Mayhem, Mystery and Murder

by John A. Broussard

  The witness turned out to be the least cooperative person I ever had to deal with on this assignment. She was a gray-haired, six-foot, hefty black woman who made it very clear at the outset that she didn’t care for the police and, if anything, cared even less for any blacks who wore the uniform.

  “Ain’t no use my lookin’ at no lineup. I wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a pack a dogs.”

  I grinned as I checked the report to find her name. “That’s OK, Mrs. Deetham, just do your best.”

  She gave a non-committal grunt as she heaved herself up from the bench and followed me into the soundproof viewing room. While we waited, the name and her address almost rang a bell. “You don’t go by Auntie Deet, do you by any chance?”

  She sat down in one of the cushioned seats, looked at me and asked, “Wheah you heah that?”

  “My girlfriend is Jalina Simmons. I remember her saying something about Auntie Deet, who lives on DeRoche.”

  Her tone immediately became friendlier. “She’s no kin.” She grinned. “Her grandma and me use to trade off watching the kids. She was a sweet little thing. Goin’ to become a lawyah, I heah.”

  I nodded. “It’s pretty rough. She’s got a scholarship, but she has to hold down a waitress job besides.”

  “Not much time for lovin’.”

  Before I could comment, the six men were marched into line behind the glass.

  “Take your time,” I cautioned her, as I turned on the tape recorder.

  She did, shaking her head as she did so.

  “Numbuh two looks like he’d muhduh his maw.”

  I ignored the comment

  “I know numbuh six.”

  I tried to keep from expressing any feeling, since the prosecutor took a dim view of anything that could prejudice his case. “You mean that may be the man you saw in the car?”

  She shook her head. “That ain’t what I said. I saw him pick up a hookuh on DeRoche, maybe a month ago, maybe moah. But he’s not the one drivin’ that cah. Ain’t none of these look like the one I saw. But I told you I couldn’t pick him out of a pack a dogs. Could be any of these. Could be none of ‘em.” She shrugged.

  I went through the routine of making them face left and then face right. It only convinced her that number two not only was capable of killing his mother but very probably had done so. It also elicited unhelpful comments about the physical characteristics of each member of the lineup. I soon lost track of which one she was talking about.

  Sergeant Clancy wasn’t especially amused to find out that he’d been regarded as a potential matricide, but Lipscombe barely looked up from his report writing when I told him he’d been fingered, too. I marked the tape and turned it into the evidence room.

  It wasn’t until I was about ready to go off shift that I gave any further thought to Auntie Deet and the lineup. Since Jalina wasn’t going to be back until late to the apartment, I decided—for lack of anything better to do—to drop in on Auntie. Her apartment was far more prepossessing on the inside than on the outside. It consisted of a sitting room, a kitchen and a small bedroom. She seemed far friendlier in her home territory than she had been at the station, waving me to a chair and lumbering off to find a beer for me over my protests.

  When I told her that I was interested, not in the hit and run, but in the date when she had seen the prostitute being picked up, she wasn’t much help at first.

  “Musta been August, sometime. It was hot. No. It was befoh that. I membuh firecrackahs a night or so befoh. Couldn’t sleep none.”

  I checked my list. Seventh of July, a strangled prostitute found in the warehouse district. A black!

  “Was she a black or a white girl?” I asked.

  Auntie laughed. “Any white whoah try to work this street be cut up, for sure.”

  I checked my watch. It was still early. Jalina wouldn’t be home for at least another hour. I finished my beer and decided to go back to the station to listen to the tape.

  It wasn’t that easy. The tape had been checked out, and the officer on duty wasn’t very helpful. “Sorry. I just came on shift, and damned if I can tell by the signature.” On looking at the scribble, I had to agree.

  It was then I made the fateful decision. Running out to my car, I jumped in and roared back to Auntie Deets, taking the steps up to her apartment two at a time. Lipscombe must have heard me because when I burst into the room he had his gun drawn. It wasn’t hard to see what had been going on. Auntie Deets was sprawled back in her armchair, gasping for breath.

