The Amazing Adventures of Aaron Broom

by A. E. Hotchner

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Followed me tonight on the streetcar.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And to Marcy’s.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why?”

  While I was yes-siring him I knew this why was on its way.

  “Because I’m writing about the J & J shooting as my summer English project.”

  “You think you’re going to solve it?”

  “Oh, no, well, I’m just a twelve-year-old boy.”

  “And this is okay with your parents that you’re down here?”

  “They’ve gone away on an emergency.”

  “You’re all alone?”

  “No, I’m staying with friends.”

  “What friends?”

  “The Hammocks.”

  “They picking you up?”

  “No, I have a streetcar pass.”

  “Well, here I am—interview me.”

  “You’re a swell cardplayer. Making all that money, why you have to work?”

  “We don’t play for money, we’re all broke, we just play for the chips and the one who winds up with the most, the others have to pay his dinner. We all had jewelry stores and were fierce competitors but the big D put us out of business and now we are like a sad-ass fraternity.”

  “How come the J & J brothers can stay in business and you can’t?”

  “You better ask them. I warn you, they don’t like to answer questions.”

  “They weren’t there when the shooting happened?”

  “Nope, neither one. That’s something you can put in your story—first time I know of that one of them wasn’t in the store. You also might want to talk to Grace who’s so jolly and giggly all the time, and the beauty Bonnie Porter, who’s always in the paper at the races with Roy Delray, the actor who’s on KMOX and at the Muny. They are married. I can tell you, there is something fishy about J & J and you may get an A plus from your teacher if you write about all of that.”

  I asked him to tell me just what happened at J & J on the day of the shooting. I took my pad and pencil out of my pocket to take notes and make me look like an eager beaver chomping for that A plus.

  He said, “Well, the Bulova man showed up at the door at three o’clock and Dempsey buzzed him in. There had been so many robberies of jewelry stores since the Depression, the stores are now required to have buzzers to unlock the door for people to enter, and owners must let employees know when appointments are made. So in comes Bulova with his sample case followed right behind by a fat man with a heavy beard in overalls and a floppy tennis hat. Right away he pulls a revolver from his overalls pocket and says, ‘Everybody freeze. Put your hands where I can see ’em, not up, just out in front.’ ”

  “What does the Bulova man do?”

  “Nothing. The fat man goes right to the number one case, knocks the lock off with the handle of his gun, takes a cloth bag from his pocket, and tells the Bulova guy to hold it open while he scoops up the stuff in the case and fills the bag.”

  “Exactly what does he say to Bulova? Call him by name?”

  “Nope. Just ‘hold this open.’ Fat man shuts the top of the bag, he’s wearing gloves, stuffs the sack in his overalls and turns to go when Dempsey shoots, misses, the front glass breaks, fat man swings around, shoots, I duck down under the counter, don’t see anything more until the cops arrive. Did you get all that?”

  “I sure did. Did you see any more of the Bulova man?”

  “Nope. Cops took him away.” Mr. Greenblatt stood up and looked down at me. “Looks like you could use something to eat.”

  “Oh, sir, I’m fine. Really.”

  “Come on.”

  He brought me to the bar and introduced me to the pretty barmaid.

  “Rosemary, this is Ichabod. He needs a juicy hamburger and fries, on me.” He left me with Rosemary and went back to the card game.

  Rosemary had shiny blue eyes and dimples that showed up when she smiled at me. She was putting a large hamburger on the grill.

  “How you like it, Ichabod? Medium?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Ketchup?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Pickles?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Onions?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Relish?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Mustard?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “French fries?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Cheese?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Tomato?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She served it at the bar, the most wonderful sight my eyes had ever seen. Rosemary made herself a drink and talked to me as I wolfed down the loaded burger and the fantastic fries. While I was eating, the card game ended. Sol came to the bar and sat down beside me.

  “So you’re going to interview everyone who works in the store?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You want their home addresses?”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  “You better be careful. You may be getting yourself into a little trouble.”

  “I hope not.”

  He wrote down their addresses.

  “You think one of them might have tipped off the three o’clock shooter?”

  “Sure.”

  “Which one?”

  “Any one of them. Think you can find your way back to the streetcar?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  He shook my hand and I thanked him for the burger and the interview. Rosemary gave me a big hug and a kiss on both cheeks even though I was reeking of onions.

  Happening 22

  When I got back to the Hooverville I found a note from Ella pinned to my hammock asking me to dinner the next night. It said her mom was making chili con carne, one of my favorites.

  Using water from a bottle I kept hidden under old newspapers, I brushed my teeth, kicked off my Keds, and swung myself into the hammock, feeling kind of depressed. As a detectifier I had been a flop. I didn’t fool Sol Greenblatt one bit. He knew I was tailing him, and for all my dumb questions, I didn’t find out anything that would help me. I didn’t even discover anything about Sol himself, anything might make me think he could be the three o’clock tipster I was looking for. Instead all I got was his card game and Rosemary and that luscious hamburger.

