Читать книгу The Affair of the Bottled Deuce - Harry Stephen Keeler - Страница 7

CHAPTER V

Observation Sage, Observation Philosophic!

Damage to the Flats Marchesi turned out not to be too vast! For insertion of the crowbar by Butterball between door and casement, and pressure by both men, finally aided by Marchesi himself pressing against them, resulted in a loud fracturing and popping and splitting of ancient wood, where wood had encased both hand-bolt shaft and Yale-lock bolt-shaft, and inward the door swung.

Lou was in the lead, Butterball behind. Now came Mr. Marchesi sadly taking mental notes at side of door as to what his bill might be able to be made. He now stood off to one side, out of the way of things, arms folded resignedly, the while Butterball swung the door closed to keep out onlookers of which there were none to keep out.

Lou, having had, so he decided, probably more experience in medicine in the medical corps of the United States Army, than had Butterball, in changing bedpans once, in the County Hospital, stepped over towards the body sitting at the table, rounded it, and put his fingertips experimentally on the wrist of the arm which lay partly on the table, for the reason that the pressed forward torso had kept it there.

There was no pulse. Not the slightest.

He removed his fingers from it. Turned partly.

“Yeah, he’s dead all right, Butterball. As is obvious, anyway. And has been so, moreover, ever since he blew in the side of his head there.” He glanced leftwise at the line of objects on the table. “Wonder if this sheet of paper in the machine could be a farewell note of some kind?”

He leaned over in that direction, and read. It was a sheet of apparently bond paper, numbered 136. Was apparently about some girl named Almarine wandering in a tizzy, or a dizzy, or something, through some pansy fields, either real or imaginary. A glance rightwise of the machine, at the topmost page in the stack at the side, showed that this page was a beginning or commencement of Almarine’s wanderings in wherever she was wandering. The novel had been progressing onward, not backward, as any well-behaved novel should.

Leaning over, Lou gazed at—in fact, in—the incinerator which stood next to the stacked sheets. It was nothing but a short cylinder of brass standing on four legs, with grillwork across its interior at a point about halfway down, and a pan at bottom for ashes to fall in; it had holes around its base to make a draft through itself, and thus became a very short “chimney”. Ashes were there galore in the pan, betokening the burning of many manuscript sheets as the novel proceeded, so that no ribald garbage-collector could read forth the contents to his fellow can-hustlers.

Looking up, Lou saw that Butterball had gone straight to the wrappings that lay partly behind and doorward of the sitting body. Was, in fact, holding up to view the sheet of gold-spiculed paper.

“Look, Lousy,” he was saying. “No return card. Nor has it been cut off and burned. The oblong sheet is complete.”

“None, eh?” said Lou. “Well, that makes it kind of anonymous, doesn’t it, unless—”

He came over, and surveyed, over Butterball’s shoulder, the sheet, now turned about facing them both. The address

LYTHGOE CROCKETT

663 LEAF STREET

CHICAGO

had been crudely printed in black ink, with, beneath it in larger caps and brilliantly red ink, the notification

NO WRITING ENCLOSED.

4th CLASS MATTER. MAY

BE OPENED FOR POSTAL INSPECTION.

“The Negro postman,” he said, toward Marchesi, “who had to take this up himself today, said it was ‘first-class’, didn’t he? But it’s—”

“And first-class it is,” grunted Butterball, a bit irritably, as a man who was forced to travel along with people who didn’t see everything at a glance, “as you’d see, if you looked, Lousy, both from the stamps—totaling $1.08—and the tiny em’ndation up offside them. See it?”

Lou did now. $1.08 in stamps, and a small penciled “1st Class”.

“Yes,” he nodded contritely. “Well, it means that the sender intended first to send this via parcel post, but decided to post it first-class instead—”

“Decided, maybe,” offered Butterball sagely, “since it was going to cause a guy to bump himself off—for it did, remember—decided not to get himself identified at the post-office window. So that if—”

“Yes,” said Lou, “so I’ve read. People contributing to suicide—can be sent up for at least manslaughter. Yeah.”

He turned about. Picked up the carton that Butterball hadn’t. Wondered if he couldn’t find something of interest now.

