The Affair of the Bottled Deuce. Harry Stephen Keeler

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СКАЧАТЬ professional detectives to come up and officially bust the door open. And find why the young man did what he did. And—”

      “Oh,” said the man called Lousy, “he did it because he couldn’t pay the landlord his high rents. I know those rat-holes without rats. $25 a month. And worth $15—maybe only $12. He couldn’t—”

      “He did it,” almost yelled the Captain, “because he had just received a sealed bottle with a—a deuce of diamonds in it. From Lord knows where, or whom. Within 20 minutes or so after he unwrapped it, he blew his brains out—what brains he had after doing his daily stint on the Great American Novel. Now mooch—both of you. Shake the creases out of your behinds. Get on the job. Get on the job or I’ll—I’ll—”

      Both men had risen with alacrity to their feet, with some covert, half amused, yet half uneasy glances at each other. The thin tall one might better be said to have unfolded himself like a jackknife. The rotund one with the round head was already putting on that head his brown derby hat. Now the first man was putting on a grey felt hat he retrieved from somewhere behind him.

      “To the fray, Butterball,” said the tall thin one ironically. “To the fray!”

      “Forward, forward, and never say die!” echoed the rotund heavy one, with a grimace.

      The Captain opened the door and stood meaningfully aside. The three men moved heavily, in unison, from the room, the Captain to go reluctantly and disgustedly back to his desk and high stool to handle dull and mundane things. The two ill-assorted ones to survey, at close hand and under observant eyes, the surveyable, and to analyze the unanalyzable, as all of such might present itself this day in the Flats Marchesi!

      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 СКАЧАТЬ