The Dead Ringer

by Fredric Brown

  I did; I shut her up very thoroughly, and I felt that kiss all the way down to my toes.

  It wasn’t quite like anything that had ever happened to me before. It left me dizzy when we broke, and the cab was just pulling up in front of Rita’s hotel.

  Rita led me through the lobby to the bar and grill that opened off it. We took a booth.

  She asked, “Hungry, Eddie?”

  “Not for grub.”

  “Behave yourself. Here comes the waitress. I am hungry; I haven’t eaten since I got up.”

  She ordered a plate lunch and I settled for pie and coffee.

  When the waitress had gone away, Rita frowned at me across the table. Not a mock frown, a faint but unmistakably genuine frown. She asked, “Why did you come in the posing show that night, Eddie?”

  “I know I shouldn’t have,” I told her. “But—I’d been drinking, and I was mad. Hoagy told me you had a date with a mooch, and I—just couldn’t take it. So I decided I didn’t give a damn what anybody thought, and I didn’t until I was inside and saw you, and—hell, it’s all mixed up. Anyway, you damn near knocked my block off outside, and I had it coming to me.”

  “All right, Eddie. Just don’t ever do it again. Whether I come back to the show or not.” She smiled. “Particularly if that Estelle dame is with it. She’s kind of soft on you, Eddie. Has she made a play for you yet?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “She probably will. Well—”

  “You are coming back to the carney, aren’t you, Rita?”

  “I’ve been wondering, Eddie. I don’t like the posing show.”

  “I don’t either,” I said. “I mean, I don’t like you being with the posing show. Can’t you do something else with the carney?”

  “A cooch dance, maybe?”

  “Damn it, you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean, but you’d better get over it, Eddie. Nature made me for a show girl or a dancer or something like that. A body but no brains.”

  “How much are two and two?”

  “Five. See, Eddie?”

  “All right,” I said. “I give up.” The waitress came back with our orders. I sat sipping coffee, watching Rita eat. Even eating, she was beautiful. I was the luckiest guy in the world—maybe. I was just a little scared, at the moment, of crowding my luck by finding out how lucky I was.

  I sat there without talking any more until she’d finished eating. Then I asked, “And now?”

  “And now—to the railroad station, Eddie. You’re going back.”

  “Back? I just got here. I can stay a week or so. I want to stay here until we find out how your father’s doing—he ought to be out of danger by that time, and we can go back together.”

  “No, Eddie. You’ve got to go back this afternoon. Right away. I—Eddie, I want you to stay, but you mustn’t. With Dad maybe dying, it—it wouldn’t be right for you to stay.”

  “We could—behave ourselves.”

  “But we wouldn’t. Not any more than—than gunpowder and fire could be together and behave themselves.”

  I knew all too well that she was right about that, but I still wanted to argue.

  She leaned across the table and put her finger across my lips. She said, “Be a good boy and go back, Eddie. And if you do, I’ll promise to come back to the carney. As soon as I can. And then—we’ll have fun, Eddie.”

  I took her finger from my lips and kissed the palm of her hand, warm and moist. “All right,” I said.

  We went to the station. There was a train out for South Bend in only a few minutes.

  At the iron gate leading back to the tracks, I kissed her. That was the third time I’d kissed her, and the best. Then, with her arms around me, she leaned back a little.

  She said, “Damn you, Eddie. Are you worth a million bucks?”

  “I’ll try to be.”

  “You’d better. Good-by, Eddie …”

  I guess I forgot to wipe the lipstick off. I saw it in the washroom mirror a few hours later when I was getting cleaned up to get off the train at South Bend. There was a silly, fatuous smile on my face, too, along with the lipstick.

  I wondered if I’d worn that all the way from Indianapolis.

  CHAPTER VI

  Sunday night after the crowd had gone, we tore down. We were rolling by four o’clock and pulled into Fort Wayne just after dawn. As on all of the short jumps, Uncle Am and I stuck with the trucks.

  We weren’t opening until evening, but we went ahead and set up our stuff so we’d have all day to sleep. The sun was out bright by the time we hit our cots, dog tired.

