The Dead Ringer

by Fredric Brown

  “Of course the coroner’s physician had a look at him, to make out the certificate. That was after the wagon brought him in, around five. Said he’d been dead an hour or two. That’d put the time of death between three and four o’clock. Not much traffic on that road at that time of the morning. It’s unlikely, but he could have been lying there since three o’clock, an hour and ten minutes before he was found. More likely he was killed there— or left there—about four o’clock and found ten minutes later.”

  I asked, “And his clothes?”

  “That’s the only interesting thing the investigation turned up, Ed. His clothes were in the number four van, where he usually slept, right on the carney lot. All he’d been wearing, which was a pair of overalls. Just as though—”

  “How about his costume—for the show, I mean—and his tap shoes?”

  “Oh, those. He changed out of them under the jig show top, and put on the pair of overalls. That was the last time he was seen—by several people, incidentally; all performers in the show.

  “And then—well, his overalls are in the van. Indications, such as they are, are that he went back and turned in. And then got up and left again, naked, or else somebody or something took him out of his bed—if you call a roll of blankets a bed.”

  “What do you mean,” I asked, “somebody or something?”

  “I dunno what I mean, Ed, unless maybe—well, a chimpanzee could carry off a kid, couldn’t it? And didn’t you see one on the lot that night?”

  Uncle Am cleared his throat. He said, “Don’t drink any more of that stuff, Cap. You’re talking like a double-horror show. You give me the creeps. Let’s have another drink, since it’s on the taxpayers.”

  Weiss poured them. I had another short one, myself. I carried it over to the window and stood looking out at nothing, across the airshaft.

  Uncle Am got up off the bed, and I could hear him walking back and forth in the space between the bed and the door. He said, “About the Maj. You know what hotel he’s at?”

  Weiss’s voice said, “None. He took it on the lam. If Susie scared him, then what happened to Jigaboo must have given him the screaming meemies. When he grabbed a cab from the lot, we found out, he took it to his hotel and had it wait there till he packed. He checked out, and the clerk says he could hardly talk. He put his stuff in the cab and went to the railroad station.

  “Well, a midget’s easy to trace. We found he headed for St. Louis, and we’ve wired ahead for them to hold him there.”

  I said, “The Maj couldn’t have killed Jigaboo. He couldn’t have carried him that far, and he doesn’t drive.”

  “Doesn’t or can’t?”

  “He hasn’t got a car. And he couldn’t drive an ordinary one; I mean, his feet couldn’t reach the pedals and he couldn’t see over the hood without standing or kneeling on the seat.”

  “Un-huh. Well, we didn’t figure him for that anyway. We want to find out what he’s scared of.” Weiss stared gloomily at the ceiling. “Not that it’s likely to mean anything. Nothing does, in this damn business.”

  “Yeah, Cap,” Uncle Am said. “Too bad the killer doesn’t sign his name for you.”

  Weiss didn’t even answer.

  I was tired of standing up. I went over and sat down on the bed. Something seemed to be stuck between two of my teeth and I started fumbling through my vest pockets to see if I had a toothpick. I didn’t find one, but in the lower right hand pocket my fingers touched something tiny and smooth.

  I took it out to see what it was, and it was the tiny red cube Lee had given me, the one of a pair of dice that had lost its mate.

  Idly I shook it in my hand and started tossing it on the bed cover with a vague idea of seeing if it was loaded. Uncle Am asked, “Where’d that come from, kid?” I told him, and he started pacing back and forth again. He said, “Cap, if you assume Susie’s death is a part of the pattern, then there are two things alike in all three killings.”

  Weiss frowned. He said, “Well, one is that none of ‘em had any clothes on. Not that you’d expect a chimp to be wearing any. What’s the other?”

  Uncle Am jerked a finger at me. “Look what the kid’s playing with. That tells you.”

  Weiss looked. He said, “Huh?” He thought a minute. “What about it? It’s a dice.”

  “Nope,” Uncle Am told him. “It’s a die, Cap. One of a pair of dice is a die. The little die. Staffold—Susie—Jigaboo. A midget, a chimp, a kid. But they were all the same size, Cap, within an inch or so.”

