The Dead Ringer

by Fredric Brown

  “Got things to do, Hoagy,” Uncle Am told him. “We’re leaving in a minute.”

  “What things we got to do?” I asked him.

  “Well—one more drink, for one thing. You want one?”

  “I guess so.”

  We had a drink apiece. I asked, “What would Hoagy have done if Lee’d called him on that hand?”

  “What do you mean, what would he have done? He’d have lost some money. But Lee didn’t call, did he?”

  “No,” I admitted. “What do we do now, though?”

  “Kid, you got a one-track mind.” Uncle Am frowned. “Look, Ed, if I had all the answers I’d know what to do. But then—if I had all the answers, I wouldn’t have to do anything at all.”

  “You mean, you got some of the answers?”

  “I think so, Ed.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  “No.”

  I said, “Thanks.”

  He grinned. “You want to do something, huh? Okay, come on, let’s take a ride.”

  “On what?”

  “The Ferris wheel.”

  I didn’t know whether or not he was kidding, but when he started out, I strung along. We went out to the midway and turned right.

  He wasn’t kidding. We went over to the Ferris wheel, talked a minute with one of the ride boys, and got on. They were loading and unloading and it took us a few minutes to get up to the top.

  I looked over and down at the dark surface of the water in the diving tank where, Tuesday afternoon, the mark had looked down from one of these cars and seen Susie floating. There wasn’t anything floating there now.

  I wondered if that was why Uncle Am had thought of the Ferris wheel—to look down at the water? But he didn’t seem even to glance that way, as far as I could tell. Our car started down again and this time the ride boys had finished changing passengers, and the wheel went round and round for a while, and we went round and round with it.

  After a while Uncle Am passed a signal to the ride boys when we were on the down side, and the next time around they stopped the wheel and let us off.

  I still didn’t see this as a substitute for Indianapolis. I asked him, “What next? Do we ride the merry-gee or buy some floss candy?”

  “I been thinking about that. How about the train?”

  I said, “I’m thrilled to death. Listen, Uncle Am, it’s all right to be eccentric if you want to, but aren’t you working too hard at it?”

  He laughed, but didn’t answer me. Instead, he started off in the opposite direction from the terminus of the scenic railway. I thought my crack had changed his mind for him, and tagged along, wondering what crazy thing we’d do instead.

  We headed for the main gate, and through it. A taxi was letting out some customers, and Uncle Am got in and said, “The railway station,” and it wasn’t till then that I realized he hadn’t been talking about the carnival’s railroad, but a real one.

  I stopped with my foot on the running board. “Hey,” I said, “where are we going?”

  “You heard me tell the man,” Uncle Am said.

  “But where from there?”

  “Cincinnati.”

  “I can’t, Uncle Am. I talked to Rita on the phone. She’s going to be back here tomorrow evening, just for a few hours. And I promised to meet her at the train around seven. I can’t break—”

  “That’s okay; we’ll be back long before then. Shut up and get in.”

  I got in. While we were heading for the station, I told him about Rita’s father dying, and most of what she’d told me. I mentioned the insurance and that she had some business in mind, but I didn’t say much about her implying she wanted me to go into it with her. No use talking about that, I thought, until I knew what she’d meant.

  Then I asked him what we were going to Cincinnati for.

  “Kid, we got to start somewhere. And that’s where Lon Scaffold started from. That’s the farthest back we’ve got anything on this mess—the time he left Cincinnati five days before he turned up dead on the Evansville lot.”

  I said, “Weiss went to Cincinnati. Can we do anything more than he did there?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  At the station, we learned we were lucky; there was a train out in a few minutes that would get us to Lima, Ohio, in time to transfer to the fast train of the B. & O. that high-balled between Detroit and Cincinnati. Our only stops would be Dayton and Hamilton, and we’d be in Cincinnati by two-fifteen in the morning.

  At least, Uncle Am said we were lucky to get a connection like that. Personally, I didn’t see that we were any better off getting in at two-fifteen than a few hours later; we couldn’t do anything at that hour in the morning. Except maybe get a few hours sleep before we started doing whatever we were going to do.

