The Dead Ringer

by Fredric Brown

  It was a personal, and it read:

  LON S.—BIG DOUGH, WRITE SHORTY, Box D-4, Billboard, Cincinnati 1, O. au17

  I was still staring at it when Uncle Am said, “After the wants, Ed, look through the Letter List—he could have had a letter waiting for him at—”

  “I got it,” I said. “Look.” I handed him the magazine and he read it and then looked at me.

  “That’s it all right, Ed. Did you circle it, or—?”

  “No, it was already circled. What does the ‘au17’ mean?”

  “That’s the last issue it was to run in. Let’s see, this is the August third issue, and I’ve got the last issue in July and it wasn’t in there. So the ad was placed in time to make August third and was scheduled to run three issues—that’d be the third, the tenth, and the seventeenth. You’ve got those issues; take a look.”

  I did, and the ad was in both of them, but not circled as it was in the first issue it appeared in.

  I showed Uncle Am. He said, “Let’s find out about that circle, Ed. Flo said the midget didn’t read Billboard. I wonder if he managed to read her copies without her knowing about it.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Couldn’t be, on second thought,” Uncle Am said. “Because if he read them secretly, the last thing he’d do would be to circle the ad in heavy pencil like that, to show he’d read it. That wouldn’t make sense. Well, come on.”

  He gathered the Billboards, with the important one on top, and started for the stairs. I folded back the newspapers we’d spread on the floor and put them where they’d come from, and then followed him. From the head of the stairs I took a last look back at the trunk. It looked, I thought, almost like a child’s coffin. Or a midget’s.

  And, in a way, it was. A coffin not for a body but for the thoughts that had once been in that body. Thoughts on a sheaf of paper that would someday be thrown away or burned, and then both the thoughts and the body would be dead forever. The thoughts would be smoke from a furnace fire, and the body that had held them was already one of many disintegrating raisins in a vast mud pie. …

  Uncle Am was waiting for me at the foot of the attic steps. I turned out the light, leaving the attic dark behind us, and he locked the door that led to it.

  I wondered if anybody would ever again read those dark poems up there in the dark attic.

  Going down the stairs to the second floor, I asked, “You aren’t going to wake her up again, are you? We were up there a long time. It’s about four o’clock in the morning.”

  “Sure I’m going to wake her. This is important, maybe.”

  He knocked on the door of Mrs. Czerwinski’s room. The bed creaked and a light went on. Then there was a shuffle of footsteps and the door opened.

  Uncle Am said, “I’m sorry as hell, Flo. But I’ve got to know about this tonight. About this ad.” He handed her the magazine, opened to the ad, and pointed it out to her.

  “Oh, that. Damn it, I’d forgotten all about that. Come on in, Am.”

  “No, we’re leaving. Won’t bother you any more tonight. But about the ad—?”

  “There’s nothing much about it. I saw it that Saturday when I was reading the issue and it said ‘Lon S’ so I thought it was for Lon Staffold, naturally. I marked it, and when he came home that evening I showed it to him. But he said it couldn’t be for him, that he didn’t know anybody named Shorty, and didn’t know what it would mean anyway. Said it must be for someone else.”

  “That’s all that was ever said about it?”

  She nodded. “Sure. It was in the next issue or two and then it quit running. Since it wasn’t for Lon, I forgot all about it, till you showed it to me just now.” Her eyes got a little less sleepy. “Say, it could have been for him, couldn’t it. And if it was, he didn’t want me to know. But it’s such a short ad, he could have remembered the whole thing, and the box number, just from reading it once, and just pretended it wasn’t for him but maybe answered it anyway. Think so, Am?”

  “I don’t know, Flo. I’ll try to find out. Anyway, thanks to hell and back. Here’s your attic key, and the Billboards.”

  “I’ll see you again. Am, before you leave town?”

  “I hope so. I’ll at least phone you; that’s a promise. ‘By, Flo.”

  We walked south on Vine Street, toward downtown. A cab or two went by, but Uncle Am didn’t try to hail them. There was a first faint gray of dawn in the sky, and a cool wind was blowing north from the river.