  “How convenient,” Lipscombe said. “Looks as though I’ve caught the Central District Strangler right after he strangled a witness.”

  It wasn’t too difficult to figure what he had in mind as he lifted his revolver and aimed it right at my chest. But what surprised Lipscombe even more than it did me was the speed with which Auntie Deets moved. With a heavy table lamp in her hand she caught him on the top of the head just as he turned around. The doctor later said that it was a wonder the blow hadn’t killed him.

  I was wearing my sergeant’s stripes several days later when I dropped by to see Auntie again to show off the new decorations. I asked her what she intended to do with the reward money.

  “I don’t know ‘bout most of it, but ah’m goin’ to spend a few dollahs to help a nice, sweet little gal get through law school.”

  THE LOTTERY

  She was absolutely, totally beautiful. In fact, I had never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life. I’d first spotted her when “Doc” Desrosiers bought her—brand new. And now she was sitting in Walsh’s used-car lot, with an enormous five-hundred dollar price tag chalked on her windshield. She was less than a year old, and she was an even lovelier jewel now than the day Doc drove her up and parked her in front of his drugstore. I think he must have loved her as much as I did, because he spent hours taking care of her—washing, polishing, waxing. No wonder she looked better now than when she left the dealer’s lot.

  Five hundred dollars! That was a steal, if there ever was one, for a beautiful ’30 Ford Roadster—gray canvas top, rumble seat, whitewall tires and all—hardly any miles on her. But it might as well have been five thousand, or five million, as far as I was concerned. I was making only about nine dollars a week selling lottery tickets and doing odd jobs, and most of that was going to my folks. I didn’t have to actually pay room and board, but I’m not sure what they would have done if I hadn’t helped out. Here they’d raised eleven kids, with Tony, me and Teresa the only ones left at home, but they were still scraping to get by, especially since Papa had been laid off at the brickyard.

  The money left over from what I gave them didn’t go very far. But cigarettes were two packs for two bits, and I could usually nurse them through a whole week. With Tony as ticket taker at the movie house, I could get in free. And then my clothes were mostly hand-me-downs. Shoes were a problem, because I did a lot of walking while peddling those lottery stubs, but beyond that I didn’t have much in the way of expenses. Not that any of that mattered, since I knew I couldn’t possibly save enough to buy that car.

  Still—five hundred dollars! She was worth way, way more than that. Doc would never have sold her, if the booze squad hadn’t caught him selling grain alcohol from under the counter. He needed the money to pay his fine. There just had to be some way for me to come up with five hundred dollars. But I couldn’t count more than a half-dozen kids who’d graduated from high school with me that spring who were making even what I was, so I wasn’t too likely to find better-paying work. Tony, who was three years older than me, wasn’t doing much better. His regular job, if you want to call it that, was peddling door to door fresh eggs he bought from a New Hampshire farm, in the old Chevy I’d learned to drive in.

  It did look like he might have a steady job pretty soon, though. He was learning how to run the projector at the Porter Square Theater, after months and months of being nothing more than a ticket-taker and usher. In fact, he was grooming me to take over his old job. Two bits an h
our, three hours a night. Six nights a week, plus one matinee.

  I’d sold papers when I was barely old enough to carry them, and I’d learned to make change faster than anyone in the neighborhood. Besides, arithmetic was my A subject in school. So it didn’t take but a few seconds to figure out those wages came to five-fifty a week. If I worked at the movie house for a year, and saved every single cent—plus the rare tips—I still wouldn’t have near enough. Maybe—if Tony turned the egg route over to me and if I kept on selling lottery tickets. But Doc’s roadster would be long gone by the time I’d saved up all that money. Still, every time I walked by Walsh’s lot and looked at her there with the big sign on her, I knew there just had to be a way.

