“And I went down the street a few blocks—to another drugstore in the region—and I called Rozalda up. That is, I couldn’t get her first—the line here was busy—and so I dialed Sun 0000, and asked immediately for Transcription Soo, and—”
“Whoa—Steenburg!” I ejaculated. “Transcription—Soo? You’re talking Greek to me. Sun 0000—and Transcription Soo—what—”
“Well,” he admitted, apologetic in tone, “I guess you wouldn’t know about that, at that, if you’re only just back in Minneapolis from the sanitar—but you didn’t see this morning’s Sun?”
“No,” I said truthfully, “I did not.”
“Well,” Steenburg explained, “The ‘Sun 0000’ and ‘transcription business’ is a brand-new experiment, it seems, in the newspaper game—in reality, of course, a continuous advertisement for the paper that utilizes it!—and being watched tonight with huge interest, as I understand it, by the other papers all over the U.S.A.—and probably to be taken up, by one paper in each city. Since the scheme is, it seems, patented! Anyway—as per the announcement in the Sun this morning—the Sun will, beginning today, make phonograph records of all the latest developments in all important news-stories. If, that is, there are any later developments! Each of these records—they estimate that around 20, on the average, will be in continuous employment—will be kept on the reproducing machines until supplanted with a later record. Anyway, to get any last-minute development in a news-story, Mr. King, one dials that new special number—Sun 0000!—asks the replying operator for ‘Transcription this’—or ‘Transcription that’—naming the chief feature of the story one is interested in—and one’s line is immediately connected with the soundbox of that particular transcription; and, in case the phonographic record isn’t revolving for an already-delivered phone connection, it automatically starts to revolve—but goes back to starting position immediately in case one hangs up. And—well—that’s quite all there is to the whole thing. The announcement this morning had stated that the plan was to commence today at 4:30 only—and since it was 4:31 when I was in the drugstore trying to get Rozalda—and this line here apparently busy—I just dialed the magic Sun number and asked for Transcription Soo. Just in case—don’t you know?—that the Buffalo Trust and Savings knocked my Chinese client off—or some strange thing?”
“Yes. Of course. Though they’ll ‘knock your client off,’ I rather think, by bringing him into old age before he gets a settlement! But be that as it may,” I asked interestedly, “you got—what?—when you asked for Transcription Soo?”
“I got a report—obviously from off a revolving disc—and incidentally a special disc!—calling forth, over and over: ‘You are now listening to a news transcription record in the Minneapolis Sun. With regards to the story about which you have just inquired, there is nothing recorded in this department. If your story is not of wide general interest or special local importance, you had better look further into the columns of the Sun. You are now listening to a news transcrip—’ And thus,” Steenburg finished, “over and over and over—till I hung up.”
I nodded. “Well, now that I’ve learned some new developments in my own home town,” I commented, “carry on—or rather finish your story. Which you were just about to do, I think. You called Rozalda? About the skull she’d promised to loan you? And got her, I take it?”
“Yes. And boy, oh boy, but was she cool? She must have had an idea I’d pumped her last Saturday—or else she had a guilty conscience due to knowledge on her part that she’d probably talked too much. And when I asked her ‘hows-about’ it—the skull—yes—she gave me the ritz. Said she was sorry—yes—it’d come back to her, all right—yesterday morning—but that you’d just returned to town at noon today, and that you’d locked it in your safe. And had said it was going to stay in there—from now on!”
“Rozalda lied,” I told Steenburg. “Because I didn’t come back to town so early as noon today. Nor did she even know I was coming back—to town. Nor had I actually locked it in my safe. Nor did she see me wrap it for airmail shipment. Nor mail it. No—she suspected some skullduggery, Steenburg—on your part—against her doctor friend—and thought she’d just abort any further attempts on your part to get the skull. Maybe it was nothing more than that she didn’t want to lose her job.”
