Читать книгу The Affair of the Bottled Deuce - Harry Stephen Keeler - Страница 6

CHAPTER IV

At the Marchesi Flats

Lou Ousley, known to his familiars better as “Lousy Lou”, bent forward, considerably compressed as to his frame, over the wheel of the light runabout leaving the station, circling quite adroitly off of Chicago Avenue into the traffic of North LaSalle Avenue. Here, the street had once been widened—the staid old residences of that once-aristocratic street had all been given new fronts of compressed orange brick. But room-to-rent signs were to be seen in profusion. Stumps protruded from sidewalks off of narrow strip-like front yards which once had been trees growing in front gardens. Progress!

Lou was speaking to the other man with him.

“The old boy really softened up before we took off, didn’t he, Butterball?”

“Meaning, Lousy, that he told us all that he’d just got—over the phone?”

“Yeah. He’s got an amazing memory for details, that old boy. And can thumbnail facts like nobody’s business. I’ll bet he told us, in those 200 gatling-gun-like words of his, all that the Marchesi gent told him in 10,000 words.”

Here the speaker had to stop. For he was edging off of LaSalle into a narrow street that would bring the car to Wells Street. Did, in a trice. And which caused him to circle again. Here, on Wells Street, were down-at-heel shops—mostly plumbing establishments, sign shops, or second-hand stores known today as “re-sale shops”; and on the sidewalks were Negroes galore, shuffling along or cackling and heehawing.

Gee, haw—left, right—zig, zag—and thus, by a series of right-angular progressions which, reduced in size, and to scale, and transferred somehow to a ribbon of metal, would have made an adequate saw-blade, the car was now edging ever so carefully down a narrow street which definitely proclaimed itself Little Italy. The street at various points was full of boys playing baseball, shouting purely Italian phrases and none other. Bambinos in buggies, or lying comfortably on dark-eyed mothers’ breasts, were to be seen in profusion. Little girls, playing on the sidewalks, would dart out every so often to retrieve a ball, making it necessary for Lou to almost inch his way along. The stores along here were flyspecked as of windows, replete with green goods and gourdlike fruits, and held in view pearshaped cheeses strung on stout strings.

The Marchesi Flats, looming up ahead on the right side of the car, though facing chiefly on the further north and south street beyond, were unmistakable. While their rear could not be seen at all because of a somewhat modern 5 or 6-story modern windowless orange brick storage warehouse that looked out squarely on this narrow east-west street just to the side of their main front, the single oncoming Leaf Street side entrance of the Marchesi Flats facing on this particular street was enough to mark the whole assemblage as one of those architectural monstrosities out of the World’s Columbian Exposition Days of 1893, where no less than Little Egypt herself introduced the Hoochie Koochie. Days wherein all the architects seemingly tried to create the same identical exterior to their flatbuildings—but made of their interior layouts of stairways and entranceways veritable Chinese puzzles, individual to each.

For they were built, the Marchesi Flats were—certainly the segment that lay back on this street, and consequently the whole—of dingy red brick, and full 4 stories high, and, therefore, bearing precarious-looking fire-escapes on their fronts—rears, too, beyond any doubt—like incrustations of some sort. Their sidewalk levels, at least on this street, and doubtlessly similarly on the street beyond, consisted of two dingy looking stores, the further one a corner store, of course, with a narrow black-painted and high-transomed door between, leading to this segment of the flats themselves. Or rather, to be exact—assuming the interiors were as hundreds of others built in 1893—to narrow, uncarpeted wooden stairway leading to flats above. In short, the Flats Marchesi were slum, slum, slum, today—too small in ground area, in toto, to provide ground suitable for a modern housing development—too large to be economically torn down. And destined doubtlessly, as Lou, at the wheel, was reflecting at this moment, to be here in 2060—maybe even 2160, providing wood, plaster and baked brick held out that long!

A man was standing in the doorway of the flats that led to the particular coterie reached from this street only. He seemed to stand there stiffly, and even uneasily, as though waiting for the car, and must therefore, so reasoned Lou at the wheel, be Marchesi himself. The orange brick warehouse was now bearing down on the side, beyond it a narrow gangway cutting it off from the Flats Marchesi—so narrow, indeed, that it couldn’t really be called a gangway—was but a separating “slit”, so thin that only a slender l6-year old girl could ever have traversed it rearward, and that only, probably, sidewise! Now the fact of the store this side of the oncoming doorway being untenanted was discernible, for it became a barbershop with chairs, yes, but no barbers—and no tools—a revolving striped pole that was completely static—nothing, now, but a For Rent sign! Now the identity of the furthest cornermost store was fully evident as a grocery store. Now the man himself—who was already detaching himself at sight of the car from the doorway—was fully observable in every detail.

He was a man all of 60 years of age. Corpulently stolid, grey of hair on bovine head bearing a purple velour hat, with troubled jet black eyes and a touch of unshavenness. He wore a black shirt with scarlet tie, and a navy-blue stiffish suit such as Italians all wear on important occasions, or unimportant ones.

