The Man with the Wooden Spectacles

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “Yes, I know. And—”

  “And the lug never mentioned the hole, see? He knew his burlap all right—and played the fact of the screen being covered with burlap—but got fooled by the outer surface of it.”

  “Well—well, maybe still, Art,” said Elsa desperately, “his confession is the McCoy, but is garnished up a little because of Cap Congreve’s fists over there—”

  “No, Elsa. For to put your mind to rest on that matter for good and all, it just happens that Mr. Vann has two investigators who happen to have been in the company of this lug all night at a party off Bughouse Square—on another matter entirely—and at the very hour of the bump-off they were at dinner—why, they even both have this fellow’s signature on a paper napkin.”

  Elsa was depressedly silent. She was trying to assimilate this smashup of her mental roller-coaster car.

  “But why, Art,” she asked suddenly, “is the—the confession only going out on the stands—and not—not the repudiation? Plus, I presume, the various confirmations of the repudiation?”

  “Because, Elsa,” said Kelgrave—painful reluctance in his voice, “the papers jumped on top of the S.A. awhile ago—and told him they were going to slit his throat on the renomination. And so he had to buy ’em off—in short, Elsa, he handed ’em this story—all, that is, but the Despatch, which was the horsefly in their butter, for the point at issue was his having given the Despatch that fine exclusive story today—and we—all of us who were on the ground, helped the little conspiracy. And so the repudiation—plus all its confirmations—plus the 24-karat 200-proof alibi!—will go out on the newsstands in about the 7 o’clock editions.”

  “After the confession has sold a quarter million papers. And made Vann sweet again with the Fourth Estate! Yeah, I get it, all right. And—but say—this is on the level now, is it? And no dodge of Lou Vann—to lull me to sleep?”

  “Absolutely on the level, Elsa. All of it. But 1000 per cent confidential. And for nobody but you, kid, would I double-cross Mr. Vann as I have. Though, at that, I can’t regard it as—er—double-crossing him. The point just is that I don’t want you to get stuck out on a limb—thinking your case tonight is all in the bag. Through a nolle-prove on Vann’s part—or an argument by you to His Honor that your client is guilty, at most, of disorderly conduct. As might be one verdict under this fellow Wainwright’s confession. No, Elsa, the confession is nothing but a phoney flash—in a phoney pan; and was made, all right, to bust a contract. And—but listen, now, girl, you won’t let this leak?—so that the Despatch breezes out with an advance story on the repudiation?”

  “Heck no, Art! I won’t double-cross you in any way. I’m—I’m darned grateful to you—and I’ll at least show you that.”

  “Okay, Elsa. And now I’m going back to my lug—and wait the hour for the repudiation to be launched. And—mum’s the word?”

  “Mum’s the word,” Elsa said. And, practically together, they hung up.

  CHAPTER XX

  Colby Versus Moffit—Round 2

  Elsa turned around in her swivel chair. Her uncle was the first to speak.

  “Well,” he said dryly, “it was easy to interpret your end of that conversation—both halves of it! For your end was quite all I got, thanks to the insulting way you hugged that receiver against your ear. Am I some kind of a filthy scoundrel, Elsa, that I have to be crudely excluded from even—but skip it! As I say, it was easy enough to interpret your end of that conversation. And both halves, moreover.”

  Elsa regarded him puzzledly.

  “Well,” she said undecidedly, “private business is private business, you know, Uncle—but I’ll be a sport and confirm all—if you’ll state correctly what I was talking about.

  So—” She was frankly curious now. “—what was the first half of my conversation about?”

  “Simply,” he said confidently, “that the man on the other end was asking you—though for reasons, however, that I can’t fathom—whether by some chance you had a lead to the whereabouts of that old Mrs. O’Shanahan who stole that roster of secret gangster and illicit contributors to the Republican Party out of Democratic Boss Hennerty’s office last week—though God knows how he ever originally snitched it!—and burned it before the local Republicans here in that sunflower field in North Chicago. And for which—as I gather—our esteemed mayor is to slip her a valuable tavern license—for a deluxe tavern, to be call the Palay d’ Dreams. For I heard you distinctly Speak of ‘her’ and ‘roster’ and ‘field’—and opening up the said luxurious tavern—and ’twas all self-evident.”