But Butterball had this all mentally indexed and classified without having even picked it up!

“Woolworth Stores carton,” he said. “Size 3-c, price fifteen cents.” Lou’s hand reached out to the excelsior. “No smell thereto,” Butterball described. “Except—excelsior—woody, yes.”

Lou stood disgruntledly erect. Turned about. They both now were studying the bottle from their distances of some feet. But neither one stepping forward to touch it, nor intending to. For if it should prove later to contain the fingerprints of Chicago’s present gang-leader, the latter could be put in jail for 90 days for scaring a young man into suicide—90 days of luxurious living in a carpeted cell with champagne brought in every hour on the hour. And if the bottle should prove to contain the fingerprints of some young ribbon clerk at Marshall Field and Company, who fingerprint all their employees, the ribbon-clerk could be given 5 years in jail, with good-behavior time off, for manslaughter, capital M. Most likely the bottle would contain none!

Lou now took a wandering look about the room. As did Butterball, in direction opposite, but in curious short jerks, like photons of observation, they were! Lou saw what was really nothing more than an “elaborative expansion” of the adumbration he had seen a few minutes earlier through the door gap. A stark room with ceiling seemingly higher than ever, once one was inside it, and holding, moreover, as Lou had first guessed, no furniture whatsoever but this kitchen-table desk, the single kitchen chair over at side of the doorway of the adjoining bedroom. And, of course, the swivel chair itself in which the dead figure sat. The room, ceiling and walls, Lou was able to perceive, now that he was in it, and not looking through a peep hole, showed itself not to have been calcimined yellow, but to have been painted a probably once white, which had yellowed with years, and since its first painting had been washed down now and then by whoever might occupy it. A single greenish-brass gas fixture hung down from the ceiling midwise thereof, bending about and up, and holding a single gas tip, minus any shade—a tip capable of giving off a flame that doubtlessly should be in the Smithsonian Institute. On the left side wall was a further fixture, similarly greenish-brassy, protruding forth from the wall like a prizefighter’s chin. Also without shade. What a welter of light this place must be, Lou reflected, on a “spooky night” when the wind roared outside!

The rear end of the room gave out onto an obvious kitchen, through a wide doorway containing apparently a sliding door. At the further side of the kitchen could be seen a grating-equipped window, and a fire-escape platform.

Leftwise of the writing table by about as far as the table itself stood from the entrance door, was the doorway leading into the bedroom. The latter now proclaimed itself to be, technically, an “alcove”—because the doorway itself, now inspectable and appraisable, was not only so inordinately high that a giant could walk through it without bobbing his head—but far wider than the ordinary doorway, too—it was framed about with unusually wide unornamented woodwork with a lintel a full foot wide itself, and had never borne a door, as was obvious by the absence thereof of hinges, or even hinge marks, and even vertical and horizontal doorstop strips—had, in short, been intended in the long ago to carry the usual bead-hung portiere characteristic of the Gay Nineties. And carried now nothing but oblong openness.

With a sigh Lou turned clear about and went over to the front windows. Of which windows there were three: a substantially wide middlemost one, and a narrower one each side of it. The rightmost one was open, all of a foot, to give air to the place. But all were covered with steel hinged gratings from top to bottom. The fire-escape platform that came to the windows outside came from some distant ladder—containing construction, for it was not visible. The window gratings were of expanded steel mesh, but unusually wide as to expanded gaps, being big enough, any of the latter, to put a hand and even a forearm through—that is, if such were slender! They did not bar the light in the least, or even cast shadows on the floor. The locking lugs on each window were locked with powerful Yale padlocks.

Lou looked around, and on the wall near where Marchesi stood, he saw 6 small brass hooks that had been screwed ruthlessly into the plaster, and which carried keys. That is, to be exact, 5 carried keys, and the sixth carried a hanging gold watch which plainly was the official “clock” of this “studio”. The keys all had tags, apparently lettered, and so Lou went over close to the keys while Mr. Marchesi stood alongside with impassive, pained mien. The tags were all turned outside, as to inscriptions, and read, respectively: Front Window, left; Front Window, center; Front Window, right; Bedroom Window; Kitchen Window. In the event of a fire around here anyone who could read English could get out quickly. Others—well, out of town papers please copy!

