The Dead Ringer

by Fredric Brown

  “I just don’t like it. I wish he hadn’t picked on me. It’s too much like stool pigeoning.”

  Uncle Am was quiet while the cab went a couple of blocks, and light and shadow played alternately across the inside of the taxi.

  Then he said, “Kid, you got the wrong slant. Maybe it’s my fault. We carneys aren’t crazy about cops, but that goes for sloughing concessions, and little stuff. We don’t have to like murder. I know I don’t.”

  He was right, sure. But I guess I was feeling cantankerous enough to want to argue about it. I said, “Then why don’t you solve it for them?”

  He said, patiently, “Because it isn’t my business to do Weiss’s job for him. But it is my business to tell Weiss anything I might know about it. If I knew who stuck a shiv in the midget, I’d tell him. If I knew any facts that might help him at all, I’d tell him. That’s not playing copper—or playing stool pigeon either. Is it?”

  “I guess not,” I admitted.

  The cab was pulling up in front of what looked like an ordinary, but fairly swanky, tavern.

  There weren’t many people at the bar; it was pretty obviously just a front, put there for decoration. And the bald bartender didn’t give Uncle Am too much argument before he nodded and showed us the door at the back that led to the real joint. Back there, there were plenty of people. All of them were well dressed and nearly half of them were women. They looked like money. I thought, if we could only get marks like these to come to the carney— There were two roulette wheels, three people at one and about a dozen packed around the other. There was a semi-circular blackjack table, a crap table, and a round poker table with seven or eight players.

  “What you want to play, Ed?” Uncle Am asked me. I told him I’d just wander around and watch awhile. He went to the table in the corner where a man with an eyeshade sold chips. He came back with one pocket bulging and a stack of chips in one hand; there were three blues and about twenty whites.

  He said, “Here’s thirty-five bucks to play with. The blues are fins and the whites are bucks. Play around awhile. When you lose ‘em, look me up. I’ll be at the poker table if I can get a seat.”

  I watched the crap game awhile, but it was crowded and I didn’t lay any bets. I played a few hands of blackjack at a white chip each. I got twenty the first hand and won, stood sixteen and won the second, then got a pair of nines, doubled down on them and won on both. That made me four chips ahead so I did as all suckers do and played the four bucks. I got a king-ten and felt pretty cocky about it until the dealer gave himself an ace, looked at his under card and flipped over a queen.

  That put me back where I was, with my original thirty-five bucks, so I wandered over to the less crowded of the roulette wheels. Uncle Am, I noticed, had a seat at the poker table.

  The wheel was an eagle-bird wheel, with a triple zero for the house besides the ordinary zero and double zero. Strictly sucker stuff. I played single chips on the red or black for a while, watching the play of the others at the table.

  A fat man in a tux was the heavy player; he didn’t have any white chips, just blues and yellows. He was letting the numbers alone, but putting stacks of blues on screwy red-black, odd-even, and high-low combinations. The woman with him, a painted ex-chorine in a backless gown cut so low in front that it must have just barely covered the nipples of her breasts, had the opposite idea. She had white chips, but played the long shots only, scattering whites over at least a half dozen numbers on every turn.

  I played along without getting anywhere, one way or the other, on the red-black. After a while I started playing two whites at a time and then three, and sometimes five. I still won just about as often as I lost, and I started getting bored.

  I thought, I guess I’m just not a gambler; I ought to be all excited about this. I wanted to quit and go over and watch Uncle Am. Poker is a good game to watch, if you’re on somebody’s side. There’s drama in poker, even just watching it. You can back your judgment instead of blind chance, or a crooked wheel.

  Thinking of crooked wheels made me think of the zeros; none of them had come up for quite a while. So next spin, instead of playing black, I put a chip on each of the house numbers, the 0, 00 and 000. It didn’t hit, but I tried again.

  At least I was getting rid of my chips faster that way, three at a crack. For the next few spins I put two chips on each of the zeros, and that spin and the next cost me six chips each.