  “It seems,” said Elsa unblushingly, “that you win! Yes, that was the subject of the first half. The fellow on the other end thought I had a lead to old Mrs. O’Shanahan. Who’s now known, incidentally, to be a woman narcotics bureau worker—stooling for no less than the Federal-G. But about the second half of my conversation—again—I’ll bite?”

  “That,” he said, again utterly confidently, “was all about the fact that somebody has obviously confessed that crime for which your client is to be tried tonight—but that his confession is all moonshine—and completely—provable so. Yes—no?”

  “Yes,” said Elsa angrily—and angry that her Uncle should have had a batting average of even .50 after the way she had purposely pressed that receiver all the way about her shell-like ear. “But for God’s sake, Uncle, keep your mouth shut—will you?—and don’t get me in bad with—with whoever was on the wire?”

  “If you can trace anything later as having come from Silas Moffit,” said her uncle sonorously, “Silas Moffit will give you a thousand dollars.”

  “Thank Silas Moffit for me,” said Elsa unsmilingly. “And tell him I’ll hold him to that!” She paused. “Well, just as the phone rang, Uncle, you were floundering around, like a dragon in a mudpuddle, trying to tell me how and where you heard the two facts of this case being tried tonight, and of my being attorney for the defense in it. So—”

  “Why, Elsa!” he ejaculated piously, “I was doing no such thing. Not in the least was I floundering. I heard them from Manny.”

  “Oh, I see. And where did he hear them, Uncle?”

  Mr. Silas Moffit was no longer stammering. If he had needed time to think, he had gotten it!

  “He heard them,” he declared promptly, “from some lawyer named Smith, who in turn heard them from the—”

  “State’s Attorney’s office—of course!” said Elsa, perceiving that this chain of communication was one not checkable, with one link named “Smith”! “I think,” she said directly, and unsmilingly, “that you, Uncle Silas, had something to do with my getting this chilled steel nut—to crack.”

  “I?” he retorted, in mock surprise. “Why—Elsa! What on earth do you mean? How could I have had—”

  “Well, I’ll tell you just exactly how you could have,” Elsa said suddenly. And prepared—as she herself would have phrased it—“to pull a swift one”! For Elsa, being herself a female, had all the cunning of the female—back to the original Eve. “You see,” she said unblinkingly, “today, somewhere between—” and she hesitated but the ten-thousandth of a second. Her client, “John Doe,” had been arrested shortly after noontime. And Louis Vann had talked with him shortly after that. And knew that her client had no case—and no money either. “—between 1 and 2 o’clock,” Elsa hastened on, “—yes, I’m sure it was between 1 and 2, though I’m not dead sure as to the exact moment, no!—I was in the apartment building where you live—yes, there on Cleveland Avenue—on an errand, and I passed the door of your apartment and—and you were talking on the phone—I could hear you”—that, she figured, was probably a reasonably safe bet! “—and—” And now she decided to plunge all “—and through the very door I heard you say; ‘Yes, Vann.’ And there,” she finished, gazing innocent-eyed at him, “is how I’m certain you learned this tough case—tough, that is, for the ultimate defense lawyer—broke i
n Chicago. After which, ’twould have been easy—at least for you—to have pulled some wires that would toss it into my—” She gave an airy gesture with her hands that said all the rest for her.

  He gazed at her with a worried expression that showed plainly he was wondering whether she were being a female of the species. Or whether—

  “It is true,” he said, with great dignity, “that I was talking with Mr. Vann at about that hour. He—he called me up. But strictly on a business matter. We talked for some number of minutes—yes—but absolutely nothing was said about matters in his office. Nothing!” he added belligerently. “Any time!” Elsa said to herself. “Caught him that time—with his britches out on the line!” And, aloud, she said: “Well, I think, just the same, that Vann slipped you that info, due to some previous request of yours, so that—”

  “Mr. Vann,” Silas Motet declared, with extreme dignity, “is an honest man.”

  “Are you telling me?” Elsa retorted. “Lou Vann might peddle a piece of info out of his office—yes—for that’s his own right; but when it comes to driving relentlessly after convictions, he’s so honest he leans over backwards. Vann would hang his own grandmother—if, that is,” Elsa qualified, “she were guilty of murder.”

  “I believe he would,” Silas Moffit agreed—and his agreement was plainly genuine, and not a hypocritical assent.

