The Man with the Lumpy Nose

by Lawrence Lariar

  The Man with the Lumpy Nose

  A HOMER BULL & HANK MacANDREWS MYSTERY

  Lawrence Lariar

  CHAPTER 1

  In the United States, many things were news.

  Inner circles at the White House gossiped that President Roosevelt might report his travels to a joint session of Congress, thus borrowing a strategy from Churchill.

  In Nebraska, a Post Office clerk was amazed when a lady requested the name and number of a Post Office pen because it wrote so well.

  A minor explosion shook the Senate. Veteran lawmakers exchanged epithets over the soldiers’ voting bill.

  Endless swarms of high-flying bombers dropped tons of bombs over bleeding Berlin. Authorities predicted that Germany would either be knocked out by air or left too weakened to resist the forthcoming invasion from the west. Leaders high in Army and Navy circles cautioned an uncertain public against overconfidence.

  A minor plague of influenza swept the eastern seaboard, raised the absentee rate in war plants. The Health Department of The City of New York reported many tenement buildings unheated. A system of coal rationing was suggested by government experts. People were confused, irritated, aroused, hopeful, phlegmatic, violent and glum.

  Dignitaries returning from the Teheran conference reported that Josef Stalin was the dominant personality in that historic meeting. Dramatic climax came when Churchill presented the Stalingrad sword, a gift from King George VI “to the steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad.”

  Adolf Hitler trembled on his Berchtesgaden crag as the great Soviet Army seized the initiative in the battle of the Kiev bulge and slowly pressed the shivering Nazi hordes back toward Russia’s western border.

  The German underground movement prepared a new attack on American home front morale. American liberals deplored the sudden rise in apologist propaganda, cautioned against the coming German peace offensive.

  A serious tenement fire broke out in lower New York City. Mayor LaGuardia ordered an investigation because the firemen discovered the charred body of a policeman in the ruins of the street floor.

  It was a cold fall. The winter would be colder, weather men predicted.

  All this was news, good and bad.

  At Times Square the streets were alive with the usual late afternoon crowds. Tired and hungry, the workers gathered in the canyon of Times Square for a last deep breath of cool air before taking the plunge into the subway.

  Many newspapers were bought. The news was good tonight.

  On the west side of the Times Building the crowd knotted. People craned their necks to read the Times Bulletin:

  SOVIETS SEIZE INITIATIVE IN BATILE OF KIEV BULGE

  Jittery Berlin Sees Several Offensives Under Way

  A great noise, a subtle and meaningful noise, rose from the crowd, rose above the din of the traffic. People were approving this news from Russia. American crowds always cheer for the side that fights stubbornly to come back. All this was merely a symptom. Underneath the simple sentiment lay a realistic conviction that the fate of the United States would continue to be linked with the Great Russian Bear, in peace as in war.

  Suddenly the crowd tightened around a group of struggling figures. Three men were fighting.

  “Harry! Harry—come back here, you fool!” A woman’s scream, in a high tremolo. “Harry! Hareeeeeee!”

  Other voices added to the broth of noise.

  A man shouted, “Kill the Nazi!”

  Another man shouted. The woman screamed: “Harry! Come back here!”

  Taxis squealed to a stop. The crowd was surging around the subway entrance now. Several hundred people tried to see three men fight. It was impossible. In the tight small circle around the pavement battle there was confusion. Toes were being mashed. Hats were knocked askew. A policeman entered the outer fringe of the mob. Another shouldered his way from the curbing. Still a third hurled himself into the mêlée and floundered to the core of the crowd.

  “Break it up! Break it up! Stand back, you!”

  The other two policemen seized a man and held him.

  “Who started this?”

  The man on the sidewalk didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He lay face down, a thin flood of blood pouring from his forehead to his chin.

  The man with the red scratches on his chin squirmed in the grip of the two cops. They edged him forward.

  “This guy’s the battler, Tom.”

  “That isn’t right,” said the man. “I didn’t hit that man.”