  Business was good Monday night. That was the night of the second murder, if you can call it that. I mean, it wasn’t a human being. It was Hoagy’s chimp, Susie.

  At two o’clock in the morning, about an hour after we’d closed, some of us were in Lee Carey’s trailer. There was Uncle Am and I, Lee Carey, Estelle Beck, and Major Mote, the midget. We’d been there half an hour. Carey and I had been playing the phonograph, but there was so much talking that we finally gave up and joined in the conversation. Carey had broken out a bottle of whisky and everybody was having a drink or two, but nobody was high. I was going very easy on the stuff myself, nursing my first drink along so I wouldn’t have to turn down another.

  Uncle Am and Carey started arguing politics. As nearly as I could make out, Carey was for politics and Uncle Am was against them; it was that kind of a silly argument. Carey was practicing the front-and-back palm with a half dollar while he talked, the bright coin flashing, appearing at the end of his fingertips, then vanishing as he turned his hand, palm and then back. I don’t think he even knew he was doing it.

  I was listening, amused, and Estelle was listening, bewildered and a little bored. The Major sat glumly silent on the edge of the bunk, looking like an oversize doll somebody had stuck there.

  That was the way we were when Marge Hoagland pushed open the screen door. She said, “Susie’s gone.” Lee Carey said, “The hell! She got out?” I hadn’t taken it that way; I thought at first she’d meant the chimp had died. They’d been expecting her to, any minute, and I’d thought she was too sick to move around at all. The times I’d seen her, she’d barely been able to move. She’d been just an inert ball of monkey fur, barely breathing. I couldn’t picture her running away, even if they’d left the cage door open.

  But Marge nodded her head, to Carey’s question. She said, “She was there at ten o’clock, when Hoagy got back from Milwaukee. We went uptown for some drinks, Hoagy and me. And when we got back a few minutes ago—”

  “Where’s Hoagy?” Uncle Am asked.

  “Hunting for her. He’s going through the freak show top now; we saw your lights and—”

  “Sure,” Carey said. “We’ll all help. Drink first, Marge?”

  “Had too many already, Lee. Thanks.” She turned around and went out and we all followed her—all but Major Mote. I happened to look at him as I was following Uncle Am out the door. He still sat on the edge of the bunk, but he was hunkered up now, as though he was trying to take up even less room than he did otherwise.

  He looked up as I stood there, half in and half out of the door, and I saw he was scared of something, scared stiff. I said, “What’s the matter, Major? Aren’t you coming?”

  He looked at me, but he didn’t answer. His eyes didn’t seem to see me.

  I stood there, not knowing whether to go on out or stay and try to find out what was eating the midget. But Uncle Am said, “Coming, Ed?” and I went on out and closed the door behind me.

  As I went down the trailer steps, I heard his footsteps patter across the trailer floor. I heard the inner door of the trailer slam and the bolt slide shut. He’d locked himself in.

  Uncle Am had turned and was staring back at that closed door. He must have heard the bolt click, too. He asked, “What gives with the little guy?”

  “Scared stiff,” I told him. Carey had heard, too, and was standing there, looking back. I asked, “How man
y drinks did he have, Lee?”

  “Two,” Carey said, wonderingly. “Just two.”

  I suggested, “He’s kind of small. Two drinks might have hit him a bit.”

  Carey shook his head. “Nope. I’ve seen him handle seven or eight and still be all right.” He shrugged. “The hell with it. One thing at a time; let’s find the chimp.”

  Estelle and Marge were already ducking under the canvas sidewall of the big freak show top. I could see that Hoagy, or someone, had turned on the lights in there; they’d been off when we’d passed half an hour before on our way to Lee’s trailer.

  We followed them under.

  Hoagy was crossing to meet us, inside the top. Behind him, one of the canvas men, Pop Janney, was pulling on his pants; he’d been asleep on one of the platforms.

  Hoagy had a flashlight in his hand. He said, “She ain’t here. I looked behind the bally cloths, under all the platforms. It’d be some place like that she’d crawl off to.”

  Uncle Am asked, “How’d she get out?”

