“I haven’t lost interest in it,” I said. “It’s just that—well—”
“Yeah,” he said. “Ed, we all go through it. Some of us survive. Sometimes we live to a ripe old age.”
He shook his head slowly. “Did I ever tell you about the redhead I knew once in Cairo?”
“You weren’t ever in Egypt,” I told him. “Don’t try to kid me.”
He looked injured. “The hell I wasn’t. This was Cairo, Illinois. But I’ve been in Egypt, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, damn it. Little Egypt. Sometime remind me to tell you about that. Right now we’re in Cairo on the Mississippi. It was in—let’s see—the year of the big snowstorm. Only this was in summer and the snowstorm was in the winter …”
I quit listening until he ran down. Then I said, “Let’s go over to Carey’s.”
Uncle Am said, “Sure,” and put his shoes back on.
We went to Carey’s trailer. Estelle was there. The radio was going full blast; we’d heard it from clear out on the midway. It was a late dance music program from Chi. Carey and Estelle were dancing.
We pushed in and Uncle Am turned down the volume on the radio. He said, “For God’s sake, are you people deaf?”
Carey and Estelle broke, and Carey said, “The mighty Hunters. What do you want to drink? We got whisky.”
I said I didn’t want anything yet and Uncle Am guessed he’d take whisky. The bottle was on the table and he took a drink out of it.
Lee said, “Am, I got a half-baked idea about a new routine—tossing broads out of a Svengali deck. I want you to help me work up a patter.”
He reached into his pocket with his right hand, but grabbed the air with his left and there was the deck. He sat down at one side of the table and Uncle Am at the other and I heard him start explaining how he was tying in the Mex turnover gimmick of monte with an alternating Svengali. Estelle and I just weren’t there.
The music on the radio wasn’t bad. It was a small combo with a string bass that stood out. I turned it up a little, not as loud as it had been before, and held out my arms to Estelle. She shook her head. “Let’s not dance, Eddie.”
That was okay by me; I hadn’t really wanted to. I sat down and Estelle sat on my lap.
Here we go again, I thought; well, anyway we’re chaperoned, if you could call Lee and Uncle Am chaperons. Thinking about that made me grin.
I said, “Uncle Am, you better protect me.” Estelle laughed. Uncle Am gave me a look over his shoulder and said, “God will protect the working boy,” and then turned back to Lee.
Estelle said, “Reach me the bottle, Eddie.”
She took a drink and I took one and put the bottle down. It was pretty bad whisky, I thought; it tasted raw and burned my throat on the way down.
Estelle said, “I feel a little dizzy, Eddie.”
“You are a little dizzy,” I told her. “Why shouldn’t you feel that way? But you better lay off that white mule, or I’ll have to carry you home.”
“Will you carry me home, Eddie? Now?”
“No,” I said.
“You’re so-o romantic, Eddie. That’s why I like you. That, and you’re so handsome.”
“Another crack like that, and you’ll land on the floor.”
“With you, Eddie?”
I said, “You little—” and couldn’t think of the right word to finish it. None of the words I knew fitted Estelle. “You’ve got a one-track mind.”
“So have you, only I wish it was on a different track. Say, is that whisky all right?”
“It’s pretty bad,” I said. “Don’t drink too much of it.”
“My heart’s beating too fast, I think. Feel it.” She put my hand over where she thought her heart was.
I took it away again. My mouth felt kind of dry; I had to swallow before I could talk. I said, “Cut it out, ‘Stelle. Please. I’m not made of wood, but damn it, I—”
“Answer me one question, Eddie. Honestly.”
“Sure.”
She sat up a little and turned her head to look at my face. “Are you really in love—I mean, the real stuff—with that— with Rita?”
“I guess so,” I said. “I mean— My God, yes.”
She gave a little mock sigh and then, surprisingly, she smiled at me. She said, “All right then, Eddie, you win. I’ll quit teasing you. We’ll be friends?”
“Pals,” I told her.
“All right, Eddie. From now on. But first, kiss me. Just once. Nice.”
