The Affair of the Bottled Deuce. Harry Stephen Keeler

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the late war. The two together are’s good as any doctor. Now you stick right around there from here on.”

      “I will even stand downstairs in the doorway—so they can see, as they come up, which is the entrance to where they are going.”

      “Do that. Stand down there. Have the crowbar back inside. Be very casual. So that we don’t drum up a crowd!”

      “Will do all that, Captain. Will, incidentally, be in the Leaf Street entrance.”

      “Oh yeah, Leaf Street. I remember. All right. Goodbye.”

      And the Captain hung up. Went wearily through the swinging wooden gate in the wooden railing which closed in, for most of its extent, the wicket-encased “desk”. Here he turned toward a closed room diagonally across the station area. A young man in bright lavender suit, and Panama hat, came up the low stairs leading from off the street.

      “Hi, Cap? I’m Spayley. New man on the City News Bureau. Anything of interest breaking, broke—or to break?”

      “Not a damned thing, Spayley,” said the Captain with a moue.

      “Okay. I’ll run on then.”

      The Captain continued his progress toward that further closed room.

      “If there’s anything I hate,” he said emphatically to himself, “it’s the Press barging in and messing in on even such a mere thing as a suicide. Least of all a suicide because of—of a bottled deuce. Phooie! Now the case can be in the exclusive hands of two guys who’ve had some experience in crime, suicide, murder, whatnot.”

      To which he added:

      “Lousy Lou—and Butterball!”

      He had reached the room now that was his objective. Was turning the doorknob.

      “Maybe,” he said, “this’ll make ’em think for a change. Lousy Lou and Butterball—thinking—in mut’al company. That’ll be something—for the birds!”

      CHAPTER III

      Two Birds Without a Thought!

      The Captain opened the door. Stepped in. Swung it to in back of him. Stood there with arms critically folded.

      For two men were playing some kind of cards at a small portable table, exhaling generous clouds of smoke from cigarillos hanging from the corners of their mouths. Their background was a dusty window looking out onto an alley. Their floor was softwood like that of everything in this old station.

      The leftmost man was, beyond doubt, the homeliest man in creation. Or nearly so. He was thin, for one thing, thin like a spaghetti straw, and being tall also had actually to slump down in his chair even to play cards. He had badly misshapen and almost mismatching features, including several face-warts and a nose far too large, and with high cheekbones under somewhat bleak and hollow eyes. Those eyes, which were brown, were, it would have had to be admitted by anyone, friendly eyes, and with even a touch of laughter in them. The man was about 43, and his nondescript hair was commencing to thin, yet had no grey. He was clad in a badly rumpled dark grey or black tweed suit with decidedly baggy knees.

      The Captain gave him a gelid look.

      “Would I possibly be addressing,” he asked disarmingly, “Mr. Lou Ousley?”

      The other looked up, a card in his hand. Didn’t play it, however. Brought it back to his own side of the table. Removed his cigarillo to a cracked glass dish off to one side.

      “Are you kidding, Cap?” he asked. “Or have you got amnesia? Yes, my name’s Lou Ousley—what can I do for you?”

      “You are,” went on the Captain, still quite unsmilingly, “if I’m not mistaken, a detective assigned to this station by the Detective Bureau? Is that correct?”

      “Correct as correct, Cap. But what is all—”

      “Your salary is charged to this station, if I’m not mistaken?”

      “Well, it’s chargeable. I don’t know whether they make the charge—”

      “Well, I do! Because I have to subtract it from my budget. Well, now you are supposed to have to do with investigations off the routine, are you not? Like murder, mysterious stuff—anything involving violence with causes not evident or—”

      “Right, right, right. Trouble is, in this now-today obscure down-at-heel station nothing like you describe ever happ—don’t take that trick yet, Butterball. I didn’t play my last card.”

      The Captain had turned dourly to the other man. This one was a definite human dumpling. Though only about 35 he weighed, obviously, all of 275 pounds. He had badly ruffled nondescript hair atop a round spherical head, in which two greenish eyes were close together. A brown derby hat sat nearby him on a chair, explaining why he was known as a “pulp-paper magazine detective”. He wore a wrinkled brown coat with pants of not the exact same shade of brown, and a wildly pink shirt.

      “Your name, sir, is Homer Tomaroy?” the Captain inquired coldly. “Or could I be wrong!”

      “What—the—hell—goes on here, Cap?” said the latter. Withdrew his pudgy hand that was just about to rake in an unearned trick. And put his cigarillo, too, into the cracked glass dish. “Is this a game or—well, it was Homer Tomaroy five minutes ago. Why?”

      “You are a detective of this station if I mistake not? Not assigned to it, but of it. Is that right?”

      “Right, right, right, right, Cap. I—play your ace, Lousy, or whatever you’ve got there to play, and let’s get this trick off the table and out of the way. It—”

      “You are supposed,” the Captain drove on to the speaker, “to investigate crimes, and other affairs of violence or illicitness of enigmatic nature and so forth? Is that right?”

      “Yeah, but only with and in company of Lousy here. For most enigmatic crimes take place in bad districts, and they don’t want one dick sashaying around by himself, nor—”

      “Correct,” acknowledged the Captain. Drove on. “Well, here we got two nice good unused detectives, capable of investigating, appraising, diagnosing, enigmatic crimes and what have you. Two such detectives, sitting here, playing gin rummy or some fool game. And—”

      “What can we do, Cap?” said the man Lou Ousley frankly. “There isn’t anything up to our caliber around this funereal dead-end dump, and—”

      And now the Captain roared forth answer instead of talking in cold gelid reserved tones.

      “I’ll tell you what you can do! Both of you. Get out! Get on the job—right this minute—now!—this very second—get—on—the—job.”

      “Job?” said Butterball contemptuously. “There hasn’t been a Grade-A investigating job around this mausoleum-crypt since Hector was a—”

      “There’s one right now. Young guy, renting a flat in Little Italy, to write a novel in, has just bumped himself off. The Marchesi Flats. You can see him, hand and arm with gun in the hand, hanging down, through a gap or crack or something in the door—but you’ll have to bust СКАЧАТЬ