  I shivered a little, but it wasn’t from the pre-dawn coolness. I was still thinking about the two poems I’d read, and they were growing on me, now that I was away from them. I remembered them, I found, word for word.

  Uncle Am asked, “Cold, Ed?”

  “Nope. Hungry, though.”

  “Okay, we’ll eat. Then we’ll check in at a hotel and get a few hours’ sleep. Next thing is 25 Opera Place, but we can’t go there until nine or ten tomorrow. Today, I mean.”

  I nodded. I didn’t have to ask what 25 Opera Place was; it’s the one address every carney knows—Billboard. I asked, “You think they’ll tell us who put in the ad?”

  “I used to know a guy who worked there. If he still does, he’ll get me the dope—what there is of it.”

  “And if he isn’t?”

  “If I can’t find out myself, we’ll have to let Weiss in on it. He can get the police here to make the request official. But—hell—I’m afraid it isn’t going to get us anywhere. I mean, if they still have a record of the holder of that particular box on those dates, it’ll be a fake name and a general delivery address.”

  “Then why bother?” I asked.

  “Got any better ideas?”

  “Guess not,” I admitted, “except to eat and sleep. I’m starving to death.”

  Near Sixth and Vine we found a restaurant open and put a meal under our belts. Then we checked in at a hotel on Fountain Square and got a double room. Uncle Am left a call for nine.

  In our room, he said, “No use your getting up at nine, Ed. I can handle things at Billboard better alone. I’ll wake you up when I get back from there. That’ll give you an hour or two more sleep.”

  “Swell,” I said. “But don’t let me sleep too long. I can’t miss getting back to Fort Wayne by seven tonight, to meet Rita.”

  “Don’t worry, Ed; you’ll be there.”

  I was already in bed by then. Uncle Am switched out the light and lay down beside me. He groaned. “After all season on that cot, I’ll never get to sleep on a bed as soft as this. I feel like I’m drowning.”

  But when I asked him a question less than a minute later, he was already asleep.

  CHAPTER XIV

  I heard the phone ring at nine, but I realized that I didn’t have to get up yet, and dropped off to sleep again. But the instant it stopped ringing, Uncle Am started shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes and said, “What the hell, I thought you said I could—” Then I saw that he was fully dressed.

  He grinned at me. “It’s noon, kid. You better pile out if you’re going to be sure of being back in Fort Wayne in time.”

  I sat up on the edge of the bed, and saw that he had a package. He tossed it down on the chair where I’d hung my clothes the night before, only my suit wasn’t there any more.

  He said, “You don’t have to hurry; the train’s at two. But there’s the transfer and it won’t get in much before seven, so I figured you’d want to clean up here before you start. Room Service is pressing your suit; it’ll be back by the time you take a shower.”

  He was opening the package and I saw that it held a new shirt, socks, a pair of shorts, and a really snazzy necktie.

  I said, “You’re a swell guy, Uncle Am.”

  “Sure I am. But I’ve been up three hours and I could use some breakfast. Get going.”

  It wasn’t until I’d had a shower and was putting on the suit that the bellboy brought back freshly pressed, that I remembered to ask what luck he’d had at Billboard.

  “What I fi
gured, Ed. No better, no worse. The name was John Wilkins, which I take to be a slight variation of John Smith, and the address was General Delivery, Louisville, Kentucky. The ad was placed by mail and paid in advance, with cash enclosed in the letter. Their records show there was an answer to the ad and it was forwarded to the General Delivery address.”

  “Louisville,” I said. “That was about the time we played Louisville, wasn’t it?”

  “On the head. We opened in Louisville on Monday, August fifth, two days after the date of issue of the first mag the ad ran in. Yeah, it ties it to the Hobart carney, Ed.”

  “What if the answer had come after we’d left Louisville? The ad was for three weeks and we were there only one.”

  “Whoever placed it would have left a forwarding address from Louisville General Delivery to Evansville General Delivery, that’s all. And the next week to General Delivery, South Bend. But he got his answer right away—since Flo showed the ad to Lon on the third of August.”

