The Affair of the Bottled Deuce. Harry Stephen Keeler

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      “I own them, yes. For many years. I live in one myself. So I can watch my tenants, and all that goes on.”

      “Good for you, Mr. Marchesi. If more slum-owners did as you do, there’d be less crime in slums. Most slum landlords I know live in Lake Forest or Winnetka. And—well, now who is this bird who’s killed himself? Roomer? No, not a roomer, for those flats only have three rooms in each, so—”

      “Right, Captain. Well, he is a young man—oh, about twenty-three years old—who rented the particular flat that’s directly above me to write the—as he called it—the Great American Novel in.”

      “Great American Nov—why’d he come down to your region to write it in? In your building—of all?”

      “He wanted to be by himself.”

      “Greta Garbo the II’d, eh? Well, there’s lots of places a guy can be by himself without—why did he even come to Little Italy? Did he want to write a novel about—Little Italy?”

      “No, Captain. Actually, he did so to save money—at least he said, when he came here, about ten months ago, that he had no money to waste on high rent. He moved in with but four pieces of second-hand furniture—no, five pieces—well, six pieces. One kitchen table on which to write. One swivel chair in which to sit back in, while thinking what to write—or maybe what not to write. One kitchen chair alongside table or elsewhere, if he should have a visitor—which, however, he never did. One cot to sleep on, in the bedroom—one kitchen chair on which to undress—one chiffonier to put his clothes and all his other things in. Plus—yes, plus!—one typewriter—one frying pan—a couple of cooking pots—a few cracked dishes—a big gas-heater he used all of last winter but since then sold to me—a mop and pail—a desk incinerator—a—”

      “You mean one of those gadgets to burn up discarded papers in, right on your desk?”

      “Correct. They are today sold in all stationery departments, particularly in—”

      “What did he want a desk-incinerator—for?”

      “For burning up, each day, the discarded pages of—”

      “—the Great American Novel, of course! Yeah, I get it. Well, what’s his name? Or had I better put it now—what was his name?”

      “His name was Lythgoe Crockett.” Mr. Joseph Marchesi painstakingly spelled out the name of his tenant.

      “Lythgoe—Crockett, eh? Very Anglo-Saxophonish handle, if you ask me! Well, now, Mr. Marchesi, when did you last see him alive?”

      “I saw him about one hour ago. And even talked with him in the half-opened door of his flat. He was dressed, as usual, only in bathing trunks and grass slippers—”

      “Bathing trunks? Has he got a play-beach in his flat?”

      “He believed clothes are un—unhygienic. Or shall I put it—unnatural. He went about—inside, that is—at least now that summer has come on, in bathing trunks and heelless grass slippers.”

      “Well, that’s a man’s priv’lege, I guess, in the priv’cy of his own domycile. All right. Well, what did you and him talk about? Listen—I hope he ain’t alive all the time we’re gassing here, and bleeding to death—”

      “He is as dead as a doorknob, Captain. He’s so dead, Captain, that— Listen, Captain, if he’s not dead, I’ll give you the Marchesi Flats.”

      “I don’t want ’em, Mr. Marchesi. I got troubles enough already. Well, what did you and him talk about? Were you giving him 24 hours’ notice or something?”

      “Oh, heavens no. He was always paid up on his rent. Always. No, I was asking only if he would not like a certain nice little flat down on the lowest floor, on the other street. So that my signora—” Mr. Marchesi had unconsciously slipped into his own tongue at this moment, or perhaps it was a term definitely showing affection. “—and I could take his flat. For my signora has become, as she has become older, fearful of cat burglars—”

      “Cat burglars? Now I know what that would mean to me as a policeman. But does it mean the same thing to you? You don’t mean prowling cats, I take it, but burglars who come down from roofs, or off fire-escapes? Is that right?”

      “That is correct, Captain. And Mr. Crockett’s flat has swinging steel gratings, each locked with stout Yale steel padlocks, on the inside of every window in it, from front to back—”

      “Steel gratings? Swinging, padlocked steel gratings—on every window? Why, did he put these in—”

      “Oh no, no, no. A bootlegger of absinthe, the sale of which, it seems, is forbidden in this country—I’ve even heard rumors the fellow was a dope seller, too—who lived here when I took the flats over, he had the gratings put on. He evidently was afraid, continuously, of being assassinated. When I took over, and heard the rumors about him, and realized from the gratings he was no good, I was just about to take action in court to eject him. But fortunately he was assassinated in some other district, and solved my problem in that way. Sam Bellanco never even got to return to his flat; so—”

      “Bellanco? Sam Bellanco? Yes, lone wolf. Lived alone and liked it! Stabbed to death, in the back, around Orleans Street and West Superior. He was a drug-dealer—far more than an absinthe bootlegger. Sold badly-cut drugs, and some addict finally gave him whats-what.”

      “You know the crime-history of these parts, Captain! Well, Bellanco had this flat we’ve been talking about, and I didn’t have to put him out. For the reason that the day I went into court for an ouster order, he never came back, being dead, dead, dead. And it is those gratings, of Bellanco’s, still there today on the windows, I do surmise, that induced Mr. Crockett to rent that flat.”

      “No doubt! He didn’t want nobody to steal the gre–e–eat American novel from under his nose. All right. What next? What did he say when you tried to subtly shoehorn him out of his luxur’ous quarters?

      “He said, indignantly, ‘I like it here—I like it right where I am—I am going to stay right here, by godfrey—I have a lease—you cannot throw me out—I—

      “I said, ‘All right, all right, Mr. Crockett. If you don’t like to move, you don’t have to move. I want you to be happy. Good day, Mr. Crockett.’”

      The name “Crockett’ was coming up so frequently now, and sounding so much, at least to the Captain, like “croquette”, that he was licking his lips. And making mental reservation that, when this conversation was over, he would phone the hamburger man across the way and tell him to bring over turkey-meat croquettes on toast, instead of hamburgers on rye. Went on.

      “We don’t seem to be getting to the vital thing here, Mr. Marchesi—the suicide. However, we’ll carry on—now that we’ve embarked on the ins and outs of slum real-estate business. All right. What next?”

      “Well, next, I am downstairs—at the front door—the street entrance door, that is—thinking how much it might cost me to have, for my signora, steel gratings put on all the windows in our own flat—when comes along the postman. A black Negro. Yes, mail-delivery we have last of all in Little Italy. And the Flats Marchesi at roughly 2:15 p.m. each day. Well, the black postman he had, it seems, for Mr. Crockett, what he said was a first-class package. You know? All sealed? СКАЧАТЬ