The Affair of the Bottled Deuce. Harry Stephen Keeler

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ room containing a cot of some sort, the apartment’s apparent bedroom. Bringing his focus forward again, Lou studied the table. A typewriter stood neatly on the furthest outside corner away from the door. A sheet of paper protruded halfway out from its platen. A stack of sheets lay inward from that by just enough margin not to abut the machine. Still further inward, and still out on the rear edge of the table, stood a brass thing which Lou recognized as a home paper-burner, Woolworth’s, $1.98. For it was of brass, cylindrical, and stood on tiny legs. And on the table top, even further in—thus directly in front of the young man—was—

      Lou surveyed the object as best he could from his vantage point of vision. Taking in all he could of it. It was a roundish glass flagon-like bottle with sufficient base to be able to stand upright, for standing upright it was. It was sealed, at its neck, with some kind of clay or something. And in it stood a playing card. A deuce of diamonds! For it was turned sufficiently in the bottle to show its face.

      Lou’s eye swept automatically rearward of the young man. On the floor, thereof. Yes, there were wrappings there—gold-spiculed white paper—a folding carton—excelsior. The thing on the table had, quite obviously, just been taken from those wrappings.

      He detached his eye. To see none other than Butterball doing the same thing as himself at the other door. Butterball was, however, detaching his own eye. Returning to Lou’s side. Saying, “Hand-bolt shot there. No entrance.”

      “Same and like here, Butterball. But more to see—and how! Want to look? After all, the order for cracking the joint has to come from the lips of the local station dick—you!—and not the supernumerary dick from the downtown division assigned to the station—me!”

      Butterball leaned forward. Applied his eye. Took what was virtually a true lightning-like look! For it lasted no more than 1/100th of a second. He jerked his eye away with a scowl.

      “Whooie!” he said. “What a mess! I mean—that he made of his sconce. That bullet was really—a gate-crasher!” He made a futile gesture with his hands. “But that’s the way things go, I guess.”

      And now Butterball showed how amazingly much he could take in—in a lightning glance. Revealing for the first time why such a rotund and too-well-fed individual as he remained successfully on the police department.

      “And now,” he said, “to find out who sent him that lavender-tinted Spanish flagon—with the French playing card in it. And thus and thus only, eh, Lousy, find out why the kid in there did—what he did. All right, Marchesi. That crowbar you got there. And start writing out your bill to the Police Department—for one door-frame!”

      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 СКАЧАТЬ