  We didn’t talk much on the train. Uncle Am apparently wanted to think, and answered only in monosyllables whenever I said anything.

  So I gave up talking, and tried to think, too. But I wasn’t a success at it; midgets and monkeys and kids went in circles in my head and didn’t get anywhere. The more I tried to make my ideas into a pattern the more confused they got. After a while I gave up thinking and tried to sleep instead, but I couldn’t do that either.

  At the big railroad station in Cincinnati, Uncle Am headed for the telephones. He didn’t make a call, but just looked up an address in one of the phone books.

  We took a taxi and he gave an address on Vine Street.

  I said, “Vine Street— That must be where the midget lived. Weiss said a rooming house on Vine Street, didn’t he?”

  “That’s right. Mrs. Czerwinski’s.”

  “Two-thirty in the morning,” I said. “A hell of a time to call on somebody.”

  Uncle Am said, “Yeah,” absent-mindedly.

  He was looking out of the window; the cab had just turned a corner. He said, “Ed, this is Vine-Street-Over-the-Rhine. That’s what they used to call this section back in the old days before the first world war, and before Prohibition. It was all German beer gardens, and little German bands and orchestras playing German music. Full mit Gemuetlichkeit. The ‘Rhine’ was the old canal—they’ve got a parkway over it now, and it’s gone. The whole thing’s gone, and it was like a cross between the Beer Barrel Polka and a Strauss waltz. They say some of the places had signs that read ‘English sprechen here,’ but I never actually saw—”

  The cab swung in to the curb in front of a brownstone front that was gray with age. There was a sign in the window, “No Vacancies.”

  Uncle Am paid off the cab and we went up to the door, and Uncle Am held his finger on the doorbell button awhile. There wasn’t any light on in any window at the front.

  Behind us, the cab slid off into the night and nothing else happened for a minute. Then a window went up, on the second floor right over our heads. A woman stuck her head out and looked down at us.

  She had red hair, bright red hair; the light from the street lamp on the corner caught it, and made her head look like a stop light. Her face, bent down toward us, was in the shadow and I couldn’t see it.

  She called out, “Whadda ya want?” Something in the tone of her voice confirmed my idea that two-thirty in the morning isn’t the right time to make a call.

  But Uncle Am took a few steps back from the door, so his face would be in the light, and looked up. He said, “Hi, Flo. You decent?”

  Her voice dropped a couple of notches. “Damn if you don’t look familiar, but—” Then it went up three notches, shriller than it had been at first. “My God, Am Hunter. Be right down, Am.” Her head disappeared.

  I looked at Uncle Am. I said, “Is that Mrs. Czerwinski? Why the hell didn’t you tell me you knew her?”

  “You didn’t ask me.”

  “Nuts,” I said. “You didn’t tell Weiss, either.”

  He grinned. “He didn’t ask me, either. Flo and I were both mentalists with the same carney once, years ago. She ran the mitt camp, and phrenology. I was in the side show; I made w
ith the madball.”

  “What’s making with a madball?”

  “Crystal-gazing, Ed. Hell, I thought you talked carney by now.”

  “Give me time. Say—you didn’t ever know the midget, did you? That’s another thing I never asked you.”

  “No, Ed. Weiss did ask me that. No, I didn’t know Lon Staffold.” His face was serious now. He said, “Kid, never take for granted that people are going to volunteer information, if they’ve got any. Like—well, those marks that Hoagy saw on Susie’s arm. He didn’t tell us that until we asked him if he’d noticed anything unusual about her.”

  A light went on inside the downstairs hall, making a yellow rectangle of the glass pane in the door and the pulled-down curtain behind it. Footsteps shuffled toward us and the door opened.

  “Am, come on in and let me get a look at you! My God, where have you been all these years?”

  I think she was going to throw her arms around him, but Uncle Am pushed me in ahead of him as a buffer.

  “You haven’t changed a bit, Flo,” he said, “except maybe to put on five pounds or so. But on you it looks good.”

