The Dead Ringer

by Fredric Brown

  I went back to the phone booth and got Estelle on the phone.

  “Hi, Eddie.” Her voice sounded sleepy. “Just woke up.”

  “You haven’t heard what happened, then?”

  “What, Eddie?”

  I told her the little I knew about what had happened, and that Uncle Am and I wanted to talk to her to get our stories straight before either of us did any more talking to the police. And I told her about meeting us at Maxie’s at two.

  “Eddie,” she asked, “you talking from a private booth?”

  “Yes.”

  “About last night, Eddie. I know it didn’t mean anything. We said that, so let’s mean it. I—I really didn’t mean it to; I honestly meant what I said first, and I don’t want to spoil anything between you and Rita.”

  I felt better. I said, “Thanks, kid. You’re swell.”

  “You didn’t tell anybody? I mean your uncle?”

  “I didn’t tell him, ‘Stelle, but I wouldn’t put it past him to be pretty sure about it. He’s a hard guy to fool; he can read me like a pack of marked cards.”

  She laughed a little.

  “Okay, Eddie. Anyway, it never happened. Right?”

  “Right,” I said. It was more than that; it was a hell of a load off my mind. ‘“By then. I’ll see you at Maxie’s.”

  I went back to the bar and told Uncle Am it was all set.

  “Come on, then,” he said. “We got time to go back to the lot.”

  “What for?”

  “I want you to get that trenching shovel. If you’d left it where you did the digging, that’d be all right because you’re going to level about that. But you don’t want to have to explain to the cops how come you forgot it at the edge of the woods, do you?”

  “I guess I don’t,” I admitted.

  We left the tavern and started back to the lot, and Uncle Am said, “While you’re doing that, I want to talk to a few guys with the side show. We never did follow through about the Major and his being so damn scared about the monkey business. Remember? We were going to find out if he had a phobia on chimps or if it might have been something else.”

  I said, “We told Weiss about it. Maybe he followed through on it.”

  “He could have tried, but it would be pretty tough for him to get the straight dope—unless the Maj happened to feel like telling him. And I wouldn’t bet on that.”

  On the midway, we were stopped by a pair of cops again and we had to explain we’d been put on record already. We pointed out the cops we’d talked to and they gave us the high sign, so that let us through the blockade.

  We split up, then, and agreed to meet at Lee’s joint. I cut off the midway to the south side, nearest the woods, and didn’t have any trouble finding the shovel. I went the long way around the outside so as not to have to cut across the midway carrying it, and put it in our living top.

  Then, because I had time, I changed clothes and put on my good suit and another pair of shoes, since we’d be eating downtown. I’d been in such a hurry dressing the first time that I’d put on the clothes I’d taken off the night before, work clothes to begin with and muddy in spots from the digging I’d done.

  Uncle Am and Lee Carey were waiting for me. Uncle Am whistled when he saw me coming. “What the well-dressed young man will wear.”

  Lee said, “A page out of Esquire.”

  “Shall I go back and put on overalls?” I asked Uncle Am.

  “Won’t be time. Lee’s driving in to town; we can catch a lift with him. We’ll get there in plenty of time for the show.” His back was toward Lee and he winked at me, so I didn’t say, “What show?” I got it that I wasn’t to crack to Lee about what we really were going in to town for.

  CHAPTER X

  We got in Carey’s coupe, Uncle Am in the middle and me on the outside. It was the first time I’d been with Lee in his car and I noticed, as we went in to town, that he drove with the same easy dexterity with which he handled cards and coins. He was a fast driver but a good one; he could tool that little coupe through holes in traffic that didn’t look big enough to fit a kiddy-car.

  As we neared the downtown section, Uncle Am asked, “Say, Lee, happen to know what hotel the Major’s staying at?”

  Uncle Am turned to me when he shook his head.

  He said, “The Maj is scared again. Lee tells me he came out to the lot early today, a little after noon, and then turned around and high-tailed out again, grabbed a cab and beat it.”

  “When he heard Jigaboo was murdered?”