Looking around back of himself now, Lou found what he had practically known he would find. Namely, that Butterball’s sequence of photon-like observations about the room had completed the room for him in three seconds flat, and that he was already in the bedroom, or alcove, calling it the latter because of its wide and doorless entrance. Lou proceeded, therefore, to join his right-bower, else the man to whom he himself was a right-bower. The bedroom window also, as was derivable from the phalanx of keys in that other room, had its grating; the fire-escape platform was visible through this one, too. The room held only the cot partly visible from the doorway earlier, a chiffonier in a far corner, and one kitchen chair to undress on or dress on. Butterball, riffling about in the chiffonier drawers, was flinging them back practically as fast as he opened them.

“A very clean young man, Lousy,” he commented. “Note his bed linen. And plenty more here, for changing.”

Lou did draw back the coverlid, more or less gingerly. Saw clean linen indeed. Replaced it, equally gingerly. Came back into the main room. Waited while Butterball clatteringly drew further drawers open, and banged them to again.

Butterball was coming back in.

“Clothes and clothes,” he said. “Underwear—all clean—and wash cloths. Papers, none. No, no papers.”

He turned to Lou.

“What did you find, Lousy, when you—”

“—when I pulled back the cot coverlid? Oh quote noth—”

“No, when you ran your hand over his mattress pad purely as routine exam—”

“Why, I didn’t,” said Lou, dignifiedly. “I knew that a guy sophisticated enough to write a novel—or try to—wouldn’t put his 98 cents worth of loose change under a—”

“Ah me, Lousy! Such carelessness! Well, I’ll just do it for you, then. So we can report him to be—sophisticated?—was that your word?”

Butterball went back in. And did the job he seemed to think that Lou should have done when Lou had been at the cotside.

Lou could him reaching in under the mattress pad. Flailing around with his extended arm as though it were some kind of a semaphore arm operating in the wrong plane, and not knowing where to settle. He covered all the area, evidently, for he withdrew his arm, and came back into the main room with that arm straight out in front of him as though its hand carried something smelling bad—and in that hand was a roll of currency bills large enough to choke a horse with.

“Icky!” he said disgustedly, to nobody in particular, else to all in the room. “If there’s anything I hate to come upon in a death room, it’s a commodious supply of money—for then, when the case is written up by the press, all the readers say ‘How much money did the detectives keep for themselves?’” He looked, woebegonely, at Lou, and then at Marchesi against the wall.

“Mr. Marchesi,” he begged, “will you take this filthy stuff out of my hand?—and count it—officially? Money—go!”

Marchesi had stepped forward eagerly. Took the money. Counted it affectionately. He palpably liked counting money.

Finally announced his count.

“Six hundred and 72 dollars!” he said.

“Now I will take it,” pronounced Butterball with relief. “Since it’s been counted by a disinterested observer. And is thus officially registered. Six hundred seventy-two, gentlemen. Six, seven, two. Property of the State of Illinois. From now!”

He put it into his hind pocket, and buttoned some flap on it.

“That boy there,” he said, almost reprovingly, “must have got an advance on that novel he’s writing.”

“Not that one!” said Lou. “I read the one page of it there, and that was enough—for me. I don’t presume to be a critic, but—no, he didn’t get that moolah from that novel.”

“Well, wherever he got it,” declared Butterball, waxing sardonic and even sarcastic, “he sure hid it deep, didn’t he? And safe! ’Way down in the deep recesses of the earth! Under—his mattress pad—all that dough!—enough for a guy to live on for—all that dough—kept under a mattress pad. Lousy, you know something?”

“If I did I wouldn’t be here,” Lou repeated the old bromide.

“Nor I. Well, that young man sitting there, Lousy, now dead as a doornail, is—was—the most naïve person on the face of the earth.”

“Naïve?” said Lou.

“Naïve, I said,” said Butterball. “So naïve, in fact, he—he hadn’t been born yet.”

“So naïve—he hadn’t been born yet?” echoed Lou, highly amused. “Butterball, you have just branded him as possessing the ultimost most of naïveté. With accent tick over the last letter thereof. So naïve—he hadn’t been born yet. Butterball, go to the head of the class!”