  Weiss said, “I’ll be a son of a bitch.” I rolled out the little die again. It wasn’t loaded; I was sure by now. I closed my eyes; there was something at the back of my mind that I could almost think of but not quite. I reached for it, but it slipped away.

  Uncle Am said, “Come on, Ed. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER XI

  The jig show was closed that night. The rest of the carney was running, but not doing much. The carneys all were jittery, too.

  I wondered why the marks weren’t coming in droves, the way they had in Evansville, after the first murder. That night had been like a madhouse. I asked Uncle Am about it.

  He said, “Hell, kid, I don’t think the marks know there’s been a murder. The kid’s death looked like hit-run—at first, anyway. Maybe they gave it to the papers that way, for some reason of their own.”

  “I’d like to get a paper and see.”

  “Go ahead. Unless you want to, don’t come back. I might close up anyway. The hell with it.”

  I walked to the nearest drugstore and got a Fort Wayne evening paper. I ordered a malted at the soda counter and while the clerk was making it I looked for the article on Jigaboo’s death.

  It wasn’t on the front page. I found it on the second page, about four column inches. It didn’t mention murder, or that the kid had been found naked. It didn’t even mention that he was Jigaboo, the boy wonder of the carney show. It identified him only as Booker T. Brent, 7, Negro, from the J. C. Hobart carnival. Just the outside facts, none of the inside ones.

  I went back to the lot. I told Uncle Am he’d been right and asked him why the cops had kept it out of the papers.

  He shrugged. “Just being cagy, Ed. Cops like to be cagy, even when they don’t know why. It makes them feel clever to keep something under their hats as long as they can.”

  I said, “If you’re cleverer than the cops, who killed Jigaboo?”

  “I don’t know, Ed. Good God, did you think I did know?”

  I said, “I think you could find out. You used to be a detective.”

  “Ed, I was an operative for a private agency; that’s all. I traced skips, checked references, did a little tailing, stuff like that. That’s different. And that was a long time ago.”

  “So you’re smarter now,” I said. “Seriously, why don’t you?”

  He frowned. “It seems to me, Ed, just night before last you weren’t enthusiastic even about keeping an eye open for Weiss.”

  “I could have been wrong. You told me I was. It could be we’ve both been wrong from the start, from the time you told me it wasn’t our business and I agreed with you. Only it’s worse for you because you could have done something about it.”

  “Who the hell do you think I am, kid? Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance or something?”

  He sounded annoyed with me, almost for the first time since I’d been with him. Uncle Am’s got the smoothest disposition of anyone I know; he’s pretty tough to ruffle.

  I didn’t answer. I sat down on the counter of the booth and didn’t say anything at all. That must have annoyed him more.

  He said, “God damn it, Ed, the police get paid for working on murders. Why should I break my neck doing their job for them? Even if I could.”

  “Because you could,” I told him.

  I didn’t look at him. I said, “When the midget got murdered, it wasn’t any of our business. But maybe if we’d made it our business the jig show wouldn’t be closed tonight. Maybe it’d be running, and wit
h Jigaboo up on that bally platform.”

  “God damn it, Ed—” It was the first time I’d ever heard him sound really mad. At me, anyway.

  A mark, a guy with patent leather hair and a flower in his buttonhole, had stopped in front of the booth. He asked, “What do you win if you knock all the—?” Uncle Am said, “Go to hell. We’re closed.” The mark glared at him like he was going to make a beef, but Uncle Am glared back, asking for trouble, and the mark changed his mind and went on.

  I said, “He was afraid of you. It’s that black slouch hat and the way you wear it. It makes you look sinister.”

  I didn’t look at him; I guess I was a little afraid to, after saying that. I sat there on the low counter of the booth, trying to juggle three baseballs and not having any luck with it.

  I dropped one of them and it hit my foot and rolled out of reach back toward one of the platforms the milk bottles were on. I didn’t get up to go after it.

  I thought, maybe this is the split-up between me and Uncle Am. I felt like hell. My stomach felt hollow.

