The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  For most of an hour Trixie battled the telephone calls.

  “Yes, Mrs. Liptrot, I realize that there has been a mix-up . . . Your luggage will be delivered yet this afternoon, I’m sure . . . But I’ve already sent the trucks out to make the exchange . . .

  “Your piano is on the way, Mr. Jandrene. The transportation men won’t go off duty until the exchanges have been made . . . Yes, they’ll pick up the blocks of quartz they left . . . Simply a mix-up of P’s and Q’s. We’re very sorry . . .

  “Of course if you insist on suing for damage . . .”

  “Great spoutin’ whales, what’s the hurricane all about?”

  Trixie dropped the ’phone. “Ebbtide!”

  “It’s me all right!” Ebbtide grinned as he strode around the desk. Trixie sprang into his arms.

  “Ebbtide! I didn’t expect you for a week!”

  “I didn’t expect myself. But business in China—well, don’t ever let nobody fool you, Chinese junks haven’t got nothing to do with junk. They’re two different breeds, like cheese and mosquitoes. What’s all the ’phone jangling about?”

  “Ebbtide!” Trixie was suddenly sobbing. “I was going to have such a big surprise for you—but—but—”

  “What-the-hell-kind of surprise?”

  “Two-dimensional—” Trixie fairly boo-hooed against Ebbtide’s topcoat. “Everything was going fine till I got the letters mixed.”

  Ebbtide’s face lost all symptoms of its usual grin and took on the look of a pickle freshly dipped in salt-water brine.

  “You mean you’ve been messin’ with that boa constrictor that Kendrick gave us?”

  In answer Trixie brushed her pretty nose up and down against Ebbtide’s topcoat pocket.

  “Well, I’ll be shoved out to sea on a turtle’s back!” he muttered. He grabbed up a ringing telephone and barked into it. “What’s that? . . . Supposed to deliver an airplane? . . . Big surprise for the father-in-law, huh?

  . . . Inheritance at stake—yes . . . Well? . . . Oh, the disc turned out to be a bicycle, did it? . . . Umm . . . Family sore, huh?”

  “I got the A’s and the B’s mixed,” Trixie snuffled.

  “Go ahead and put in your claims,” Ebbtide snapped at the ’phone. “We’ll treat our customers right . . . Yes!”

  Another call came in. It was the father who had planned to give his son a bicycle for a birthday gift. While Trixie sobbed something about B’s and C’s, the father on the telephone unfolded his heart-rending sob story. He had plugged in the silver disc, it had swelled up into a crane—a full grown steel crane big enough to lift a freight car. The damned thing had pushed up through the living room ceiling and broken out one of the walls before they could turn the juice off.

  Damages? Off course, Ebbtide’s firm would stand good for the damages.

  Brrrrng! Another call! Another mix-up! The foolish-hearted old fellow’s embarrassment was so hot that Ebbtide fairly blushed to hear him talk. It was ermine he had promised this girl; that fox fur was meant for another one. He was already in a jealous tangle, and after what happened last night he was just plain sunk.

  “Take it easy,” said Ebbtide. “Go pick out a nice cool iceberg. You need a vacation—Damages? All right, you old snapping turtle, do your worst!” Brrrrng! Brrrrng! Brrrrrng! Brrrp! Ebbtide threw his topcoat over the telephone bell and let it buzz on unnoticed. He turned to Trixie with a fierce light in his eye and demanded to know what else she had done during his absence. As if it wasn’t enough to fly around the world on a wild goose chase, he had come back to find his business jammed full of monkey wrenches.

  “Did Kiptoller know you started all this?” he demanded.

  “No,” Trixie sniffed. “It was my own idea.”

  “You might have at least consulted Kiptoller about it.”

  “Kip hasn’t been in but twice, and I was too busy to talk with him. I told him where you’d gone. Gave him your Siberian address. That was all.”

  “When was that?”

  “Last week. He said he’d get in touch with you as soon as you got back.”

  “I’d better go over and see him right away,” Ebbtide grumbled. “The kind of whirlpool you’ve got us in is gonna call for a neat handful of Zandonian jewels quick, or we’re sunk. It’s lucky this is the day the safe opens. I’ll catch him there at seven.”

