by Craig Rice
“Two hundred and sixty dollars and fifty cents,” Handsome said.
“It isn’t worth it,” Bingo said. “Not if they all turned out to get their pictures taken. We’ve got five dollars and thirty-six cents. Let’s just head on out of Thursday and keep going. After all, we’ll make millions, once we get to Hollywood.”
Handsome glanced at him and said, “You haven’t had any breakfast yet, that’s the trouble.”
Bingo realized that Handsome was right. After the discovery that Henny, and the money, had vanished, he’d insisted on going right in to the sheriff’s office. That had been at about seven in the morning. He glanced at the dashboard clock. It was nearly noon now.
“There’s still some eggs, and a whole lot of bacon, and almost a whole can of coffee,” Handsome said. “And I’ll stop at the grocery and get some sweet rolls. Four for ten cents. We can wait just long enough to get breakfast.”
Bingo nodded. He rode through Thursday, trying to pretend he’d never seen the place before and would never see it again. One Main Street among a hundred they’d passed through so far. There would be more like it, on the way to Hollywood. But he and Handsome wouldn’t pause in any of them; they’d drive straight through.
And if they ran over any more turkeys on the way, they wouldn’t stop to argue, they’d pay for them and drive on.
Pay for them with what?
He’d worry about that when the time came.
He drew a long breath as they passed the sign that read THANK YOU. COME BACK TO THURSDAY.
“I got two sweet rolls and two doughnuts,” Handsome said. “Ten cents, no tax.” He slowed down as they approached the shanty. “Bingo, I think we got company.”
Bingo sat up and looked. Company was right, a lot of company. Cars of all makes and descriptions were parked on both sides of the road. A small crowd of people was milling around the house. Out in the fenced-off yard, the turkeys were huddled together, squawking nervously.
“Looks like Thursday County has heard there was a murder here,” Bingo said. “And everybody’s come to see the scene of the crime.”
“We can drive straight on through to Lima Junction,” Handsome said. “You can eat the sweet rolls and doughnuts on the way, and we’ll get some hamburgers when we get to Beaverville.”
“The scene of the crime,” Bingo murmured, his eyes half closed. “Hold it, Handsome. We’re stopping here. Drive up in the yard.”
“But I thought you said—” Handsome began, and stopped.
“Get out the camera, quick. The little one. And a bunch of cards. The print-your-name-and-address ones.”
“O. K.,” Handsome said, stopping the car. “But Bingo—”
Bingo didn’t hear. He was out of the car already.
There were at least two dozen people in the back yard itself. He was glad he had on the brown-and-tan cords, the hand-stitched yellow sport shirt, and the blue-plaid jacket. There was easily another two dozen moving around the house, trying to peer in the window. And from the appearance of the highway, there were more customers coming.
A plump lady in a blue-and-white cotton print, who’d been timidly inspecting the closed door of the house, said excitedly to Bingo, “Is it true there was a murder here last night?”
“Absolutely true,” Bingo said. About half the customers crowded around to listen to him. “We found the murdered man ourselves, a bullet hole right through his forehead.”
There was an appreciative gasp from the customers.
“And right at this moment,” Bingo went on, “your highly efficient sheriff has arrested the man suspected of the murder.” Might as well give Henry Judson a plug. He was a good guy. “He didn’t lose any time tracking down the murderer and putting him in jail. You certainly ought to vote for him again when election comes around.”
“Henry always was a good boy,” an elderly woman said.
Most of the sight-seers had crowded around Bingo by that time. He said, “To think that right on this peaceful and quiet spot, a murderer crept up, gun in hand, to his unsuspecting victim. He fired, aiming carefully for the forehead. His victim gasped—perhaps screamed—staggered, and fell dead.”
A girl in the crowd shrieked. Handsome came up from the car, with the cameras. This, Bingo decided, was the time to make the pitch.
“It isn’t every day you visit the scene of a murder. Why not have your picture taken for a souvenir, right on the spot where the unsuspecting victim dropped dead?”
