The Man with the Crimson Box

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “I was a lapilist—or what you would call ‘burlap specialist.’”

  “Burlap specialist? What do you mea—”

  “Simply that I had been a burlap clerk who had learned so much about burlap, that I was promoted over the other clerks to the position of lapilist, with an additional $5 a week salary.”

  “Wait. I thought burlap—was just burlap?”

  “So does the rest of the world. No, there are more kinds of burlap—such as that made from jute, flax, hemp, manila—et cetera—and more aspects thereto—and more kinds of weave—than you could ever imagine. For instance, you would not know, I fancy, that it is possible to calculate the exact weave of a piece of burlap by measuring the distance through which the burlap permits visibility of objects behind it. I discovered that—and put it into a formula which is used today to check burlap weave counts. And—”

  “Well, that’s most interesting, to say the least. However, a knowledge of burlap, I take it, wouldn’t be much help in writing crime stuff, at least regularly, and so—well, speaking again of groundwork and whatnot, have you ever gone out to a penitentiary—one like, say, our famous Moundsville, containing cell blocks that are the newest creation in penology, as well as cell blocks that are the oldest and most archaic—and inmates ranging from the softest to the hardest—and gone all the way through it? And talked with the men?”

  “Good heavens, no! And besides, how could I—ever accomplish that?”

  “How? Good Lord, Piffington! A ‘famous’ radio writer like you? Why you could tell the warden you were just in town a couple of hours—and making a study of the ‘radio-mentality’ of the men, having heard that many of them tuned in on kid stuff. On your stuff, in short. And you could—but let it pass. Well, did you ever visit, through the help of a friendly State’s Attorney—or say, an attorney for the defense—a real crook—in a real cell—on a real charge?”

  “Why, no! I nev—”

  “Well, have you ever seen a real big-time criminal?”

  “We-ell—I waited one day—after the radio had announced that Emory Peters had been captured in Elgin, Illinois—I waited next that famous door in the City Hall that’s said to lead down to—”

  “Oh, yes—I read that article too! It was in the Gazette, wasn’t it? Some feature story titled ‘The Door from Which No Man Returneth!’ For the reason that through it go the State’s Attorney’s prize catches—toward the chair! I’ve been through that door myself—but on business. There’s quite a scandal about that tiny drugstore whose show window is right plumb next it. The store with the revolving lamp going ever around, in the focus of several inclined mirrors. For—but maybe you know the scandal, eh?”

  “No, I do not. I may have been in New York—or elsewhere—when it broke. I know the window you speak of—and the revolving lamp—from having waited there—to see that Emory Peters. But not the scandal.”

  “Well,” Allstyn elucidated, “the little store is known, you know, as the Little Revolving Lamp Drugstore. It being an offspring of the more well-known and larger Revolving Lamp Drugstore—on Van Buren and Dearborn. And it—the little store—got into the City Hall—of all sacrosanct places!—with one entrance on the street, and one inside the foyer—through a direct pull between the owner of the main R. L. Drug Store—and the Mayor. And—however—did you get to see Emory Peters—by waiting there—next the famous door?”

  “No, I did not. I waited full two hours. And a detective—at least he wore, on his vest, a gold star, all fringed with little diamonds—though I can’t, for the life of me, imagine for what kind of a deed a red-faced lout like him, with a scar on his chin, would have been honored with a star like that—anyway, this detective came along and said—hrmph—he said—that is—”

  “Well—what did he say?”

  “Well, the filthy oaf said, ‘Beat it, Gertrude, before I run you in.’”

  Allstyn tried to keep his face straight. And to cover his embarrassment added:

  “Well, what did you say? Or did you say—anything?”

  “Indeed I did! I spoke up. And said plenty.”

  “Well—what on earth did you—could you say?”

  “Why—I said to him, I said: ‘You go to hell, you dirty goddamned bastard of a grandmother-raping son-of-a-bitch.’”

  “Ow-w!” said. Allstyn, putting his fists to his head. “Was that telling him—things! And—and what did he do?”

  “He? He looked at me and said, ‘Excuse me, buddy—my mistake. But we police make it a point to keep people moving—in City Hall Block.’”