  I said, “You’re mad because you know I’m right. You’ve got brains. More than these hick coppers—even Armin Weiss— have got. And you’re on the inside, instead of on the outside like they are. Maybe you couldn’t have found out who bumped off the midget and Susie.”

  Still I didn’t look at him. I said, “But God damn it, you could have tried, instead of playing rummy in the G-top. Me, too. We should have tried, even if it wasn’t any of our business. And if we had what it took, then Jigaboo wouldn’t have died last night. Don’t you see that?”

  Then neither of us said anything for a long time—it might have been only a minute or less, but it seemed like a year.

  And then another mark stopped in front of the booth. I heard him start to say something, and Uncle Am said, “Sorry, we’re closing.”

  His voice wasn’t mad any more. It was just normal; not even with the exaggerated calmness that comes to the top when you shove anger under and hide it. His voice was natural, and that meant it was decided one way or the other. I mean, he might be ready to say, “Okay, kid, if that’s the way you feel, we better split up.” Or—Or he might say what he did say when the mark moved on:

  “All right, Ed. Where do we start?”

  It was all right, then. I got up and got the baseball that had rolled to the back. I came back with it.

  He was grinning at me when I faced him. He said, “About this hat, kid. Which makes me look the most sinister—like this, or if I turn the brim down all the way around, like this?”

  He turned it down all around, and either way—with that grin on his mush—he looked about as sinister as Porky Pig. I tried to keep my face straight, but I couldn’t.

  When I managed to get things back to a serious plane again, I said, “Listen, Uncle Am, I didn’t mean we should close up and go at this full time. I just meant that from now on let’s really try to use our eyes and brains.

  “As to where we should start, I was hoping you might have an idea. Let’s skip it till we close tonight, and then talk it over and see if we can get an angle.”

  He said, “Sure, Ed. But I don’t feel like working tonight anyway. Let’s dose up. We won’t lose much.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I reached up to lower the canvas front but somebody said, “Hi, Ed.” I looked, and it was Armin Weiss.

  “Step on over,” Uncle Am told him.

  Weiss did, and I lowered the front, with the three of us behind it. Weiss sat down on the counter, his back to the canvas, and asked, “How come closing?”

  Uncle Am said, “We just ain’t ambitious, Cap. Don’t feel like working.”

  Weiss sighed. “Oh, for the life of a carney.”

  “What’s new?” I asked him.

  “Not much. The St. Louis boys picked your Major Mote off the train all right, but he won’t come back.”

  “Won’t come back?”

  “Not voluntarily. He stood up on his short little hinders and got himself a lawyer. We gotta extradite if we want him back. Be a lot easier for me to go there and talk to him, than to go through all that. Not that it’ll do any good, either way.”

  “Will he talk?”

  “Oh, sure; he’ll answer all the questions we want. The St. Louis boys held him up to a phone, or held a phone down to him, and he talked. Mostly what he says is that he’s coming back to the carney or even to this state over his own dead body. Long distance made a lot of money on the variety of ways he thought of to say that.”

  “What about why he lammed? Will he talk about that?”

  “Oh, sure. He says he was scared stiff he was going to be the next one to get bumped. He’s also scared stiff of monkeys.”

  “What else did he say?” I asked him. “Why was he afraid of getting bumped off?”

  “He started getting scared when the midget turned up dead, he says. He didn’t exactly reason that somebody was starting a campaign against midgets, but— Well, he was the only midget around and when another turned up with a shiv in his back, it worried him for fear he’d be the next one. He couldn’t make his reasons any more definite than that. He still swears he didn’t know Lon Staffold, the other midget, and had never seen him or heard of him before.

  “Then Susie getting loose gave him a different kind of jitters. He’s got a horror of monkeys. Not just because he’s little, but like some people have a horror of cats or snakes. Says he’s stuck to carneys and never worked for a circus for that reason—because all circuses have apes or monkeys. He says he almost quit the carney when Hoagy bought Susie, but he decided he’d ride out the season.”