He grabbed the cards from Handsome.
“Since my partner and I just happen to be here, on our way to Hollywood, we’ll be glad to take those pictures for you, and give you attractive postcard-size prints, at cost. What a souvenir to show to your friends!”
“Bingo,” Handsome whispered in his ear. “We can’t take that many pictures inside the house. We’ve only got two dozen flash bulbs.”
“Never mind,” Bingo whispered back. He glanced around. Handsome ought to be able to get some perfect shots. He located the plump matron in the blue-and-white print and said, “Come now, lady, you want your picture taken at the exact spot where this murder was committed, for a souvenir.”
She giggled and said, “Well—”
Bingo posed her carefully. Handsome snapped the picture. Bingo handed her one of the cards.
“Just fill in your name and address and leave this card with me. Twenty-five cents for one attractive postcard-size print, or two prints for forty-five cents. Print your name and address plainly, please. Who’s next? How about you, mister?”
Business was good, more customers kept arriving, including one family of fourteen, packed in a 1922 Studebaker touring car, all of them posing for two pictures each.
“Yes, sir, you’ll have your pictures in the morning mail.…”
“What a thrilling souvenir to show to visitors, folks. An action picture of you, standing on the very spot where—”
“That’s right, ma’am, twenty-five cents for one print, or forty-five cents for two.”
“Please print your name and address plainly—”
By two in the afternoon Bingo was hoarse, Handsome was out of film for the small camera, and the crowd had dwindled away to five curious small boys and two dogs.
“You can develop and print ’em after breakfast,” Bingo said, yawning. “Breakfast? What am I saying! Lunch!” He thrust his hands into his pockets, encountered a satisfactory number of quarters, and said, “We really cleaned up!”
One of the small boys approached him timidly. “Hey, mister,” he said. “We don’t want no pictures and anyhow we ain’t got no money, but we do wish we could have some kind of souvenir.”
Bingo looked down at him, a very hopeful, and incredibly dirty child. “You bet you can have a souvenir. Better’n a picture, too.” He bent over and, with great care, selected five small pebbles. “These are some of the very stones the murderer was standing on when he fired at his helpless victim.”
One of the small boys took the pebbles, another one said, “Gee!” and the other three just stared, reverently. Then the first one said, “How much?”
“How much have you got?” Bingo asked.
They went into conference. It developed they had exactly three cents between the five of them.
“The price of these wonderful souvenirs,” Bingo said, “is five for one cent. However I’ll be delighted to give them to you, for free, if you’ll take this sack of feed and throw some of it at those turkeys out in front.”
It was a bargain. The five small boys and the two dogs started joyfully around the corner of the shack. One of them paused, right at the corner.
“Say, mister. How much do you charge for us to look at footprints?”
“Footprints,” Bingo said, “is free.” He went on into the shanty, which was already pleasantly filled with the odor of frying bacon. He stacked the address cards neatly on the battered table, dumped the quarters beside them and began counting.
He was halfway through his counting job when ther
e was a soft knock at the door. The dirtiest of the five small boys stood there, grinning.
“Hey, mister,” he said happily, “we found some swell footprints. Wanna come see ’em?”
Handsome looked at Bingo, and at the counting job. He shoved the skillet to one side. “Sure,” he said. “I wanna.”
Bingo sighed, restacked the quarters, and began all over again. He’d gotten as far as “Four dollars and seventy-five cents” when Handsome came in the door.
“Bingo. There really are some footprints. Maybe you better come see ’em.”
“Footprints!” Bingo snorted. “There must be about a million footprints, what with all that mob tramping around the place. And you made me lose count again.” Just the same, he got up and went outside.
“Right along the side of the house,” Handsome said. “And they couldn’t of been made by none of those people, because none of those people were barefooted.”
Bingo looked. Someone—a girl—had walked in the soft dust close to the shanty, barefooted.
“She didn’t have any socks on under those wedgies,” Handsome said.
“Who cares?” Bingo said wearily.