  “You didn’t exactly kiss him, mister!”

  “No. No. You got me wrong. I tried to help this man, officer. I tried to help him shake off that bum—”

  The policeman took out a notebook. “What bum?”

  “The one who hit that poor fellow.”

  “What’s your name, mister?”

  “Harry Wasserstein. But I didn’t do nothing, honest. I was standing here minding my own business, just looking up at the bulletin. Then all of a sudden I hear this man here say something nasty to another guy behind my back.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He called this big guy a Nazi.”

  “Then they started to fight, hey?”

  “Yeah. Then they started. So I tried to help this little man hold off the Nazi. But he was plenty tough, that German bum.”

  They carried the man on the sidewalk to the drugstore and the big cop called for an ambulance. Harry Wasserstein was released.

  His wife, a nervous little woman, wept into a handkerchief. “Oh, Harry, Harry, Harry—you’re always mixing your two cents in where it doesn’t belong.”

  Harry patted his wife’s arm. “Never mind, Bertha. You hear what that big Nazi bum said?”

  “All right, he said something terrible. It’s a free country, isn’t it? Even if we are at war, let those German fools talk. God will take care of them in due time.”

  Harry tried to laugh, but his chin hurt when he moved it. “God is kind of busy these days, Bertha.”

  “Please, Harry, please. You’ll make a nervous wreck out of me yet with your hot temper.”

  “My temper isn’t hot. I’m a citizen and it hurts me to hear such talk about our country.” He touched his jaw tenderly. “Did you notice the face on that guy?”

  “I didn’t even see his face. How could I? I was too busy watching my Harry being a boxfighter!”

  “A face like a dog he had.”

  “Who cares about him? You’re anxious to maybe fight him again?”

  “A face like a dog he had on him, I’m telling you. Never in my life have I seen such a nose.”

  “You should talk, Mr. Boxfighter.”

  Harry Wasserstein’s hand went to his nose. He blew it. “I know my nose ain’t no beauty, Bertha. But now I don’t feel so bad about mine any more. Now I saw for once in my life a man with something worse on his face than even mine. My best enemies shouldn’t look like that Nazi!”

  “Forget about him, please. As a personal favor to me, please forget about him, Harry.”

  Harry shook his head and sighed. “Such a face I never saw in my life. Till my dying day I’ll remember him.” He shook his head again, blew his nose violently. “The dirty Nazi!”

  Ten minutes later four people left the subway at Canal Street.

  The first, an overworked stenographer, climbed the stairs eagerly, as though the smell of fresh air above might take the torture out of her eyes.

  Behind her came a young man with a mustache who had been watching her since Grand Central and hoped to meet her personally on Canal Street. />
  Third came a young man carrying three books. These three books were concerned with medicine, and the young man held them firmly because he had recently paid twenty-three dollars for the set. This young man walked with a sly step. He would wait on the street until the man behind him stood near. Then he would do what he rarely did, he would turn and stare at the man’s face for a long moment.

  The man with the lumpy nose came fourth. He passed the medical student a few steps short of the street level. On the street he paused, eyed the sky, sniffed, shrugged and buttoned the top button of his topcoat. It was at this instant that the young medical student stared at him and told himself, “Acne rosacea.” And having told himself this, he lit a cigarette and walked off.

  The man with the lumpy nose started east with a step at once spry and jerky. He was a heavy man, broad in the shoulders and broader in the midsection. His head sat tightly on those shoulders, a massive head, thick-necked and stiff-necked. He bent forward a bit, thrust his jaw out and moved quickly, but when his right foot came down you felt the limp.

  He paused at a newsstand. He lifted six magazines, one newspaper and a racing sheet from the stand and walked inside, holding a crumpled bill in his hand.

  There were two people in the store: the newsdealer, small, squat, with blue-grey hair on his chin; and another man, tall and thin with a sharp nose, a sharp jaw and sharp eyes behind heavy horn-rimmed glasses.

  The man with the lumpy nose held out his hand for change, studied the headlines in his newspaper.

