The Dead Ringer

by Fredric Brown

  He looked at me kind of funny, but he answered. “No, it was telephoned in. The office girl wrote it down and I took it over to her.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  After Maury had walked away, Uncle Am looked at me and scratched his head, but he didn’t ask why I’d wondered that.

  That evening it was still cloudy, but we did a fair business. And Monday the same.

  Tuesday it rained. It started about three-thirty in the afternoon. We’d been open and doing fairly well up to the time the rain started.

  I’d just reached up to let down the front when somebody said, “Hi, Ed. Hi, Am.” It was Armin Weiss, the Evansville copper. We said “Hi” back and he said, “I got to see some other guys first. You going to be around?”

  “Sure,” Uncle Am told him. “We’ll be in our living top, in back.”

  “See you in a few minutes then. We got an identification on the midget.”

  We finished closing up and went back. Half an hour later Weiss came in. He sat down on one of the cots. I’d had my trombone out, polishing it and working a little fresh oil into the slide; I started to put it away.

  “Lon Staffold,” Weiss said. “The midget’s name was Lon Staffold. Ever hear it before?”

  He looked from one to the other of us and we shook our heads to show the name didn’t mean anything to us. He went on:

  “He lived in Cincinnati. He was thirty-six years old. He lived in a rooming house on Vine Street and had a paper corner downtown selling Enquirers in the morning and Times-Stars and Posts in the afternoon.

  “He’d been a carney once, but a long time ago. Six or eight years ago, mostly out on the west coast. He’d been in vaudeville, too. As far as I could find out, he’d never been with a carney in the east or the middle west.”

  Uncle Am asked, “Who missed him?”

  “His landlady. She’s an ex-carney, too, and I think she used to be in burlesque. Anyway, she still reads Billboard; that’s where she read about the murder. If the regular Cincy papers carried it, she didn’t notice. That’s why we didn’t get a response right away; not till Billboard came out. She gave a description to the Cincinnati police. It fits.”

  “She got any idea who might have killed him or why?” Uncle Am asked.

  Weiss shrugged. “Not that she told the police there. I’m going to Cincinnati to talk with her. This is a kind of roundabout course from Evansville to Cincy, but I wanted to try around here to see if I could get any reaction to the name Lon Staffold, get a little ammunition to take to Cincy with me. Thus far, it’s a blank.”

  He stood up off the cot. He turned and looked at me. “Well, learned anything, Ed?”

  I shook my head.

  “Funny thing,” he said. “Staffold left Cincinnati about ten days ago. Turns up on your carney lot in Evansville, dead, last Thursday night, five days ago. Where was he the other five days, in between? If we knew that, we’d have something to get our teeth into.”

  Uncle Am said, “Have a drink, Cap?”

  “Well—one won’t hurt me. It’ll sure wear off before I get to Cincinnati; it’s a hell of a long drive from here.”

  Uncle Am got out the nested aluminum cups he used to use in a cups-and-balls routine, and a bottle. He poured us three drinks, going light on mine as usual.

  After we drank, Weiss said, “He sold his paper corner—got two hundred bucks for it. So he didn’t expect to sell papers again when he got back; he could have rented it out instead. But he did expect to get back. He kept his room and paid two weeks advance rent. He figured on getting back within that time. He let out a hint that he might come back with more money than he’d ever had before. Kinda mysterious about where it would come from.”

  Uncle Am said, “The Cincinnati cops did a good job for you.”

  “They didn’t get me all that. I talked to the landlady long distance last night. She’s a Mrs. Czerwinski, a widow. Had a right nice voice on the phone.”

  Uncle Am was grinning; I didn’t know why, then. He said, “Another shot, Cap?”

  “Nope. I’ll run along. Say, Ed, I’m driving—and you can’t work in the rain. Want to come along?”

  I shook my head. “No thanks, Cap. I—I got something else I got to do.”

  “Okay, Ed. Well, keep your nose clean. And your ears open.”

  “All right,” I said.