  “Yeah. That is, Jigaboo was murdered. The cops aren’t— Okay, Lee, you can drop us here. I got an errand or two before we take in the show.”

  We got off and headed into a department store and kept going on through to go out the doors on the side street. Uncle Am said, “We’re only a block from Maxie’s.”

  I asked, “Why did we give Lee the runaround?”

  “General principles, kid. Never advertise your business. If the carneys got the idea we were seeing Weiss, some of them would clam up on us. And if we’d told Lee we were meeting Estelle for breakfast, he might’ve wanted to come along. If we’re going to straighten out your story and hers about last night—well, no reason why he should listen in on that.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Did you find out what happened to Jigaboo? I mean, how he was killed?”

  “Lee knew a little about it; I didn’t talk to anybody else. Here’s Maxie’s. Wait, if Estelle’s already here, I don’t want to have to tell it twice, otherwise while we’re waiting for her—”

  Estelle had taken a table not far back, and was watching the door. She saw us come in, and waved. We went over and sat down at the table. Estelle started to ask something, and Uncle Am said, “Hold it.” A waitress was coming.

  We ordered, and waited until she was out of earshot, and then Uncle Am said, “Okay, kids, here’s the little I found out from Lee that we didn’t know. Jigaboo was found about four o’clock this morning, before dawn. Not on the lot—on a road somewhere. Looked like he’d been hit by a car. Took him to the morgue as a routine accident case and didn’t identify him till almost noon. His parents missed him then and—”

  “He was gone all night?” I interrupted. “And they didn’t miss him till noon?”

  “Yeah. They sleep all over the lot. He used to sleep in the number four van mostly, with his ma, but she figured he’d bedded down somewhere else and didn’t think anything of it for a while. Then she went to Maury and asked about him. Maury figures the kid maybe ran away—he did once early in the season—and he knows the kid being gone will put a crimp in the jig show. So he gets a few canvas men and ride boys to help look in likely places and to ask around, and when the kid doesn’t turn up and nobody’s seen him, Maury starts phoning.” I said, “There must be some reason, though, why the police think he was murdered. If it was just that he was hit by a car somewhere, they wouldn’t have sent that battery of harness bulls out to the lot.”

  Uncle Am nodded. “There must be, Ed. But I don’t know any more than I just told you. Well, Estelle—”

  “Yes, Am?”

  He told her that we were seeing Weiss—and had to explain who Weiss was and what he was doing in Fort Wayne—and that I was going to tell Weiss the truth about digging into Susie’s grave, and why I’d done it.

  He said, “If you want to stay out of it, we can say Ed did the digging alone, after he put you in a cab.”

  Estelle looked from me to Uncle Am and back again. She said, “I—I guess not. No reason why you shouldn’t tell him I was along, and held the flashlight for you. There’s nothing they can charge us with, is there?”

  Uncle Am shook his head. “No, definitely. There’s probably a law about digging into a human grave without official permission. But not an animal’s.”

  “Okay,” Estelle said. She looked at me. “But you’re not going to tell him—”

  I said, “After the digging business, I put you right in a taxi. You were feeling a little shaky, remember?”


  “Yeah. I was. Okay, Eddie. Deal me in, then.” The waitress brought our grub, and we didn’t talk much while we ate. Then Estelle said she was going on out to the lot, and we put her on a bus and went around to the Ardmore Hotel.

  At the desk, the clerk told us Weiss hadn’t come in yet, but had phoned and left word we were to go on up and wait in his room. The clerk gave us the key, and we took the elevator up and found his room.

  Uncle Am sat on the bed and I went over and stood looking out the window, although there was nothing to see but the other side of a wide airshaft. We didn’t talk.

  After a while I heard the door open behind me and turned around as Weiss came in. He looked hot and tired. He said, “Hi,” kind of listlessly, took off his hat and suit coat and unbuttoned his vest. Then, before he said anything else to us, he sat down on the straight chair in front of the writing table and picked up the telephone.

  He asked for room service and ordered a fifth of Seagram’s and a couple of extra glasses.