  It was the first month after graduation that the way became a possibility. I’d been selling tickets for old man Francetti for about three months. They were five cents each, and I got ten cents for each hundred I sold. It took a lot of hustling to move them, but I was getting better at it all the time. It wasn’t really legal, but the police never bothered me. In fact, Jack O’Beirn, the policeman who patrolled most of North Cambridge, was one of my regular customers, buying twenty tickets or more at a time from me. He was lucky, too, winning something just about every other week. And then he’d give me a four-bit tip… more than a lot of the other winners ever did.

  The tickets were brown tickets—“stubs”—folded over and sealed, with the week’s date stamped in white on the outside on top of a black band. To see the five-digit number, the stub had to be torn open. Not that it would do much good to see what was inside ahead of time, since the winning tickets were determined by the U. S. Treasury Number published Friday night in the Daily Record, the only Boston paper that listed it.

  The payoff was simple. It was based on the last five digits of the treasury number—which I never figured out what it stood for. We just called those five digits “the lotto number.” If your ticket’s five numbers matched all five numbers of the lotto number, you’d get the big one—one thousand dollars! I never had any of my customers get that lucky, but they did win lots of smaller amounts.

  If only the first four numbers of your ticket matched the first four of the lotto number, then you’d get a hundred dollars. The first three matching won ten dollars. Two matching won a dollar. One matching got you a free ticket in the next week’s pool. Friday night, when the Saturday Record came out, was an important night in a lot of houses on my route, as people checked their tickets against the treasury number.

  I hadn’t been peddling the tickets long before I figured out that Francetti was coming out way ahead. I knew he was marketing a hundred thousand tickets a week, numbered from 00000 to 99999. That brought him in five thousand dollars. Then he paid out one thousand one-dollar winner, nine 100-dollar winners, ninety 10-dollar winners and 900 one-dollar winners. That left him more than a thousand dollars a week. He sold some of the tickets himself, but even writing off the free tickets for the single-digit winners, and if he farmed all the tickets out to kids like me, that still meant he was making out like a bandit. If all the tickets weren’t sold in any given week, that cut down on the number of winners. Sweet deal! No wonder he had a beautiful house in Belmont and was driving a new Packard.

  I explained all that to Tony one day. He always thought I was a whiz at numbers because I could figure up sale totals in my head faster than he could on paper when we went out on his egg route. That’s when he gave me a long lecture on business ventures, telling me it was more than just adding up numbers. He told me all about overhead, capital investments, operating costs, and on and on. I caught on fast, and did some recalculating of the lottery game.

  Francetti did have to have the stubs printed. He also had an office—not much of a one—two floors up in a rickety building in Porter Square. And Tony also told me about the facts of life, that Francetti probably had to make payoffs—maybe not as much as the local bootleggers, but the lottery was just as illegal. Making allowances for all that, he must have still been clearing hundreds of dollars a week. He had to—to pay for that Packard and the beautiful home he had in Belmont. I’d been there once and couldn’t believe: —two bathrooms!

  As for my part of the job, the ritual was always the same. The runners, including me, would pick up the tickets at his ratty office on Monday. Peddle as many as possible by Friday morning. Have the money and any left-over tickets back to him by noon on Friday. Winners were known by four on Friday afternoon when the Saturday paper came off the presses. Payoff was on Monday. I’d pay the small winners out of my pocket and keep the stubs to get reimbursed later. Big winners would go directly to Francetti for their money.

  It was just about the time when that sweet little Roadster showed up on Walsh’s lot that I ran into Phil Donovan. We’d been in high school together but hadn’t seen much of each other since he’d graduated. He’d gotten out of school a year ahead of me, and he was one of those doing better than I was—and then some. He’d been big on photography and was even making money at it, taking pictures of accidents for insurance purposes. Enough to buy some fancy equipment. He was all excited about a new enlarger, and he wanted to show it off, so he invited me out to his darkroom. I wasn’t much on taking pictures, but it was fun to see them show up gradually on the blank paper when he dipped it into some foul-smelling chemicals.