  Allstyn shook his head hopelessly.

  “You are a most amazing individual, Piffington,” was all he could say. “But of course the said ‘detective’—well that is—but just between us now, Piffington, as man to man, don’t you know—and all in friendliness—why do you use—use rouge—on your cheeks?”

  “Why? For two reasons. One, I am an aesthete. And am pained by my ordinarily pale complexion. Second, my body belongs to me—and nobody else.”

  “Bravo! Your case is carried—on either point alone. Hm!” And Allstyn surveyed his ever collected client. “Well—you sure put a high-up member of the Chicago Police Department smack in his place! For the man you jumped on was—believe it or not—no less than Chicago’s Chief of Police—”

  “No?” ejaculated Piffington, leaning forward, mouth agape.

  “A fact! For you said, didn’t you, that he wore a diamond-fringed gold star?—had a red face?—and a scar on his chin? Well that was Philander Moriarity, Chicago’s famous Police Chief who was known—at least years back, when he was Chief Inspector at the Detective Bureau—as the Nemesis of the Parson Gang, a gang of rascals who were outwitting the police back in the days of your youth, but most of whom are pushing up daisies today—or serving life sentences. Moriarity loves City Hall Block—loves to stroll about it, in plain clothes; they say that on a vacation trip he took to South America two years ago, he wandered his City Hall Block up till time to take his plane for New Orleans—and, on the very first hour he was back in Chicago, went to his City Hall Block first and immediately!”

  “I—I think,” said Piffington Wainwright, “that you’re spoofing me. Either about a Philander Moriarity being Chief of Police of Chicago—for I know absolutely nothing about local politics here—or that, if he is, the man I unloaded all that blistering vituperation on was he!”

  “But I’m not spoofing you,” declared Allstyn, “on either fact. I might perhaps tell you, if you don’t believe me, to open yonder telephone book, look up the name ‘Philander Moriarity,’ and note the words after it which I happen to know say ‘Executive Head, Chicago Police Department.’ I might even urge you to ring him tonight at his home, and catch the sound of his voice. Except for the fact that—”

  “Except for what?” asked Piffington, with a peculiar tone in his voice that, to Allstyn, seemed to say the other was looking forward to unloading shortly some more billingsgate on P. Moriarity—but telephonically only!

  “Except for,” said Allstyn hastily, “that Philander Moriarity left Chicago, by air, last night at midnight, on another vacation—Asia, according to this morning’s Trib—Australia, according to this morning’s Herald-Ex—Alaska, according to today’s early News!—he detests reporters, it’s said, and won’t talk to ’em; so the only thing the Municipal Airport newshounds could get was from the ticket-window, and that he was booked straight through to Frisco, but with a stop-off at Denver—to recover from that ol’ Rocky Mountain airsickness!—till the 3 p.m. Denver-Frisco plane today. And so puh-lease, Piffington, don’t go calling his quarters; for he not only, as now you see, won’t be there, but calls to police chiefs are invariably traced even while they’re being made—and you’ll only get yourself in more Dutch than you were the day Moriarity encountered you there on City Hall Bl—but that’s more or less what I’m really trying to get at: namely, that
Moriarity, in accosting you that day, was only fulfilling a necessary and obligatory duty of any policeman high or low, in a troublesome block—yes, City Hall Block—around which there are always so many strange—and therefore suspicious—characters going, just as there are about Old Post Office Block, and—”

  “Isn’t it the truth?” Piffington acquiesced. “Only this morning, while coming out of the Old Post Office, after registering one of my scripts to New York, I saw a girl tramping along the block, and carrying—of all things—a lavender gripsack.”

  “A gripsack? Good heavens! I didn’t know such things still existed. And lavender? How—”

  “Yes, Mr. Allstyn, lavender. For ’twas made of carpet—that had been a brilliant lavender. Anyway, people turned and stared after her like nobody’s business.”

  “No doubt! We’re chronic starers here in Chicago. And as rude as they make ’em. And—however, I was trying, a moment back, to sort of—of plumb your capabilities, don’t you know, for writing the stuff you want to write. And so—continuing along that line—have you ever visited the corpse of a murdered man—in the police department morgue?”