He nodded slowly. “Well, I guess you’ve got the right answer to that. For she was plainly agitated, all right. But since I at least believed that lie she told me—that you had come back to Minneapolis—and that you had locked the skull in your safe—I just decided to camp right on the job—up to the very last minute, if needs be, that I could leave Minneapolis, which would be by the 1 a.m. plane to Buffalo, for you’ll remember my big case opens tomorrow morning in court in Buffalo?—yes—and to see you personally, Mr. King, and give you the low-down on what’s been done with your skull to destroy its lucky properties as a fetish—and to put it to you, as man to man, to turn it back to me. Or, rather, to ‘Big Shoes.’ But for a healthy consideration—as I look at it.”
He had finished.
“All this,” he reaffirmed, “it was my intention to do—and now have done, thank heavens, and all before Mrs. King’s arrival home here at 3 a.m.!”
“Laurel’s arrival—here—tonight?” I echoed in surprise. “But what on earth makes you think that she will return before—
“Oh!” he said, half apologetically, “I just presumed, when I spoke thus, that you knew all about it—perhaps from some wire she might have sent in advance. But I refer, Mr. King, just to the little society item I read tonight, in the early edition of tomorrow’s Morning Sun, out at 8 p.m. tonight, while waiting in that drugstore across the prairies there. And which item said—” But Steenburg was already sheepishly fishing the said item out of a vest pocket, and handing it to me.
I read it. It ran:
Mrs. Mortimer King of this city has terminated her customary annual “3-day novena” at the Convent of St. Ethelreda, Milwaukee, a bit earlier this year than her friends expected—or even she herself anticipated, and will—as of October 23rd and thereafter—be back in her home in Hobury Heights. Mrs. King was seen by the Society Editress of the Milwaukee Chronicle, in the Milwaukee Union Station, boarding the Chicago and North Lakes Special, which stops daily at Milwaukee at 6 o’clock p.m., and replied, in explanation of her hejira, that she had terminated her novena suddenly this year at the petition of the Mother Superior of St. Ethelreda who deemed her not strong enough, at least this year, to continue the somewhat ascetic ordeal. Ascetic as it may have been, Mrs. King looked—as she ensconced herself in her compartment on the Chicago and North Lakes Special—very blooming, and mentally happy.
“And of course,” Steenburg was saying, again apologetically, “I knew, from having studied the timetables between Chicago and Minneapolis as I have, that since that Chicago and North Lakes Special gets into Minneapolis at the unearthly hour at 2:15 in the morning, to switch its Pacific-bound sleeping cars onto the Seattle Transcontinental Limited—and knew also that this place out here is about 30 minutes, at the most, from downtown by taxi, then—”
“—then a taxi would bring Mrs. King straight out here? Or just before 3?”
“Yes,” nodded Steenburg. “Just before 3—yes! Indeed,” he commented, rather gaily, “everything seems to be taking place tonight—around 3. The Cobb execution in London—Mrs. King’s return to Minneapolis. Indeed,” he added, “I rather fancy that while I’m flying homeward tonight, you and Mrs. King will both be downstairs in your parlor, tuned in with your radio, and listening to the last chapter in the Jemimah Cobb caser?”
“Yes,” I said, unsmilingly, “we will be—at least can be, yes!—both downstairs—tuned in with our radio—and listening to the last chapter in the Jemimah Cobb case. But I believe you’re waiting for me to pass—on your mission here—yes?—no?”
CHAPTER XVII
“It’s Your Move, Mr. King.”
&
nbsp; “I am indeed waiting on you,” was all Steenburg said.
“Well now,” I told him frankly, “this skull of which you speak—carrying within itself the results of a complete practice surgical operation, as it undoubtedly does—isn’t worth a nickel any more to me. But that doesn’t mean that I’m simply going to toss it into your client’s lap. Either for nothing—or for something, so far as that goes. You know, Steenburg,” I went on, “we bookies are looked upon by the smug and churchgoing public as sort of belonging to the criminal class. Yes—a fact. Yet nobody ever stops to think that the criminal class is our sworn enemy. Good Christ, man, the times we’ve been mulcted by wire-tapping gangs—laying bets in our handbooks on information that should have come in on our wires, but which was momentarily sidetracked—and then later firing in the information themselves. More than once our bookies have been kidnaped—and more than once, let me tell you, taken for a ride—oh yes—and the times we’ve been swindled out of thousands by fellows who drug horses—why hell, Steenburg, I once knew a whole racing stable to be drugged—all but a certain 100-to-1 shot nag, who waltzed in and took us—each and every one of us—for nearly all we had.”