  “He’s so honest,” he went on, this time with a slight sneer in his voice, “that he’ll probably not get renominated. But be that as it may, Elsa, what on earth were you doing in my building? Whom were you calling on?” And he fixed her fast with his eyes.

  “Ouch!” said Elsa. “Now he’s tossing one straight to first.” But, undaunted, Elsa slid for the goal. And, as it eventuated, made it. Made it, that is, at the expense of revealing Saul’s new location—but, since that was in the new telephone book, it would only be a matter anyway of a few days before Silas Moffit would have known.

  “I heard,” Elsa said, “that a certain party had moved onto Cleveland Avenue. Near Fullerton. And without even bothering to—to look in the telephone book, I decided to call on him. While near there. And since you yourself live on Cleveland—near Fullerton—I naturally presumed—”

  She gave a beautifully helpless gesture with her small hands. “I naturally presumed he’d be right in your building. Good God—why not?”

  “Good God why not? And Good God why, pray? Why should your friend be in my building, for God’s sake?”

  “Why? Why because the man is a relative of mine as well as my friend. In short, he is Saul.”

  “Stop!”

  And Elsa’s mouth fell wide open as, from her uncle’s eyes, blazed a light not one whit different than many hours earlier today she had seen pour from Saul’s eyes. It was positively uncanny.

  “I—I don’t want,” Silas Moffit was raging, “to hear the name of that dirty, filthy, lousy, goddamned, whore­monging—”

  “Rat!” put in Elsa, helpfully. “Why not? That’s what he’s forced to call you—thanks to whatever you’ve done to him. So a tossed bouquet is worth the tossing back, if only to stop the—the billingsgate around here.”

  “What—what I’ve done to him?” Silas Moffit was echoing, plainly aghast. “Good Christ a-mighty! What I’ve done to him? That’s—that’s good! What he’s done to me, you mean. And so—so—” He was half choking. “So he had the supreme gall to refer to me, eh, as—as a rat?”

  “Aye,” said Elsa, sepulchrally. “And also a viper—and even the cockroach of hell!”

  “Of all the goddamnable supreme gall,” he began irately, “that’s—”

  “But I don’t see,” Elsa now defended, “that ’twas gall, if you’ve at any time dished out to him any of the stuff you’ve just—”

  “It’s amazing,” her uncle commented bitingly, “how people call others by the exact names that they are themselves. Why, that—that piece of dried putrid cat-vomit calling itself a man—with a whiskey-soaked sponge he calls a brain—that delusion-riddled whelp—that—”

  “Whoa, Tillie! Do you mind telling me, Uncle, just what Saul—”

  “Stop!” warned Silas Moffit. “I—I won’t have that filthy word soiling my ears.”

  “Him the same,” Elsa retorted outspokenly. “Except that he goes you one better. And how! For he’s legally chopped his patronymic to—but anyway,” she broke off hastily, “do you mind telling me what he ever did to you that makes you so damned bitter?”

  “What—what he did to me? Why the goddamned whoremonging—”

  “Great guns, Uncle,” Elsa put in, downright admiringly, “I didn’t dream you had a command of cusswords like that. You’ve positively only one equal.”

  “Who?” he demanded.

  “The identical guy you’re talking about,” she snickered. “But who’s more or less boiled you down to rat, viper and cockroach.”

  “He has, heh? So he’s boiled me down, has he, to just rat?” For some strange reason, the appellation “rat” seemed to be the only one of the 3 that was hitting Silas Moffit where the skin was thin. “Well, let me tell you, my girl, that when it comes to that, he’s the—the—the Adam, and Eve, and Cain, and Abel, of the—the whole rat tribe. Crossed with all the—the bedbugs to boot. He’s—he’s—he’s—and so he dares to call me a rat? Well, by God, I’ll—I’ll—”

  “Sue him for libel maybe?” said Elsa unsympathetically. “Or maybe sue him to—to just nullify his copyright on the name ‘rat.’ Well, it seems to me,” she again defended Saul, “that maybe he has got some right to have some iron in his soul—whatever the right is—and—”

  “You shut your mouth!” Silas Moffit snapped. “Nobody asked you what you thought. And so he calls me a—however, you asked me to tell you what the—the—the—”

  “Bastard son-of-a-bitch,” put in Elsa kindly and helpfully.