  “Broke the catch. Damn, I didn’t think she was strong enough.”

  Marge said, “You should’ve known. You kept telling me how strong a chimp is. And then you—”

  Uncle Am said, “Pipe down, Marge. Give him hell afterward, but let’s find the chimp first. Think she’d have gone far, Hoagy?”

  “No. My guess is she’d crawl under something. Sick animals do. Let’s split up and—”

  Marge said, “She might’ve headed for the woods. There’s two-three acres of ‘em over the other side of the lot.”

  Uncle Am seemed to be taking charge. He said, “Let’s get some system in this. Sure, she might have gone for the woods, but we’d never find her there in the dark. Once in the woods, she’d go up a tree and— Well, let’s let the woods go until it gets light. She’s probably still on the lot anyway. Just how sick was she, Hoagy?”

  “I’ve been away two days,” Hoagy said. “But when I saw her last she wasn’t able to sit up. Let alone walk, God damn it. I damn near decided to put her out of her misery with chloroform before I went away. But Marge—”

  Marge cut in, “Wasn’t I right? And she did sit up this afternoon and eat a little. Two bananas besides that formula you made.”

  Uncle Am said, “Okay, then we can figure she didn’t go far. Ten to one, she’s on the lot. So—” He went on, dividing the lot among the seven of us—it was seven now with Pop Janney, who’d got his clothes on and was with us.

  Uncle Am told us, “Get flashlights first. Then cover your territory and meet by my booth in half an hour. Look under stuff, anywhere she might have crawled. And look up, too. She might have got a notion to climb.”

  We started to split up, but Uncle Am called Hoagy back and I stuck around.

  He said, “Hoagy, you better call the cops.”

  “The cops?” Hoagy looked as though he thought Uncle Am had lost his mind.

  “Sure, the cops. Don’t be a dope, Hoagy. You’ll be protecting yourself and the carney—and the chimp. You don’t want her shot, do you, if she does get off the lot and a cop sees her?”

  “Hell, no. If she’s well enough to have got out—”

  “Yeah. So you report to the cops. Tell ‘em she’s sick and that she’s tame anyway and not dangerous, and that if they get a report on a loose monkey they should call you instead of getting excited and spraying lead. And there’s another angle. If she’s not as sick as you think and does any damage, well—”

  “Hell, Am. She’s tame as a kitten.”

  “All right, she’s tame. But she might do some property damage or accidentally scare someone stiff. Or something. And you’re going to be in a devil of a lot better spot if you’ve already reported, as soon as you found her gone.”

  Hoagy sighed. You could see the idea of calling copper hurt him. But he said, “Maybe you got something, Am. But Maury isn’t here and I don’t want to burgle the office car to use the phone and I want to stick on the lot in case somebody finds Susie, because I can handle her better. So will you phone?”

  “How about me?” I suggested. “I’ll do it.”

  “Would you, Ed?” Hoagy asked. “Look, you might have to hunt for a phone at this time of night, so take my car. Here’s the key.”

  I took it. Uncle Am said, “Then forget the territory I gave you, Ed. I’m going to break up the rummy game in the G-top and get some recruits.”

  I took Hoagy’s car and drove toward town till I found a place that was open, and used the phone. The guy on the desk at the station was pretty dumb. He got all excited at first; I think he got chimps mixed with gorillas and pictured Gargantua or King Kong loose on the unsuspecting community of Fort Wayne.

  I finally got him straightened out and calmed down. He promised to notify the beat men out in our end of town, when and as they phoned in from their call boxes. He was going to send a couple of squad cars to the lot, but I talked him out of that.

  When I got back to the lot, the search was in full swing. Somebody had turned on some of the lights around the midway, and there were lights in most of the tops. The search party seemed to be growing by the minute as more people got waked up by those already hunting.

  I wandered around a few minutes trying to find Uncle Am but I couldn’t remember what part of the lot he’d taken for himself, and I didn’t see him.

  I looked inside the lemonade stand, thinking somebody might have missed searching it, then I sat down on the counter of it to think, to see if I could get any bright ideas that had been missed.

