“I couldn’t never go back to sleep,” Spelvin Sump said. “Let’s play some cards until mornin’, Klump.”
ILLIE, before he went back to gin, draped his coat over the back of his
chair and felt of the Roscoe that was in the right hand pocket. It was beginning to dawn upon him that this client of his was just a little crazy. He sat down and watched Sump deal the cards and wondered at the changing lights in the character’s peepers. He had forgotten all about Humphries Bogard now and thought only of Peter Lorry. Willie could feel little things running up and down his spine and their feet were as cold as a Gromyko’s good morning.
Dawn finally came and it was the first time Willie ever realized it rode on the backs of turtles.
“You could sneak out now an’ save two bucks,” Willie said. “Mrs. Kozowski don’t git up ‘fore seven. An’ anybody who is chastin’ you won’t expect you to be abroad at this hour.”
“That is a splendid idea, Klump,” Spelvin Sump said and reached for his pants. Fifteen minutes later Willie Klump was alone and sitting on his bed trying to add things up. Crazier things could have happened to him before, he mused, but he could, not remember them. He finished the last of the very black coffee and then splashed cold water over his noggin. At seven A.M. he was down in the front hall calling Gertrude Mudgett.
Gertie was no end irked when she recognized Willie’s voice. “Oh, it is you, you rooey!” she snapped. “First, you got a nerve callin’ me anyways and secunt this is no time to git no lady out of bed. Git it through your thick skull I am through with you, you bum! Leave us forget an’—”
“Gertie, I can explain about the pitcher of the mouse,” Willie said in a hurry. “I just got to talk to you, baby. It is about somethin’ that scares me. How’s about tonight for dinner?”
“Mr. Klump, I am dinin’ with a gen’leman frien’ this evenin’,” Gertie said haughtily. “He’s had some nice publisticy in the papers if you’ve noticed.”
“Kelly, huh?” Willie sighed. “Well, how about after?”
“I am baby-sittin’ at eight o’clock sharp, Mr. Klump. If you care to call at a certain address around nine I shall be at liberty for a few moments. Take this down.”
Willie scribbled an address on the wall near the common telephone as Gertie gave it to him. He was quite downcast when he hung up the receiver.
“Satchelfoot!” he choked out. “He’ll be spendin’ my savin’s account yet if I don’t work fast. Of courst I could perpose to Gertie tonight—er—there must be a better way out.”
At the appointed hour William J. Klump rang the bell outside the door of Apartment 7B in quite a genteel pueblo on East Seventy-Eighth. Miss Mudgett admitted him and she had a very precocious moppet by the hand. In her free hand she held a book.
“Good evenin’,” Gertie greeted Willie coldly. “I’ll give you two minutes.”
“I don’t like him!” the moppet said bluntly, then hauled off and kicked Willie in the shins.
“Cute kid, huh?” Willie sniffed. “I am glad I brought a heater with me. What you readin’ to her, the story of Jack The Ripper?”
“Nya-a-ah!” the sprout yipped, and stuck her tongue out at Willie.
“Now behave, Lucretia,” Gertie cautioned. “Or I shan’t read no more of Goldilocks An’ the Three Bears.”
“Her last name maybe is Boggia?” Willie asked, then felt something snap inside his head, “Wha-a-a-a? Goldilocks? The bears? Louie an’ Waxie Behr? I found Goldilocks in the closet an’—Gert, I must
be runnin’ along! He wa’n’t tryin’ to rub out his wife. Oh, have I been dumb!”
“You’re beginnin’ to catch on, Willie,” Gertie threw after Willie as he legged it down the hall.
Willie had a dollar and eighty cents left so he took a cab to his rooming house. He was panting like a bloodhound after a mile run in August when he burst into Mrs. Kozowski’s front hall. The landlady was just hanging up the telephone when he shut the door behind him.
“What ails you, Klump?” the landlady asked. “You look scairt to death!”