  I wondered why he hadn’t brought it along with him, since he’d just come in. He must have been a mind-reader, because he looked over at me as he put the phone down. He said, “Cheaper this way. If it’s on the hotel bill, which I tell ‘em not to itemize too closely, the department pays for it.”

  He grinned and tilted the chair back against the desk. “Got something, Am?”

  Uncle Am said, “Maybe. Maybe not. The kid had a funny experience last night. Get it straight from him.”

  I told him what had happened, starting with Uncle Am and me going to Lee’s joint, and Estelle being there, and then how I’d happened to look at the open window and what I’d seen, or thought I’d seen. I picked my words carefully, trying not to exaggerate it and not to play it down too much, either.

  He interrupted me a few times to ask questions, but mostly he let me tell it my own way. When I got to the part about deciding to be sure Susie was still where she was supposed to be, he asked, “Why? Did you think she’d dug her way out again?”

  I said, “I don’t know exactly what I thought. I’d just seen a chimp, and Susie was the only chimp around. I—I just wanted to be God damn sure it wasn’t Susie I’d seen. I just had other people’s word she was dead.”

  He snorted a little. “Several thousand other people. Okay, so you and this Estelle—Beck, you say her last name is?—went out and dug. So?”

  “So Susie was there. I filled in the hole again, and that’s all.”

  He ran his hand through his thinning hair. “Way I got it, they wrapped the monk up in canvas to bury her. Did you really follow through, and open up the canvas to be sure what was in it?”

  I’d been hoping he’d ask that. I grinned at him. “Why? Do you think she’d dug her way out again, and left something else in the canvas?”

  He grunted, and Uncle Am chuckled.

  I said, “Yes, I opened up the canvas. It was Su— Wait a minute; to be strictly accurate, I don’t know for sure that it was Susie inside. But it was a chimpanzee, and it was dead.”

  “A female one?”

  “I didn’t get that intimate with it.”

  He grunted again. “How’s the level of that trailer window? Could a man look in without standing on anything?”

  I said, “A man could. A chimp would have to be standing on something, but there was something it could have stood on.” I told him about the packing case I’d found outside.

  Uncle Am said, “It was still there today; I looked. And I asked Lee about it and he said it had been there before yesterday. So it wasn’t put there last night especially to let a chimp look in the window.”

  “An empty case?”

  “Yeah. Came early in the week with stuff from the magic supply house Lee deals with. Twenty gross of the outfits of slum he pitches in the side show, and some other magic stuff, for himself.”

  “Like maybe a monkey illusion?”

  Uncle Am shrugged. “I didn’t ask him.”

  I said, “You’re off the beam there, Cap. It wasn’t any illusion—I mean, any rigged-up illusion. It was—”

  Weiss held up his hand, and I shut up. I hadn’t heard the footsteps but there was a knock on the door. Weiss called out, “Come in,” and a bellboy brought in the whisky and glasses.

  After he’d gone, Weiss poured us drinks. I told him to make mine short. He handed it to me and said, “Okay, Ed. You were saying about illusions—?”

  “It wasn’t any rigged-up illusion,” I told him. “I’ll bet on that. It could have been—but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t—a trick of eyesight; I mean, sometimes you take a quick look at something and think it’s something else till you take a second look.”

  Weiss nodded. “I’ve had that happen. Seen a man in the hallway at home, clear as hell. Then you take a second look, and it’s the hat rack with a coat on a hanger on it and a hat on top. For just a fraction of a second, your mind, your imagination, supplies the missing details.”

  I said, “This could have been that. I don’t think it was. For one reason, it was—well, I’d guess it was a full second I saw it, maybe two or three seconds. It was about a foot back from the window, though, and it was dark outside. The only light on it was indirect, from inside the trailer. I’ll give you the possibility that it might have been a man looking in, but I still don’t think it was.”

  Weiss nodded slowly. “A colored man, if anything. You’ve got lots of them with the carney. A trick of the light—”

  Uncle Am said, “Maybe. And maybe not. The kid isn’t imaginative, Cap. Well, that’s the story. Take it or leave it; we give it to you.”