Just the same, he examined the ground. She’d been walking very carefully, not making any sound. The sight-seers who had been tramping around in the yard hadn’t obscured any of her prints because she’d kept close to the shadows of the house. She’d avoided the driveway and walked down beside the turkey yard to the road. She’d walked a few more steps and vanished. Just like that. There were footprints and then, suddenly, no more of them.
“What do you make of it?” Handsome asked solemnly.
“That she had pretty feet,” Bingo said. “Small size. Probably wore a four-and-a-half.”
Handsome looked disappointed. One of the small boys said, “G’wan!”
“Oh, all right,” Bingo said. “She walked this far, being very quiet and very cautious, and there was a car parked here beside the highway—see, there’s the tiremarks—and she got in the car and drove off, or someone drove her off.”
“You’re smart,” one of the small boys said admiringly.
“I’m hungry,” Bingo said. “And we’ve got work to do.”
He looked down at the most completely soiled young face he had ever seen, a mixture of jam, chocolate, watermelon juice, and just plain dirt.
“Tell you what,” Bingo said. He pointed to the marks left in the dust by dainty, lovely bare feet. “You boys can pick out any footprint you particularly like and take it home with you for another souvenir. G’by, now.”
The boys giggled appreciatively and fled, accompanied by the loudly barking dogs. Bingo and Handsome went back to the shanty.
“Another thing,” Handsome said as they reached the door. “Her gun is gone. I looked all over for it. Unless, maybe, one of those souvenir hunters took it.”
“None of them came in the shanty,” Bingo said. “No, she took it, all right. She waited until we were asleep and took the money out of my shoe and sneaked out. She couldn’t put her shoes on because she had to tiptoe out without making any noise, and she couldn’t carry them because she had her purse, and the money, and her gun.”
“Bingo,” Handsome said, “I still say, she wasn’t—”
He looked at Bingo, shut up, and put the frying pan back on the fire.
Bingo started counting again. “Twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, one dollar. A dollar twenty-five, a dollar fifty—”
Handsome slid a plate of bacon and eggs in front of him and put the steaming coffeepot on the table just as Bingo looked up and announced, “Fifteen dollars and seventy-five cents. We caught exactly sixty-three suckers.”
That, plus the bacon and eggs and coffee, and the sweet rolls and doughnuts Handsome had warmed over the flame, revived his spirits considerably. He dropped all conversation until the last fragment of roll had been dunked in the last teaspoon of coffee.
“Have we got everything we need?” he asked. “Including envelopes and stamps for mailing these pictures out?”
Handsome nodded. “I stocked up on everything before we left,” he said. “And I can fix this place into a darkroom without any trouble. I’ll have them all ready to mail by dinnertime. And we don’t need to buy a thing.”
“Good,” Bingo said. “Then the fifteen dollars and seventy-five cents is pure profit. Maybe I was right, that we ought to stick around here awhile, and clean up.”
Handsome looked at him, and then said, “Oh, sure.”
“Maybe we could make a deal with that Charlie Hodges. For a dollar, a person could have his picture taken beside the murdered man. We could cut Charlie Hodges in for ten cents on every picture.”
“Easy,” Handsome said, carrying off the plates.
“And then maybe we could tour the country and take pictures of people who don’t have time to get into town. Real, nice, portrait pictures, finished while you wait, for about two bucks each.”
“Yeah,” Handsome said. He finished clearing off the table and began getting out his equipment.
Bingo rose, stretched, and said, “I’ll get out of your way.” He walked over to one of the bunks, took off his tan calf and white buckskin snappy sport oxfords, and stretched out comfortably.
“I bet,” he said dreamily, “there’s people in Thursday County who’d even pay five bucks to have a picture taken. Handsome, we can clean up here.” He closed his eyes.
“Darned right,” Handsome said. He began covering the windows. “But, Bingo. That girl, I’m positive about it. She isn’t—”
He took another look at Bingo and stopped talking. After all, the little matter of the real identity of the girl was something that could wait.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The smell of chemicals was pleasantly familiar. It reminded Bingo of “the offices of the International Foto, Motion Picture, and Television Corporation of America, Riggs and Kusak,” and of “our apartment, just off Central Park.” Both of which were a nine dollars per week two rooms with connecting bath in a shabby rooming house.
