“About these bloodstains on the window sill,” said the detective. “Would the cat attack an intruder viciously enough to draw blood?”
“Heavens, no!” said ONE. “He's just a pampered little house pet. We found him hiding under the bed, scared stiff.”
“And you're sure you can't remember any unusual incident lately? Has anyone come to the house who might have seen the silver or jewelry? Repairman? Window washer?”
“I wish I could be more helpful,” said ONE, “but honestly, I can't think of a single suspect.”
Phut Phat gave up.
Wriggling free, he jumped down from ONE's lap and walked toward the door with head depressed and hind legs stiff with disgust. He knew who it was. He knew! The man with the shiny stick. But it was useless to try to communicate. The human mind was closed so tight that nothing important would ever penetrate. And ONE was so busy with her own chatter that her mind ...
The jingle of keys caught Phut Phat's attention. He turned and saw TWO swinging his key chain back and forth, back and forth, and saying nothing. TWO always did more thinking than talking. Perhaps Phut Phat had been trying to communicate with the wrong mind. Perhaps TWO was really Number One in the household and ONE was Number TWO. Phut Phat froze in his position of concentration, sitting tall and compact with tail stiff. The key chain swung back and forth, and Phut Phat fastened his blue eyes on three wrinkles just underneath TWO's hairline. He concentrated. The key chain swung back and forth, back and forth. Phut Phat kept concentrating.
“Wait a minute,” said TWO, coming out of his puzzled silence. “I just thought of something. Helen, remember that party we gave a couple of weeks ago? There was one guest we couldn't account for. A man with a silver cane.”
“Why, yes! The man was so curious about the coop on the fire escape. Why didn't I think of him? Lieutenant, he was terribly interested in our Georgian silver.”
TWO said, “Does that suggest anything to you, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, it does.” The detective exchanged nods with his partner.
“This man,” ONE volunteered, “had a very cultivated voice and a charming manner.”
“We know him,” the detective said grimly. “We know his method. What you tell us fits perfectly. But we didn't know he was operating in this neighborhood again.”
ONE said, “What mystifies me is the blood on the window sill.”
Phut Phat arched his body in a long, luxurious stretch and walked from the room, looking for a soft, dark, quiet place. Now he would sleep. He felt relaxed and satisfied. He had made vital contact with a human mind, and perhaps – after all – there was hope. Some day they might learn the system, learn to open their minds and receive. They had a long way to go before they realized their potential – but there was hope.
Fredric Brown
(1906–1972)
Fredric Brown's vision of the world is paradoxical and slightly cockeyed. Things, in his eyes, are not always what one might think they are; elements of the bizarre spice the commonplace, and, conversely, elements of the commonplace leaven the bizarre. Madness and sanity are intertwined, so that it is often difficult to tell which is which; the same is true of tragedy and comedy. Brown seems to have felt that the forces, cosmic or otherwise, that control our lives are at best mischievous and at worse malign, that man has little to say about his own destiny, and that free will is a fallacy. The joke is on us, he seems to be saying in much of his work, and it is a joke that all too frequently turns nasty.
Brown employed a deceptively simple, chatty style that allows his fiction to be enjoyed as entertainment and also to be pondered by readers interested in the complex themes at its heart. The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947), the novel that introduced his detective duo of Ed and Am Hunter, and which also earned Brown a Mystery Writers of America Edgar for best first novel, is a prime example. On the one hand it is a tough, uncompromising mystery in which young and idealistic Ed Hunter joins forces with his pragmatic and jaded uncle Am, a retired circus performer, to solve the murder of Ed's father. On the other hand there are deeper meanings to the narrative – underlying themes of obsession, a young man's bitter and tragic coming of age, and the manipulation of those dark cosmic forces that the author believed control our lives.
Brown wrote six other Ed and Am Hunter books, in which the pair function as Chicago–based private eyes. None of these is as powerful or memorable as The Fabulous Clipjoint, though Compliments of a Fiend (1950), a mix of numbers racketeers, crystal gazers, and astrologers, and the kidnapping of Uncle Am, has some of the same obsessive intensity. The novelette that follows is the only Ed and Am Hunter short story – at once a straightforward medium hard–boiled detective tale and a complex character study in which Brown's skewed worldview may be glimpsed.
Even better than Brown's series mysteries are his nonseries suspense novels. Knock Three–One–Two (1959), a brilliantly constructed, frightening novel with a shocking and ironic climax, is the author at his most controlled while dealing with material at its most chaotic. The Screaming Mimi (1949) and The Far Cry (1951) are also outstanding. In addition to his crime fiction, Brown wrote fantasy and science fiction of comparable quality, and excellent short stories in both categories, including dozens of mordant short–shorts – a demanding form at which he proved himself a master. Many of these may be found in his 1961 collection, Nightmares and Geezenstacks.
BEFORE SHE KILLS
ED AND AM HUNTER
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 1960
The door was that of an office in an old building on State Street near Chicago Avenue, on the near north side, and the lettering on it read Hunter and Hunter Detective Agency. I opened it and went in. Hunter is my uncle, Ambrose Hunter.
