The Man with the Wooden Spectacles

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  It was considerable of a jolt to me this noon, Eustaqua, when I learned, from a morning newspaper, about last night’s raid, and the exact nature of the operations you have been carrying on in the South Kedzie Avenue flat. I did believe, all the time, that it was but an ordinary assignation flat. And therefore legitimate. And—

  “Legitimate!” chocked Elsa. “Well—if assignation flats are legitimate—then—then pigs are doves! Now at last I understand—Relativity!” And on she went.

  But since I am now having to hand you a jolt, the pot can’t call the kettle black, can it, Eustaqua! So that is that. But learning this noon that you are all washed up in everything pertaining to earning money, I immediately transferred to you a very valuable something that has just come into my hands. That is to say, Eustaqua, it has no value whatsoever in its present form—it has a mathemat—

  And here it was—or at least not very much beyond this point—that Elsa was to learn that the name of MOFFIT had been graven, this day of October 23, upon the Great Hall of Fame of Winners at Lotteries! Together with a good half-thousand other persons.

  —it has no value whatsoever in its present form—it has a mathematical value of some $1400, depending on various things—but has an immediate value of $5000 the second I am dead.

  In other words, Eustaqua, I was notified by phone today, shortly before noon—and confidentially, of course—by the Associated Life Companies Corporation, that I am one of the 500 winners of the $5000 paid-up life policies in the Life Show drawing, held this morning. The full list of win—

  “Well for—for crying out loud,” Elsa bit out, suddenly grasping the full import of these new words. “And me—with a registration number of seven beautiful 2’s—all in a stri—well, for—and a full 500 of those juicy bones tossed to the pack—well, there ain’t no justice, that’s all.” And on her eyes raced:

  —winners is to be exclusively published tomorrow in the Tribune, which gave to the Life Show at least a hundred thousand dollars worth of free publicity. At any rate, Eustaqua, I am one of the 500. The policy now on my life—and which is assigned to the Mid-West Life of Illinois—is non-cancellable for any reason whatsoever—though it is, at the same time, non-negotiable—nonborrowable-on—non-assignable–and non-surrender­able for cash; it is—or rather was—drawn, for the time being, to “Next of Kin.” As beneficiary. (James will explain all these things to you fully.) But immediately I learned of your being washed up—and but 10 minutes after I received my notification—I went straight down to the Associated Life Companies Corporation, in the London Guarantee Building, and, under my qualified legal rights to do so, had the beneficiaryship of the policy changed over to you instead of to “Next of Kin” as it then tentatively stood. I rea—

  “No—no wonder,” Elsa said grimly, “that he was so darned confident this afternoon that his father would never get hide nor hair of anything he had.” And on she drove.

  I realized of course, Eustaqua, that should I unexpectedly die—when I should die, in fact—my transference to you of the beneficiaryship of that policy would indicate that we have been lover and mistress over these recent months that you have lived in Chicago. But a dead man, being a non-existent man, feels no “disgrace”; and my blood relatives will, I’m sure, without exception, successfully survive the public revelation of our little romance.

  “I’ll say they will!” was Elsa’s firm declaration. “Because public revelation there’s gonna be none! Since this pipedream is going to be covered up plenty—and how!”

  And she drove relentlessly on.

  And now, very strangely, Eustaqua, Fate has suddenly closed tightly in on me. (At least, in this cycle of my existence.) Has closed in on me with respect to the crime committed in the Klondike Building. And I must—if I am not to become just a man wearing a number, over long long years—end my life. (Step, that is, easily, into another cycle.) Obviously—at least so far as this cycle goes—there is nothing else to be done.

  “Marijuana talking—as sure as—as cats yowl on back fences,” Elsa commented sagely. “When it comes to Fate—and that Klondike Building stuff.” But a second later she was to find her conjecture 100 per cent wrong.

  And why, Eustaqua, did you never once induct me into the mysteries and pleasures of the fumes of marijuana? If only you had done so, I might have had a happier existence in this cycle which I am now discarding. And the very cycle itself might never have come about.