It jolted my memory; they were almost exactly the words Rita had used the first time I’d kissed her, two weeks ago, the night I’d taken her for a ride in Hoagy’s car to help her get over her touch of hysteria from falling over the dead midget. She’d signalled no passes, and then just before we started back, she’d asked me to kiss her just once, and nicely.
Estelle leaned toward me and I put my arms around her. I closed my eyes as our lips touched, and I was thinking of that first kiss I’d given Rita. I thought, why not? and let myself imagine it was Rita I was kissing again.
Estelle broke away. She sat up straight again and looked at me. Her eyes were sort of misty and then she smiled and they were all right again.
She said, “Was that nice? My God, Eddie. Well, I asked for it, didn’t I?”
I smiled at her but she didn’t smile back. Her face got serious. She said, “I meant it, Eddie. From now on I won’t tease you any more. You’re Rita’s, and I’ll keep hands off. Honest. We’ll be friends. Say, does it bother you if I sit on your lap?”
I lied and said it didn’t.
She reached over and got the bottle again and this time she said, “You take one first, Eddie,” and I did. I handed her the bottle and it was while she was drinking that I looked up at the open window, over Estelle’s shoulder.
Maybe it was the smell that made me look up; I don’t remember, exactly, which I became aware of first—that smell, or the sight of what it was looking into the window.
It was a monkey, a chimp. And it was either Susie or a dead ringer for her.
The face was a few inches outside the window, not in the direct light of the bulb in the trailer’s ceiling, but I could see it fairly dearly. It was the comic-opera-Irishman face of a chimp, and nothing else. Only it wasn’t comic: I was scared stiff.
The smell was the smell of fresh earth, the smell of a new grave. And I could see that there was fresh earth, not yet completely dry, clinging to the hair of the chimpanzee’s face and head.
It wasn’t my imagination, that smell. Whatever I saw, I didn’t imagine the smell. There was a draft that was almost a breeze coming in at that window and for just an instant that earth smell was stronger than the smell of whisky or the smell of Estelle’s perfume.
And then the face was gone, and the window was empty.
And the smell was gone, too.
Estelle was handing me back the bottle. She was saying, “That is lousy stuff, Eddie. But before I put it back, do you want anoth— What’s wrong, Eddie? You sick?”
She was up off my lap suddenly, standing there looking down at me, and the sudden change in her voice had made Lee Carey look over toward me, and Uncle Am too turned around and then stood up.
He said, “What the hell, kid? You’re white as—” Somehow I didn’t want to say, just then, what I’d seen. And already I was beginning to wonder whether I’d really seen it. Did whisky really— No, I thought, nobody gets D.T.’s suddenly after a couple of drinks. But—
I shook my head as though to clear it. It was easy to see what they thought was wrong with me, and I said, “I’m all right. I—just felt funny all of a sudden. I want some air.”
I got up and went to the door of the trailer. Estelle must have started to follow me because I heard Uncle Am stop her and say something about letting me alone; if I was going to be sick I wouldn’t want company.
As the door shut behind me I heard Estelle telling Lee to get some coffee going quick.
And if I thought I�
�d been scared in the trailer, I hadn’t known what being scared was. Because, out in the darkness alone, I knew now what I’d come out to do. But I knew if I thought about it I’d make it worse, so instead of thinking, I went around to the other side of the trailer, where the window was.
There wasn’t any chimp there, dead or alive. There was enough light so I could see that. But there was a wooden packing box standing almost against the side of the trailer, and almost under the window. A chimp could have stood on that box and looked in.
I was less scared now. I don’t know what I’d expected to find, but there was a reassuring look about that packing case that took the edge off my fright. I walked up to the packing box and moved it. It was empty and there wasn’t anything under it.
I backed off a dozen steps and moved around to where I could get a look under the trailer itself, with the open space silhouetted against the all-night midway lights between two of the tops. I bent down and looked carefully. There wasn’t anything under the trailer.
I walked back slowly to the trailer. I thought of striking matches, or going back for a flashlight, to look for footprints, but I could tell by the feel of the ground under my soles that it was too hard. Footprints wouldn’t show.