  I was beginning to get one when Estelle came toward me down the midway. She waved and said, “Hi, Eddie.”

  “No luck?”

  “There’s no chimp in the posing show top or dressing tent. That’s what I covered. I’m glad there wasn’t. I’d’ve been scared plenty.”

  “A big girl like you,” I said. “Afraid of a little monkey.”

  “Wouldn’t be if you were along, Eddie. Say, how big is Susie? You ever see her?”

  “A couple of times. I was just getting an idea for a place to look. Want to come along?”

  I jumped down off the counter and she fell in step beside me down the midway. “Where, Eddie? What’s your hunch?”

  “The place I bet everybody else forgot to look. Hoagy’s trailer.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ll bet when Hoagy found the chimp gone he started out hunting without looking in his own closets and under bunks and around. Maybe she holed in somewhere else right in the trailer.”

  “My God,” Estelle said, “You’ve got brains too!”

  We cut back between tops, off the midway, to Hoagy’s joint. It was dark back there. I held Estelle’s arm tightly and she hung on to me as we worked our way back slowly so as not to fall over any ropes or stakes. We did that until we were almost there, anyway, and then I remembered she had a flashlight.

  I reminded her of it and she turned it on. I thought that she giggled a little, but I wasn’t sure.

  At the door of the trailer, I reached up and turned the little knob of the screen door. The door opened, but it didn’t feel right. I mean, the knob was loose and the door had started to come open before I’d really turned it at all.

  I asked Estelle for the flashlight and with it I looked at the knob and the catch. The catch had been broken, all right.

  I said, “Nuts. My hunch was wrong, ‘Stelle. The monk did get all the way out of the trailer.”

  The catch, I saw, had been a flimsy one. It wouldn’t have taken much strength to have broken it. I wondered if the catch on the door of Hoagy’s homemade cage inside the trailer had been as flimsy.

  We went on in and turned on the lights. Then I went to the end of the trailer where the monkey had been kept. It was still dim down in that end; Hoagy had shaded his light on one side so the bright bulb wouldn’t shine in Susie’s eyes. I used the flashlight to examine the catch.

  It was on the outside of the door. It was a hinge and hasp affair, with a padlock. It wasn’t b
roken, nor was the padlock; the screws had been pulled out of the wood. There’d been three screws in the end that had pulled loose; two of them were still in the holes in the hasp; the other had fallen out. They were five-eighths-inch-long screws, and the wood they’d been in looked fairly hard. I didn’t know what kind of wood it was, but it wasn’t pine, anyway.

  It would have taken a plenty hard pull, I thought, to yank those screws right out by their roots that way. A man couldn’t do it, I was pretty sure. It was a little scary to realize just how strong a chimpanzee really was. And to know that, tame or not, it was loose somewhere.

  Estelle was leaning over me, breathing down the back of my neck. She asked, “Finding anything, Eddie?”

  I shook my head. I took another look at the cage itself, opening the door and sticking my head in. They’d kept it plenty clean. There was fresh straw on the floor, a couple of inches deep. The only refuse was the skins of two bananas, the ones Marge had mentioned.

  The cage— Maybe I’m giving a wrong idea calling it that; it wasn’t a cage, really, in the sense of having bars all around. It was just a partition of bars—one-by-three boards—nailed to the trailer floor and the trailer roof, leaving a space three feet deep between the partition and the end of the trailer.

  The floor area was about three by seven feet; not an awful lot of room, but then Hoagy had told me that he didn’t expect to have to keep Susie locked up much, except at night, once he’d really got a start at training her.

  Studying the space back of the door, I realized something that made me feel better. It wouldn’t have taken any superhuman strength after all to have sprung those screws in the hasp. The three-foot depth of the space behind the door was what made it easy.

  Inside the cage, bracing your shoulders against the wall and shoving against the door with your feet, there’d have been enough leverage for a normally strong person to have done it. Why, even a husky kid the size of Susie might have been able to do it, if the kid had been smart enough to think of using his feet that way. And for a monkey, using feet is as natural as using hands.

  Someone opening the screen door made me turn around. It was Hoagy coming in.