  So I put three chips on each zero number, and the double zero hit. The croupier put a stack of twenty-one blues—a hundred and five bucks—on top of my three whites on the double zero.

  I picked them up and let a spin go by while I took inventory. I had a hundred and thirteen bucks. I put the hundred in one pile and the thirteen in another. I decided I’d cash out either a hundred even, or a hundred and thirty-five even.

  I put ten bucks on black and three on odd, and the ball dropped into an even number in the red.

  I went over to the corner and cashed in the twenty blues for a hundred bucks and put it in my wallet. Then I strolled over to the poker table to watch Uncle Am.

  He must have felt me standing behind him, because he turned his head and looked up. He said, “Bust already, Ed? Want some more?”

  I shook my head. “Cashed out a hundred,” I told him. “Attaboy. Watch a while. This is table stakes.” He turned back to the game; the man across from him was dealing. It was five-card stud. Uncle Am had a couple of hundred dollars in front of him, but I didn’t know what that meant, because I didn’t know how much he’d started with. I’d have guessed a hundred, which would put him that much ahead. He shielded the corner of his down card with the palm of his left hand, and then lifted it high enough that I could see it. It was the jack of diamonds. He got the king of diamonds up. He stayed for a five-dollar bet from an ace and then a five-dollar raise from a seven that must have been a pair of sevens. He got the nine of diamonds for his third card—still a possible straight or flush or both.

  A ten across the table had paired, and bet twenty. Uncle Am stayed, and so did the ace and the seven that had raised the first time, but the seven didn’t raise again, not into a pair of tens.

  On the fourth card Uncle Am got the three of diamonds, and raised a fifty-dollar bet another fifty. That knocked out both the other hands, leaving Uncle Am’s four-flush and the pair of tens.

  The pair of tens drew an indifferent card and Uncle Am drew the jack of spades, busting his flush but pairing his hole card. He had the tens beaten, but was licked if there was anything back of them.

  The pair of tens said, “I’ll bet ‘em. A hundred. Whatever part of it you can cover.” He tossed five yellows into the pot.

  Uncle Am sighed and counted his chips. “Eighty,” he said. “Call. Jacks.”

  The pair of tens flipped over a trey to match his fifth card.

  Uncle Am nodded. “Hold the seat. Got to get reinforcements.” I walked with him over to the cashier’s table. He bought two hundred dollars worth, and I noticed that it emptied his wallet. He said, “Don’t worry, Ed, I’ve got more stashed back on the lot. We won’t be broke.”

  “I’m not worrying,” I told him. “But, say, maybe I’m a jinx. Should I wander off and not watch?”

  He shook his head. “No jinxes in poker, Ed. It’s just judgment—and the cards.”

  I watched a couple of more hands in which Uncle Am folded early.

  Then he hit aces up, bet the works, and lost to three sixes. He stood up and nodded to a guy who’d been waiting for an open chair.

  He grinned at me. “Kid, the rest of the party’s on you. Will you buy me a beer?”

  I said, “Sure,” and took out my wallet. I started to count out the hundred I’d cashed out, to give it to him. He saw what I was doing and stopped me, but after a little argument, I got him to take back the thirty-five he’d started me with.

  We stopped for another beer apiece in the bar in front of the gambling rooms.

  I was wondering how much he’d dropped; h
e’d bought two hundred the second time and if he’d bought a hundred the first time, it had been three hundred bucks. He must have guessed what I was thinking. He chuckled.

  “Easy came, easy went, Ed. But you worry me. You’re no gambler. You quit before you broke the wheel.”

  “It looked pretty substantial,” I told him.

  “Maybe so. Well, I guess I’m no gambler either, or else I’d go back and lose this thirty-five bucks—or else get back what I lost.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Should I?”

  I said, “It’s your life. I wouldn’t advise you.” He laughed and went back into the gambling rooms. He came back in ten minutes, grinning. He said, “Some days you can’t lay away a dime.”

  I ordered us another beer. I said, “Now that that’s off your mind, let’s get back to murder. I still don’t get why you said Susie’s dying would bring Cap Weiss back here. How?”