“I ain’t laughin’, I admit,” Willie gasped. “Anybody been here astin’ for me? He’s got long arms an’ big hands, an’ most likely wears a gray herrin’-bone suit. His face—”
“Why, that is odd,” Mrs. Kozowski nasaled. “A man like him went upstairs about twenty minutes ago. Carried a bag an’ said he was an exterminator who went to Barber’s college by the day so had to work at night. I told him it wouldn’t hurt none to fumigate, not that there is a single bug in the—”
“No, they all have big fam’lies,” Willie yipped and started up the stairs, three steps at each jump. “An’ he is not kiddin’ about bein’ an exterminater. Oh-h- h-h!”
N THE first landing Willie drew his Roscoe. He met an old doll in a kimono on the second floor and she immediately went into a swoon. Up to the third floor Willie ran and then stopped dead in his tracks. Light shone brightly under his door and he heard disturbing
sounds.
William J. Klump advanced along the hall and paused, in front of his skylight room, peered through a crack in the door and saw Spelvin Sump kneeling beside the bed. Willie knew the citizen was not
saying his prayers, not with a jackknife in his hand. Sump had stripped the bed and was inserting the blade of the shiv in one corner of the old lumpy mattress. A black bag was on the floor beside him and it was open.
Willie Klump stepped back, got set, then catapulted himself against the door. It shivered and cracked, held for a moment, then gave way. Willie went in pulling the trigger of his Roscoe and suddenly remembered he’d forgotten to load it when Sump jumped up and pulled a heater of his own. A bullet burned Willie’s left ear and left it strumming like a plucked banjo string. Another slug made a mess of the padding at his shoulder. Then he closed with the intruder and a terrible struggle ensued.
Spelvin Sump’s long arms and mighty hands wreaked havoc with Willie’s anatomy and physiognomy for the first few moments. In a clinch Willie clamped his teeth on Sump’s right ear and got hold of the erstwhile client’s necktie and pulled with all his might. The intruder gasped for air and turned Willie loose and his knee hit Willie in the meridian and let all his air out. Willie, painfully waiting for his flat to be repaired, heard the clamoring of Mrs. Kozowski’s other guests. Somewhere there was the screech of a cop’s whistle.
Sump barricaded the door with all the furniture in the room, then went to work on the mattress. He slit it open and some familiar green stuff spilled out with the other stuffing. Sump feverishly grabbed it up and tossed it into his bag.
“You got no chance,” Willie yelped when his bellows responded, and wondered what his hand was pressing against. He looked down and discovered it was his Roscoe. He came up with it and threw it and it bounced off the side of Sump’s head. The mysterious intruder blinked, swung his eyes toward Willie.
“It ain’t possible,” Willie gasped. “Nobody has a noggin that hard. Well, I tried to puncture it.”
Sump’s eyes looked very strange to Willie. The things the intruder started babbling pulled Willie’s lower jaw down.
“Did they break out, huh? Waxie an’ Louie? How did you git that suit of civvies, pal? Say, this don’t look like the cell where—I guess Waxie hit me harder than I—” He looked down at the shiv he held and quickly dropped it. “It was a billy club I was holdin’ when—for the lova Mike, say somethin’!”
“Dr. Jeekle again, huh?” Willie forced out. “Who are you anyways?”
“Dinsmore Ilch, a guard here at the pen,” the intruder said, and then fell forward on his face.
Willie was unsteady on his pins when the cops broke in and surveyed the shambles.
“Goldilocks,” he mumbled. “She knew just two Behrs. The payroll from the armored jalopy stuffed in the mattress. Yeah, Waxie Behr had this room oncet an’—he knew the clams w
ould be safe in this mattress as it wouldn’t be changed oncet in twenty years, but—”
“I had a suspicion he was a little crazy,” Mrs. Kozowski told the cops.
“I wisht you’d told me,” Willie yelped, spinning around to face her.
“I wa’n’t talkin’ about the poor man on the floor,” the landlady sniffed. “It is no wonder all my tenants the last few months who had this room complained about the lumps in the mattress. How much did you say was in there?”
“Over a hundred grand,” Willie said. Mrs. Kozowski gasped for air and then
fainted.
“Let us start at the beginnin’,” a big cop said. “Who was it you was fightin’ with over the swag, you punk!”
“Just a moment!” Willie said
indignantly. “Take a look at my badge! I
am Private Eye William J. Klump.” “Mike,” another member of the force
said, “It is him, no kiddin’. In a setup like this who elst could it be?”
