The Man with the Magic Eardrums

by Harry Stephen Keeler

  “Well, that’s easy, Steenburg. They’d say that, representing the American Bookies’ Association, as I do—I was delegated to ‘put the fix’ on your dad—through you, of course, as ‘fixer’—with a present of—oh—10 or 20 grand—to blow out of America and derail the threatened abolishment of race-track booking. Which, by the way, I don’t think will be abolished.” I paused. “In fact, if your father does leave before that investigation—the newspapers, if they ever got a thousandth of an inkling of your being here with me tonight, would practically come out flat-footed and say that your dad had been ‘fixed’—at least their stories would drip with open innuendoes to the effect that another good Jew—had gone wrong for gelt!” I smiled, however, to show him I meant no personal animus toward his race by my remark.

  “Precisely,” was Steenburg’s reply. “And the old man could never, never stand up under anything like that. It—it would just about break him, mentally and physically, Mr. King. I know!” He paused. “And so, quite naturally, Mr. King, I’m damn frank to tell you—here and now—that if anything whatsoever ever leaks out about my having been up here with you tonight—talked with you alone—I’m going to have one beaut of a mental blank! A fit of both amnesia and aphasia—combined! In short, don’t get sore if I ever hand the frozen-face to any friend of yours whom you might tell to give me a ‘hello’—up my way. Why say, I wouldn’t let the tiniest breath of suspicion attach itself to the person of the grandest old man who ever lived—for any price whatsoever.”

  “I get you perfectly,” I assured him. “And I understand. So carry on. After all—no one need ever know that you and I were alone tonight; and, moreover, if you’ll recall my conversation with you on the phone a while back—yes, while that other chap was here in the room—I addressed you then only as ‘my friend.’ And not as Mr. Steenburg. And purposely, of course. So carry on. No one can overhear us—unless they have a pair of long-range ears that can overhear all the way from Weddles Street—across the prairie southward.”

  He looked exceedingly relieved, at my very confirmation of what he was already practically assured of.

  And then began the subject of his strange errand.

  The mere presentation of which was—though I did not of course dream it then!—to contain a single fact which was to uncover for and completely!—that utterly unsolvable Mulkovitch Riddle now locked within the brain of England’s Home Secretary.

  And which single fact, moreover, was to bear an even more vital relationship to my nearly hopeless problem of that mad Negress due to be hanged tonight in Pentonville Prison than did, indeed, the odd revelation of the stocky little man now locked in the closet.

  And quite unknowing that I was to receive such fact, I bent my full attention to Steenburg’s words.

  CHAPTER XII

  The Case of Henry Speevy

  “About a year and six months ago, Mr. King,” Steenburg began, “a farmer named Henry Speevy—chap who lives alone—batches it—on his farm on Rural Route 3, just out of Wiscotown, Wisconsin—brought to you a skull that he’d plowed up in a field of his which had been running to pasture for some eight years—a field right off the road. He—but you’ll admit this much, to begin with, won’t you?”

  “I’ll admit nothing,” I said pointedly, and a bit sternly, “till I know what the devil this is all about.”

  “Fair enough!” he said. “For after all, Henry Speevy—in the subsequent deal he made with you—made you promise solemnly and faithfully that never—as long as you lived—would you reveal where that skull came from. For No. 5,621 of the Wisconsin Revised Statutes, of just two years back, states that anyone who uncovers evidence of a murder, or part of any human body, and who fails to turn it over to the nearest county officer or else representative of the state’s attorney within 48 hours, is eligible to a fine of not less than $1000 and a sentence of 5 years in the penitentiary. And Speevy, being a Wisconsinite, knows all about that law. And so he made you promise. And the honor of a gambler, of course, is said to be the most precious thing he has.”

  I gave Steenburg a poker-like mask in return, and offered nothing to corroborate the point-blank statement he had just made. Although it was evident that the man was primed with a lot of hard facts.

