The Thursday Turkey Murders

by Craig Rice

  There had been ups, and there had been downs. Sometimes both cameras were out of hock, sometimes only one. Sometimes only three or four quarters would come in the morning mail, sometimes as many as thirty.

  The recent loss, first of a thousand dollars and then of a hundred and seventy-two, was unfortunate, but, after all, every business had to sustain a few losses. Right now they had—Bingo did a little quick mental arithmetic—twenty-one dollars and eleven cents more than when the I.F.M.P. & T.C. of Am. was organized.

  And there were still people in Thursday County who’d want pictures taken.

  Plus more people in all the towns between here and Hollywood.

  No doubt about it, they’d hit Hollywood with a real bankroll.

  Besides—there was still all that gold from the bank robbery buried somewhere around here.

  Bingo dozed.

  He’d buy the biggest and most beautiful house in Hollywood. Genuine, solid mahogany furniture, every stick of it. No veneered stuff. None of those fake antiques, like the ones he used to sell for the guy who made them in an old garage up in the Bronx. Genuine oil paintings on the walls. A telephone in every room. Genuine marble tubs in every bathroom.

  Maybe he’d get married. Some gorgeous blonde, who looked like Christine. Or some gorgeous brunette, who looked like Henny. Maybe some famous motion-picture star, blond or brunette, he didn’t care which. He’d shower her with diamonds. Genuine diamonds.

  Bingo tucked an arm under his head, sighed contentedly, and slept.

  He dreamed that he was back in Uncle Herman Kutz’s grocery-delicatessen-confectionery, in Brooklyn. Uncle Herman was telling him sternly to save his money, or he’d never get anywhere in the world. He started to scoop pickles out of the barrel for a customer, and discovered that the pickle barrel was full of glittering gold coins. He started to fill a paper container with potato salad, and found that the potato salad was covered with diamonds instead of hard-boiled eggs. He started to tell Uncle Herman about this, but Uncle Herman said, “Don’t bother me, I’ve lost my turkeys,” and vanished. At that point Henny came through the door. She had on a gingham dress, her hair was blond and in pigtails, and she said, “See, I’m not the same girl.” The store turned into a mansion where every room was twenty feet high and all the doors had gold knobs, and Handsome came in and said, “Bingo, I found the bullet.”

  “Don’t bother me,” Bingo said. “I’ve got to find Uncle Herman’s turkeys.”

  Handsome shook him gently and said, “Bingo! Wake up!”

  Bingo sat up and said, “Besides, it’s a wig. She is the same girl.”

  “I found the bullet,” Handsome said.

  “That’s nice,” Bingo said. He yawned and stretched, still half asleep. “We’ll give it back to Chris Halvorsen and—” He blinked, and said, “What?”

  “I didn’t want to wake you up,” Handsome said. “But it’s getting late, and the pork chops are almost done and, Bingo, I found the bullet.”

  Bingo looked around the room, rubbing his eyes. The prints had been made and were laid out to dry on Handsome’s bunk. The stove was going, and there was a pleasant odor in the room. The table was set.

  “You hadn’t had any lunch,” Handsome said. “So I drove into Thursday and got four pork chops and some potatoes and some onions and some catsup and some cold beer. Ninety cents, altogether. And the potatoes and onions are fried, and the chops are almost done, so you better wash your face.”

  Bingo yawned again, walked over to the washbasin, washed his face and brushed back his hair. Handsome slid the pork chops and a lot of fried potatoes and onions onto the two plates on the table.

  “And the bullet,” Handsome said.

  Bingo cut off a second bite of pork chop and said, “Don’t bother me.”

  “O. K.,” Handsome said. He ate in silence for a few minutes and then said, “But it was smart of you to figure out that that guy was shot outside the house instead of in here. I still don’t see how you knew.”

  “Nothing to it,” Bingo said, absent-mindedly, busy with the potatoes.

  Five minutes later Handsome said, “I thought at first it was just a gag, account of I couldn’t take pictures of them people inside the house. I thought that until I found the bullet and knew you’d been right all along.”

  “Huh?” Bingo said. He paused, halfway through the second pork chop. “What bullet?”

  Handsome pulled a handkerchief out of his breast pocket and carefully unfolded it. “The bullet that was in the wall outside. I thought I’d better dig it out in case somebody found it and stole it for a souvenir. How did you know it was there, Bingo?”

  “I—” Bingo stared at the bullet. “How did you know it was there?”

  “Why,” Handsome said, “the pictures.” He rose, picked up two prints that had been drying on the bunk, and brought them over to the table.

  The first showed the matron in the cotton print dress, grinning broadly. The second showed a sheepishly smiling elderly man. In both pictures a spot, like some unusual highlight, shone on the wall.