“Never mind the flattery,” Willie said sharply. “Shall we pack up the dough and take it and the criminal character to the nearest Bastile or do I have to also do that solo? I can’t wait until I find out how all this happened.”
N HOUR later Dinsmore Ilch, after sampling certain restoratives, related
a story that no reputable radio station would buy. Willie Klump had called up Satchelfoot Kelly immediately upon his arrival at the precinct station, and now Willie’s pet aversion was sitting here open-mouthed, and braiding the two sections of his necktie.
“Sure, I was a guard at the Trenton stir,” Ilch said. “I got to know Waxie Behr. Once he showed me a picture of the blonde exactly like the one I picked up in Klump’s office. Well, Waxie and four other cons figured out a jail-break, but they had to have a guard in with ‘em to be half-sure it would work. Waxie started feelin’ me out day by day an’ finally he said if the break worked an’ he got out where he’d planted the armored car scratch, he’d see I got fifty G’s. I said for him to count me in. I was to be at a certain spot with a key that would get them out of the cell-block. Waxie was to tap me on the noggin just to make it look good for me.”
“I get it,” Willie cut in. “They crossed you up an’ Waxie tried to tap you for keeps.”
“Shut up, Klump!” the D.A. snapped. “Yeah, you’re right, Klump,” Ilch
went on. “I never was myself very often afterwards. I lost my job, of course. I remember somethin’ about tellin’ the Mrs. I was makin’ atomic bullets out of
uranium I said was in the rocks in the backyard. My brain kept gettin’ mixed up. That picture of Waxie’s moll I saw in Klump’s office knocked me almos’ sane for a couple of days. He told me where he’d found the picture and right away I guessed where Waxie or Louie must have stored the dough, so I worked it so’s Klump would take me to that room of his where I tried to knock him off. It was awful—there was days an’ weeks I don’t even remember. Waxie hit me with a piece of lead-pipe, an’ it sure scrambled me up.” “I understand, Ilch.” One of the men listening nodded his scholarly noggin. “I am a psychiatrist. At times you were acting under a subconscious, plunged deep
into your neurogliosis, and other times—” “You mean he was just plain wacky!”
Willie said.
“When I first began to act queer, my wife took me out of where we lived in Jersey an’ moved up where we are now,” Ilch continued. “She figured I could change my name and it would be good for me psychological. Don’t tell her I was in with Waxie on the break, as maybe durin’ a subconscious I never told her.”
“I have a slight headache myself,” the D.A. sighed. “Klump, you said you caught on when you went to see your girl who was baby-sitting and readin’ about Goldilocks an’ the bears. Let us think up some other solution for the newspapers, shall we? I realize the public believes everything they hear at political conventions, but after all there’s a limit to what they—ha, you understand, Klump?”
“I do not intend to hold none of the true facts from the citizens who pay salaries for the likes of cops,” Willie said indignantly, and felt the Bogie influence once more. “You coppers want to hog the credit, maybe. You think I was born yesterday?”
“Was you born?” Satchelfoot Kelly
asked sourly.
“You wa’n’t you dope,” Willie sniffed. “They found you under the leaf of a opium plant.”
“Lock me up,” Ilch begged. “If I listen to Klump anymore I will go stark and ravin’ mad again.”
Satchelfoot Kelly arose and placed his slouch hat on top of his head on the bias and asked to be excused.
He stumbled toward an open window and a cop yelled, “Hey, that ain’t the door!”
“Who ast you?” Satchelfoot flung back. “If I survive the drop I am goin’ to look for that Snowy White and the seven dwarfs. I think they’re runnin’ a narcotics ring.”
The D.A. and three cops finally forced
Kelly into a chair.
Willie said petulantly, “I don’t see what ails everybody. You’d think it was the first time I ever solved a case.”
“That is what puzzles us, Klump,” the D.A. said pawing at his face. “As a detective you look absolutely insolvent.”
“Just what I’ve been tellin’ all my clients,” Willie said, and yanked down the brim of his hat. “Well, so long coppers. I must call up Baby.”
Willie did after posing for some pictures.