I sat down on the packing box a minute to think it out.
Trying to figure what I’d seen just made me more confused. Susie had been the only chimp on the lot; there wasn’t any doubt about that. Also, there wasn’t any doubt that I could think of about Susie being dead. Dead enough to bury; one of the wheel men had told me Hoagy’d buried her in the woods west of the lot, the woods we’d hunted through yesterday morning.
Was there any chance Susie hadn’t really been dead? I didn’t see how there could be; I hadn’t been there, but plenty of other people had seen her body fished out of the tank of water. Surely Hoagy wouldn’t have buried her—
It seemed so impossible, so utterly silly, that I began to wonder if I really had seen something that wasn’t there. Or, more likely, somebody—maybe from the jig show or one of the colored canvas men—had looked in the window, and my mind had been tricked into supplying details that weren’t there. I told myself that, but I didn’t believe it. After a while I went back around the trailer and went inside again. Estelle was back by the hot plate, and there was a percolator bubbling on top of it.
Carey said, “Feeling better, Ed?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Guess I’m not going to be sick. You can skip the coffee, Estelle.”
“You’re going to drink some or get it poured down your neck, Eddie. It’ll be ready in a minute.”
Uncle Am said, “You’re still a little pale around the gills, kid. The coffee won’t hurt you.”
I sat down by the table. I felt silly to realize what the others were thinking—that I hadn’t been able to hold two drinks, which was all I’d had, without shooting my cookies.
Carey walked down to the kitchen end to help Estelle find a cup, and Uncle Am walked around the table so he was between me and them, and they couldn’t hear him.
“What happened, Ed?” he asked. “It wasn’t the whisky, was it?”
I shook my head. Lee was coming back. I said, “I’ll tell you later.”
Carey picked up the bottle of whisky, still about a third full. He said, “We held an autopsy on this, Ed. The verdict is that it’s bad, but it’s still whisky. How many did you have?”
“Only a couple,” I told him. “It wasn’t that. I don’t know—something I ate maybe.”
He shook his head and put the bottle down. “Maybe it’s acute indigestion, Am. Maybe you should take him to a croaker.”
“I’m all right,” I said.
Uncle Am said, “He’ll be all right, Lee,” and winked at me. Estelle brought the coffee, thick as mud and hot as hell. I had to drink it. I wanted a drink of this whisky now; I felt shaky with reaction setting in. But I couldn’t very well take one, as long as Carey and Estelle thought it was the cause of my trouble.
Uncle Am and Carey went back to what they’d been talking about before the interruption, and I sipped at the coffee until I got rid of it. Estelle tried to wish a second cup on me, but I said fresh air would do me more good and I was going to take a walk.
“I’ll go with you,” she said. And that was all right by me.
We went out on the dim midway, heading for nowhere in particular.
“Want a drink?” I asked her. “At the tavern a block down the drag, where we were the other night?”
“Sure, Eddie, but—you shouldn’t drink any more.”
“Nuts,” I said, “it wasn’t the whisky, ‘Stelle. I’m all right, no kidding.”
“If you’re sure—”
We strolled on down to the street and down to the tavern. It was still open. We took a booth and ordered highballs.
Estelle drank her first one fast, but sipped her second.
“Eddie,” she said, “what happened between you and Skeets Geary?”
“Not much. Why?”
“I’d watch out for him, Eddie. I don’t know what you did to him, but he’s got a grudge. And a guy like him—settles one. A guy like that will wait a month or a season, until you’ve forgotten about it, and then—blooie.”
“He’s yellow. He’s got a wide stripe of—”
“Sure, Eddie. He wouldn’t do anything he’d get caught at, or that you could trace back to him for sure. He wouldn’t lay a finger on you himself. But—”
“Okay,” I told her. “So if a pole falls on my head, or I step in a mud hole, I’ll know it’s Skeets and I’ll look him up and take him apart.”
“Don’t underrate him, Eddie. He’s got dough; the side show’s been making plenty this season. He made a killing that one week in Evansville, with that x-marks-the-spot business and the knife. And he doesn’t waste his money either, like most of us carneys. He’s—rich, I guess, compared with the rest of us. He can hire anything he wants done.”