  After he left, I wondered why I hadn’t wanted to go along.

  That evening in the chow top, I saw Charlie Wheeler, the barker at the posing show. I sat down next to him.

  I asked very casually, “Anybody heard from Rita?”

  He shook his head. “Why should anybody?” He took a bite out of a sandwich and talked around it. “Hell, she won’t be back.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know; I’m just guessing. But it’s a good guess. Look, Ed—”

  “I’m looking.”

  “For your own good, forget that dizzy blonde. You’d like to get in, but so’d the whole rest of the carney. She’s out for dough. Nobody around here’s got enough of it for her. I got an idea for you, Ed. The side show’s going to take on a tattooed lady on our next jump. Now there’d be something. Leave the light on and if you can’t sleep, you can lay awake and look at the pictures.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure, I’ll do that, Charlie.” The next day, Wednesday, it was still raining off and on. Uncle Am chased me downtown and I saw three movies.

  Thursday afternoon it cleared for a while but we didn’t do much business. Thursday evening, it was drizzling again. We didn’t bother to open, although some of the concessions were running for peanuts.

  I tried to practice trombone, but I couldn’t get my mind on it.

  Uncle Am said, “For God’s sake, Ed.”

  “Yeah. I know it stinks. I’ll put it away.”

  “I don’t mean the trombone. I mean you. What the hell’s wrong with you? Or don’t you want to talk about her?”

  “I—I guess I don’t.” He knew what was eating me all right; there wasn’t any use lying to him and I was too mixed up myself to tell him the truth.

  “Kid, I hate to see dumb animals suffer,” he said. “Look, the grouch bag is overstuffed. Why don’t you put on that suit of yours that makes you look like a god damned matinee idol, let me give you twenty bucks and go out and get plastered and fall in the mud and ruin the suit?”

  I said, “I didn’t fall in the mud.”

  “You stopped too soon.”

  “I don’t want to get drunk. It wouldn’t do any good.”

  He sighed. “I was afraid of that. I thought I could settle for twenty. All right, here’s a hundred. That enough?”

  He wasn’t kidding. He had his bankroll out, peeling bills off it into a pile on my cot. Tens and fives and a couple of twenties until it made a hundred bucks. “Is that enough?”

  “Enough for what?”

  He looked and sounded exasperated. He said, “You know for what. Find out what gives and get it over with, one way or the other. But straighten yourself out. There’s a late train this evening you can still catch.”

  I said, “You mean—I should go to Indianapolis?” He snorted. “Hell, no. I mean Mars. You transfer to the rocket ship in Patagonia.”

  He got up and went out, leaving the money lying on the cot beside me.

  I looked at it awhile, and then I picked it up and put it in my wallet. With what I had left otherwise, it made a hundred and twenty-two bucks. It was more money in actual cash than I’d ever had at one time in my life. I felt rich.

  I started getting dressed, slowly—and then I got in a hell of a rush when I realized I didn’t know what time the late train left and I might miss it. I realized, too, that I didn’t know how long I’d be gone or what I was running into, so I popped a couple of extra shirts and some socks and stuff into a valise.

  Uncle Am had probably gone to the G-top and he wouldn’t want me coming there to say so long, so I wrote, “Thanks to hell and back. I’ll keep you posted,”
and pinned it to his pillow. I got off the lot without having to talk to anybody. I was in such a hurry now that I grabbed a taxi going by out front and took it to the station. When I got there, I found I had almost two hours to wait for the Indianapolis train.

  I’d figured it out on the train; there were three angles I could start from: the hospitals, the newspapers, or the police. If there’d really been an accident last Friday in which a man named Weiman had been injured, I could get the dope on it from one of those three sources. And the police would be last choice; I’d have to do too much explaining to them.

  It was almost two o’clock in the morning when I got off the train. The newsstand in the depot was open, but they had no back copies of local papers. I got a dollar’s worth of nickels and went to a phone booth.

