss wouldn’t let either of us help with the dishes, not even on wiping them. So the Cap and I sat over coffee and cigarettes and talked about everything except what I’d expected him to talk about. He still hadn’t even mentioned the murder.

  He asked if I wanted to play some more, but I told him I was too stuffed to blow a horn, and he admitted he felt kind of that way himself.

  He got a couple of bottles of beer out of the refrigerator and opened them, and still we talked about everything but.

  I broke down first. I asked him if they’d identified the murdered midget.

  “Nope,” he said. “That’s what makes it tough, Ed. We can’t even get a start—an intelligent one—till we get an identification on him. We’ll get one, though.”

  “How?”

  “Publicity. If a midget turns up dead in Evansville, then there’s got to be a midget missing somewhere else. So we get the A.P. and the U.P. to put the story on their wires, and it’s a good enough story that it’ll make the newspapers all over the country. And pretty soon now somebody will come up with a missing midget to match, and then we got a place to start from. That story’s in evening papers all over the country right now, and a phone call from headquarters any minute wouldn’t surprise me.”

  I said, “Wouldn’t Variety and Billboard be the best bets? Damn few carneys and show people read the regular local papers.”

  “Sure. We’re writing Variety and Billboard. But they don’t come out daily like newspapers and it’ll take longer if we have to wait for results from them. And the carney’ll move on meanwhile. So I’m hoping for results from the dailies. And when we find out who he is, then we can start trying to tie him in with someone in your carney.”

  I said, “Or someone in Evansville who isn’t with the carney.”

  He shook his head slowly. “That won’t wash, Ed. I don’t mean we ain’t got murderers in Evansville, but none of ‘em did this little job.

  “For one thing, Ed, look at the knife angle. It belonged to your knife thrower. It was in his trunk under the platform he works on, inside the side show—only a dozen yards from where we found the midget’s body. A carney must have got it out of that trunk. A carney would have known where Australia kept his shivs. An outsider wouldn’t know.”

  I said, “Suppose it was a thief hunting around inside the top for something to steal. He finds the trunk and the knives, and—”

  Weiss’s quiet chuckle stopped me. He said, “And then he took a naked midget out of his pocket and stabbed him. Hell, Ed, it ties in with the carney. You can’t get away from it.”

  I asked, “Have you talked with the electrician who fixed the generator?”

  “Who’s pumping who, Ed? Yeah, I saw him. It was lightning all right.

  The murderer took advantage of the darkness
, but he didn’t manufacture it. You know, Ed, you ought to be a detective. You got a hell of a big bump of curiosity.”

  “Have I?”

  “Haven’t you? You know damn well you’re as interested in finding out what happened last night as I am. And I get paid for wondering and you don’t. Another bottle of beer?”

  He got up and got two bottles without waiting for me to answer so I didn’t say no.

  He said, “Ed, I did have in mind pumping you a bit when I asked you here. But I thought it over and decided it wouldn’t do any good. Until I get some lead to work on, find out who the midget was, I don’t know what questions to ask, and you wouldn’t know what to tell me.

  “I may want to pump you later. But, meanwhile, I’ll ask you something else. I’ll ask you to keep your eyes and ears open. Just notice anything unusual you see or hear around the carney, anything that might, even remotely, tie in with the murder. And keep me posted. You’ll do that?”

  “I—I guess so.”

  “I wish you sounded more enthusiastic about it. You don’t like murder, do you?”

  “Does anyone?”

  He said, “Murderers do. Hell, that ain’t exactly right. Let’s say they dislike it less than they dislike some alternative they have to face. Like a torpedo who kills a man for five hundred bucks, let’s say. Unless he’s off the beam mentally, he doesn’t get any actual pleasure out of pulling the trigger, but he dislikes worse being without that five hundred bucks. Without it, he might even have to take a job and go to work.”

  He poured the rest of his second bottle of beer into his glass and drank it.

  He said, “A psychopathic murder might be something else again, but this wasn’t a psychopathic murder, Ed.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know how I know. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. It’s too screwy to be a psychopathic murder. It—it ain’t the pattern.”

  I nodded. It wasn’t very logical reasoning, but I felt that it was right, because I had the same hunch, too.

  I said, “You mean you want me to be a spy in the enemy camp. I don’t like that.”