  “Liar.” But she said it with a smile broad enough to block a street. She’d put on more than that, I judged. And most of it was around the hips and bust. She must have weighed a hundred and sixty or seventy pounds, and she wasn’t over five feet three tall. But, surprisingly, her face was still pretty. She’d put make-up on, rather hastily and too much of it, but through that she had really pretty features, laughing eyes, and a skin as smooth as a baby’s backside. Her teeth were pretty, too, and looked like they were still her own. If she’d ever weighed less than one-thirty—and she must have, once—she must have been really beautiful. I don’t know if it would have been because of or in spite of that brilliant shade of red of her hair. Or maybe it hadn’t been that red, then.

  Uncle Am got behind me again as she closed the door.

  He said, “Flo, this is Ed, my nephew. Same name, Hunter. He’s Wally’s boy; you remember my brother Wally.” And before she could ask, he said, “Wally died a little over a year ago. Ed’s with me now. We’re running a ball game with the Hobart shows.”

  “Hobart? Say, isn’t that the carney where Lon—” Her voice trailed off.

  Uncle Am nodded. “I want to talk to you about it, Flo.”

  “Sure, Am. Say, what are we standing here for? Come on up to my room. Go on ahead; I take my time on these stairs.”

  “Ladies first, Flo. Go ahead; we got all night.”

  “And trust you behind me on a flight of stairs? Git on up there before I kick you up.”

  Uncle Am laughed and we went up the stairs first. She took us into the front room at the end of the second floor hallway. It was a pleasant room, nicely furnished—although a bit garish in choice of colors—and it was as neat as a pin. Except for the fact that the bed was rumpled and the covers thrown back, it looked as though it had just been house cleaned.

  She waved us to chairs and sank down into a rocker that creaked under her weight.

  “Staying awhile, Am? Look, I’m full up here right now, but I can make a couple of these monkeys double up and get you a place to sleep for tonight, and then tomorrow—well, there’s a guy on the next floor two weeks back in his rent. Besides that he’s a creep. I’ll move his stuff out and—”

  Uncle Am put up a hand to stop her. “Nix, Flo. We aren’t staying. Hobart’s in Fort Wayne; we got to get back there. We just ran down for a talk with you. About Lon.”

  “Sure, Am.” She’d got her breath back now, and got up out of the rocker. She tightened the blue quilted bathrobe—or housecoat or whatever it was—around her and started for the back corner of the room where a screen with bright parrots on it shut off most of the view of a kitchenette. “You’ll have a drink; I don’t have to ask you that. God damn it!”

  What sounded like an icebox door slammed shut. “God damn it; I forgot—it’s all gone.”

  She came around the screen and headed for the door. “Well, just a minute. I’ll get some. One of these damn roomers’ll have a bottle—”

  “Forget it, Flo. Sit down.”

  “Sit down, hell. We’ll have a drink, or I won’t talk. What’s the use of being a landlady if you can’t wake up people to borrow a drink?”

  She closed the door, and a few seconds later we heard her pounding on another door down the hall. Uncle Am grinned at me. “Some gal, Flo.” I said, “She scares me, but I like her. How long did you know her?”

  “Two seasons. Then she married a ringmaster with the Big Top. Ted Czerwinski. I heard he died a few years later. And somebody told me Flo had quit the game and was running a rooming house. But I didn’t know where till Weiss told us.” He shook his head slowly. “She was sure a looker in those days.”

  “How well did you know her?”

  “Kid, you ask the damnedest questions sometimes.”

  “You told me never to take it for granted that people will volunteer information if they’ve got any.”

  He laughed, and didn’t have to answer because the door opened and Mrs. Czerwinski came back, carrying a fifth-size bottle of clear liquid.

  “Gin,” she said. “Don’t remember whether you like it or not, but if you don’t, the hell with you. You’ll drink it anyway. You open it, Am. You’ll find glasses back there.”

  She handed over the bottle and sat down again, and this time she looked at me. She said, “Am, you got a good-looking nephew. A likelier kid than you were at his age. I’ll bet the carney girls are nuts about him.”

  From back of the screen, Uncle Am said, “He drives them off with a baseball bat.”

  She looked at me again. “Can he talk?”