  We were cleaning up after he’d developed and printed a couple of rolls, when Phil screwed a different bulb into the lamp. “Watch this,” he said, as he shone the light on a set of photos. The pictures looked odd, as though they’d been changed into negatives. “It’s a backlight. It’s supposed to produce all sorts of strange effects, but I haven’t had much time to try it out.”

  I couldn’t see that it would do much for him, since nobody needed strange effects in pictures of smashed-up cars. About then I remembered he wanted to buy twenty lotto tickets, so I handed him a batch. When I did, my hand with the tickets happened to pass under the light. Amazing! The numbers inside the tickets showed up—not very clear, but enough to read. We both laughed at that, and I suddenly got an idea. “Can I borrow that light, Phil?” I asked.

  “Sure, but if you bust it, you owe me six dollars. I’ve got a big photo job coming up, so I won’t have a chance to try it on anything for a week or so. But what are you going to do with it? Reading the numbers won’t do you or anyone any good.”

  I wasn’t so sure of that. I knew some of my customers would like to pick out their own “lucky” numbers. In the back of my mind I thought that maybe old man Francetti might let me pick out the numbers people I knew wanted, then I could charge them more for them. Not exactly a brilliant idea, but just being able to read the numbers without opening the stubs was kind of fascinating.

  It wasn’t until I was walking back home past Walsh’s lot, where the little beauty was still sitting there wearing that big sign and looking lonesome, that another idea struck me. Why couldn’t I just check the numbers on my unsold tickets and buy whatever winners were left? The problem with that was that I never had many unsold tickets. Besides, I always had to turn them in before the Record hit the streets. The next step in my thinking was something I would never even have considered, if Jerry Walsh hadn’t come by when I’d stopped to admire the roadster.

  “Price is going down on it, kid. Four-seventy-five. Gotta move it this month or the liquor agents are going to take it and auction it off to pay part of Doc’s fine.”

  With a lot of luck, I figured I might have ten or twenty dollars worth of winners in my unsold stubs, but there were at least a dozen other runners working for Francetti, and some of them returned a lot more tickets than I ever did. “Suppose, just suppose,” I thought, “I could use the backlight on all of those stubs after finding out the winning number. There might even be a couple of hundred-dollar winners among them—and Jerry Walsh might settle for two hundred down, and twenty dollars a week. Maybe, just maybe…”

  There were a lot of things making the scheme workable. Francetti was a heavy drinker. He actual
ly got publicly drunk on occasion, something pretty rare among the Italians I knew. I’d watched him fumble over his safe combination once when he was pretty far gone. For no particular reason, I memorized the numbers. Also, there was a back room to his office where a window led out to a fire escape and where he stored a bunch of odds and ends he never used. It would be simple to find some excuse to go in there and unlatch the window when I came by his place. Then, on Friday, after the number had hit the streets, all I needed to do was to climb through the window, open the safe, take out the returned stubs, flash the light on them, pick out the winners, pocket them, substitute some duds I’d bought earlier and checked out with the backlight, go home, then come back Monday morning to get my winnings.

  The scheme was simple. It just didn’t work. At first, it all seemed to go just as planned. Francetti left as usual around noon, so the office was empty when I got there—late that evening, just to be safe. He had even left the lights on, as he usually did, so I didn’t have to bother with the flashlight I’d brought along—in case.

  The safe was duck soup. I opened it on the first try. But that’s when things began to go wrong. There were no returned stubs. Francetti must have taken them home with him or discarded them already. I checked the waste basket. Nothing! The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that Francetti opened all of the left-over tickets himself then doled out the winners to “friends” like Jack O’Beirn. That way he passed out favors, and word got around that there were a lot of winners. No wonder O’Beirn was so lucky!

  Exasperated and about ready to give up, I decided to take a look through the drawers in the dilapidated desk. Bingo! More than bingo. The drawers were stuffed with unopened stubs, in neat packets, not only from the current week but for weeks and weeks before. Each packet must have had up to a thousand stubs. It made absolutely no sense. I couldn’t believe that there were that many unsold tickets every week.