  “Hm?—the marijuana’s out, then,” Elsa commented grimly. “And I—well damn it, I—I don’t at all like this. I—” And on she drove.

  But getting back to this life-insurance policy, Eustaqua. Now suicide—which I of course know is in reality nothing more than the discarding of a worn shoe for another one which fits equally as well, if not probably better—has always been—in Illinois—and at least up to recently—evidence definitely establishing insanity. Though—since 1939—it has been prima facie evidence thereof only in the complete absence of contravertive evidence thereto. And since, by the new inheritance-relationship code of this spring, THE KING OF SKUNKS is now my legal “next of kin”—

  “And he’s righter than right at that,” Elsa nodded, “in spite of his plainly having gone plumb, stark crazy! Father and first-born—now closest—and next—in law!” And on she read:

  —he will, of course, try to utilize the fact of my “suicide” to set aside—in the courts—my transference this very day, to you, Eustaqua, of the beneficiaryship in that policy. And which, reverting again to being payable only to “next of kin,” becomes payable to him.

  And so that is why, Eustaqua, the envelope—

  “Hells—bells!” said Elsa suddenly, passing her free hand over her forehead. “This—this is no drunken letter. Nor half-drunken letter. Nor—nor drug-ridden letter either. That—that precision of expression! And—and that punctuation! And if—if it isn’t a pipe-dream, then—then it could—might—maybe be the McCoy—about his being somehow involved in the Klondike Building killing. Oh dear!”

  And on she drove, fearfully now.

  —is why, Eustaqua, the envelope which contains this letter contains the letter and not the mere signed statement which, in any event, I would have left behind me. (Since through such statement—brief as it might have been—or detailed as now it is—the KING OF SKUNKS will always and forever, during the brief space of life left to him, be branded with the blood of “criminal” and “killer”! And, wherever he goes, people will turn, and point him out, and say—but I am sure, Eustaqua, you grasp what I mean.) But now—instead of that brief statement—I send this letter. For this letter, Eustaqua—and nothing else—must serve in court, under Attorney James, to constitute the contravertive evidence against the charges of insanity which are bound to be brought by THE KING OF SKUNKS. (And so far as my referring within this letter to the cycles of existence—and which perhaps the Honorable Court itself will insist the jury consider as evidence that I am insane, James—who is himself a metaphysician of high order—will slap on expert testimony which will prove that there is ample evidence today, of sheer scientific value, to prove the multiplicity of cycles of existence.) And so this letter—as I said above—must be the one thing to prove that I retained, clear to the very end of this cycle, the power of coherent thought; to indicate—by its correct spelling—by its very punctuation—

  “And right there,” said Elsa suddenly—and perspicaciously, “is the loose thread—the—the sophistry—in this whole weird composition, that shows it to be either a game of some sort—or a pipe-dream. For people who really and absolutely intend to kick off simply can’t write coherently—can’t spell—can’t punctuate—and anybody knows that!”

  Poor Elsa! Or perhaps, even at that, Fortunate Elsa. For she could not see, as she stood tonight, in the musty hall of the old Ulysses S. Grant Building, her dress box tilted against her slender thigh, that dread incident in her own life, 40 long years later, w
hen a laboratory slide made from her blood revealed to her—through her physician—that she had the most fatal of all diseases; nor the beautiful little letters she wrote to each and all of her friends—so finely written—and so finely and rhetorically punctuated—that never subsequently was she able to get a single one back; for of course—as tonight she could not see—the laboratory man had accidentally transposed the slides of two patients—and Elsa had been literally snatched from the jaws of what had seemed to be quick, and sure, and distressing death. Nor could Elsa see, either, tonight, the practical dictum of the American Institute of Psychiatry, issued in 1979, wherein the institute declared that “every individual tainted, even slightly, with lunacy and inoculated at the same time with any metaphysical belief whatsoever, presents an absolutely distinctive and unpredictable case as to both motiving and motivation.” And so, because all these things were, after all, things lying 40 years or so hence when Elsa’s red hair carried streaks of gray, and she could not see them now, she sagely nodded, and “knew” conclusively that a man contemplating death could not spell—and could not punctuate! And having stopped to render this triumphant analysis of the document in her hands, she now went back and picked up once more the strange thread which she was endeavoring to run through her mental bobbin.