  “Sure,” I said, before Uncle Am could answer her. “What do you want me to say?”

  She sighed. “Just like you used to be, Am. Except he’s taller.” She reached over. “Let me see your hand, Ed.”

  I held it out and she took it, looked at the back of it, and then turned it over. She held it down a little so the direct light from the table lamp fell on the palm. She said, “You like music, Ed, don’t you? It gets you, gets inside you, does things to you. But—I don’t think you’ll be a musician. It isn’t there.”

  Uncle Am came out from behind the screen, with a tray with three glasses and the bottle. He said, “Cut it out, Flo.”

  “Put mine down here on the table, Am,” she told him, and looked back at my hand. “You’re going to have a long life, Ed, but there’s a lot of trouble in it. How old are you—twenty, twenty-one?”

  “Not quite twenty.”

  “Then there’s trouble coming soon. I think you’re riding for a fall. It’s something to do with a death, but—”

  Uncle Am spoke sharply. “Cut it out, Flo. Damn it, you know better than that.”

  I was looking at the woman; her face was serious, dead serious. She let go my hand, though.

  Uncle Am said, “He doesn’t believe that stuff, Flo. And if somebody doesn’t believe it, it’s bad. Because the good things you tell him will slide off since he doesn’t believe them—but the bad ones will worry him, even if he doesn’t believe them. You know that as well as I do.”

  She said, “Yeah, Am. Sorry. I was just ribbing you, Ed.” She leaned forward and reached for her glass of gin. Her hand shook just a little and she spilled some of it on the carpet.

  Uncle Am looked at me sharply and then took his own glass to the sofa and sat down. Gradually his face relaxed into a smile.

  He said, “The years have been good to you, Flo. Damn it, you’re still pretty.”

  “They’ve been better to you, Am. You’re still with it. But hell, let’s quit throwing bouquets at each other and have a drink instead.” She lifted her glass and her hand was steady. “To-to—”

  “To Lon,” Uncle Am said. “I didn’t know him, but let’s drink to him anyway. We’re going to talk about him.”

  Flo Czerwinski said, “Okay, Am; to Lon. He was a nasty little bastard, but—I liked hi
m a little anyway.”

  They drank and I took a sip at mine. It tasted raw and pretty fierce.

  CHAPTER XIII

  The conversations for a while after that drifted into reminiscences and I didn’t pay any attention. They had a few more drinks, but I didn’t like gin much, so I kept working on my first.

  Then I heard the name “Lon” again and I came back from thinking about Rita and started listening again.

  “Yeah,” Flo was saying, “he was hard to get along with— most midgets are, the ones I’ve known, anyway. But once you got inside his guard, he wasn’t so bad. But he’d never talk about himself. The little I do know about him, I just picked up and put together from here and there; you know what I mean.”

  “How long had he lived here?” Uncle Am asked.

  “Four—it’d be five years this coming November. He was— let’s see— he was almost thirty then. Something had soured him on show biz. He hated it and swore he’d never go back on the road. He hated being a freak; Lord, how he hated it. If you wanted to get along with him, you had to forget he was a midget and never mention it or mention anything that had to do with size.”

  “What had he been doing before he came here?” Uncle Am asked her. “Weiss said he’d been away from the carney business six or eight years; he was here, you say, less than five. What about in between?”

  “He was in Toledo. Didn’t say so, but I think he ran a newsstand or paper corner there. Anyway, he knew the racket; it wasn’t new to him when he started here.”

  “Did he do good at it? Have much in the grouch bag?”

  “Hell, no. He made a bare living and was always broke— or most of the time. Always squawking about lack of money. Half the time he’d be on the cuff for a week or two, and then gradually catch up. I even lent him money a time or two—a fin or so.”

  Uncle Am said, “He couldn’t have been broke when he left here; Weiss said he paid two weeks in advance, so you’d hold his room.”

  She nodded. “That’s right. Because he sold his paper corner for a couple hundred bucks.”

  “Weiss told me that,” Uncle Am said. “I forgot. That’d mean he expected to come back to Cincinnati—but not to selling papers. Did he say anything to show what he did expect to do?”