  “He’ll learn about it from the Fort Wayne police. And he’ll come back, just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  Uncle Am sighed and sloshed his beer around in the glass. “Ed, I told you I used to work for a detective agency once, for a few years, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, we didn’t work on murder cases much, so I don’t know anything about ‘em. But if I did know anything, I’d say there were two kinds. First, the kind where the coppers catch the guy with the gun in his hand, or running away, or where a guy calls the police station and says, ‘I just killed my wife.’ That’s one kind. And then there’s the other kind.”

  “Which is?”

  “That’ll cost you another beer.” I ordered him one.

  He said, “The second kind is comparatively rare, but it happens. It’s the kind of murder you read about in detective stories. It’s the kind of a murder this one is. It’s a puzzle for the cops to solve.”

  “And so?” I prompted him.

  “And so the only way they can do it is to dig up facts— a few million seemingly irrelevant facts, maybe, and then try to guess which of them aren’t irrelevant so they can fit them into a pattern that spells mother.”

  “You mean, spells murder.”

  “Only three letters difference. But my point is, the facts which they try hardest to fit into the pattern are the unusual ones. Just like Weiss had in mind when he asked you to keep your ears and eyes open for anything unusual that might happen. Isn’t that how he put it?”

  I thought back, and then I nodded.

  “Weiss is a smart duck,” Uncle Am said. “And isn’t it unusual for a chimpanzee to drown in a diving tank? How many chimps have you known to drown in diving tanks?”

  “Not very many,” I admitted. “Specifically, one. So it’s unusual. Q.E.D.”

  “But how would it tie in with the murder of the midget?” He put down his glass of beer and made little wet circles on the bar with the bottom of the glass. Finally he said, “How was the midget brought to the lot? Why was he killed? Who gained what by doing it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So if you don’t know those things, how could you figure out how it could tie in with the death of a sick chimp? But you do know that they have two things in common already. One is that they both happened with the carney. The other is that they’re both unusual. So why, maybe, wouldn’t they have still more things in common?”

  I thought it over. “Maybe,” I admitted. “But I still don’t see how you can fit them together.”

  “You can’t, with what we have. You need other facts. Then it might all make a pattern. But finding those other facts is Weiss’s job, not ours. Only, what else have you got to tell Weiss if he wants to know what’s been going on?”

  I lighted a cigarette, thinking it over. I said, “About Major Mote being scared stiff and locking himself in the trailer.”

  “Good boy. Now why is that especially good?”

  “Because it concerns a midget; so did the murder.”

  “We’ll make a detective out of you yet. How’d you like to be one?”

  I thought about it seriously. “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s the right answer, too. But let’s get back to the Major. You do see, don’t you, that there’s one simple, obvious explanation of it—which might be as wrong as hell?”

  I thought again. “It might be he’s just afraid of chimps, and knowing one was on the loose gave him the meemies. Come to think of it, a chimp, to a midget, would be as big and dangerous as a gorilla is to a man.”

  “Attaboy. So, if you really want to help Weiss, you can find out for him, tomorrow, if the Major is still scared now that there aren’t any more live chimpanzees around.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, not too enthusiastically. “Anybody else been scared?” he asked. “Ummm—Rita was scared the night of the murder. But that’s understandable. She fell over the body. Any woman would be scared.”

  “That’s all?”

  “All I know of,” I said. “Why? Who else?”

  “Marge Hoagland. She’s been scared ever since the murder. Hadn’t you noticed?”

  I shook my head. Then I told him, “Now that I think of it, she has acted a little funny a few times. How about Hoagy?”

  “Hoagy wouldn’t be scared of the devil himself.”

  “I guess he wouldn’t,” I said. “But—maybe Marge is scared of Hoagy. He’s been drinking a bit more than usual lately.”

  “Never enough to get out of control. He can hold it. No, I don’t think that’s Marge’s trouble. Hoagy’s not hot-tempered; I don’t believe I ever saw him mad, drunk or sober. And, too—”

  “What?”