  There wasn’t any Howard Weiman listed. Not that I’d expected to find one; if Weiman was a widower and a lush, the way Hoagy described him, the chances were against his having a home of his own and a phone in his own name. He’d be more likely to room somewhere or leave his extra shirt in a hotel room.

  There was a discouraging number of hospitals. But I was going to do at least something before I turned in, so I started. I called the emergency hospital first, as the best bet. “No Weiman registered here,” the girl said. “He might have left,” I told her. “He would have been brought in last Friday, after an auto accident. Would it be too much trouble—?”

  “Just a moment, please.”

  I held the phone until her voice came back on the line. “Yes,” she said. “A Howard Weiman was brought in Friday evening. On Sunday he was moved to a private hospital, Pinelawn.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That would mean—uh—that somebody arranged private hospitalization for him?”

  “Yes, probably. We handle only emergency and indigent cases. As soon as a patient can be moved, we advise it if other hospitalization can be arranged.”

  I asked, “It was his daughter who arranged the moving?” Her voice hesitated a moment. I said quickly, “I’m a friend of hers from out of town. The only way I know how to get in touch with her is through her father.”

  She decided that it was harmless. She said, “According to the file card, a Rita Weiman made the arrangements. The relationship isn’t shown, and her address isn’t given. Pinelawn Hospital might have it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

  I still had nineteen nickels. I made it eighteen by calling Pinelawn Hospital. Howard Weiman’s condition, I was told, was “fair.” And that was all the information I could get, except that visiting hours were two to four in the afternoon. If they had Rita’s address, they were keeping it a secret.

  Well, I’d learned a lot more than I’d dared to hope for from two phone calls at two o’clock in the morning.

  I decided I’d wait until daylight to do more. At the latest, I could find Rita tomorrow afternoon by being at the hospital during visiting hours. If she were staying here solely for the purpose, surely she’d visit him every day.

  So I checked in at a fleabag across from the station and went to sleep. I left a call for ten in the morning.

  After breakfast, I went to the office of the morning paper and got a copy of their Sunday morning edition. I went through it systematically until I found what I wanted, a single paragraph on the local page:

  INJURED BY TRUCK

  Howard Weiman, 53, of 430 W. Emory St., was seriously injured at about 8 p.m. Friday evening when struck by a moving van at the intersection of Emory and Blaine Sts. He was taken to emergency hospital. The driver of the van was not held.

  I took a cab to 430 West Emory Street. It was a three-story brick rooming house in a cheap rooming house district. A sign, “No Vacancies,” hung in the window of the downstairs front room.

  The outer room was unlocked, and I walked into the hallway and knocked on the door that would lead to the front room where the sign had hung.

  A woman who looked something like the house opened the door. I took off my hat and said, “I hear Mr. Weiman’s in the hospital. I wonder if you could tell me how he is.”

  “Pretty bunged up, I guess,” she said. “Touch and go for a while, but I guess he’ll pull through. Tell ‘em he’ll be back, but nobody can say when.”

  “Tell who?” I asked.

  “The construction company. You’re from there, ain’t you, where he works?”

  “No, I’m just a friend of his.”

  She wouldn’t buy that; her eyes got suspicious. She said, “You don’t look it.”

  I grinned. “More strictly speaking,” I told her, “I’m a friend of Rita’s. His daughter.”

  She believed that. She nodded. “She was here. Sunday, I guess it was.

  Paid his room rent for a while so his room would be held. Nice gal, she is.” The barriers were down now and I was a member of the family. She opened the door and stepped back from it. “Come on in.”

  I went into a frowzy room with an unmade bed, a stove, a sink with unwashed breakfast dishes in it, and an oilcloth-covered table. She waddled across the room and sat down in a chair at the table. I took one near the door, started to toss my hat onto the bed and thought better of it. Not that bed; I kept my hat in my lap.

  I said, “I wonder if you could tell me where Rita is staying.” Her eyes got that look again. She said, “I thought you said you was a friend of hers.”

  “I am. From the carnival. Did she tell you she was with a carnival?” She nodded.

