The Fabulous Clipjoint

by Fredric Brown

  It told plenty. I said, “Listen, damn y —”

  Uncle Am put his hand on my arm. He had a grip.

  He said, “Shut up, Ed. Take yourself a walk around the block and cool down.”

  His grip got tight and it hurt.

  He said, “Go ahead. I mean it.”

  Bassett got up to let me out of the booth, and I got up and went out fast. The hell with them, I thought.

  I went out and walked west on Grand.

  It wasn’t until I started to take out a cigarette that I found I had something in my hand. It was a round, red, rubber ball. Bright shiny red, one of the half dozen that had been in the suitcase.

  I stopped by the staircase leading up to the el, and stared at the ball in my hand. Something was coming back to me. A vague picture of a man juggling some of them. I’d been a-baby then. He was laughing and the bright balls were flashing in the lamplight of the nursery room in the Gary flat, and I stopped crying to watch the whriling spheres.

  Not once, but often. How old had I been? I remember I’d been walking, once at least, walking, reaching out for the bright balls, and he’d given me one to play with, and had laughed when I put it to my mouth to chew it.

  I couldn’t have been over three — not much over, anyway — the last time I’d seen them. I’d forgotten completely.

  Only this ball in my hand, the size and the feel and the brightness of it, brought back the lost memory.

  But the man, the juggler — I couldn’t picture him at all.

  Only laughter, and the bright flashing spheres.

  I tossed it up and caught it, and it felt good. I woundered if I could learn to juggle six of them. I tossed it up again.

  Somebody laughed and said, “Want some jacks?”

  I caught the ball and put it in my pocket, and turned around.

  It was Bobby Reinhart, the apprentice at Heiden’s Mortuary, the guy who had identified Pop when he’d come to work on Thursday morning and found the body there. He was wearing a white Palm Beach suit that set off his darkish skin and his grease-slicked black hair.

  He was grinning. It wasn’t a nice grin. I didn’t like it.

  I said, “Did you say something?”

  The grin faded out, and his face got ugly.

  That was lovely. I just hoped he’d say something. I looked at his face and thought of him being with Gardie, and I thought of his having seen Pop there in the mortuary, and maybe working on his body, or watching while Heiden did, and — Oh, hell, if it had been somebody else, it would have been different. But when you don’t like a guy to begin with, something like that happens, and you hate him.

  He said, “What the hell are you getting —?” And he was reaching his right hand into the side pocket of his Palm Beach coat.

  Maybe he was reaching for a cigarette; I didn’t know. He’d hardly have been reaching for a gun, out here in the open, even if there was nobody within half a block. But I didn’t wait to find out. Maybe I was just looking for an excuse.

  I grabbed him by the shoulder and whirled him around, and I had hold of his right wrist from behind, twisting it. He made a noise that was half-cursing, half-squawking, and something hit the concrete with a metallic clink.

  I let go of his wrist and got the back of the collar of his coat. I jerked to keep him from stooping down, and as our shadows got out of the way, I could see the thing on the sidewalk was a set of brass knucks.

  He gave a hell of a hard lunge to get away and the cloth of the coat tore in my hands. It ripped all the way down the back, and the right side of what was left of it fell down from his shoulder, and a notebook and a billfold fell out of the inside pocket.

  He was backed up against the building now, and he looked undecided. He wanted to take me apart, I could tell, but without those brass knucks, he knew he couldn’t do it. And that torn coat was in his way.

  He stood there, panting, ready if I came for him, not daring to try to pick up the things that had falledn from his coat, not willing to run away without them.

  I gave the knucks a kick that sent them halfway across the street, and then took a step back. I said, “Okay, pick up your marbles and scram. Open your yap and I’ll knock your teeth out.”

  His eyes said plenty, but his mouth didn’t dare to. He came forward to get the stuff, and I looked down at it, and said, “Wait a minute,” and reached down and picked up the billfold before he did.

  It was Pop’s wallet.

  It was tooled leather, a nice one, and almost new. But there was a diagonal scratch across the polished leather. That scratch had been from the sharp corner of a hard-metal linotype slug. The wallet had happened to be lying on Pop’s stand at the lino, and he’d let some slugs slide off a galley onto it. I’d been there.

  I heard a car swinging in to the curb, and Bobby took a look past me and started running. I started after him, shoving the wallet into my pocket. A voice yelled, “Hey —” The car started up again.

  I caught him as he was trying to cut through a vacant lot, and was beating the hell out of him when the car and the squad coppers got there, and one of them got each of us. One caught my coat from in back, pulled me away from Bobby Reinhart, and slammed me alongside the face with the flat of his hand.

  “Break it up, punks,” he said. “Down to the station for you.”

  I wanted to kick out backward, but that wouldn’t do any good.

  I gulped air as we were headed for the squad car, until I had enough of my mind back to talk, and then I started to talk fast.

  “This isn’t just a fight,” I said. “This is part of a murder case. Bassett of Homicide is in a tavern two blocks east of here. Take us there; Bassett’ll want this guy.”

  The copper that had me was running his hands over the outside of my pockets. He said, “Tell it down at the station.”