  I said, “But once Susie was found dead, that took care of that, so why’d he run off today? I saw, or thought I saw, another chimp last night. But he couldn’t have known that. Nobody knows it now except—let’s see, you and Uncle Am and Estelle and I. Or—say, did you ask him if he saw anything last night? Without suggesting a chimp, I mean?”

  “Sure I asked him that. No, he swears nothing happened last night. He went right downtown as soon as the side show closed. And I believe him on that—at least I believe that he didn’t see anything last night like you did, or he wouldn’t have come out to the lot at all today. And we know he did.”

  I said, “And then scrammed out of town.”

  “Yeah, when he learned Jigaboo’d been killed. He didn’t even ask how or why. He just beat us to the same idea your uncle got this afternoon. Three deaths with the carney in two weeks and all the same size. His size. He just didn’t want to hang around to find out if that was all or if there were going to be any more.”

  “He got any ideas about who or why or anything?” I asked.

  Weiss said, “Oh, sure. He thinks it’s a homicidal maniac with a mania for picking ‘em according to size, some nut following the carney, moving from town to town with it.”

  I said, “The Phantom of the Carnival.” But it didn’t sound very funny.

  Uncle Am said, “It just could be that he’s got something there. I mean, there’s just one thing in favor of it. The first midget not being with the carney. It could be an outsider brought his own midget to the lot. What with the midget himself being an outsider— Hell, that doesn’t make sense either.”

  “Nothing does,” Weiss said. “Well, I’ll mosey along. I got other guys to talk to. I dunno why, or what about, but I got to earn my pay somehow.”

  “You going to St. Louis?” I asked him.

  “I dunno. I dunno that I could get anything out of that midget face to face I didn’t get over the phone. Not unless I get some new questions to ask him, anyway. Only if he’s got a lawyer the St. Louis cops can’t hold him long either, and if I do want to talk to him, I’ll have to chase him to Florida.”

  “Florida? If he was heading for Florida, wasn’t St. Louis kind of out of his way?” Uncle Am asked.

  “He didn’t care. He just took the first train out of Fort Wayne. He’d have gone to Florida by way of Canada if he had to, to get o
ut of here. Says his grouch bag’s in good shape and he isn’t going to work any more this year. He doesn’t seem to care much, any more, for the J. C. Hobart carney.” I said, “Maybe he’s got something there.”

  “I see his point. Say, the inquest on the Brent kid is tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, downtown. You don’t have to come, either of you; you’re not witnesses. Hell, there won’t be any witnesses, except his parents for identification, and the guy who found him on the road and the coroner’s physician that made out the certificate.”

  “Want us to come?” I asked him.

  “I dunno what for. How do you get out of here?”

  “Lift the side wall,” I told him.

  “Funeral for the Brent kid’s tomorrow afternoon at three. Wiley Mortuary, a Negro outfit on the east side. Closed casket. Well, got to see Maury. So long.” He ducked under the side wall. Uncle Am said, “Well, Ed—?”

  “You name it,” I told him.

  He thought a minute. “Let’s go over to Carey’s. He’ll be in and out, between shows. We could talk in our living top, or here, but—maybe I’m getting jittery like the Maj. I’d have a feeling someone was listening outside the canvas. I’d rather have a wall, even a trailer wall.”

  Out on the midway he suddenly stopped walking. “Flowers,” he said. “Ed, we want to get some flowers for Jigaboo. What time is it?”

  “A little after eight. Won’t tomorrow do?”

  “Ummm—better tonight. If we’re up late, we might sleep late. There’ll be florists open downtown. Will you take a cab and take care of that?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You’ll be at Lee’s when I get back?”

  “Yeah. Here’s twenty. Get something good, put both our names on it. Just first names—Ed and Am.”

  “What kind of flowers?”

  “Anything, just so they’re— Wait, get something bright. He liked bright colors. Red roses or something red, like that red costume he danced in. Come on, I’ll walk you to the cab.”

  We headed out the main gate instead of to the trailer. I was glad he’d thought of the flowers; I might not have thought of it, even tomorrow. A cab pulled up just as we got there, bringing some people to the lot.