  While we were eating breakfast in the hotel dining room, I asked Uncle Am if he’d phoned Flo Czerwinski yet, as he’d promised he would.

  He thanked me for reminding him and called her from a lobby booth as soon as we were through eating. After that we got ourselves shaved in the hotel barber shop, because we hadn’t brought razors with us, and then took our time about getting around to the railroad station by two.

  On the train, Uncle Am was quiet for a while. So was I, listening to the click of the wheels and thinking that every click was bringing me closer to seven o’clock.

  Uncle Am took an envelope out of his pocket and began writing on the back of it with a pencil. He’d write a word or two, stop and think awhile, and then write another word or two. I looked over to see what he was doing.

  He asked, “Kid, what night was it Lon was murdered?”

  “Thursday,” I said. “Evansville. Two weeks ago yesterday. That’d make it August fifteenth. Or—wait, I guess it would be the sixteenth, because he was killed after midnight. Yeah, Friday the sixteenth.”

  He had the entry, in the middle of the envelope, “L. S. killed,” and he added a “15” after it. He said, “If it was Thursday night, we’ll call it Thursday, after midnight or not. And Susie?”

  “She disappeared the night of our first day in Fort Wayne —last Monday, the twenty-sixth. It was Tuesday afternoon they found her in the tank, but it would have been Monday night she was killed.”

  He put a “26” after his next entry. “And Jigaboo—day before yesterday, Wednesday, the twenty-eighth.” He made another entry. “And the night you saw Susie—or a dead ringer for her—looking in the trailer window?”

  He said, “What else have we got, kid? Lon left Cincinnati —how many days before he was found murdered?”

  “Five. He’d have left on the tenth—a Saturday. That would have been our second last day in Louisville.” I watched him make an entry for that, up ahead of the “L. S. killed” entry, in chronological order. “L.S. left Cin.—10th.”

  I said, “We can put one more date on there, the earliest one we got— August 3rd. That’s the issue of Billboard Mrs. Czerwinski showed Lon the personal in.”

  He put it down. “Lon sees ad.—3rd,” and looked at it. He said, “And if he answered it right away—and I’d guess he did—the letter would have reached the General Delivery window in Louisville on Monday the fifth, which is the date the carney got to Louisville. Kid, it’s all adding up—but God knows to what.”

  “The carney would have been in Frankfort, Kentucky, then, when the ad was placed,” I said. “That’s the farthest back date we can tie in—late in July. Or it could have been late the week before—Lexington, Kentucky.”

  He made another note. Then he sat looking at the list, and I stared at it, too, but it didn’t give me anything I hadn’t known before except a clearer picture of someone with the carney, our carney sending the ad to Billboard, hearing from Lon, then contacting him to make arrangements that ended with Lon leaving Cincinnati on the tenth and turning up—five days later—dead, in Evansville, four days after the carney had reached there. Where he’d been during those five days was still a blank.

  The train pulled into Lima, and we got off for our transfer to the Pennsylvania, which took us the last lap to Fort Wayne. We had a wait between trains, so we ordered coffee, across from the station.

  The envelope came out again.

  Uncle Am put it on the table where we could both see it. He said, “Ed, there’s a pattern there. There’s got to be. But we can’t see it because there’s a piece missing. There’s something that you could drop into there and then all of a sudden the rest of the pieces would fit together.”

  I nodded slowly, and took another sip of coffee. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the station clock. It was five-fourteen, one hour and forty-six minutes before seven o’clock.

  Uncle Am said, “Think, kid. What do we know about the missing piece?”

  I took my eyes off the clock. I said, “For one thing, it ought to provide a motive. You don’t like the idea that these are a madman’s crimes and neither does Weiss, so I guess they aren’t. But if not, we don’t know of any reason why they were committed. Nobody, as far as we know, gained anything at all by any of the killings. Unless—and we haven’t found anything to back it up—someone had a grudge against Lon from way back when.”

  “Ed, I don’t like a grudge for a motive. People kill in the heat of anger, but this wasn’t that, because it was planned. Somebody stood to gain something; you’re right that the missing piece would provide a motive. What else?”