The two men in the car, coming to a stop at the curb, hopped out, Lou in the lead.

Already boys in the street were stopping their baseball game—some were trailing up to look, see, and listen!

It took very little in this district to draw a huge crowd.

Marchesi, as he was to prove indeed, in a moment, to be—and as one, moreover, who knew too well how a crowd could form in this district—boomed forth a quite disarming greeting.

“Ah, my good friends—Charley and Fred—what are you doing—around here? Drop upstairs a minute, won’t you both? We will have a bit of wine! I have some very good wine—just in from Italy. And my signora will sing. We will have a gay time, say not?”

“Believe we will, Joseph!” said Lou, with a moue. “’Twill be nice to talk about old days.”

The knot threatening to form dissolved as quickly as it had started. The call of “batter up” showed the baseball game was running again just where it had left off.

All was serene again, in Little Italy. At least on Leaf Street!

Marchesi was leading the way majestically across the sidewalk—holding the door of the entrance open for his “guests”—closing it again. Now they were all inside, in a high-transom lighted narrow hallway whose calcimine was either yellowed or peeling, and with tiny fragilely padlocked mailboxes studded about like flies on the righthand wall, and a narrow wooden stairs going skyward.

“Up this stairway, gentlemen,” Mr. Marchesi said. “All the way to the top. I’ll pick up the crowbar on the way. I have it ready outside my own flat. Beneath his flat, yes.”

On the way up the first flight, he asked a question backward of himself. To Lou, who was in front of the two men following Marchesi.

“You know all the facts, do you, officers?” was his query.

“The names are Ousley and Tomaroy; I’m Ousley,” said Lou. “Yes, we guess we do know them all. The Captain fired ’em at us like a gatling gun, though he did, at that, sort of—of mortise ’em together—into a—a quaint little picture like—But we’ll ask further—if we’ve overlooked any. Three flights ahead of us, eh? Awoo!”

On they tramped, rounding finally the first landing where light from the usual skylight found at the top floors of all these old buildings fell in sufficient degree to reveal four darksome transomless doors gazing forth at various curious angles to each other. The very angles suggested that indeed some Chinese puzzle had been followed in laying out this segment of the flats, for the Captain had definitely said that the flat where he was sending his two plainclothesmen to “faced westward”. And, the Captain had said moreover, from knowing this district and even the flats themselves out of his own older days, the flat in question had a rear kitchen facing eastward. That meant, Lou figured frowningly—and he had once, in the long ago, been of mind to become an architect—that meant that the corner segment over the store must be reachable by a stairway that had north-facing doors, and would probably have to have some kind of a cross-corridor up above to take in the flats—oh, to hell with it! To hell with it! Who could tell what thoughts had gone through the brains of the men who had designed these old buildings back in the days when construction had not cost too much? Each had, it is true, tried to make the exterior like many others—but had indulged his creative senses in making the interior layouts so startlingly different that builders had bowed to their sheer “genius”!

No sounds of accordions playing gaily were in this segment of the flats—no melodious singing of O Sole Mio from throaty voices. No high voices of children. Evidently this segment of the Flats Marchesi was tenanted by people who both—husband and wife—worked daytimes, and had no children, at least today. Else Mr. Marchesi had artfully studded this segment where he lived with such people—so as to have peace and quiet. Undisturbed, even by such things as shots of suicides—which now he’d nevertheless gotten!

On they tramped to the next landing, which was much brighter thanks to the skylight coming closer. Here Mr. Marchesi took up a crowbar standing alongside a partially open door which revealed a most luxuriously furnished interior, with thick Oriental rug on its floor, overstuffed purple davenport, old paintings in gilt frames on the walls, and a handpainted lamp big enough to have lighted up a street. Mr. Marchesi was demonstrating how one could live with comfort and luxury in the Flats Marchesi!

And on they swept, all three, to the top landing, where indeed light came in, neither generously nor parsimoniously, from a small skylight of ground-glass panes covered today on their outer surfaces with the oily soot that only Chicago could deposit.

Mr. Marchesi now spoke. And sadly, resignedly.

“The door frontmost there—or leftmost, I’ll put it, since you both would hardly know now how you stand with respect to the streets outside—that door leads into his parlor and—and writing room, if we wish to call it that. Facing out, however, on the street by which we did not come in. The door to this side of it, facing same way, is his kitchen door, which room looks out rearwardly on an interior court. These two other doors—” He inclined his head in two curious right-angled bobs that should, due to their angularity alone, have dislocated his bovine neck. “—lead into a now-unoccupied flat which looks out on the street that we did come in by, but rearwardly onto the same interior courtyard his does. It—”

“I’m getting confused, Mr. Marchesi,” pleaded Lou, with a grimace. “Let’s take it on trust.”