  “Well,” he went on, “Speevy, as I now understand things, had decided, a year ago last spring, to sow this field with something—or else turn the surface of it over well so’s the timothy and clover in it would come up more luxuriant—or something like that—you can see, when it comes to something agricultural, Mr. King, I’m no farmer! No! But anyway, Speevy had plowed up this skull—this same skull we’re talking about—in this field. You probably wouldn’t be cognizant of such details—much less even inter­ested—but merely to show you, Mr. King, that I’m not speaking in vague terms, let me say that the field itself lies just to the right of a huge grove of poplar trees, on the road connecting Wisco­town, Wisconsin, with north-south Government Highway No. 41—but in giving road numbers now, Mr. King, I’m referring to the new number system now covering this entire region.”

  “Go ahead,” I told him. “I don’t have occasion to drive over much into Wisconsin—close as it is—but if you get too deep for me, in road numbers, I’ll put out the new revised road map—” I inclined my head towards the table drawer—“and follow you with a pencil!”

  “Okay,” he said. “But I’ll have occasion to refer to only a few roads, at most.” He paused. “Well, as I was about to say, this field where Speevy unearthed the skull lies on the road connecting Wiscotown, Wisconsin, with north-south Government Highway No. 41—new road number system—which itself connects east-west Government Highway No. 30—just south of Wiscotown. While Wiscotown itself lies—as of course you, Mr. King, being a Minneapolisite, would know—just across the Minnesota-Wisconsin state line—and only a healthy flea’s jump from St. Paul. And—but about the skull again. It was plowed up exactly 10 feet north, as I understand it, of the third fencepost from the west edge of the field. Now you assuredly see that I know something about the disinterment of that skull! However, to continue. There were no other skeletal appendages present—except, of course, the jawbone. For Speevy, after plowing it up, plowed and dug all around it. The skull, thanks to apparently long burial in the ground of the human head of which it had been the—the nucleus!—was fairly denuded of—well—of organic material—if you don’t mind, Mr. King, my euphemism for dead flesh!—yes—and it took very little boiling, on Speevy’s part, in an old rusty kettle—and little or no scraping after that—to convert it into a clean specimen of craniology. After being boiled a bit and thus cleaned, Speevy found that the rear wall of the left eyesocket was shattered—and the back of the skull was pierced by a bullet hole, the bullet having plainly travelled in from behind, and gone out the eye. Clean drilled, that is, the outside of that hole—compression only!—but jagged, its inside, where the bullet, leaving the inner cranium wall, tore off splinters of bone. A murdered man’s skull, in short—no suicide by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever!

  “But Speevy,” Steenburg went on—and he was now the perfect lawyer, presenting facts in their exact chronological relationship with each other, “had a chap living out there with him on his farm some six months or so before. A chap who’d come out there, right after the racing season had closed in that particular year, with some hunting paraphernalia—in fact, I think the plover season or the duck season, maybe it was—had just opened—and had asked permission to lay up for a week or 10 days in a spare room in Speevy’s cottage—and was willing to batch his own meals just like Speevy was doing. As you yourself know, Mr. King, Northern Wisconsin’s got a lot of small marshes scattered about it—and I guess maybe this chap was going to shoot some duck, and not plover. God knows what. It doesn’t matter. I even forget what name he gave to Speevy, and that doesn’t particularly matter, either; all that matters in this affair is that, talking with Speevy, of a night, over their pipes, he�
��d gotten more or less confidential with the farmer—and he told him he worked for you—or maybe it was—yes—that he had worked for you the previous year—as conductor of one of your many booking stands—I think at Hennepin Race Track—or maybe it was another track. That all really doesn’t matter so much.

