The Affair of the Bottled Deuce. Harry Stephen Keeler

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СКАЧАТЬ hundred and 72 dollars!” he said.

      “Now I will take it,” pronounced Butterball with relief. “Since it’s been counted by a disinterested observer. And is thus officially registered. Six hundred seventy-two, gentlemen. Six, seven, two. Property of the State of Illinois. From now!”

      He put it into his hind pocket, and buttoned some flap on it.

      “That boy there,” he said, almost reprovingly, “must have got an advance on that novel he’s writing.”

      “Not that one!” said Lou. “I read the one page of it there, and that was enough—for me. I don’t presume to be a critic, but—no, he didn’t get that moolah from that novel.”

      “Well, wherever he got it,” declared Butterball, waxing sardonic and even sarcastic, “he sure hid it deep, didn’t he? And safe! ’Way down in the deep recesses of the earth! Under—his mattress pad—all that dough!—enough for a guy to live on for—all that dough—kept under a mattress pad. Lousy, you know something?”

      “If I did I wouldn’t be here,” Lou repeated the old bromide.

      “Nor I. Well, that young man sitting there, Lousy, now dead as a doornail, is—was—the most naïve person on the face of the earth.”

      “Naïve?” said Lou.

      “Naïve, I said,” said Butterball. “So naïve, in fact, he—he hadn’t been born yet.”

      “So naïve—he hadn’t been born yet?” echoed Lou, highly amused. “Butterball, you have just branded him as possessing the ultimost most of naïveté. With accent tick over the last letter thereof. So naïve—he hadn’t been born yet. Butterball, go to the head of the class!”

      CHAPTER VI

      Discovery Strange, Discovery Odd!

      Butterball made a curtsey. To show complete modesty on the part of a Chicago Avenue police station detective possessing far too large a stomach. He did it well. He should, Lou reflected, have been doing it in the Follies.

      Butterball threw a question now toward Marchesi.

      “Did this well-heeled well-garnished plutocrat here have any visitors, to any extent?”

      “I never saw one in my life,” declared Marchesi. “I am up—I am down—many times a day. I never saw any of such.”

      “Yet he’s been here a long time?”

      “Since early last fall, yes.”

      “Has he relatives here in Chi? Maybe some multimillionaire uncle who gives him chewing gum money—to put under mattresses?”

      “He said, when he came here, sir, he had no relatives.”

      “Lone wolf, eh? Well, I might as well go back in to his bedroom, and examine the tags on his clothing. See how much he paid for same. Sometimes you can find out more about a man from his cloth—”

      He said no more. But turned and went back into the bedroom.

      Lou, therefore, strode down the room toward the kitchen. Strode through the doorway containing apparently a sliding door. Found, as he got into the kitchen proper, that the sliding door slid back only on rails, above and below, that lay in the kitchen itself—that it wasn’t even an honest God-fearing sliding door—was an 1890 phony imitation of one.

      The kitchen bore a softwood floor as did the other room, and had an old zinc-lined sink on its left wall. From the wall above it protruded a single faucet. At the window side of the sink was a cast iron handpump that had been necessary to get the water to the 4th floor back in the ’90’s when everybody below was washing his neck at the same hour. With today’s pressures, the giving ’way of a single Fuller ball would have ejected a stream of water from the one faucet of the sink big enough for a fire hose.

      Off from the sink pump was—ahem!—a toilet seat affixed hydrostatically to the same vertical drain pipe that took care of the sink, and placed here obviously in the long ago for purposes of plumbing economy. One drain pipe—for one flat. It seemed, from marks in the floor, that once, in the long ago, the toilet seat had been modestly encased in a matchboard cubicle. Which presumably had been torn away during the years, by some former tenant, during some cold period when coal was scarce in this flat, and burned in a coal-burning stove. Here now today, in this room, a man could cook or reign—reign or cook. Lou wrinkled his nose. Swung his gaze on beyond it. Saw the other bathroom facilities which this particular flat afforded. A round zinc wash tub, standing off the wall, that could be filled partly under the cold-water faucet, and put on the stove and warmed; in it was a long backscrubbing brush, a colored bottle of bubblebath powder, and a pink washrag. Fit for Cleopatra herself. Maybe!

      Practically in the entrance of the kitchen yet, Lou swung his gaze rightward to see, of course, the other door of the flat that led out into the hallway, and which did, indeed, carry on its inside a powerful hand-bolt, completely shot, and a complicated Yale lock fixture. The door apparently never used—that is, had not been used during the tenure of occupancy of this now-dead tenant, for up against it was shoved an upended soap box, its open side in front so that one’s knees could be shoved into it, from a small up-ended wooden box such as carries proprietary remedies, standing just off it as a seat. A paper napkin atop the taller box made it a dining table of sorts, and a plate, a knife and fork laid out, proclaimed that dinner tonight was to have been for one!

      Off from the blocked door and improvised dining table ensemble, was a 4-hole gas stove with, above it, a long shelf carrying a congeries of breakfast food packages and cans, including corn beef hash and lobster, with, below same, a few pots and pans on nails, plus a frying pan, and plus a wire rack containing a few pieces of silverware, a few more pieces of chinaware. Off from the stove, further windowward, stood a zinc scrub pail with a mop in it, and which explained fully why the floors in this place were as unusually clean as they were.

      Lou strode forth, over to the rear window. It was open an inch, to create a draft from front of the flat to rear. But its grating was locked tight, like all the others, with the Yale padlock. Gazing out, all he could see was the blank windowless side of the cold storage warehouse off from it, to the extent of about 10 feet or so. Gazing sidewise, he could see that the latter bellied out, rearwardly, of its own front, in his direction. Even the buildings around here were just like the flats!—mortised together—in jig-saw puzzle-like segments! He sensed the bottom of the fire-escape on the outside of the windows along here must, indeed, fall into some sort of a nearly closed courtyard, even as Marchesi had earlier suggested by just a few words. Was, indeed, subsequently to find even more that this was so.

      He turned from his position of no vantage, and went back into the main room.

      Butterball was back. Shaking his head.

      “Suits, about $40 each—made of stuff that never needs any pressing—shirts, $2.25 each—ties, 75 cents. Not rich. Not poor. Reg’lar middle-class.”

      They stood now. Each in his own thoughts. Lou spoke.

      “Butterball, do you know someth—”

      “If I did I—”

      “Yeah, we both know the regulation answer. But Butterball, that hanging hand of yon clean, naïve young middle-class man yonder—the one holding the black gunmetal gun, yes—and which hand actually sticks to gun because СКАЧАТЬ