“But my client, ‘Big Shoes’—” Steenburg began.
“—didn’t work in that angle of the racket, eh? Well possibly not. But he was a crook. He worked and hobnobbed with crooks. He was one of the fingers on the arm of—of a social body that has always worked against us, the bookies. A little world that has taken us for plenty of rides—both financial—and in black limousines, with drawn curtains, too. Oh yes! He’s on another side of the fence from me, Steenburg. So what on earth was the sum you expect to pay me tonight—for that skull?”
“Expect—to pay you?” he replied, repeating my words, even to the present tense I had given them. “But—but you said you’d shipped it down to Evanston, Illinois, tonight—on the airmail?”
“True,” I admitted blandly. “I did. And still I ask the question. What was the maximum you were ready to pay me tonight—if I’d had the skull here?”
“We-ell,” he said slowly, “I wasn’t in a position, myself, to pay you anything. Or even to advance it—for my client ‘Big Shoes.’ For—be assured, Mr. King!—I’ve got my financial troubles—and plenty. But ‘Big Shoes’ himself can raise—well, he has raised—at the close of banking hours today—some $500. On a mortgage on his place. He’d pay that sum. Plus, I know, transportation to and from Chicago. For any trusted messenger you might care to send. And—and it’s impossible, I know, for him to pay any more.”
“Can’t be much of a farm,” I commented, “if that’s the most he can raise?”
“Yeah? But have you stopped to think—it has had to be raised—through a country bank?”
“I did forget that—for the moment,” I nodded. “And will agree that a small-town banker is so tight that he’d rattle inside the cast-off shell of a cockroach. The only thing he’d more prefer to foreclose on than his own father is—his own mother!”
“Whooie! Mr. King!” said Steenburg admiringly. “You sure don’t love small-town bankers. You must have had a sad experience with one—at one time?”
“And how!” I replied sourly. “One—after he dropped a thousand dollars in one of my books, playing 50-to-1 shots, and trying to get rich, sued me for the return of his thousand. And made so much trouble that, believe it or not, I actually found it advisable to give his money back to him. Yes, I know country bankers!” And I got back to the original subject. “And so that—that measly $500—is all ‘Big Shoes’ can pay—for his life?”
“Absolutely all he has been able to raise, or will be able. I give you my word on that.”
“And how soon,” I asked sardonically, “will he be back in the criminal game again—once he feels safe as to this murder charge?”
“Never, Mr. King. The child—”
“Who may—or may not—exist,” I pointed out. “After all, Steenburg, you’re a lawyer—and since you have a right to keep ‘Big Shoes’’ identity secret, you are safely able to give him all the children you want to.”
He shook his head. “No, there is a girl child, Mr. King. Though I can’t prove it to you. And he won’t go back to the rackets. Even if I can’t prove that.”
“But whether or no,” I queried, “you’re convinced he wasn’t in on that Wisconsin gang killing?”
“Absolutely, Mr. King. The man wept like a baby when he told me about it.”
I wasn’t so altogether convinced of the actual existence of those tears. For Steenburg was, as I had told him, a lawyer who knew how to present facts effectively.
“At any rate,” I commented dryly, “if he’s made this $500 loan in a small town—he’s got about 22 times that much equity still left in his place. In which event—the girl kid—hypothetical or otherwise!—isn’t due to get robbed. Is that correct?”