  I said, “It ought to explain the screwy business of all the victims being the same size. They were, damn it. That’s what—”

  I stared at the list again. It still didn’t mean anything.

  Uncle Am said, “Kid, you’re the one of us that’s got a good memory. Close your eyes and think. Think like hell— Wait, don’t; make your mind a blank. Then take those two angles you just mentioned: gain, money—and size, the size of a midget, a young chimp, a child. Think, remember.”

  I closed my eyes and tried. I couldn’t get a thing. After a while I shook my head.

  Far off, a train whistled.

  Uncle Am said, “Once more, Ed. Here comes our train, but try it. What’s the missing piece?”

  I didn’t close my eyes this time; I was looking out of the restaurant window at the station across the street. I said, “I thought of something. But I don’t see how—”

  “Forget how; what?”

  I said, “The day after Lon’s murder, while I was in town in Evansville, I read the newspaper to see what it said about the night before. I remember reading that a boy was kidnapped somewhere; there was a ransom demand for fifty grand. It happened the night before I read it—that would have been the night Lon was killed. The kid was seven, it said—that fits for size—same size as Jigaboo, Lon, Susie. And—fifty thousand bucks in money.”

  “Where? Where did it happen?”

  I thought back, and remembered. It put a little chill down my spine. I said, “Louisville.”

  The train was getting close to the station and I stood up. I said, “Come on, or we’ll miss it.”

  I took a few steps toward the door but I didn’t hear Uncle Am move, so I turned back. He was still sitting there, with his eyes wide open, looking as if he’d seen a ghost.

  I called, “Uncle Am, the train. Come on.”

  He turned slowly in the booth. He said, “Go ahead, kid. I’ll join you later. Tomorrow. I—”

  I didn’t get it; what I’d told him must have meant something had, hard. His face had something of the same expression I’d seen on it the first time I’d ever seen him, when I’d had to break the news that my father—his brother—was dead.

  It was the same look on his face now.

  I didn’t get it; what I’d told him must have meant something to him more than it had to me.

  But the train was pulling in, slowing down, and in a minute or le
ss it would start without me, and it was the only one that would get me to Fort Wayne in time, and I’d definitely promised Rita I’d meet her.

  He saw the indecision on my face and helped me out. He said, “Get the hell out of here or you’ll miss that train. I said I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “But—”

  He picked up the salt shaker as though to throw it at me. “Get the hell out of here.”

  The train highballed.

  I got the hell out of there and made the train.

  Rita wore a black dress. It did things for her. It made her skin whiter and her hair more golden. It made her look like an angel—but not the kind of angel you want to worship from far off. There was enough of devil in her eyes and her face, as she looked at me across the table, to keep me from getting any ideas like that.

  I’d mentioned her father, and she said, “Let’s not talk about that, Ed.” And then she went ahead to talk about it anyway.

  She said, “Ed, I don’t want you to get a wrong idea. I want to be honest with you. I didn’t love my father. He was—well, he’s dead now, so I hate to say it, but he wasn’t much good. He was cruel to my mother. Oh, I don’t mean he beat her or anything like that, but in little ways, little things. I don’t even know—or care—if he was unfaithful to her, but I do know he cared more about drinking than he did about her, or me.

  “I think she stayed with him only because of me, so there’d be a home for me to grow up in. She had a little income of her own, and that’s what she kept his insurance up with and that’s why she fixed it so he couldn’t cash it in, and took paid-up insurance on him when she knew she was going to die. She died of cancer, Ed, and she must have known it was coming for a long time before. She—”

  I put my hand over hers, on the table. I said, “You don’t need to tell me all that, Rita. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “But it does, Eddie. I want you to understand why it—it hit me so hard that we’ve been away from each other so long, just when we found each other. It hurt me to have him dying like that, because I hadn‘t liked him. But then—sometimes when it’s too late, you get to know people. He wasn’t a bad guy, Eddie. I found that out, visiting him every day at the hospital. He was just weak—about drinking. And he was my father. He—”