  “Getting cooler,” said the storekeeper, in that guttural monotone common to newsdealers.

  “Eh?” said the man with the lumpy nose, more to his paper than to the storekeeper. “Yes. Cooler.” Then he pocketed his change, folded his paper and walked out.

  The newsdealer joined his friend in the rear. “Where were we, Johnny? Oh, yes, we were talking about unions, wasn’t it?”

  John Hedge stared at the door with the measuring glance of a carpenter. “What a nose!” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That man’s nose,” said Hedge. “That’s a treasure of a nose, I tell you. It isn’t often a roving cartoonist hits a proboscis like that one.”

  The other shrugged. “You were talking about unions. Now it’s noses? You artists sometimes strike me as crazy—all of you. To me that nose wasn’t so extra.”

  “It was extra, all right.”

  “I don’t see it.” He laughed into his front teeth. “But I know what you’ll say next. I am a candy store man, a newsdealer. I can see no further than a man’s nickel and the name of the paper he’s buying. No?”

  “Not exactly. It’s a matter of association of ideas. You look at a shoelace and think of a shoe. It’s a perfectly normal reaction. But artists aren’t ever perfectly normal, you see. When I look at a shoelace I think immediately of an old man I saw selling laces on the corner of Forty-Ninth Street and Third Avenue, on a rainy night last August. I can see that old fellow as clearly as I see you now. He was wearing a greenish coat, with two huge patches on his right arm. His beard was a reddish-brown, his eyes were dead black and he had the boniest hand I’ve ever seen. He sold me a pair of shoelaces, too—insisted that I take the laces for my nickel, and I can’t forget the sudden fierce pride in his eyes when I took ’em. That’s a long story for a pair of shoelaces, I know, but can you understand my interest in that nose now?”

  “It reminded you of something?”

  “Several things. Especially a picture I saw in the Louvre, back in ’28.”

  “A picture of a nose?” The storekeeper’s shoulders went up and his eyebrows joined them. “In the Louvre they have pictures of noses?”

  John Hedge smiled. “This was a masterpiece. The Old Man and His Little Son, it was called. Painted by Ghirlandaio. Italian master, he was.”

  A customer came in. Hedge found an empty page in his well-filled pad of manila sketching paper. He penciled the broad mass of a man’s coat in three-quarter rear. Then the head flowed into place under his quick fingers, and the hat with the oversize brim, the black tie with the oversize knot, the pockmarked face, the small ears, the short-cropped hair; the pig eyes. Everything but the nose.

  The newsdealer leaned over the counter. “You are finished with him?”

  “I have enough of him.”

  “Enough? You have his hat and his coat, yes. But where is that wonderful nose you wanted?”

  John Hedge moistened a cigarette and slid it into his smile. “The nose escaped me. That nose will come to me some night after my fifth Tom Collins or a Welsh Rarebit cooked by Molly Andrews at three in the morning. It’s a nose for a nightmare, Sidney. It’s a nose to come haunting me in bed when my stomach turns to fictioneering with my brain. I’ve missed dozens of essential features in my day only to find them piling up on me in a rush from some hidden corner of my libido.” He blinked his eyes good-naturedly. “Of such is the kingdom of cartooning.”

  The little man laughed up at the ceiling. “I never saw a man make himself so miserable, over a nose. Why don’t you guess at the nose? Take a stab at it. You saw him for a few seconds when he walked in, didn’t you?”

  “It didn’t appeal to me in full face. That way, it was just another nose. Noses have a way of sinking into the flesh in full face. They are lost in the wrinkles, in the cheeks, in the fat. His nose in full face was pure stevedore. You can find a thousand of those noses down at South Street when the boats come in. These are the breed of broken snouts, smashed in battle … pig noses, blunt and broad and mashed into cheekbones.” He dragged, a smoky comma in his monologue. “But when he turned down to look at his paper, our man became a fascinating subject. The profile reveals all, of course. My split second glimpse at the lumpiness, the queer bumpy fatness of his nozzle was enough to tease my imagination. Nothing but a close-up of that snout would please me now.”