  And so this letter—as I said above—must be the one thing to prove that I retained, clear to the very end of this cycle, the power of coherent thought; to indicate—by its correct spelling—by its very punctuation—before a jury of thinking men that I am not rambling by so much as 1/100th of 1 per cent; to show, moreover, that circumstances over which I had no control—and not any defect in my own mind—so definitely dictate my own erasure [from this particular cycle] that the matter is not even a question of insanity. Or drugs. Or even of drink. And under that verdict which I am certain any competent jury, under James—and with this letter—will render, THE KING OF SKUNKS, sniffing hungrily around to get that $5000 life insurance, will have to skulk off into the bushes with his frowsy, lousy tail between his flea-bitten shanks.

  “Oh, dear me—such awful hatreds,” Elsa half wailed. “To be stirred in with—with the deepest of philosophy. If—if ever there was an example of a man as sane as—as a college professor—for, after all, no one can disprove his ‘cycles’ business—yet dippy on one single tiny point—his closest blood relative—Saul is it!” And again she passed a hand unhappily across her forehead, for her complete assurance of a few minutes back was, like all such things, swiftly evaporating: and she was confused again—yet not so much that she did not realize that that very stupendous mutual hate existing between son and father was the one thing that bid fair to make this document clear up, in complete detail—and to the last minute element thereof—the amazing events, for such they must have been, which must have occurred last night in the Klondike Building. If, that is—if—if this whole thing really wasn’t a pyrotechnic mirage of Saul’s brai—if—But further than this Elsa’s own now confused brain could not reach.

  I went yesterday afternoon, Eustaqua—and now I write not only for your benefit, and for Barlow James’ benefit—but for the benefit of Lou Vann—for the Commissioner of Police—and for the Chief of the Detective Bureau; for should THE KING OF SKUNKS, goddamn his soul, succeed in declaring me insane, this letter will therefore fail to have been competent evidence. And COMPETENT and COMPLETE evidence it is going to be—I promise you!—for Vann, Congreve, and Brittman will all go into court and help you to find it so. Otherwise, they will have failed to officially clear off their dockets a certain little troublesome happening in the Klondike Building. And thus, by Vann’s help, and Congreve’s, and Brittman’s, the KING OF SKUNKS will fail to get his stinking talons on one cent of that insurance I have just won.

  “The—the very fact,” Elsa said to herself, her brain swinging dizzily, “that Saul continually puts that skunk business down in capitals is damned near legal proof he’s insane—at least on that one subject. And if he’s insane on the one subject, then he’s legally insane on every oth—but by gosh, he’s—he’s shooting straight enough mentally—everywhere else. Oh—I do hope he started in to drink after he wrote this out—still—my God!—if he has got something to do with that murd—yes, he’d be better off dead. Still—oh my,” she ended in a half wail.

  And desperately resumed again—re-reading that last paragraph, but automatically jumping over the bitter interpolation that had been enclosed within it.

  I went yesterday afternoon, just before five o’clock, to Lou Vann’s personal office in the Klondike Building. To request a favor. In connection with a certain vacancy existing on his staff of assistant-State’s Att—

  “To—to beg—that vacant berth on the rackets division, there, of course—just as I advised him to this afternoon,” Elsa commented, still dazed. “Yet how—how does he tie that visit up with—”