That had been one of a number of rooming houses, all shabby, since the day he’d met Handsome, otherwise known as Boniface Kusak, a newspaper photographer, and formed the I.F.M.P. & T.C. of Am. The rooms had all been a trifle mousy, the beds hard, the dishes (“everything furnished,” the want ads always said) chipped and cracked, and the gas stove temperamental and sulky. But always, after they’d been settled for a week, Handsome had gotten the gas stove to work, and the mousy smell had been replaced by the odor of photographic chemicals.
Bingo sighed happily, inhaled deeply, closed his eyes, and dreamed. For the first time since they’d left New York, he felt completely at home.
Thursday County was a prospective gold mine. He should have thought of the “Your Picture While You Wait” angle before.
Chris Halvorsen ought to pay a fancy price for a really good picture of Christine, if only out of gratitude for the return of the turkeys.
He glanced at Handsome, who was already hard at work. What a stroke of luck for Handsome that they’d met just when they did, and gone into business together!
“Handsome,” Bingo murmured, “we’re going to get rich.”
“Sure,” Handsome said agreeably.
After all, they’d started business with nothing, except Handsome’s two cameras, one of which they’d immediately hocked to buy materials. Bingo, born Robert Emmet Riggs, had just resigned his job as street photographer for See-Ure-Self, Inc. Since he’d punched the manager in the nose when he resigned, he felt it might not be tactful to go back and collect the two dollars still owed him by See-Ure-Self, Inc.
Besides, he’d felt that the brief association with See-Ure-Self, Inc., had been sufficiently valuable in that it had opened his eyes to the potentialities of street photography. Before then he’d tried a number of ways to get rich, which had been his one ambition since he left the orphanage where he’d lived until the age of twelve.
He’d never been able to go into any kind
of business without starting immediately to figure out ways to make a million dollars in it. So far, none of them had worked. Bossing and taking a cut from all the newspaper routes around the little Brooklyn grocery, where he’d worked for Uncle Herman after leaving the orphanage, had started out well. He’d built up a nice little daily profit, when another guy, two inches taller and ten pounds heavier, took it away from him.
After graduating from the grocery store, he started door-to-door selling and crew managing, and quit because he couldn’t see enough potential profit in it. Running concessions at county fairs began encouragingly, but he got too homesick for New York. Barking for freak shows at Coney Island turned out better, and he stuck with it until he ran into a fortuneteller who needed a manager and promoter. It looked for a while as though he’d really struck ore. He and the fortuneteller worked out plans for a nation-wide horoscope, numerology, and tea-leaf-reading ring, and saved every cent above their bare living expenses toward launching it. After three months the fortuneteller ran off with the bankroll, and Bingo answered a help-wanted ad of See-Ure-Self, Inc.
The personnel manager, a plump gent with a shifty eye, had pointed out the chances of making some big dough, and Bingo had decided this was the real thing. There was a four-dollar deposit on all cameras “loaned” to See-Ure-Self, Inc., employees, but Bingo hocked his favorite suit, and paid it. Then he found that See-Ure-Self, Inc., kept seventeen and one-half cents out of every quarter he brought in, and that fact was what led to his resignation.
He met Handsome in a Third Avenue bar where he still had credit, discovered that Handsome was a newspaper photographer and had two cameras of his own, and realized that fortune was now within easy reach. Handsome was a trifle conservative, but he agreed that Bingo could manage the business, and he quit his newspaper job.
They used Handsome’s last week’s pay and his bank account (nine dollars) to pay up Bingo’s back room rent, move to larger quarters, and get Bingo’s suit out of hock. Then the International Foto, Motion Picture, and Television Corporation of America (We’re gonna expand, aren’t we?) had been born, without a cent of cash, but with two good cameras and a wonderful future.