  The other one said, “There’s a Homicide dick named Bassett. What case is it, kid?”

  “My father,” I said. “Wallace Hunter. Killed in an alley off Franklin street last week.”

  He said, “There was a guy killed there.” He looked at the copper that had me, and shrugged. He said, “We can look there. Two blocks. If it is a homicide case —”

  We got in the car, and they didn’t take any chances on us. They collared us again when they marched us into the tavern. It made quite a parade.

  Bassett and Uncle Am were still in the booth. They looked up, and neither of them showed any surprise.

  The copper who knew Bassett beat me to the punch. He said, “We found these punks fighting. This one said you’d be interested. Are you?”

  Bassett said, “I could be. You can let go of him, anyway. What is it, Ed?”

  I took the wallet out of my pocket and tossed it on the table of the booth. I said, “Pop’s wallet. This son of a bitch had it.”

  Bassett picked up the wallet and opened it. There were a few bills in it. One five and several singles. He looked at the identification card under the celluloid and then looked up at Bobby.

  “Where’d you get it, Reinhart?” His voice was very mild and calm.

  “Gardie Hunter. She gave it to me.”

  I heard Uncle Am let out a long breath that he’d been holding. He didn’t look up at me. He kept his eyes on the wallet in Bassett’s hand.

  Bassett asked, “When was thin?”

  “Last night. Sure it had been her old man’s. She said so.”

  Bassett folded the wallet back shut and put it carefully into his pocket. He took out a cigarette and lighted it.

  Then he nodded to the squad-car men. He said, “Thanks a lot, boys. Look, I’d sort of like to keep track of Bobby here till I can check that story. Will you take him and book him on disorderly?”

  “Okay.”

  “W
ho’s on the desk tonight?”

  “Norwald.”

  Bassett nodded. “I know him. Tell him I’ll probably phone in pretty soon and tell him he can let Reinhart go.” He took out the wallet again and handed Bobby the bills and identification from it. He said, “I guess we won’t need these, son. The wallet’s evidence, for a while.”

  Bobby looked around at me when they were taking him to the door.

  I said, “Any time. Any place.”

  They took him out.

  Bassett stood up. He said to Uncle Am, “Well, it was a nice try.”

  Uncle Am said, “You know it doesn’t mean anything. About that wallet.”

  Bassett shrugged.

  He turned to me. “Kid, ‘fraid you can’t sleep home tonight. You can bunk with your uncle, can’t you?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “We’ll have to do something we should have done right away. Search the place. For the insurance policy, and anything else we might find.”

  Uncle Am nodded. “He can stay with me.”

  Bassett went out. Uncle Am sat there and didn’t say anything.

  I said, “I guess I went off kind of half-cocked. I threw a monkey wrench in things.”

  He turned and looked at me. He said, “You look like hell. Go wash your face and straighten yourself out. I think you’re going to have a mouse, too.”

  I said, “You ought to see the other guy.”

  That got a snort out of him, and I knew it was going to be all right with him. I went back to the washroom and cleaned up.

  He asked, “How do you feel?”

  “About that high,” I said.

  “I mean physically. Can you stay up all night?”

  “If I can get up, I can stay up.”

  He said, “We’ve been piddling along. We’ve been kidding ourselves we’ve been investigating. We’ve been babes in the woods. We’d better start chopping down some trees.”

  “Swell,” I said. “What’s Bassett going to do — arrest Mom?” “He’s going to take her in for questioning. Gardie, too, now that wallet business came up. I had him talked out of it; he was going to give us another few days to crack Kaufman.”

  “He’ll let them go when he’s questioned them?”

  “I don’t know, kid. I don’t know. If he finds that policy, maybe he won’t. We got two kicks in the teeth tonight — that insurance receipt and the wallet. They both point the wrong way, but try to tell that to Bassett.”

  I had the red rubber ball in my hand again, playing with it. He reached over and took it from me and started squeezing it. Each time, it went almost flat. He had tremendously strong hands.

  He said, “I wish we’d never found this stuff. It — Oh, hell, I can’t explain. I just wish Wally hadn’t kept it.”

  I said, “I think I know what you mean.”

  “He must have been a hell of a mess, Ed. I hadn’t seen him in ten years. My God, what can happen to a guy in ten years —”

  “Listen, Uncle Am,” I said, “is there any way he could have done it himself? Hit himself with — say, with one of the bottles? Or — this sounds screwy except that he used, you said, to juggle Indian clubs — thrown it up high and stood under it when it came down? I know it sounds crazy, but —”

  “It doesn’t, kid, except for one thing you don’t know: Wally couldn’t have killed himself. He had a — well, not exactly a phobia, but maybe you could call it a psychic block. He couldn’t have killed himself. It wasn’t fear of death — he might have wanted to die. I remember once when he did.”

  I said, “I don’t see how you can be sure. Maybe he didn’t want to badly enough, then.”

  He said, “It was on our trip through Mexico, south of Chihuahua. He was bitten by a Cugulla adder. We were alone, on a lonely road across wild country, not much more than a trail. We didn’t have any first-aid stuff, and it wouldn’t have mattered if we had. There isn’t any antidote for a Cugulla bite. You die within two hours, and it’s one of the worst and most painful deaths there is. It’s unadulterated hell.