The door to the inner office was open and I could see Uncle Am playing solitaire at his desk in there. He's shortish, fattish and smartish, with a straggly brown mustache. I waved at him and headed for my desk in the outer office. I'd had my lunch – we take turns – and he'd be leaving now. Except that he wasn't. He swept the cards together and stacked them but he said, “Come on in, Ed. Something to talk over with you.”
I went in and pulled up a chair. It was a hot day and two big flies were droning in circles around the room. I reached for the fly swatter and held it, waiting for one or both of them to light somewhere. “We ought to get a bomb,” I said.
“Huh? Who do we want to blow up?”
“A bug bomb,” I said. “One of those aerosol deals, so we can get flies on the wing.”
“Not sporting, kid. Like shooting a sitting duck, only the opposite. Got to give the flies a chance.”
“All right,” I said, swatting one of them as it landed on a corner of the desk. “What did you want to talk about?”
“A case, maybe. A client, or a potential one, came in while you were feeding your face. Offered us a job, but I'm not sure about taking it. Anyway, it's one you'd have to handle, and I wanted to talk it over with you first.”
The other fly landed and died, and the wind of the swat that killed it blew a small rectangular paper off the desk onto the floor. I picked it up and saw that it was a check made out to Hunter and Hunter and signed Oliver R. Bookman – a name I didn't recognize. It was for five hundred dollars.
We could use it. Business had been slow for a month or so. I said, “Looks like you took the job already. Not that I blame you.” I put the check back on the desk. “That's a pretty strong argument.”
“No, I didn't take it. Ollie Bookman had the check already made out when he came, and put it down while we were talking. But I told him we weren't taking the case till I'd talked to you.”
“Ollie? Do you know him, Uncle Am?”
“No, but he told me to call him that, and it comes natural. He's that kind of guy. Nice, I mean.”
I took his word for it. My uncle is a nice guy himself, but he's a sharp judge of character and can spot a phony a mile off. He said, “He thinks his wife is trying to kill him or maybe planning to.”
“Int
eresting,” I said. “But what could we do about it – unless she does? And then it's cop business.”
“He knows that, but he's not sure enough to do anything drastic about it unless someone backs up his opinion and tells him he's not imagining things. Then he'll decide what to do. He wants you to study things from the inside.”
“Like how? And why me?”
“He's got a young half brother living in Seattle whom his wife has never met and whom he hasn't seen for twenty years. Brother's twenty–five years old – and you can pass for that age. He wants you to come to Chicago from Seattle on business and stay with them for a few days. You wouldn't even have to change your first name; you'd be Ed Cartwright and Ollie would brief you on everything you'll be supposed to know.”
I thought a moment and then said, “Sounds a little far out to me, but – ” I glanced pointedly at the five–hundred–dollar check. “Did you ask how he happened to come to us?”
“Yes. Koslovsky sent him; he's a friend of Kossy's, belongs to a couple of the same clubs.” Koslovsky is chief investigator for an insurance company; we've worked for him or with him on several things.
I asked, “Does that mean there's an insurance angle?”
“No, Ollie Bookman carries only a small policy – small relative to what his estate would be – that he took out a long time ago. Currently he's not insurable. Heart trouble.”
“Oh. And does Kossy approve this scheme of his for investigating his wife?”
“I was going to suggest we ask Kossy that. Look, Ed, Ollie's coming back for our answer at two o'clock. I'll have time to eat and get back. But I wanted to brief you before I left so you could think it over. You might also call Koslovsky and get a rundown on Ollie, whatever he knows about him.”
Uncle Am got up and got the old black slouch hat he insists on wearing despite the season. Kidding him about it does no good.
I said, “One more question before you go. Suppose Bookman's wife meets his half brother, his real one, someday. Isn't it going to be embarrassing?”
“I asked him that. He says it's damned unlikely; he and his brother aren't at all close. He'll never go to Seattle and the chances that his brother will ever come to Chicago are one in a thousand. Well, so long, kid.”
I called Koslovsky. Yes, he'd recommended us to Bookman when Bookman had told him what he wanted done and asked – knowing that he, Koslovsky, sometimes hired outside investigators when he and his small staff had a temporary overload of cases – to have an agency recommended to him.
“I don't think too much of his idea,” Koslovsky said, “but, hell, it's his money and he can afford it. If he wants to spend some of it that way, you might as well have the job as anyone else.”
“Do you think there's any real chance that he's right? About his wife, I mean.”
“I wouldn't know, Ed. I've met her a time or two and – well, she struck me as a cold potato, probably, but hardly as a murderess. Still, I don't know her well enough to say.”
“How well do you know Bookman? Well enough to know whether he's pretty sane or gets wild ideas?”
“Always struck me as pretty sane. We're not close friends but I've known him fairly well for three or four years.”
“Just how well off is he?”
“Not rich, but solvent. If I had to guess, I'd say he could cash out at over one hundred thousand, less than two. Enough to kill him for, I guess.”
“What's his racket?”