  “Marge wouldn’t be afraid of him anyway; she’s too much in love with him. She’d go through hell for him, if he sent her.”

  “Say,” I said, “about the Major— Did anybody check with Carey to see if he was okay when Carey got back after we searched the woods?”

  Uncle Am said, “I did. Carey and I put him in a cab and started him off for his hotel. He was awake by then, but woozy.”

  “Oh,” I said, and felt a little better about it. “Want another beer?”

  He did, and I had one with him this time. Then we decided to call it a night and go home. There wasn’t anything else either of us wanted to do.

  CHAPTER VIII

  In the morning, the first person I saw, outside of Uncle Am, was Armin Weiss. While we were getting dressed, somebody called out, “How the hell do you knock on a tent flap?” and it was Weiss.

  He sat down on one of the folding chairs and wanted to know all about the chimp business and we told him. He’d already talked to Hoagy and Marge and had the facts, but he wanted to check them with us and see if we could add anything. He was particularly curious about how the chimp had got out of the cage, and I was glad I’d checked that angle and could tell him how it had worked out.

  He told us nobody had seen him come into our tent so it wouldn’t matter how long he stayed. He stuck around for quite a while.

  He’d run into pretty much of a dead end in Cincinnati. He’d found out a lot about the midget, Lon Staff old, but nothing he’d learned had led to the Hobart Shows. He was pretty discouraged, and admitted that it looked as though he wasn’t getting anywhere at all.

  “A damned carnival,” he said, “is the limit. For any other murder, the setting stays put, if nothing else does. But a murder happens in Evansville and a few days later, the whole damned surroundings of it and all the people concerned in it, are in South Bend, and then in Fort Wayne, and then—where do we go next?”

  “Milwaukee,” Uncle Am told him.

  Weiss grunted disgustedly.

  “Well,” he said, “I get mileage allowance on my car. Say, Ed, outside of the monkey business—and I don’t see how that means anything, I admit—have you noticed anything out of the ordinary?”

  I told him about Major Mote’s being scared the night of the monkey hunt.

  “Could mean something,” he said. “Then again he could have
, like you say, been scared of the chimp being loose. I thought he was a little scared that night, the night of the murder, I mean, when I talked to him. And, if you’ve wondered, I’ve checked Major Mote’s history back to his great-grandparents since then, account of him being a midget and it being a midget was killed. He never worked at any carney this Lon Scaffold midget worked at. I can’t find that they ever met or even knew about each other.”

  He shoved his hat back on his head. He said, “Such a goddam case. It’s like hunting a black cat in a dark alley when you don’t even know if the cat’s there.”

  He turned down a drink, then changed his mind and took one.

  “Sticking around town a while,” he said. “I’ll be at the Ardmore Hotel till tomorrow noon. Damn if I know why. I don’t know of anything to do.”

  He took a second drink for what Uncle Am called a stirrup cup and finally left.

  That was Wednesday, and that night was Wednesday night, the thirteenth night after the murder.

  I won’t forget Wednesday night; it was the night of the third murder, the one that made us mad, Uncle Am and me. And it was the night I saw and smelled a ghost.

  The crowd faded early that night. There was no special reason for it; they just did. By eleven or a little after, the midway was thinning out. The talkers on the shows started to turn their last tips and Maury gave the signal to give the free show—the dive act at eleven-thirty—and get it over with.

  We got a few on their way out after the free show, and let down our front before midnight.

  As usual, Uncle Am said, “Well, kid?” I think he wanted me to want him to take me to the rounds again, but I didn’t. I told him I’d mess around on the tram awhile.

  I got it out and tried some Dorsey arrangements that were too tough for me to play well, and managed to discourage myself pretty quick. So I did a few scales and arpeggios and let it go at that. The tram just didn’t feel right or sound right, and there’s no use monkeying around when you feel that way.

  Uncle Am had been lying on his cot, reading. He put down his book and watched me polish up the trombone and put it back in the case. He said nothing, but I knew what he was thinking.