  “The corpse—of a murdered man? Great heavens—no! And what could I discover—if I did?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Allstyn said frankly. “Maybe pick up some clue that would help a State’s Attorney send two men to the chair—or three—instead of one.”

  “But—but my business isn’t sending two—three—any men to the chair. It’s—but anyway, there are no murdered men just now in the Chicago police department morgue.”

  “True. Or perhaps so. For, in Chicago, one never knows what will come to pass between strokes of the clock. However, try it sometime—unless, of course—” Allstyn gave a shrug of his shoulders, “—the sight of a dead man is repellent to you?”

  “Repellent?” repeated Piffington Wainwright in apparent utter surprise. “Why—how could it be? A dead man is nothing but a live man with the vital principle drawn out. If the vital principle that’s drawn out isn’t in itself repellent—then what’s left certainly can’t be.”

  Allstyn passed a hand helplessly over his forehead. “Well—by gosh—I never heard it put quite that way before. However, Piffington, sometimes one’s emotional self finds something repellent. Quite against the dictates of one’s cool reason. And—”

  “Well, no dead man exists,” declared Mr. Wainwright, “that could cause the tiniest flurry in my psyche. Fact is, I once had an undertaker friend who always called me in just before shipping his lady corpses to the house—to apply the rouge and lipstick. He was a clumsy ox—and I flatter myself that I fixed him up some mighty de luxe corpses.”

  Allstyn stared. “Once again, Piffington, I declare you’re a strange chap. For—but getting back again to the concrete matter of building fiction out of at least some semblance of fact, have you ever, for instance, watched a criminal attorney working—in the hours just before a trial?—working desperately for an acquittal?”

  “Why, no, I—”

  “Well, did you ever, then, attend a hard-fought murder trial?”

  “No, never! But why should—”

  Allstyn made a significant gesture with his hands.

  “But you don’t understand,” expostulated Piffington Wainwright, obviously catching the meaning of the gesture. “Authors don’t have to know anything about what they write!” Allstyn’s mouth was opening for a vigorous denial. “Authors,” the other reaffirmed vehemently, “don’t have to know anything whatsoever—about what they write. A fact, Mr. Allstyn! If—if an author wants to stage a scene on the Sahara Desert he—he just steps down to the Oak Street beach—on a hot noonday—and gets the atmospheric ‘feel’ of things. And—”

  “But where will said author, for instance, get, for instance, the lingo that professional crooks use?”

  “Oh—that?” said Piffington disdainfully. “Any 10-cent pulp-paper magazine contains yards and yards of that. Like, for instance, a safe being a ‘pete.’ Hmph! Why, a man could—if he collated the data in those stories—go out and become a professional safe cracker. Could even blow a safe, and correctly measure out the—the—soup.”

  “Well, that builds up my very contention,” persisted Allstyn. “Those fellows who wrote those stories did have the correct dope. Not so?”

  “No doubt. But why should I feel I have to dig it all out again? If they have it—and I get it from them—then I have it. And—and everybody’s happy.”

  Allstyn stared at Wainwright.

  “You are a most blissful combination, Piffington, of theory and—and pragmatism, I have ever encountered.”

  “Indeed? Well that was exactly what a chap who was encumbered with religion—many religions in fact—once told me.”

  “Encumb—well—have you no religion?”

  Piffington shrugged his shoulders daintily. And replied: “Just that while I’m here on earth, I’m here—and when I’m dead, I’m non est—and when my specific moment comes, I have to pass on—like it or not—willy-nilly.”

  “But what do you mean—your specific moment?”

  “Why—that every living thing in the world has a certain moment set—oh, not by some fool score-keeper—no—but by the plan in—in which everything is meshed—for that living thing or person to check out. And when that moment is there—it has to go.”

  “Yonder fly?—the last one of the season,” asked Allstyn, “has its moment?”

  “Of course.”

  Allstyn picked up a wire flyswatter.

  “All right. Now I’m going to whack him into Kingdom Come. Note—I poise the flyswatter. If I come down—I change his moment, do I not?”

  “Not at all. For if you come down, you merely have certified that ’twas his moment!”