  “You don’t have to be so sore at me,

  Ebbtide,” said Trixie, getting into a mood for a good fight. He laughed bitterly. For a moment he wasn’t sure whether to reason with her and show her what a detriment to prosperity she was, or simply spank her and get it out of his system. He decided to reason first and finish up with the spanking, thereby leaving the atmosphere completely cleared.

  But he never got around to the spanking. The verbal fight lasted later than he expected, and it took an unpleasant turn. Trixie threatened him. She said if he was going to be ugly she’d leave him till he got over it.

  Where would she go, he’d like to know.

  “I’ll go in the atom constrictor, that’s where.”

  “Haw. You’d be a pretty thing, flattened out into a disc.”

  “All right, smarty, you can laugh, but I mean it. I might as well be flattened into a disc. I’m nothing but a flat tire to you anyhow. You can just file me under the T’s and I’ll stay there till you’re sorry. If you ever want me again you know where to find me.”

  “Come back here!” Ebbtide roared. “Where you think you’re going?”

  “To the atom constrictor,” Trixie snapped. She walked out the door, down the hall, her heels clicking angrily.

  Ebbtide looked after her, uncertain whether to follow. He knew that she had one unfilled order: to pick up an item on Chestnut street for storage; and he knew she was determined, in defiance to him, to complete that order. Even if she had to operate the atom constrictor herself. She would do it, all right. Nothing would stop her when she was in this mood. Woe unto anyone who got in her way!

  Ebbtide glanced at his watch and gave a start. He seized the telephone. It was high time to call Kiptoller. In fact, it was past seven o’clock.

  Kiptoller didn’t answer. Strange, thought Ebbtide. Kiptoller never failed to take care of the time-lock at seven every tenth day. Ebbtide waited a few minutes and tried again. No answer.

  On his third trial he got unexpected results. A voice was on the wire. It was an odd voice; Ebbtide had never heard its like before. But what he heard was more than a little bit interesting. Ebbtide was intent.

  “. . . hot off a tapped wire,” the voice was saying. “Don’t try to trace this call or you’ll be shot in the back before you’re a day older.”

  “Go ahead,” said the other voice.

  “Here it is,” said the rasping nasal voice. “April tenth, seven-twenty P.M. Cream Puff Scores Again. Prominent Jeweler Murdered, Safe Robbed of Millions in Precious Gems.

  “J. P. Kiptoller is dead and the famed Zandonian gems which he kept for Ebbtide Jones are gone. It’s all in the day’s work . . . (etc.) The body was found. . . at Chestnut Square. On the victim’s chest lay a fresh cream puff . . .

  “The body was identified . . . Other police officers forced an entrance . . . to find the large vault open and emptied . . .

  “. . . the letters from Ebbtide Jones, it will eventually be discovered, were only a part of the Cream Puff’s setup . . .

  “The mummy case, it will be apparent, contained no mummy when it was delivered to Kiptoller’s door. It contained the Cream Puff, very much alive. Later it contained Mr. Kiptoller, very much dead . . .”

  Ebbtide looked at his watch. It was just seven-twenty!

  CHAPTER V

  Busy Alley

  The instant Pokey divested himself of the last word of news story he snipped the telephone tap wires, threw all his evidence in a sack, and beat it. One more job awaited him, the most important detail of all. He gunned his car down the street, breathing hard through his teeth.

  Yes, the big moment was at hand. T
he final moment of his three big moments in this job.

  The first of those three had come late in the afternoon when he had closed the Cream Puff in the mummy case and bolted the lid on the shipping crate that enclosed it.

  “Nobody but Houdini could ever get out of that,” he had said.

  “Nobody but Houdini ever tried to do things like that for himself,” the little overstuffed man had laughed complacently through the breathing window in his home-made mummy case. “Me, I get other folks to do all my work for me. Kiptoller will find his way into this crate, don’t worry.”