  “What is really important in this affair, of course, is that he told Speevy he’d been close enough to you to know about some of your personal beliefs. About fetishes, that is. And hoodoos! Things that seemed to be connected with good luck. And with bad luck. And I suppose, Mr. King, that at times when you book on the tracks, you have to be pretty close with all your sub-bookies, eh? Anyway he—this chap—quoted you—at least to Speevy—as saying that, for one thing, it was bad luck in the gambling game to have one’s picture taken—and that you attributed your unusually good luck to the fact that you never had had yours taken—at least not since you’d been taken as a kidlet in diapers! Another thing he quoted you as saying to him was that it was your profound belief, based upon something you’d once heard or read, that possession of a bone or any part of the skeleton of a murdered man was good luck—and that the thousands of dollars you’d won on the tracks since you first started with a bare $100 was due, at least according to your belief, to your ownership of a front tooth—drawn by some undertaker friend of yours in the effort to make a pleasant-looking corpse—from the head of some Greek stabbed to death on Irving Avenue. In fact, you told him, if I’m not mistaken, that the day the tooth broke up because of a heavy weight dropping onto it—your luck took some particularly bad dip—and that you were perforce emboldened to believe in the whole of this theory of yours: namely, that if a human luck fetish were in any way marred, cut, chipped or broken—its powers were lost.”

  He looked at me inquiringly.

  “We-e-ell,” I said, apology in my voice, “there are some pretty deep things in life, Steenburg; far, far deeper than we know. What is our ‘luck,’ after all, but our ‘karma’—as the East Indians call it? The hidden connection between ourselves—our destiny—and certain curious objects—well, it’s mighty hidden, let me tell you. We nonchalantly group it all under the word ‘occult.’ Which science sneers at. And contemptuously refuses even to inves­tigate. And right there, Steenburg, science makes a god-damned ass of itself. It—”

  “Right, Mr. King! And I wasn’t sneering at anything.” Steenburg paused. And glanced at a watch on his wrist. “But I better go on with the story—if I’m to make that night plane out of St. Paul tonight.” He paused again. “Well, inasmuch as this skull Speevy turned up was manifestly the skull of a murdered man, Speevy, remembering what this bookie chap that had lived there a while back had told him, thought you’d be damned anxious to buy it for a good-luck fetish. He’d cleaned it up, of course, about as well as he could—but couldn’t very well take it to any anatomical laboratory, as you realize, to have the jaw swung to the skull proper with pivots and springs and all that; and so he just affixed the one temporarily to the other with a strip of adhesive white surgical tape. After which he brought the thing to you and sounded you out as to whether you cared to buy it for a good-luck fetish. Which in fact you did—for $100 cash—and a promise to Speevy that you’d never reveal his part in the skull’s coming to you. Which—if you’ll pardon my comment, Mr. King—I don’t guess you’d want to reveal anyway, considering that—that last out-of-court agreement between you and—and Mrs. King.”

  I gave a half laugh. “You would bring that up!” And added: “When and where did you bump into that story?”

  Steenburg appeared to be exceedingly embarrassed. “Well, Mr. King, I had deep reasons for wanting to read that story. In fact, I dropped into the public-service bureau of the Despatch around 6 o’clock this evening—your Rozalda, whom I frankly admit I’ve been out with once, in the course of running down the very grave matter on which I’m here tonight—your Rozalda, as I was about to say, has been plenty damn tight-mouthed about you—loyal, your servants evidently are—but she did let out, during the course of the particular party we were out on together just three nights ago, that there’d been a story about you, a few days prior to that, in the Despatch—so I went down to the public files late today—leafed over ’em—and found it. Then bought a back copy.”

  I only laughed. For I felt no rancor. “Some day, Steenburg,” I commented, “I intend to read that story in full!”

  “Of course,” Steenburg explained “the reason I finally looked it up was that I then knew for a certainty that I was going to have to talk with you personally about this thing—sooner or later—more sooner, in fact, than later!—and I knew that the Despatch story would have as much about you in it as it would about—about anything extraneous to your affairs.”

  “Right enough!” I admitted. “And you wanted to sort of—sort of catch my psychology? Was that it?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, ignore 99 per cent or so of what you read in the Despatch—and just put me down as a 50-50 combination of good bargainer—and good Samaritan!—providing the facts for my being the latter are warranted.”

  “Thanks. That’s just what I’ve done.”

  “But,” I told him, “get on with the tale. I can understand where you could read up a bit about me—but I don’t yet understand how you got these intimate, inside facts on this Speevy business? Particularly since you yourself don’t seem even to know the name of the particular bookie who batched that 10 days or so on Speevy’s farm? I do myself, yes—that is, I think I do—for I’ve employed as many as 30 bookies, at times, in the course of one season’s racings. But you—how do you get—what you’ve got?”