I reached across the table and patted her hand. I said, “Thanks, ‘Stelle. I’ll watch myself.”
She pulled her hand out from under mine. She said, “No passes now, Eddie. We’re friends, remember?” I laughed. “Right. No passes.”
“And Dutch treat. I’ll buy the next round. That is, if you’re sure it’s all right for you to – ”
“I’m okay. Don’t worry about me.”
I wished now that I hadn’t started the gag of the whisky making me sick. But I’d started it and I was stuck with it; I’d have to argue every time I got one.
So I let her order a round. The highballs tasted smooth and harmless after that vicious stuff in Carey’s trailer. “Eddie—”
“Yes?”
“Look, now that we’re friends, I was lying to you about Rita.”
“So?”
“She isn’t a bitch, like I said. She’s a swell kid, Eddie. She wasn’t with the posing show so long, but long enough for us to know that. And nobody with the whole damn carney got to first base with her, except you.”
I hadn’t any business asking, but I did. “And the mooch—the banker?”
“I’m not sure about that, Eddie.” She was very serious. “There—there was something about her having an appointment with one, but I think it was something about business. Anyway—”
“At closing time? Two in the morning?”
“I know it sounds silly, but—I think it was.”
“Uh-huh.”
She leaned forward; she was really serious about it. “Now listen, Eddie. Don’t be like that. Rita’s a good kid. Say it wasn’t business. That doesn’t mean it was monkey business either, does it? I mean, she met him at the bank, opening an account or cashing a check or something, and he asks her if she’ll have a drink with him after the carney closes, that doesn’t mean she has any idea of going to bed with him, does it?”
“No-o,” I admitted.
“All carney girls aren’t easy to make, Ed. Just most of them, they want to be. Rita’s no pushover for small-town bankers.”
I grinned at her; she was serious. “Just big-town bankers?” I asked.
For a minute I thought she was going to get mad; then she laughed.
“Why not?” she asked, and all of a sudden she was serious again. “You know yourself, Eddie, that gal doesn’t belong with a carney. She can hit the big time if she wants. And just by teasing big shots along; she’s smart enough not to put out if she didn’t want to. Only she wasn’t smart enough not to fall for you.”
I said, “She ought to have her head examined, for that.” I really meant it.
I caught the bartender’s eye and signaled for a couple more drinks. I was just beginning to feel the ones I’d had, just a nice edge, feeling just right. The bartender brought our drinks and told us they’d be the last, that the tavern was closing. So we drank them and I bought a half pint of good bourbon to take along in my pocket, and we went back to the lot.
In the tavern, I’d managed to forget what I’d seen through the window; being on the lot brought it back again.
Inside the main gate, I stopped. There was something I had to do. I knew now what it was, and I knew I didn’t want to wait until daylight to do it.
Estelle asked, “What’s the matter, Eddie?”
“’Stelle, where and when did Hoagy bury Susie?”
“Huh? Why?”
I said, “I just want to know.”
“Yesterday afternoon, late. I saw Hoagy and Pop Janney heading for the woods with her. Hoagy was carrying the chimp and Pop had a spade. That was just after they found her. Why, Eddie?”
“Are you sure it was the chimp he was carrying?”
“Eddie, are you crazy?”
“A little. Are you sure it was the chimp?”
“It was wrapped in canvas, but— Why wouldn’t it have been?”
“Why would it? You didn’t see it.”
“I saw her fished out of the tank, Eddie. We were putting on a bally on the platform then. The posing show’s right near the tank. We lost our tip when they found Susie. Everybody went over around the tank, so Charlie gave up and quit spieling.”
“Did you go over?”
“No, we could see better from the bally platform. Right over everybody’s heads. Anyway, all I had on was a thin rayon dressing gown, and nothing under it but a g-string. I wouldn’t tangle in a crowd of rubes, dressed like that. It’d start a clam, with me in the middle. I’m not that dumb.”
The Dead Ringer Page 11