  Not only had the form-fitting mummy’s case been encased in the shipping crate; the crate had been plastered over with imitation shipping seals, which in turn had been partially defaced. All in all, Pokey had done an artistic job on the first of his three duties. The finished product had all the look of having come through by air freight from Egypt.

  “Any chance that Kiptoller might not unpack you?” Pokey had finally asked. He hated to let the complacent Cream Puff know how trifling worries kept besetting his mind, but he had blurted it before he thought.

  “Not a chance. The letter instructed him specifically to check contents at once. And you checked on Kiptoller yourself.”

  “Right,” Pokey had answered. “Kiptoller was in his shop when I passed there a couple hours ago.”

  “Then we’re set,” Cream Puff had said conclusively. “The taxi driver that drops me off at Kiptoller’s freight door and an hour later picks up the same crate and carts it to the fountain at Chestnut Square has never been known to miss an appointment by a minute in his life. He’ll pull through on the dot. He don’t know what it’s all about, the poor dope. Afterward the police will avalanche him, and he’ll probably go paralyzed and tell ten different versions, none of them right. But we don’t give a damn what happens to him.”

  “Right,” Pokey had agreed, proud that the genius of murderers should have only one accomplice, and that that one should be himself.

  And so Pokey had rolled the temporary mummy to the door where the taxi driver later found him, and detail number one had been checked off successfully.

  All of that had taken place before the Cream Puff’s six-thirty deadline.

  Now, detail number two was concluded. The news story to the press agency had gone over the wire as fast as Pokey could read it. By this time—yes, it was already seven twenty-nine by the street clock—the presses would be rolling out a fresh headline for an early Sunday edition.

  Pokey turned out of the Chestnut street traffic. He shot half a block east, veered swiftly, accelerated northward through the narrow alley.

  He sharpened his eyes for job number three. Somewhere in this alley he would see a trash collector picking up papers on a stick. That would be

  Cream Puff in disguise, with his case of jewels hidden in the bag of trash slung from his shoulder.

  Pokey’s pulse quickened at the sight of the mummy crate resting on the narrow ledge of a doorway numbered 607. Clock-work! That crate was full of dead Kiptoller. Within the next five minutes the ignorant taxi driver would deposit crate and corpse in the fountain. Within ten minutes the newsboys would be screaming the story all over the city. And Pokey and Cream Puff would be rolling along with the traffic listening to the hub-bub. What a man, that Cream Puff!

  Pokey slackened his pace. He was near the end of the alley. He thought he had scrutinized every shadowed doorway that he had passed. He had seen no one collecting trash—oh-oh! There! That inconspicuous figure at the corner of the last building, that was his man.

  Pokey took a backward glance through the night-black alley. No one back of him? Yes, there a taxi turned in from the farther end of the block. Swell! Everything on schedule.

  Pokey eased almost to a stop beside the pudgy trash collector.

  Almost without warning it happened.

  It came with a low roar like a seagoing launch speeding wild through the streets. It swerved into the alley. If it had been a fire-truck storming at him full speed, Pokey would have had just as much chance of dodging it. More, in fact. This huge red monster was wide. It barely dodged the trash-picking pedestrian. It didn’t dodge Pokey’s car. Too late for another dodge.

  Pokey jammed for the reverse. He knew that big red monster. He recognized the big steel mouth that opened toward him. But there was no time—

  Blunnnk! Zoommmmmm! Blackness!

  Trixie Green Jones swallowed and ostrich egg. At least that’s the way it felt. Only the darned thing didn’t go down. It stuck in her throat, and a volley of heat waves shot through her head, and her feet went paralyzed all the way up to her heart, and her hands struck out at all the levers indiscriminately.

  But it had happened. Just like that. The atom constrictor had swallowed up a car. And she was still cruising down the alley.

  “Gee!” Trixie gasped. “Wait till Ebbtide hears—”

  Her breath ran out, and she had a two-to-one feeling in favor of fainting. Instead, she slammed her fist down on the horn and sent a shuddering steamboat blast roaring down through the canyon. The taxi that was approaching from the other end changed its mind and backed out to wait for her.

  “That’s more like it,” Trixie breathed.