  Weiss ran his fingers through his hair again. He said, “Thanks. If I needed anything to help me go nuts, this is it. Well—thanks, anyway. Another drink?”

  Uncle Am took one, but I shook my head. Weiss poured a big one himself, but put it down on the desk without drinking it. He sat down in the chair again.

  He said, “Now we got another angle. Major Mote—whose real name, if it matters, is Joseph Danton.”

  Uncle Am said, “I meant to tell you, Cap. He’s scared again. He came out to the lot about noon today and—”

  Weiss interrupted him. “I know about that. I mean, the other night. He got scared, in Lee Carey’s trailer, same as Ed did last night. Did a chimp maybe look in the same window?” I looked at Uncle Am. His mouth fell open a little. I said, “Susie would have been drowned by then. They don’t know how long she’d been gone and—”

  Weiss said, “Susie was drowned by last night, for sure. So why couldn’t the Major have seen whatever you saw?”

  I thought a minute this time before I answered. Then I said, “No, I don’t think it was anything he saw; it was Marge’s coming to the door of the trailer and telling us Susie was missing. I was looking at the Maj when she came, and he was all right then. Just sitting looking kind of glum, on the edge of the bunk. Marge came to the door and we were all looking toward her while she was telling us Susie’d got loose and asking us to help hunt. The Major would have been looking that way, too. Then when she got up to go out, less than a minute later, was when I looked at the Maj again and saw he was scared. It was what Marge said that scared him.”

  Weiss said, “Oh. Well, it was a good idea while it lasted.” He picked up his whisky from the desk and tossed it off.

  Uncle Am said, “Now you tell us, Cap. What we don’t know about Jigaboo’s death would fill a fair-sized book.”

  Weiss grinned without any humor back of it. He said, “You bring me that book, Am, and I’ll autograph it for you. How much do you know?”

  Uncle Am told him.

  Weiss said, “There isn’t much more. He was found on the Dane road, half a mile past the city limits. That’s about a mile from the carnival lot. It’s not any road that goes by the lot. Early this morning, four-ten to be exact, he was seen by a motorist, lying at the edge of the road. The motorist stopped, found the kid was stone dead, so he didn’t try to rush him to a hospital or anything like that. He left h
is car parked there so nobody else’d run over the body and walked back to where he could use a phone.

  “He called the sheriff’s office and they sent out a couple of deputies and the wagon. There was only one screwy thing about it.” Weiss paused, but we didn’t ask any questions so he went on:

  “The kid didn’t have any clothes on. He was mother-naked.”

  Uncle Am swore softly.

  I said, “Like the midget that was killed on the lot.” A kind of funny chill went down my back.

  Weiss nodded. “Outside of that it could have been an ordinary enough accident. Cause of death, skull fracture. There were other bruises and contusions. There was blood on the roadway. Everything to indicate the kid had just been walking along the edge of the road and was knocked down by a hit-run driver. Except what would anybody—even a seven-year-old kid —be walking along a road without any clothes on for?

  “Well, that worried them, but they took him to the morgue and the best angle they could figure is maybe the kid lived not so far away and might have been walking in his sleep. The Carney’s not on that road and nobody thought of the carney.

  “The county officers made a report to the police that if anybody started asking for a little Negro boy, they had him. If they mentioned the no-clothes angle, it didn’t get across or didn’t get mentioned to the right people. Because the city police here know about the Lon Staffold murder, and they’ve been keeping an eye on the carney. The coincidence of another naked corpse would have sent ‘em right out there, asking questions. But as it was, nobody tied it in until the call came from the carney lot, from Maury, asking if there’d been a Negro kid turned in to the lost and found. That’s the whole story.”

  Uncle Am said, “That’s up till they started investigating. Since then?”

  “Nothing. They haven’t found anyone on the lot—and they’re talking to everybody—who’ll admit seeing the kid after midnight. More specifically, after eleven forty-five; that’s when his show closed. Nobody on the lot missed him or looked for him till morning so there’s no lead as to whether he was on the lot until almost four, or whether he left or was taken away as early as midnight.