  “Well, if you want to know,” Steenburg admitted, “I got the facts I just gave you from Speevy himself. By a trick—yes—but I got them!” He paused. “However, Mr. King, since you know now that I know—the inside facts about that skull—come clean with me! So that we can get somewhere. First, where is that skull today?”

  But now, I thought, it was time to play chess a bit. Since, after all, he had as yet put mighty, mighty few cards on the table. But I determined it would have to be adroit chess. So I pondered some twenty or thirty seconds before I attempted to reply. He had said, a few minutes back, that he had been out on a party—or something—with Rozalda once. And that three nights ago—by his own words. So up to that time, at least, he had known that this house had been masterless. And after that, as well; in fact, up to whatever time he may have communicated with Rozalda by phone—if he did! So I selected, for his edification, a fairly late return. Late enough, that is, to lie subsequent to any personal communication on his part with Rozalda—if he’d had such—yet early enough to have gotten well rid of the skull. To be sure, I could have clamped down on him, with the icy stare, and told him it was none of his damned business where the skull was. But my feeling at the moment was that only in letting him know it was entirely out of the place—could I draw him all the way out. And then, if necessary, I could retract all I’d said. And little did I know, as I spoke, that Rozalda herself, in a timorous lie uttered to this man, that very evening over the phone—and which lie I was shortly to hear—had beautifully backed up the time scheme, at least, of the tale I was about to hand him.

  I smiled dryly, as I at last answered his question.

  “The skull just at this moment,” I lied gracefully, “is aboard a mail plane—winging its way toward the fashionable suburb of Evanston, Illinois—that is, I should say, toward Chicago—on whose proletarian edge effete Evanston nestles!” Steenburg gave a wry grin at my characterization of those two cities, one large, and one small, and both 500 miles away. But, looking at the onyx clock in back of him, I was continuing: “In fact,” I stated slowly, “in view of the special delivery stamp affixed to the square box it’s sealed up in—it ought to be going over a certain Evanston doorstep about 6 o’clock tomorrow morning!”

  He heard me through, but, strangely, did not appear to be so particularly nonpl
ussed just because the skull—as far as he then knew—wasn’t on the premises.

  “Hm!” was all he said. “Do you mind telling me how—”

  “Not at all,” I broke in. “When I got back to Minneapolis today”—and that word ‘today’ was capable of covering many ranges of hours between last midnight and the midnight now rushing on us!—“I found a letter from an old friend—yes—in Evanston—who is giving a pre-Halloween party, night after tomorrow night. He wanted a real skull—to hang from his chandelier. And asked me if he could borrow mine. Which he’s seen on numerous occasions. So I mailed it down to him at once—via airmail—special delivery—$3 in stamps, too, old top!—and put the little French toque box of Mrs. King’s, containing it, in the corner package box myself—just as dusk swept over these hyar prairies. Collection would be—let’s see—6 p.m. Thence by pneumatic tube to Nicollet airfield. And out on the 8 p.m. mail plane. So Mr. Skull would be, I think, just now passing over—well—over Madison, Wisconsin. Though,” I added facetiously, “it’ll be coming back—by ordinary parcel post—if you can wait that long!”

  “No,” Steenburg said grimly, “I can’t! Not with Soo Ching—to take care of!” He was thoughtfully silent a moment. Then he spoke. “Well, all this, Mr. King, is no insurmountable barrier anyway, to our negotiations here tonight. No! Only—that puts me out of being able to prove conclusively to you that that skull will never bring you luck again—and that, for your particular purpose, Mr. King, it isn’t worth $5—much less $500!”

  I looked at him.

  “How do you mean,” I said harshly, “that it will never bring me luck—again?”

  “Because,” he said, “it has been chiseled—cut—operated upon! And without your knowledge! Its power—as a good-luck fetish—is up the spout! And the man who did it, Mr. King, is a Dr. Stefan Sciecinskiwicz—whose office is on Queen Avenue, South, right here in Minneapolis!”