  At that moment the spotlight picked the number 607 off a door. Dizzily Trixie pulled the big machine to a halt, reached for the golf-ball-knobbed lever.

  The steel claw reached out, the steel jaws opened to receive the crate, the inner powerhouse hummed pleasantly, the atom constrictor rolled merrily on its way.

  “There!” Trixie said to herself as she turned onto Chestnut street. “Ebb can’t say I didn’t try!” Then with another gulp at that ostrich egg in her throat she added. “But somebody’s going to miss his Saturday night joy-ride. I wonder who it was I bumped into.”

  CHAPTER VI

  Trixie Wanted for Murder

  The found the door of the big basement freight room still open. She drove in, cut off the switch, bounded down from the driver’s cab. By the time she reached the elevator she had regained sufficient composure to powder her pretty nose and smile weakly at the elevator boy.

  “Is Ebbtide still here?”

  “I think so, Mrs. Jones. He’s been running around all over the building looking at the telephones.”

  “If you see him, tell him I’m waiting in his office.”

  Trixie’s composure was good for not more than thirty seconds after she had closed the private office door behind her. Then she went blind with tears that were half rage and half fear. It was all Ebbtide’s fault! She wouldn’t have got in this jam if Ebbtide hadn’t talked that way. But she was in now, all right. If she could only trade places with that fellow in the car that got swallowed up—

  Goodness knows she hadn’t meant to swallow him up. He had just bobbed up out of the dark so suddenly, and she had been doing her best to dodge that old trash picker-upper—

  Maybe nobody would ever know. Maybe he was somebody that no one would ever miss, and the papers and the police would never find out. Never!

  But what about the silver disc? Sooner or later it would have to be accounted for. She’d have to put a label of some kind on it. If not, Ebbtide would take it out someday, turn the electricity on and see it turn into a car with a man in it.

  And what then? Would the man be alive? Trixie felt a fluttering of the heart. The cat had been alive. Still, cats and men were two different breeds, as Ebbtide would say, like cheese and mosquitoes.

  No, there wasn’t any use trying to sob herself into innocence. She was guilty! She was a hit-and-run-off-with-the-victim driver! She’d be found out. The police would—

  A police siren shrieked down the street.

  Trixie huddled up in a chair in the corner and pulled Ebbtide’s topcoat over her. She could still hear that siren. And now another one. They were cruising around this building.

  Now the newsboys were shouting, Extra! What was it they were yelling? Trixie Jones wanted for murder? She strained to catch the
words. They blurred against the noisy clamor of the streets. She couldn’t make them out.

  Trixie hovered between decisions—to stay right where she was until Ebbtide came, then tell him everything—or to steal down to the freight room and unflinchingly walk into the mouth of the atom constrictor, perhaps never to be seen alive again.

  The latter course of action was what she really wanted. It appealed to her as a prison break might appeal to a condemned man. But somehow her faculties were paralyzed. All her mental arguments, all her gorgeous fancies about how Ebbtide would be sorry, failed to move her from her chair. She was scared stiff.

  But when more than an hour had passed and she had heard nothing but the noises of the streets and seen nothing but the lights of the city out the window, her resolution grew stronger.

  She opened the door, found the lighted corridor as empty of policemen as usual. She avoided the elevator. She tiptoed down three flights of stairs toward the freight basement.

  On the final flight she ran into Ebbtide and a group of policemen coming up. She squealed and took flight. Ebbtide overtook her in three bounds.

  “Trixie, we want you—”

  “Let me go, Ebbtide!” she choked. “Hide me, quick—in the constrictor—”

  “Hear that!” one of the policemen growled darkly from the foot of the stairs. “She’s tryin’ to make a gitaway. That fits.”

  “She’s in on it, no question about it,” another officer grunted.

  Ebbtide released his grip on Trixie and whirled to face the ascending officers. So that was why they wanted to see his wife!

  “Say that again,” Ebbtide shouted, “and I’ll mop up the stairs with you!”

  “Easy, Jones, easy!” the sergeant tut-tutted. “No use to git fistic. This incriminatin’ evidence is comin’ together like a head-on crash.”