  “But good God, Piffington, if I don’t come down, it isn’t his moment then, is it?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “Yet if I do—it is his moment?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Then—then the moment isn’t fixed, is it?”

  “Oh, yes, it’s fixed,” declared Piffington. And then delivered a triumph of feminine logic. “For you would only have occasion to decide to smash him when his moment is nigh and ready!”

  Allstyn laid his swatter gently back—and unused—on the desk. The fly—spared—flew gaily off.

  “Well,” Allstyn declared, jumping off philosophical argument with P. Wainwright with seven-league boots, “you were saying, Piffington, that an author doesn’t have to know a blamed thing about the things he writes. But doesn’t he have to feel the people he creates?”

  “Oh yes, surely. But that is easy.”

  “Easy? Well, I—”

  “Well, of course—you have to have some faculty—for giving imitations. As I do.”

  “Oh, do you? Professionally?”

  “Oh no. At parties—and private gatherings. Last night I was at a party—was there all night in fact, from eight in the evening till dawn—at Buford van der Zook’s, the artist who—”

  “Oh—Buford van der Zook? I know him. A charming fellow, don’t you think?”

  “I very much do,” affirmed Piffington. “One of the finest hosts I’ve ever encountered.”

  “But what do you think of his oils?”

  “I think they’re above the heads of most people.”

  “Maybe that is so. For I—but you gave some imitations at his party last night? I bet he was pleased. For he goes in for unusual and talented guests.”

  “I hope he was pleased. For I did my best. Before his dozen or so guests. And my vocal cords were in fine fettle. For low-pitched imitations—and high-pitched ones. In fact, I did one of Albert Einstein—figuring out a new relativity theory. And I—I even imitated Mae West. Which latter imitation required a wiggle—as well as correct handling of the vocal cords.”

&n
bsp; Allstyn grinned openly at the idea of Piffington giving a Mae Westian wiggle. And hastily got off that subject. “We’re off the track again, I see,” he said pleasantly. “But before getting on again, I must again say, Piffington, that you’re one of the strangest characters I’ve ever encountered in all my professional life. Bar none! You’re—you’re a thousand inconsistent traits, blended together.”

  “But consistently,” amended Piffington unsmilingly. “For no person is really inconsistent, you know. If he were, he couldn’t enter into social or business relationships—carry on—even function in the social system.”

  “Right and correct,” Allstyn conceded. “Well, about my various tips on getting practical hints on crime-story writing, it seems that—”

  “I thank you for them,” put in Piffington Wainwright. “But with respect to all of them, and on all of which I’ll at least reflect, I reaffirm that I can do dramatic crime-story stuff, concerning criminals and policemen, that will raise the hair on your scalp. And I—”

  “Well, after all,” said Allstyn, more kindly, “I really don’t know anything about all that. I confess I can’t believe that Adlai, Collerman and Grimshawster would turn your crime-story material down—if it really was dramatic. And convincing. Though God knows I’ve heard the tale about how Zenith Pictures, Inc., in Hollywood made a complete picture called The Bloody Corpse in the Forest, with Bela Rogosi, and finally produced it as The Big Red Doll in the Woods, with Shirley Hemple. And about how Izzy Villmatsch, of United Pictures, started a million-dollar production on a script which he happened by pure accident to pick up in the studio and read, and which was actually a mixture of two different scripts that hadn’t been assorted back into their respective selves! And of how Heimie Berngreiner, the head of Amalgamated Films, instructed his script editor to ‘get hold of this feller Poe in Baltymore’ and ‘get some of them hairraising scrips.’ And of how Radio station W. W. N., right here in Chicago—the World’s Worst Nuisance, I call it!—signed on 100 ‘genuine’ hillbillies for the assembling of the ‘greatest hillbilly band in creation’—and got no less than Roger Hyer’s Orchestra, all out on strike from New York. Crazy—all of those radio and movie people are, I know—from screen to microphone. And—but all I can say, again, for your $10—receipt of which I acknowledged, but acceptance of which I gladly forego!—is that you can’t break the contract. Under which circumstances therefore, the only way for you to get it broken is to—”