  “And when you get it?”

  “When I get it,” laughed Hedge, “then I’ll have it.”

  The newsdealer’s brows wrinkled incredulously. “So you have it! What next? What do you do with it? You will maybe frame it and hang it over the piano? Or you’ll better send it to The Metropolitan so they can hang it in the Nose Wing?”

  “Not at all. I’ll file it under noses!”

  “You’ll file it? You have a cabinet with files for stuff like this?”

  Hedge took the clip off his pad and flipped through the sketches. “Look here,” he said, and held up a drawing in pencil, a sketch of a woman’s rump, full-blossomed and ripe with flesh. “A man must make notes, Sidney.”

  The little man squinted at the drawing and when he smiled the wrinkles were deep around his mouth. “Such notes as these I would make myself. If I could, that is.”

  “It goes into my file of rumps. I have hundreds of anatomical views of that kind, from hair to ankle. Rumps galore. I’ve got sitting rumps, standing rumps, heaving rumps on a theater runway, tired old rumps on park benches, the rumps of babes and even elephants. A man can’t imagine these things when he draws—they’re utilitarian rumps.”

  “Are you telling me? Such an item I could use myself this winter!”

  John Hedge ripped the sheet away from the pad and handed it across the counter. “Keep it under your pillow.”

  The door opened and a man walked in.

  “Hello, Jeff,” said Hedge. “You finished? Sober?”

  “Hello, whack. I got the stuff.” He patted a notebook under his left arm. “Over three dozen Bowery vignettes that stink from stale beer and wood alcohol. I ought to charge the paper for the swill I was forced to guzzle to get past the gatekeepers in those flophouses. They seem to think their lice-bound stables are secret treasures, to be kept alone and aloof from all humans except the mangy bums who sleep and die in them.”

  They looked at the drawings. These were fine, clear pen and inks of Bowery l
ife, done in a sharp and bold technique and full of an acid bite that was Jeff Grundy. Jeff had a flair for down-and-outers. He knew how they lived.

  “Good,” said Hedge. His eyes were half closed on the last sketch, a perspective shot of an aged bum flat on his face in saloon sawdust.

  “Marvelous,” said the newsdealer.

  An old lady with a red hat broke into the discussion. The store owner dived behind the counter for her package of Sweet Caporals. Grundy and Hedge moved into the street.

  Hedge said, “I’ll buy you a drink if you show these drawings to Earl Chance tonight.”

  Jeff Grundy’s eyes went cold. He folded the sketches into his coat. When he answered he bit his words into quick, sharp syllables.

  “Earl Chance can go to hell!” he said.

  “You’re being stupid, Jeff. I’ll bet you another drink he’ll like them.”

  “I told you where he can go,” said Grundy.

  CHAPTER 2

  Homer Bull was short and fat, but he was not slow. He crossed the outer waiting room of the Bureau of Investigation with his hands deep in his pants pockets. He took longish strides for a fat man.

  At the glass door, a cop said, “You back again, Mr. Bull? The boss ain’t in but he said for me to tell you to wait inside.”

  Homer said, “Thanks, Cassidy. Here’s a good five-cent cigar I found in an ashtray downtown.”

  Cassidy eyed the cigar band and smiled. “Thanks. I wish I knew where to locate them ashtrays you’re always finding.” He opened the door to McElmore’s office for Homer. Then he walked back to the desk, sniffed the cigar, tore off the cellophane, sniffed it again and shook his head with a grin. “Five-cent cigar—malarkey!”

  “What is it, then, a seven-center?” inquired Charlie Burtis.

  Cassidy looked down his nose at Burtis. But then, how would Burtis know who Homer Bull was—Burtis had graduated from his beat in Flatlands to the main office only three weeks ago. And Homer Bull hadn’t been in the office since the Shemple case. “Listen, pavement punk, that little guy ain’t no seven-cent cigar man. That’s Homer Bull!”