  So now I’ll have to get to the other three people in the store and detectify something that would lead me to the killer—about as easy as swimming from here to New Orleans under water. But as I began to get drowsy I remembered something Hilda Levy once told me about the great books we were reading. I could hear her voice in my head as clear as rain: “Aaron, when things get looking bleak, you can always cheer up by expecting the unexpected.”

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT DAY I felt the best thing I could do while waiting for the maybe unexpected was to hang around J & J and watch the comings and goings. Augie gave me some papers to tuck under my arm so’s I’d blend in with the crowds. Of course any papers I actually sold I’d turn the money over to him. I could see the usual J & J people Grace, Matt, and Bonnie doing their jobs, selling things to customers, Sol Greenblatt hunched over his watch table. I don’t think he noticed me but if he did he didn’t show it.

  Augie had gone into Scruggs to use the men’s room and I was alone on the corner when KAZOOM! the unexpected reared up. I was on the sidewalk at the curb, shouting up the Post-Dispatch, when a really classy REO with dark windows came zooming to a stop right where I was, a back door flew open, someone got pushed into the gutter, and the REO took off as soon as the door slammed shut.

  The guy in the gutter who I thought might be dead pushed his arm up at me and said, “Hey, kid, gim
me a hand.” I put down my papers and grabbed hold of his hand and tugged him. He had some blood on his face, around his nose, and his suit was a little torn but with me helping he was able to stand up. That’s when I saw it was one of the J & Js, Justin, the smaller, skinnier one. There were drops of blood on his necktie. He was holding hard on to my arm.

  “I gotta get to Pete’s,” he said.

  I saw Augie coming back from Scruggs and gave him the high sign. There were people moving back and forth on the busy sidewalk but no one was paying any attention to us, like a guy who could barely stand up, with blood on him and his clothes torn was everyday stuff.

  No questions asked, Augie took Justin’s other arm and he leaned on us as we helped him down the street into Pete’s. We walked him past the bar and the front tables into the dining area where there were about a dozen tables with checkered tablecloths, most of them busy. There was a swing door that led to the kitchen and another door that was locked with a man sitting outside it. Justin steered us toward him and as soon as the man saw Justin he opened the locked door and took his arm and led him inside, the door closing behind them.

  On our way back to the newspapers, I told Augie about the black REO and the way Justin had been dumped in the gutter.

  “What’s behind that door?” I asked Augie.

  “Pete’s speakeasy. That’s where all the big bootleggers hang out. And rich guys with keys and flashy girls.”

  “What about Justin?”

  “There’s all kind of people. Supposed to be the best booze around.”

  “And the cops don’t care?”

  Augie laughed. “You don’t know much do you? Anyway, speakeasies are going under now with repeal.”

  Augie was right. I didn’t know much. Like speakeasy, I heard of it but really didn’t know what it was. Same for bootleggers. What kind of detectifier doesn’t know about those things?

  We were back at Augie’s corner and he scooped up the coins that had been left on top the papers. Even in hard times like these, people left their nickels when they didn’t have to.

  I went back to where I was when Justin landed in the gutter. I had a feeling that sort of drew me back there. A feeling that sometimes comes over me and makes me go places and do things. I think it’s hooked up with moving around so much. I read about nomads and Gypsies and I think I must have some of that in me. How else can you explain why I took myself back to that spot in the gutter where Justin had landed, where I helped him up. There in the gutter half covered with chewed-up cigar butts and candy wrappers was a billfold, a fresh billfold. I didn’t make a dive for it. Too many eyes around. There was a guy sitting behind a five-cent apple sign on the sidewalk right across the street. What I did was sit down on the curb and slowly, without looking, fish around the guck in the gutter, get my fingers on the wallet, and slide it into my pocket. A car honked at me—someone wanted to park in my spot.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN I told Augie I had to see him in absolute privacy, he said to follow him to a little closet in the back of a candy-and-cigarette store on the corner, where he stored his newspapers. There was just enough room for the two of us to sit down beside a pile of Post-Dispatches. I put Justin’s wallet on top of the pile. The outside was covered with gutter scum but the inside was in good shape. It was the kind of wallet that had sections with snaps. The first one we opened had cards with his name showing he belonged to the Knights of Columbus, the Shriners, the Elks, and the Salvation Army.

  The next compartment was fat with money, mostly fifty-dollar bills. I had never seen anything higher than a twenty, and not many of those. I didn’t know a fifty-dollar bill even existed. Augie jumped up and did a little kind of hop dance.

  “Boy oh boy oh boy!” he said, quietly riffling the bills. “We’re rich, Aaron, we’re rich!”

  I grabbed his shirt and pulled him down. “What do you mean, we’re rich?”

  “We add it up, split it fifty-fifty, and get rid of the wallet. Just look at all those fifties and twenties!”

  “It’s not our money.”

  “You mean let him keep it?”

  “Course.”

  “You ever heard of the law—finders keepers?”

  “That’s when you don’t know the owner.”