“Let us—yes,” granted the older man. “The old builders of these buildings—”

“—had a Roman holiday when they built this rat trap. The modern movies sure would love to use the inside of it for a chase-scene. Wonder why none ever has? Now you say you can look through a gap or crack into—”

“There’s a very slight gap between the door and its encasing framework, left,” said Mr. Marchesi, apparently not at all ruffled to hear his place called a “rat trap” by the Law. “Also a crack in the door’s leftmost upper panel. You can look in either one.”

“Oke,” said Lou. “We’ll look in them—before we crack in!”

He strode over to the door in question. Tried its knob, purely experimentally, finding what he had been warned by the captain he would find. That the door was quite locked. And the disc of shiny nickelplated steel above it, with a keyhole in it, showed it was indeed a Yale lock. The crack in the panel and gap described were easily findable,—by the blaze of yellow light inside made by the full pouring in of the afternoon sun outside. He selected the gap instead of the crack. Poised his eye just above where, plainly, a powerful hand-bolt, fully three-quarters of an inch in diameter, had been shot.

He saw, as though it were 6 or 7 feet or so from his eye, a kitchen table desk with a young man, clad only in pale green bathing trunks and heelless grass slippers, his back to the front windows, slumped face down across the desk, his right arm and hand hanging down, a black revolver, plainly of gun-metal, in the pendant hand. The young man himself would have been just about 7 feet, no more, no less, from Lou’s eyepiece. The young man was blond. The size of the jagged hole in the upper right side of the slumped forward head where the temple had once been showed a destruction of bone and integument too great to permit assumption that the man at the desk was any longer alive, or had ever been since the second his now-pendant hand had pulled the trigger of the black gun. Indeed, there was no dripping of blood anywhere now. Blood was congealed around and about the wound, mixing with ugly irregular powder mark stains. It trailed down the face sort of chinward. But congealed. Lay on the table top. Congealed. The trail of the blood led to the inner table edge. And it was on the floor below this point. But not dripping there now. He’d been dead a comparatively long while.

Lou saw too, in his wandering gaze which he achieved by moving slightly left and right with respect to the gap, an adumbration of the room itself. But for a couple or so pieces of furniture, in line with his eye, it was apparently devoid of all or most of such. Inordinately high as to ceiling, the floor was without carpeting, and was of soft wood boards. There was no paper on the walls—just what appeared through the gap to be yellow calcimine. Windows there were plainly to the front of the room, a half dozen feet back of the figure at the table—but only the furthest half of the furthestmost one of which could Lou make out from his vantage point, this one covered by a powerful grating running from top to bottom, and made of “spread steel” with diamond-shaped “gaps” so large that, as the sun now was in the Western sky, it was not occluded in the least, or was there even a shadow, reticulated or not reticulated, cast on the floor. Directly beyond the table and in direct line with it, by 6 or 7 feet, was the also inordinately high doorway of an adjunctory room containing a cot of some sort, the apartment’s apparent bedroom. Bringing his focus forward again, Lou studied the table. A typewriter stood neatly on the furthest outside corner away from the door. A sheet of paper protruded halfway out from its platen. A stack of sheets lay inward from that by just enough margin not to abut the machine. Still further inward, and still out on the rear edge of the table, stood a brass thing which Lou recognized as a home paper-burner, Woolworth’s, $1.98. For it was of brass, cylindrical, and stood on tiny legs. And on the table top, even further in—thus directly in front of the young man—was—

Lou surveyed the object as best he could from his vantage point of vision. Taking in all he could of it. It was a roundish glass flagon-like bottle with sufficient base to be able to stand upright, for standing upright it was. It was sealed, at its neck, with some kind of clay or something. And in it stood a playing card. A deuce of diamonds! For it was turned sufficiently in the bottle to show its face.

Lou’s eye swept automatically rearward of the young man. On the floor, thereof. Yes, there were wrappings there—gold-spiculed white paper—a folding carton—excelsior. The thing on the table had, quite obviously, just been taken from those wrappings.

He detached his eye. To see none other than Butterball doing the same thing as himself at the other door. Butterball was, however, detaching his own eye. Returning to Lou’s side. Saying, “Hand-bolt shot there. No entrance.”

“Same and like here, Butterball. But more to see—and how! Want to look? After all, the order for cracking the joint has to come from the lips of the local station dick—you!—and not the supernumerary dick from the downtown division assigned to the station—me!”

Butterball leaned forward. Applied his eye. Took what was virtually a true lightning-like look! For it lasted no more than 1/100th of a second. He jerked his eye away with a scowl.

“Whooie!” he said. “What a mess! I mean—that he made of his sconce. That bullet was really—a gate-crasher!” He made a futile gesture with his hands. “But that’s the way things go, I guess.”

And now Butterball showed how amazingly much he could take in—in a lightning glance. Revealing for the first time why such a rotund and too-well-fed individual as he remained successfully on the police department.

“And now,” he said, “to find out who sent him that lavender-tinted Spanish flagon—with the French playing card in it. And thus and thus only, eh, Lousy, find out why the kid in there did—what he did. All right, Marchesi. That crowbar you got there. And start writing out your bill to the Police Department—for one door-frame!”