The Fabulous Clipjoint - Fredric Brown (book recommendations website .txt) 📗
- Author: Fredric Brown
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“I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t be a dope, Bunny. That’s what you had to mean, asking it that way. Well, Mom didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I know she didn’t, Ed. That’s what I—Oh, hell, I’m putting my foot in it worse all the time. I should have kept my trap shut completely. I haven’t got brains enough to be subtle. I was trying to get information out of you without giving any, and it’s going to be the other way around.”
“All right, then,” I said. “Give.”
“Look, Ed, when a guy gets killed, they always suspect his wife unless she’s in the clear. Don’t make me explain why; they just do. Same when a woman’s killed; they automatically suspect her husband first.”
I said, “I guess maybe they would. But this was different; this was a straight holdup.”
“Sure, but they’ll investigate other angles, too. Just in case it isn’t what it looks like, see? Well, I know where Madge— your mom—was between twelve and half past one, so she’s in the clear. If she’d need an alibi, I could give her one. That’s what I meant when I said I knew she didn’t do it.”
“Where did you see her?”
Bunny said, “I was having a drink or two Wednesday, my night off, and I called up your place about ten to see if Wally was around. And he—”
“I remember now,” I said. “I answered the phone and told you he’d already gone out.”
“Yeah. So I dropped in several places, thinking I might run into him. I didn’t. Only about midnight I was in a place near Grand Avenue; I don’t know the name of it. And Madge came in. Said she’d just decided to come down for a nightcap before she went to bed; that Wally hadn’t come home yet.”
I asked, “Was she mad about it, or anything?”
“I dunno, kid. She didn’t seem to be, but you can’t tell with a woman. Women are funny. Anyway we had a few drinks and talked, and it was about half past one when I walked her home and then went home myself. I know because I got home at a little before two o’clock.”
I said, “It’s a good alibi, if she needed one. Only she doesn’t, Bunny. Say, was that why you came to the inquest? I wondered at the time why you were there.”
“Sure. I wanted to know what time it happened. And everything. At the inquest they didn’t even ask Madge whether she’d been in or out that evening. So I knew it was all right, up to then. Haven’t they asked her?”
“Not that I know of,” I told him. “It just didn’t come up at all. I knew she’d been out, because she was still dressed that morning when I went in to wake up Pop, but—”
“Still dressed? Good Lord, Ed, why would she be—”
I wished now I’d kept my yap shut. I’d have to tell him now. I said, “She had a bottle at home and must have kept on drinking, waiting for Pop to come home. Only she went to sleep without undressing.”
“Don’t the cops know that?”
“I don’t know, Bunny.” I told him what had happened that morning. I said, “She was starting to get up when I left the place; I heard her. Well, if she changed dresses or had that one off and a bathrobe on when they came, they wouldn’t know. If she answered the door the way she was when I left, well, they’d be pretty dumb if they didn’t know.”
“That’s okay then,” Bunny said. “If they don’t know she was out at all, all right. If they—Well, you see what I mean.”
“Sure,” I said.
I was a little relieved myself, I found, to know where Mom had been that night and that there really wasn’t anything to worry about. Bunny tried again to lend me money when I left him.
When I went into the tavern, Uncle Ambrose was sitting alone in the booth we had occupied a few nights ago. It still lacked a few minutes of eleven o’clock.
He glanced at me, and then at the suitcase, and his eyes asked the question for him. I told him what it was.
He put it on the table in front of him and then started rummaging in his pockets. He came out with a paper clip and bent part of it straight, then put a little hook on the end.
“You don’t mind, Ed?”
“Of course not,” I told him. “Go ahead.”
The lock was easy. He lifted the lid.
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
At first glance, it was a puzzling hodgepodge. Then one item after another began to make sense. They wouldn’t have made sense to me before my uncle had told me some of the things Pop had done when he was younger.
There was a black, fuzzy wig, the kind that went with a minstrel’s blackface make-up. Half a dozen bright-red balls about two and a half inches in diameter, the size for juggling. A dagger, in a sheath, of Spanish workmanship. A beautifully balanced single-shot target pistol. A black mantilla. A little clay figure of an Aztec idol.
There were other things. You couldn’t take them all in at a glance.
There was a sheaf of papers with handwriting on them. There was something wrapped in tissue paper. There was a battered harmonica.
It was Pop’s life, I thought, stuffed into a little suitcase. Anyway, one phase of his life. They were things he’d wanted to keep, but not to keep at home where they might have been kicked around or lost, or where he might have to answer questions about them.
A sound made me look up, and Bassett was standing there looking down. “Where’d this stuff come from?” he asked.
“Sit down,” my uncle told him. He’d picked up one of the bright-red juggling balls and was looking at it like a man might look into a crystal. His eyes looked kind of funny. Not crying, exactly, but kind of not quite not-crying, either.