  “His leg started swelling and hurting like hell right away. He had the only gun between us, and we — well, we said so long, and he tried to shoot himself. He simply couldn’t — his reflexes wouldn’t work. He begged me to do it. I — I don’t know; I might have if it had got much worse, but we heard someone coming. It was a mestizo, riding an ancient burro.

  “He said the snake wasn’t a Cugulla — we’d shot it and it was lying there in the road. It was a local species that looked almost exactly like a Cugulla. And it was poisonous all right, but nothing like the real McCoy. We got Wally tied on the burro and packed him three miles to a medico in the next village, and we saved him, or the medico did.”

  I said, “But —”

  “We had to stay there a month. That doc was a swell guy. I worked for him to help pay for us staying there while Wally was getting better, but evenings I read his books — mostly the ones on psychology and psychiatry. He had a flock of ’em, in English and Spanish.

  “That’s where I picked up a good start on what I know about stuff like that, and I’ve read a lot since — besides the practical angles you get working a mitt-camp. But, kid, we sort of psychoanalyzed Wally and he had it. There are people who couldn’t kill themselves — it’s a physical and mental impossibility, no matter what. It’s not too common, but it’s not too rare either. It’s an anti-suicide psychosis. And it’s not something that would wear off or change as he got older.”

  I asked, “That’s straight; you’re not kidding me?”

  “Not on any of it, kid.”

  He squeezed the rubber ball some more.

  He said, “Kid, when we go in, you lean against the inside of the door. Don’t say anything at all.”

  “Go in where?”

  “Kaufman’s room. He isn’t married; he lives in a rooming house on LaSalle Street, a little north of Oak. He walks home. I’ve been there and I know the layout. We’ve monkeyed around with him too long. We’ll write him off our books tonight, before things get too cold.”

  “Okay,” I said. “When do we start?”

  “He closes fairly early Monday night. Any time after one, he might get there. We’ll have to leave pretty soon; it’s after midnight now.”

  We had another drink, and then we left. We went by the Wacker and left Pop’s suitcase there. Then we went north on Clark to Oak, and over to LaSalle.

  My uncle picked a deep doorway on the west side of LaSalle, just north of the corner, and we stood in there and waited. We waited almost an hour and only a few people went by.

  Then Kaufman passed us. He didn’t look in the doorway.

  We waited till he was just past, and then stepped out and went up alongside him, one of us on either side.

  He stopped as aburuptly as if he’d run into a wall, but, one of us holding each of his arms, we started him walking again. I took a look at his face, and then didn’t look again. It wasn’tnice to look at. It was the face of a man who thinks he is dead, and who doesn’t like it. It was just the color of the sidewalk under our feet.

  He said, “Listen, you guys, I —”

  “We’ll talk in your room,” my uncles said.

  We reached the doorway.

  Uncle Ambrose let go of Kaufman’s arm and went in first. He walked confidently down the hallway as though he knew where he was going. I remembered he said he’d been here before.

  I walked third, behind Kaufman. Halfway down the hall, he lagged a bit. I touched the small of his back lightly with the end of my index finger and he jumped. He almost crowded Uncle Am, going up the stairs.

  On the third floor, my uncle took a key from his pocket and opened the door of a room. He went on in and ficked the light. We follwed him
, and I closed the door and leaned against it. My part in this was over, except for leaning against that door. Kaufman said, “Listen, damn it, I —”

  “Be quiet,” my uncle told him, “Sit down.” He gave the tavern keeper a very light push that sent him to a sitting position on the edge of the bed.

  My uncle paid no more attention to him. He walked over to the dresser by the windows. He reached around the end of it and pulled the window shade down flush with the sill.

  Then he picked up the alarm clock on the dresser. It ticked loudly; the hands stood at nine minutes of two. He looked at his own wrist watch and adjusted the time to a quarter of two. He gave each of the winding keys a few turns and then turned the button that turned the alarm hand. He set it for two o’clock, pulled up the little lever that turned it on.

  “Nice clock you have there,” he said, “Hope it won’t bother your neighbors if it goes off at two. We have to catch a train.”

  He opened the top left dresser drawer and reached in. His hand came out holding a little nickel-plated thirty-two revolver.

  He said, “You won’t mind if we borrow this a moment, will you, George?” He looked across the room at me. “Dangerous things, guns, kid. I’ve never owned one and never will. They get you in trouble faster’n anything.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He spun the cylinder, broke the gun, and snapped it shut. He said, “Kid, throw me that pillow.”

  I took the pillow from the bed and tossed it to him.

  He held the gun in this right hand and bent the pillow around it with his left.

  He leaned back against the dresser.

  The clock ticked.

  Kaufman was sweating. There were big drops on his forehead. He said, “You guys can’t get away with this.”

  “With what?” my uncle asked him. He looked at me and grinned. He said, “Kid, you got any idea what this guy is talking about?”

  I said, “Maybe he thinks we’re threatening him.”

  My uncle looked surprised. “Why, we wouldn’t do that. We like George.”

  The clock ticked again.

  Kaufman took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped. his forehead.