The Affair of the Bottled Deuce. Harry Stephen Keeler

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