Without looking at either me or Bassett, he said, “Tell him, kid,” and I told Bassett about the suitcase and where it had been.
Bassett reached over and picked up the sheaf of papers. He turned it around and said, “I’ll be damned. It’s Spanish.”
“Looks like poetry,” I said. “The way it’s divided into lines. Uncle Am, did Pop ever write poetry in Spanish?”
He nodded without taking his eyes off the red ball.
Bassett was shuffling through the stack and a smaller paper fell out. A little rectangle of new crisp paper, about three by four inches. It was a printed form, but filled in with typewriting and a scribbled signature in ink.
Bassett was sitting next to me and I read it while he did.
It was a premium receipt from an insurance company, the Central Mutual. It was dated less than two months ago and was a quarterly premium receipt on a policy in the name of Wallace Hunter.
I looked at the amount and whistled. The policy was for five thousand bucks. A little notation under “Straight Life Policy” read “Double Indemnity.” Ten thousand bucks—or is murder an accidental death?
The name of the beneficiary was shown, too. Mrs. Wallace Hunter.
Bassett cleared his throat and Uncle Ambrose looked up. Bassett passed the premium receipt across the table to him.
“Afraid it’s all we need,” he said. “A motive. She told me he didn’t carry insurance.”
Uncle Ambrose read it slowly. He said, “You’re crazy. Madge didn’t do it.”
“She was out that night. She had a motive. She’s lied on two counts. I’m sorry, Hunter, but—”
The bartender was standing by the table. He asked, “What’s yours, gents?”
“Listen,” I said, when the guy had taken our order and had left. “Mom couldn’t have done it. She’s got an alibi.”
They both looked at me, and Uncle Am’s left eyebrow went up half a pica.
I told them about Bunny.
I watched Bassett’s face while I told it, but I couldn’t tell anything. When I got done, he said, “Maybe. I’ll look up the guy. Know where he lives?”
“Sure,” I said. I gave him Bunny Wilson’s address. “Gets off work at one-thirty in the morning. He might or might not go right home. I dunno.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll hold off till I talk to this Bunny guy. It might not mean anything, though. He’s a friend of the family’s—that means of hers, too. He could’ve stretched the hour a bit to do her a favor.”
“Why would he?”
Bassett shrugged. The kind of a shrug that doesn’t mean you don’t know, but that it’s nothing you want to talk about.
It told plenty. I said, “Listen, damn y—”
Uncle Am put his hand on my arm. He had a grip.
He said, “Shut up, Ed. Take yourself a walk around the block and cool down.”
His grip got tight and it hurt.
He said, “Go ahead. I mean it.”
Bassett got up to let me out of the booth, and I got up and went out fast. The hell with them, I thought.
I went out and walked west on Grand.
It wasn’t until I started to take out a cigarette that I found I had something in my hand. It was a round, red, rubber ball. Bright shiny red, one of the half dozen that had been in the suitcase.
I stopped by the staircase leading up to the el; and stared at the ball in my hand. Something was coming back to me. A vague picture of a man juggling some of them. I’d been a baby then. He was laughing and the bright balls were flashing in the lamplight of the nursery room in the Gary flat, and I stopped crying to watch the whirling spheres.
Not once, but often. How old had I been? I remember I’d been walking, once at least, walking, reaching out for the bright balls, and he’d given me one to play with, and had laughed when I put it to my mouth to chew it.
I couldn’t have been over three—not much over, anyway— the last time I’d seen them. I’d forgotten completely.
Only this ball in my hand, the size and the feel and the brightness of it, brought back the lost memory.
But the man, the juggler—I couldn’t picture him at all.
Only laughter, and the bright flashing spheres.
I tossed it up and caught it, and it felt good. I wondered if I could learn to juggle six of them. I tossed it up again.
Somebody laughed and said, “Want some jacks?”
I caught the ball and put it in my pocket, and turned around.
It was Bobby Reinhart, the apprentice at Heiden’s Mortuary, the guy who had identified Pop when he’d come to work on Thursday morning and found the body there. He was wearing a white Palm Beach suit that set off his darkish skin and his grease-slicked black hair.
He was grinning. It wasn’t a nice grin. I didn’t like it.
I said, “Did you say something?”
The grin faded out, and his face got ugly.
That was lovely. I just hoped he’d say something. I looked at his face and thought of him being with Gardie, and I thought of his having seen Pop there in the mortuary, and maybe working on his body, or watching while Heiden did, and—Oh, hell, if it had been somebody else, it would have been different. But when you don’t like a guy to begin with, something like that happens, and you hate him.
He said, “What the hell are you getting—?” And he was reaching his right hand into the side pocket
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