  “He’ll never miss it and for us it’s to live on.”

  “He may give us a reward—you can live on that.”

  “You poor sap. You have no idea how things work do you?”

  “Maybe not, but I know what’s honest and what’s not. I’m no Boy Scout—if it’s to get life-or-death medicine that’s one thing. But when it’s to steal…”

  Augie split the money and put his half in his pocket. “Call it what you want. You can put your part back in the wallet and show him what a good little boy you are. All I ask is you say this is the way you found it.”

  “And if he doesn’t believe me? If he gets tough with me, what then?”

  “Okay, let’s just put it back in the gutter.”

  “Without the money you just took?”

  “Yup. I’m sure he doesn’t know how much—”

  “Augie, listen, my father’s not much of a thinker and what he believes in are pretty simple, corny things, and one of them is honesty is the best policy.”

  “You’re living in a ratty Hooverville, you’ve got, what? Ten cents in your pocket?”

  “Seventy-four.”

  “You don’t know where your next meal is coming from.”

  “But my soul is okay.”

  “So? What’s your soul got to do with it?”

  “My soul is who I am. I want to keep it as it is. How about you? You think about your soul?”

  Augie closed his eyes and I guess thought about his soul. He thought about it for quite some time.

  “It is the one thing the Depression can’t take from us long as we take care of it,” I said. “I have this thing about my soul. First I heard of it was when I saw a kid in a movie with his pajamas on kneel down at his bed, prayer up his hands, and say, as best I remember: ‘Now I lay me down to sleep and pray the Lord my soul to keep, but if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’ I thought the part about a six-year-old kid dying in his sleep was pretty silly, but the soul part of it got me thinking and I spent a long time thinking about my soul, that it’s the good part of me, that it can keep me going or leave me empty. I will definitely not hurt my soul for a fistful of Justin’s fifties.”

  Augie finally opened his eyes, took the money from his pocket, put it back in the wallet.

  I opened the next section of the wallet, mostly receipts and business cards and junk like that, but Augie held up a small white card that had writing on it: Catfish Dannemora and a telephone number. Attached to it with a paper clip was a telephone number with the initials G.A.T.

  “What do you know,” he said. “Looka that.”

  I looked but drew a blank. “What about it?”

  “Catfish—you don’t know about Catfish?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “Catfish Kuger?”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Jeez, it’s not that long ago. The Kuger gang, the Memorial Day Massacre on Market Street?”

  “It says Dannemora—who’s he?”

  “Oh boy! It’s not a he—it’s a max-security prison in New York where a Fed judge put him for life to keep him away from St. Louis but the Post says he has cronies here who run his gambling boats and his other stuff.”

  “There’s that telephone number. He’s got a private phone?”

  Augie got a laugh out of that. “No, that’s probably the number of the warden. But the other telephone number with G.A.T., that’s the one might tell us something.”

  “Let’s give it a try.”

  “Why don’t we go to the Post-Dispatch and
look it up before we phone.”

  “What could it tell us?”

  “Pictures. Can’t tell who we might see.”

  “Like G.A.T.?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Here, Augie, you give Justin the wallet—maybe he’ll give you a good reward. As Hilda Levy said, ‘You can never tell when to expect the unexpected.’ ”

  “Sure, he’s gonna say, ‘Keep the cash, kid, honesty is the best policy.’ ”

  Happening 23

  I had it wrong about the chili: It was chili con corny in Ella’s note not carne. Corn was a St. Louis summer plenty, yellow and white, the fields thick with it, the farmer’s co-op on St. Louis plaza even giving it to the needy and most of us qualified. But I want you to know that sitting outside their shack on boxes, eating the chili off tin plates, was as good as any chili with carne I ever had. Ella’s mom was a home-run cook, no two ways about it. A can of beans, an onion, corn off the cob to come out like that!

  Afterward Ella and I took the plates to the Hooverville wash station where water was pumped in from the Mississippi. There was also a faucet for drinking water that came from a city pipe. Farther on were a couple of stalls, one marked men the other women, where you could have a shower but you had to have your own towel and soap. Ella had given me a towel and a hunk of soap that I kept hidden with my bottle of water.

  She cranked up her Victrola and, sitting on the outside boxes, we listened to Louis Armstrong while Mrs. McShane wrote letters by the light of her kerosene lamp. Ella’s hair was piled up in a sort of bun and she was wearing a dress, instead of her usual pants, and some lipstick. For the first time she seemed a little like a woman, not a girl. I never did know her age, maybe fifteen or sixteen.

  I asked her what I had planned to ask her—would she help me interview Bonnie Porter who was such a lady, wears swell clothes, and isn’t like the saleswomen in the Scruggs department store.

  “In fact,” I said, “everyone in the J & J is turning out to be different from what they seem to be. I thought maybe we’d pretend you were writing about the murder for the Globe-Democrat and you were interviewing everyone who saw it. I’d like to be with you, maybe the photographer if your mom can lend me her box camera. I wouldn’t need film, but am I too young?”