  She pressed on. Ever more and more sick, in the pit of her stomach, as she realized increasingly that Truth—horrid Truth!—at that point was being told by the words of this communication—words that had been set down coldly—methodically—almost, in one sense, emotionlessly—yet in reality chosen and selected and tied together by sheer hate—and revealing now-confirmable things through sheer hate—that would make the document one thousand per cent attack-proof in a sanity court. And all—all—to prevent Silas Moffit—back in the “cycle” from which Saul now proposed to depart!—from cashing in on Saul’s policy won in that very “cycle.” To Elsa, who had more than just a mere glimmering grasp of what she always called “that cycles business” it was all almost an obscene travesty of metaphysics itself—an imperious attempt, by puny man, to control—whilst in one cycle—the events in another. And thus put himself higher than the God who allegedly rotated simultaneously all the cycles! And she prayed wordlessly, at this instant, to that very God that soon—soon—in this letter she would come to the illuminating point which would prove exactly how and where the mirage—which some of its facts must be!—had originated in Saul’s alcohol-sclerosed hate-tinged brain. Because only thus—and with a sigh that came clear up out of her tiny shoes, Elsa drove on.

  —assistant-State’s Attorneys. The office, however, was empty. The office girl must have been down in the women’s room. I did not know Vann was out of town. I merely thought he had not come across yet from the City Hall. I was dog-tired. So dog-tired that I lay down on the leather couch. Which stood partly hack of a folding black burlap screen. Though my feet and knees were visible past the further edge of the scree—that is to say, to be quite exact, the black burlap screen was burlap only in front; behind, it was evidently painted and re-painted with thick black paint so that, with the exception of a single slit-like hole, about 3 feet up, through which light came, it was quite opaq—

  “God!” was all Elsa said. Heartsick now. Her last lingering hopes that this was a “pipe-dream” shattered. “The—the McCoy! The inside info—that nobody but Lou Vann himself—and his girl knew. The—McCoy!” And now a terrific aching thump in her head told her that a rousing headache had begun. Grimly, she drove on.

  —opaque. I evidently dropped completely off at once. To sleep. Far when I woke, the room was dark. I sat up—

  And now Elsa realized, with a shock, that precious, precious time was being wasted by her—if Saul were due to end his life. Of course, there was always the possibility—nay, downright probability!—that he would down a double whiskey somewhere to steel his nerves. For Elsa had no illusions whatsoever that one just “stepped out of a ‘cycle’ ”—as one going to sleep! When it came right down to the “stepping,” she knew it would take some courage derived right out of this cycle! And that Saul’s dose of courage would be a double-whiskey! And that—Saul being Saul—and despite cycles being circles of the 4th, 5th, or 6th dimensions, or whatever they were!—that initial double whiskey would only induce a second double-whiskey. And, before the night was over, Saul would be drunk on a tavern floor, but in the horrible
position of a man who had locked himself in the electric chair—in the very “cycle” where he already was!—and had given the Police the very evidence to put him in the chair! But—but the police weren’t—weren’t going to get this evidence. No!—Elsa told herself fiercely—quite unable at this juncture, because of the utter turbulence of her seething thoughts, to see how the whole thing involved her—and her interests, They—they weren’t going to get this evidence! For—but yet, on the other hand, only through the police themselves could she block Saul—if he were grimly embarked this very moment on ending his own life. Yet where—where—could the police look—to block him? The somewhere, in which to do it, that he had in mind, couldn’t be the Cleveland Avenue flat where he lived. For he’d been here—within the last 50 minutes or so. And it couldn’t be Eustaqua’s quarters—completely raided and demolished last night by the police—no, since Saul had been here within at least the last 50 minutes, he must be somewhere near—or in the Loop. And because she could do quite nothing else, she read hurriedly on—for this document, and this document only, held such clue—if it did—as to where and how Saul intended to—

  I sat up, rubbing my eyes. And peered around the end of the screen. Light rejecting on Vann’s wall clock from the opposite wall of the inner court outside showed the time to be half-past 10. I realized then that the office girl, when she had left to go to the woman’s room, must already have had her hat on, and that she had returned after I dropped off, looked hurriedly in only to the extent of seeing that apparently no one had come in her absence—i.e. no one was now sitting in the one visitor’s chair—and had then hastily snapped off the lights and had left for the night.