  “Yes—squared and cubed—did to me? Why, he wrote me a letter telling me I was a senile, impotent old money-grubbing wretch who—who doubtlessly purposely scared my own father, Sylvester Moffit, into blowing out his brains the way he did, so that I could—”

  “Them is a lot o’ charges,” Elsa conceded. “Though I’ll half venture, Uncle, that what got your—your nannie, was the charges of senility and impotency—no—don’t hit meh! And so that’s what Sau—er—the ‘g. d. s. o. b.’—did to you? But what did ’oo do to him?”

  “What did—what the hell kind of talk is that?” Silas Moffit raged.

  “I stole it,” Elsa confessed, “from the come-along of a talkie. It sounded cute. So what did ’oo do to him?”

  “I—I—believe me, I—did plenty!” Silas Moffit averred triumphantly. “I wrote him a letter, the—the—the—”

  “—the goddamned bastard rat?” Elsa said helpfully.

  “—yes, the bastard rat, telling him he was not only a quarter-wit louse that a 15-cent nigger prostitute wouldn’t spit on when she was drunk, and smelled so bad that all the dead cats in cat-dom had voted him their—anyway, I told him I’d already bought a grave for him, and a gravestone, to boot, reading ‘Here Lies Nothing—God be Thanked.’ ”

  “Good gravy!” Elsa exclaimed. “You two sure certainly will never have to have a paternity test! If you two aren’t father and son, then biology and inheritance are plumb screwy. Darned if I can figure which of you can think up the bitterest terms Why, you’re like—like a couple of lunatics, each with a match or so, and each with a nice dry field—your own feelings and emotions. The first of you lights up a corner of his own field—then tosses a burning wisp of it onto the other’s—then the other tosses back a blazing bundle—then the first gets a steam-shovel and tosses over a whole blazing square rod of turf—and first thing you know the whole countryside about you both is crackling, and burning, and—”

  “And you say,” he asked moodily, and also like a little child, “you say he really called me—
his father—a rat?”

  “Good gra—listen?—do we have to go into that ag—yes,” Elsa declared. “But he didn’t particularly concentrate on any one appellation. Seems to me he used the names of all the beasts of the field—and the insects that crawl on the earth—and the birds—”

  “Never mind those,” he said coldly. “You say—he called me a rat?”

  “I said he did; so—he did. But good gravy, Uncle, the rat—believe it or not—is a benefit to all humankind. All the old theories about it have been exploded. According to an article I read in Time last week. It’s now conclusively proven that as a scavenger it consumes 8 times as much bad as it does good. If the rat, moreover, were eradicated, mankind would perish. So said the article. A fact! And the rat’s qualities of motherhood are supr—”

  “Stop your idiotic trying to square your—your filthy cousin.” Silas Moffit ordered curtly. “I only hope he—he wears out even the rags that now cover his syphilis-infected back. For he’s the lowest—”

  “Now you stop!” said Elsa peremptorily. And her eyes blazed. “I’ve—I’ve had all I can stand today—from both of you! And as for you, Uncle, I’m going to say just one thing. And here it is. Someday, Uncle, you’re going to be awfully damned sorry. At some particular moment—though what moment I don’t know. But it’s the moment when you learn that poor Saul is dead—and that that grave you’ve so kindly bought for him is at last to be filled. For you’ll outlive him all right, all right. In spite of the difference in your ages. His kidneys and liver must be all on the blink—from pouring quarts of alky through them. While you—thanks to eating oatmeal in the mornings, and unbuttered crusts, the way you do—and being underweight—you’ll outlive him. Live, probably, to be as old as Methuselah. And I only pray God—yes I do—that on the day you hear that Saul is dead from uremia—or from walking drunk into the path of a car—or however it happens—is that I can be there. To watch you. Because, believe it or not, Uncle Silas, I’m interested in psychology. Straight—or distorted. And it isn’t natural to hate one’s own blood the way he hates yours—and you hate his. And when the day comes that the survivor of an insane feud like his and yours hears that the other is gone, in some bitter unhappy way—well, there’s certain to be some sort of emotional revolution down in that bird’s guts to which the Russian Revolution, by comparison, is nothing but a flock of orators tossing handbills. All statistics, however, declare that you’ll be that survivor—and so I only pray God that, being the psychology fan that I am, I’m there—the moment the news is dished out to you. To watch—to take notes—and to marvel!”