“Construction business, but he's mostly retired. Not on account of age; he's only in his forties. But he's got angina pectoris, and a year or two ago the medicos told him to take it easy or else.”
Uncle Am got back a few minutes before two o'clock and I just had time to tell him about my conversation with Kossy before Ollie Bookman showed up. Bookman was a big man with a round, cheerful face that made you like him at sight. He had a good handshake.
“Hi, Ed,” he said. “Glad that's your name because it's what I'll be calling you even if it wasn't. That is, if you'll take on the job for me. Your Uncle Am here wouldn't make it definite. What do you say?”
I told him we could at least talk about it and when we were comfortably seated in the inner office, I said, “Mr. Bookman – was “Call me Ollie,” he interrupted, so I said, “All right, Ollie. The only reason I can think of thus far, for not taking on the job, if we don't, is that even if you're right – if your wife does have any thoughts about murder – the chances seem awfully slight that I could find out about it, and how she intended to do it, in time to stop it.”
He nodded. “I understand that, but I want you to try, anyway. You see, Ed, I'll be honest and say that I may be imagining things. I want somebody else's opinion – after that somebody has lived with us at least a few days. But if you come to agree with me, or find any positive indications that I'm maybe right, then – well, I'll do something about it. Eve – that's my wife's name – won't give me a divorce or even agree to a separation with maintenance, but damn it, I can always simply leave home and live at the club – better that than get myself killed.”
“You have asked her to give you a divorce, then?”
“Yes, I – Let me begin at the beginning. Some of this is going to be embarrassing to tell, but you should know the whole score. I met Eve ...”
He'd met Eve eight years ago when he was thirty–five and she was twenty–five, or so she claimed. She was a strip–tease dancer who worked in night clubs under the professional name of Eve Eden – her real name had been Eve Packer. She was a statuesque blonde, beautiful. Ollie had fallen for her and started a campaign immediately, a campaign that intensified when he learned that off–stage she was quiet, modest, the exact opposite of what strippers are supposed to be and which some of them really are. By the time he was finally having an affair with her, lust had ripened into respect and he'd been thinking in any case that it was about time he married and settled down. So he married her, and that was his big mistake. She turned out to be completely, psychopathically frigid. She'd been acting, and doing a good job of acting, during the weeks before the marriage, but after marriage, or at least after the honeymoon, she simply saw no reason to keep on acting. She had what she wanted – security and respectability. She hated sex, and that was that. She turned Ollie down flat when he tried to get her to go to a psychoanalyst or even to a marriage consultant, who, he thought, might be able to talk her into going to an analyst. In every other way she was a perfect wife. Beautiful enough to be a showpiece that made all his friends envy him, a charming hostess, even good at handling servants and running the house. For all outsiders could know, it was a perfect marriage. But for a while it drove Ollie Bookman nuts. He offered to let her divorce him and make a generous settlement, either lump sum or alimony. But she had what she wanted, marriage and respectability, and she wasn't going to give them up and become a divorcee, even if doing so wasn't going to affect her scale of living in the slightest. He threatened to divorce her, and she laughed at him. He had, she pointed out, no grounds for divorce that he could prove in court, and she'd never give him any. She'd simply deny the only thing he could say about her, and make a monkey out of him.
It was an impossible situation, especially as Ollie had badly wanted to have children or at least a child, as well as a normal married life. He'd made the best of it by accepting the situation at home as irreparable and settling for staying sane by making at least occasional passes in other directions. Nothing serious, just a normal man wanting to live a normal life and succeeding to a degree.
But eventually the inevitable happened. Three years ago, he had found himself in an affair that turned out to be much more than an affair, the real love of his life – and a reciprocated love. She was a widow, Dorothy Stark, in her early thirties. Her husband had died five years before in Korea; they'd had only a honeymoon together before he'd gone overseas. Ollie wanted so badly to marry her that he offered Eve a financial settlement that would have left him relatively a pauper – this was before the onset of his
heart trouble and necessary semiretirement; he looked forward to another twenty years or so of earning capacity – but she refused; never would she consent to become a divorcee, at any price. About this time, he spent a great deal of money on private detectives in the slim hope that her frigidity was toward him only, but the money was wasted. She went out quite a bit but always to bridge parties, teas or, alone or with respectable woman companions, to movies or plays.
Uncle Am interrupted. “You said you used private detectives before, Ollie. Out of curiosity, can I ask why you're not using the same outfit again?”
“Turned out to be crooks, Am. When they and I were finally convinced we couldn't get anything on her legitimately, they offered for a price to frame her for me.” He mentioned the name of an agency we'd heard of, and Uncle Am nodded.
Ollie went on with his story. There wasn't much more of it. Dorothy Stark had known that he could never marry her but she also knew that he very badly wanted a child, preferably a son, and had loved him enough to offer to bear one for him. He had agreed even if he couldn't give the child his name, he wanted one – and two years ago she had borne him a son, Jerry Stark. Ollie loved the boy to distraction. Uncle Am asked if Eve Bookman knew of Jerry's existence and Ollie nodded.
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