Steenburg nodded emphatically. “Absolutely, Mr. King. You—you wouldn’t be robbing anybody—if you’d play in with him. He can pay off that mortgage in due course. And he wants to pay—that sum—to whoever has that skull—and will turn it back to him. As I told you, I went to the Despatch office tonight. At 6 o’clock. After I talked with Rozalda. And I read—got a copy, too, as now you know, of that article. Yes, the one about this place—out here on the prairies. And about yourself. And from what I could see, you were a square-shooter—yet a hard business man. And so I rang ‘Big Shoes’ by long-distance—in one of the slot-boxes in downtown Minneapolis. And found he’d now got the money—absolutely all that could be gotten. And I ascertained the general details of exactly how he preferred to ‘make the meet’—as the term is known, Mr. King, in crookdom—provided you would either take the skull down there, or send it down there. For he has recovered enough from that lumbago now that he can come up to Chicago—which is virtually the northern end of Illinois. And ‘make the meet’ himself. And when I speak of his preferences as to the conditions of the ‘meet,’ be assured that they are such as to constrain and effect him only—and not you nor your messenger. He’s awful jumpy, Mr. King—afraid even to be cooped up inside a hotel room with any strange messenger. And wants to clean up the whole affair on a street corner. Which would, I take it, be equally as satisfactory to the other man in the affair. But anyway, after I got done talking with ‘Big Shoes,’ I went to my hotel, and typed out, on a hotel machine, the still further details for that ‘meet’—as roughly outlined by ‘Big Shoes’: mainly, concerning how the mutual ‘identification’ shall be carried out, and the exchange of goods and money be effected. Which instructions I sealed up in an envelope. And have here—” And Steenburg tapped his breast pocket significantly. “And then I came straight out here—and settled down—at around 8 o’clock—in that drugstore over there on the edge of the prairie—to wait for your return.”
I came back at him promptly.
“It’s a damned small sum, Steenburg, for saving a man’s neck from the rope. Or however they kill ’em off now in Wisconsin! And I’m thinking now of the huge sums that ‘Big Shoes’—and people like him—have taken me—and my bookies for—in the past. Boy—they worked in thousands—not in lousy hundreds.”
“Listen, Mr. King,” he pleaded, “forget what they did to you, will you? ‘Big Shoes’ never was in a racket against your game. But you naturally feel a little sore. At his tribe. And about this five hundred, now. He’s frantic, Mr. King. I hate to say this. But unless that skull comes back, I’m here to tell you that that five hundred will be telegraphed tomorrow to New York—he knows plenty guys in the racket there—and ‘Cokey’—”
“‘Cokey’—what?” I said sharply.
“Will be bumped off,” announced Steenburg. “To avert the inevitable. I tell you, Mr. King, ‘Big Shoes’ doesn’t intend to come back to the chair—or life imprisonment—in Wisconsin. No one would.”
“No,” I granted. “I wouldn’t myself.”
�
�And ‘Cokey’ is part of a gang there—that’s at the throats of another gang. If ‘Cokey’ gets bumped off—by a private guy in the racket—his gang will retaliate—against the other gang. See? And there’ll be a gang war. As sure as hell. And plenty dead—each side.”
“That doesn’t mean anything with me,” I said promptly. “Crooks are better off—as dead crooks. No, there’s only two considerations here, Steenburg. ‘Big Shoes,’ crook—vs. the little girl. If she exists! ‘Big Shoes’’ tribe has taken me plenty—in the past. The little girl—if she exists—well, I don’t want to bust any possible inheritance of hers—20 years from today. Though $500 plastered against it today hasn’t much chance to affect it—20 years from today. Hardly. For the inevitable rise in farm values will wipe that out. No,” I added, “if I were quite certain ‘Big Shoes’ was really out of the crime game for good I might—yes, I might—be inclined to give him a break.”
“You do that, Mr. King,” Steenburg begged, “and if ever you get into a jam of any sort, I’ll do any kind of legal work for you. Free gratis! I’ll—however, come to think of it, because of Father’s walking out on that senatorial investigation, helping you—or knowing you—is one thing I shan’t ever be able to do. But I’ll do anything for you that wouldn’t involve Father. For—”
“Sure—sure—” I put in. “I understand. And you say ‘Big Shoes’, in your estimation, will never return to the crime game?”
“No. No, I tell you. No. He’s got a wife—and a kid—and, but of course you have no way of knowing that. God, I wish I had some way to convince you.”
I was thoughtful for a few seconds. Then I spoke. “I don’t know, Steenburg,” I said, “but that you have got a way that will tell me exactly all of ‘Big Shoes’’ future course in life.”
“I have?” he ejaculated in surprise. “Why—what is it?”
The Man with the Magic Eardrums Page 15