  “She left there in a hurry when she got the message about her father, and she didn’t know where she’d be staying. I—I had to come to Indianapolis on other business, so I thought I’d look her up through her father’s address.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, I’m sorry but she didn’t happen to say where she was staying, except she mentioned something about her hotel, so she’s staying at one. But I guess you can reach her through Pinelawn Hospital. That’s where she had her old man moved to.”

  “Swell,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

  There wasn’t any more that I could get there, so I got away as quick as I could.

  Back in the lobby of my own hotel, I looked over the number of hotels listed in the phone book. There were too many of them to try phoning them all, unless I had to. And it was after noon already, so I might as well wait for the hospital’s visiting hours.

  I got there at a quarter of two. Pinelawn was a nice-looking hospital, but I wondered where it got the name; there weren’t any pines on the lawn, because there wasn’t any lawn. It was a three-story building, built flush to the street.

  I took up my watchman’s job, leaning against a tree on the corner diagonally across from the hospital, where I could watch both entrances. I figured out I’d give Rita until three to get there. If she hadn’t come by then, I’d try to get myself in as a visitor to Weiman and if that didn’t work I’d have another stab at getting Rita’s address from the hospital office, this time with a song and dance in person instead of over the phone.

  But I didn’t have to try that. At a few minutes after two a taxi pulled up and Rita got out. I got across the street while she was paying the driver, and I was standing there when she turned around. I said, “Hi, Rita.”

  If she was surprised, she didn’t show it. She said, “Hi, Ed,” as casually as though we’d met there by appointment. “How is your dad?” I asked her.

  “N-not too good, Eddie. There were internal injuries besides the concussion. They didn’t know about them at first. They had to operate, yesterday. They think it was successful, but they’re not sure. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to see him today, so soon after the operation, or not.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Rita, I’m, sorry about—” But she wasn’t listening. She took my arm and said, “Come on, Eddie. We’ll find out.”

  We went up the steps and inside the lobby. I waited while she crossed to the desk and talked to the nurse sitting behind it. After a minute she came back to me.

  “He’s a little better
. But he’s sleeping now and the doctor left word he’d better not have visitors till tomorrow. So come on.” She took my arm again.

  “Sure,” I said. “But what’s the rush?”

  “The cab’s waiting. I told him I might not be able to see my dad, and he said he’d wait a couple of minutes to see if I came out right away.”

  The cab was still waiting.

  As we started downtown, I slipped my arm around her. She leaned close to me. She asked, “Why did you come, Eddie?”

  “You know why I came.”

  “I—guess I do. I wish you hadn’t. Damn you, Eddie.” I laughed a little. “That’s the most encouraging thing you’ve told me yet. Swear at me some more.” I tightened my arm around her. “Love me, Rita? At all?”

  “What’s love?”

  “What I’ve got.”

  She leaned back and looked at me. She said, “Maybe it’s just hot pants, Eddie, that you’ve got.”

  “That, too,” I said. “Guess they go together. Oh, I suppose you can have either one without the other, but only a combination can make you as miserable as I’ve been.”

  “I—I’ve been miserable, too, Eddie. But damn you, Eddie, I don’t want love. I want money, lots of it. I want a million dollars and you haven’t got it and won’t ever have it. You’re too nice a guy.”

  I laughed. “Can’t a nice guy ever make a million?”

  She took that seriously. “Not—not your type of nice guy, Eddie. Honestly, can you picture yourself as a millionaire?”

  “No,” I admitted honestly. “I guess you’re right; I’m not the type. But would you know what to do with a million dollars if you had it?”

  “Wouldn’t I?” She laughed a little. “A big house, clothes, jewelry, furs—”

  “Could I live in the house?”

  “My husband wouldn’t like it. But I could set you up in a little apartment somewhere, Eddie, and pay the rent. And two or three times a week—”

  “Eight times a week,” I said. “Every day and twice on Sundays.”

  “If my husband will let me. … You don’t think I’m serious, do you, Eddie?”

  “If you are, shut up.”

  “Shut me up.”