“Oh, that will mean an awful big fee, you darlin’!” Gertie said gleefully.
“I hope you remember that ignorance of the law ain’t no excuse,” Willie said. “Fee-splittin’ is a criminal’s offense. Sorry, baby. Be seein’ you around.” He hung up quick, yanked at the brim of his hat. “Yeah, baby—yeah!” he said as he walked away. “So what?”
A LAM TO THE SLAUGHTER
William J. Klump, president of the Hawkeye Detective Agency, Inc., had never been in such a dither. He was busier than a batboy during a seven-run inning. There was a letter from his married sister, Phoebe, from up in Vermont, on the desk in front of him, and a newspaper clipping that had come out of the letter. A client was to arrive in just ten minutes. And right now Aloysius “Satchelfoot” Kelly, from homicide, sat in a chair plying the old needle, and Gertie Mudgett was on the phone.
“Look, Gert,” Willie said. “Call me back later on, huh? At this minute I don’t know whicht end I am sittin’ on.”
“Try puttin’ on your hat, knucklehead,” Gertie said, “an’ find out. I just called t’ tell you we got no date for t’night, as my boss is quite busy also, thank you, an’ wishes me t’ work overtime an’ have dinner with him.”
“It is a ill wind-bag that don’t do nobody some good,” Willie said. “That is—have fun, Gert.”
When he hung up, he picked up the newspaper clipping his sister had sent. The headline grimly said:
HITCH-HIKE SLAYER GETS CHAIR!
The picture of the unfortunate character, Willie thought, did not display criminal tendencies. But the fine print said that the jury had taken only twenty minutes to consign Elmo Rake to the rotisserie up in the maple syrup state.
“Ha, ha,” Satchelfoot Kelly laughed. “This Scuffy Smith is a howl. An’ the Hog Holler widow—have you got the comic mag comes after this one, Willie?”
“Git lost, Satchelfoot,” Willie gulped. “I have a client on the way here. What would he think?”
“You should ask me does he think,” Kelly said. “Awright, I know where I ain’t welcome.” But Kelly remained where he was and reached into a paper bag for another of Willie’s seeded breakfast rolls.
“I thought you made coffee about this time.”
Willie sighed, sleeved sweat from his face and picked up Phoebe’s letter.
Dear Willie,
I am sending you a clipping cut out from the newspaper up here. A lo
t of us don’t think Elmo Hake is guilty, as the lawyer who defended him has a son who goes around with the niece of the persecuting atturney. If the persecutor gets to be governor, then the son of the defense lawyer will get a nice soft job somewheres. A lot of us—
“Willie, do you have toothpicks anywheres about?” Kelly cut in.
THE door opened just as Willie threw the phone book. It went out of the window with Satchelfoot’s hat, and the visitor cleared his throat nervously. He was a mild-eyed and apologetic looking citizen of about thirty-five or forty and he wore a very conservative suit topped off by a wilted soft hat.
“You must be Mr. Grooby,” Willie said. “No, don’t go. This—er—gentleman is just leavin’. He’s from police headquarters. Very often they come to me for advice. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you, Kelly. Give the D.A. my promise that I shall corporate in every way with the pervention of crime in our—”
“Why, you—!”
“Satchelfoot,” Willie said stiffly. “Your hat—remember? Very big trucks pass through our streets, an’ you wouldn’t want to get it run over.”
Kelly rushed out, and then Willie slid a chair toward Mr. Ferbus Grooby.
“Now,” Willie said, “Yesterday when you made the appointment you mentioned you had a problem?”
“My wife is missing, Mr. Klump,” Grooby said quite sadly, “I’m a ship without a rudder, a cart without no wheels. I have my reasons for not going right to the police, as I simply abhor newspaper publicity.”
“H-m-m,” Willie said. “An’ what are your domestic difficulties, if any, please?” “Well, me an’ Flossie are of different temperaments.” Grooby admitted. “I’m a home body, an’ she liked excitement an’ goin’ out. When she stayed in of an evening, we had quarrels. She insisted on hearing Here Is Your F.B.I., an’ Deadline Detective, etcetera, while I wanted quizzes like For Richer Or Poorer an’ From Debt
The Willie Klump Page 31