  “That was in all the pictures,” Handsome said. “I thought it was something busted in the camera. So I inspected the camera and it was O. K. So then I went outside and looked around, and there was the bullet stuck in the wall. The sun had hit it and reflected and that’s what made the light on the pictures. I dug it out real carefully in case there was any fingerprints on it.” He looked at Bingo anxiously. “Did I do right?”

  “You did fine,” Bingo said. “We’ll take it in to Henry Judson and he can find out what gun it came out of.” He hoped it hadn’t came out of Henny’s gun. But why worry about that, he reminded himself, when Uncle Fred was already in jail? In fact, why not just forget about the bullet?

  Still, it would be a dirty trick to let Uncle Fred be convicted of the murder if he hadn’t committed it.

  Of course, it would serve him right, considering all the things Uncle Fred had done that he should have been put in jail for. That is, if Henny had been telling the truth.

  There was the chance that Uncle Fred might be a perfectly innocent victim of circumstances.

  “But you don’t need to worry about a thing, Bingo,” Handsome said reassuringly.

  “Oh, no,” Bingo said scornfully. “Everything’s fine.”

  “I mean it,” Handsome said. “I retouched the spot off every one of the negatives. And the prints are perfect.”

  “Oh,” Bingo said. Of course. Handsome would worry about the photographs first.

  Bingo carefully rewrapped the bullet and put it into his own pocket. He pushed away his empty plate, rose, and went into the yard.

  “It was right there,” Handsome said, pointing to the spot on the wall.

  Bingo examined the spot as carefully as though he’d been a ballistics expert, nodding wisely. It was about as high as the average man’s head.

  “Why do you suppose he was carried into the house after he was shot?” Handsome asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bingo snapped. “But I’ll remind the sheriff to ask the murderer that, when he finds him.”

  He stood looking at the mark on the wall, speculating. The victim, Henry Siller, Elayne-Henrietta-Marian’s father (if she was telling the truth), had come around the side of the house. It had been dusk, he remembered. Whoever shot him must have had a very neat aim.

  He turned around to figure out where the murderer must have stood. At exactly that minute Handsome yelled, “Bingo!” in a warning voice.

  Someone was coming around the corner of the house. Someone with a gun. For a moment all Bingo could see was the blue-black muzzle, aimed straight at his stomach. Then he saw that the man with the gun had bright-red hair.

  The red-haired man grinned and relaxed, but he didn’t put the gun away. He said to someone behind him, out of the corner of his mouth, “Are these the guys?”

  “Yeah,” the other man said, stepping around the corner. “That’s them.”

  In a flash Bingo forgot about the
gun pointed at him, the bullet hole behind him, the murder, the buried money, and the fortune to be made taking pictures in Thursday County. He hurled himself forward, gun or no gun, and yelled, “Hey! You! Where’s our thousand bucks?”

  The other man was Gus.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “You must be Mr. Clancy,” Handsome said, very politely, to the man with the gun.

  “You must be psychic,” the man with the gun said. “How did you know?”

  “Red hair,” Handsome said. “All the Clancys I ever knew had red hair. Are you related to the Clancy family in Jersey City?”

  “Nope,” the man with the gun said. “Our family stems from Detroit. I’m L. Clancy, L for Lorenzo, but my pals call me Luke.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Handsome said. “This is my partner, Mr. Riggs, and my name’s Kusak.”

  “One of the Milwaukee Kusaks?” Clancy said.

  Handsome shook his head. “Brooklyn.”

  “I had a cousin married a Kusak,” Clancy said, “but it was one of the Milwaukee Kusaks.”

  Bingo said furiously, “How about my thousand bucks?”

  Gus grinned and said, “That was a good joke on you, all right. What did Chris have to say?”

  “He—” Bingo paused. Chris had felt the same way about it. He’d laughed and said, That Gus! At least he’d thought it was a good joke until the turkeys disappeared. “Never mind about Chris Halvorsen. I want my thousand bucks.”

  “Spent it already,” Gus said.

  Clancy said, “We’ll take that up later. Let’s go inside and talk business.”

  He still held the gun, but he held it as though he’d forgotten about it. Just the same, Bingo and Handsome went into the house without any argument.

  Gus looked around and said, “You got things cleaned up nice.” Clancy sniffed the air and said, “Mm! Pork chops! Got any left?”

  “Sorry,” Handsome said. “They’re all gone. We got some eggs, though, if you’re hungry.”

  “We are,” Clancy said, grinning, “but this is strictly a business call.”

  “It had better be,” Bingo said. “I ought to sue you.”

  “Don’t think you could win the suit,” Gus said. “You bought them turkeys in good faith. Besides, you never did pay for the one you ran over. Anyway, even if you won the suit, you couldn’t collect from a guy that didn’t have any money left.”

  “That isn’t the kind of money we’re here to talk about,” Clancy said. “Do you know where the stuff is buried?”

  Bingo knew what he meant. He said cautiously, “What if I did?”

  “We might be able to do business with you,” Clancy said. “We might be able to figure out a split. And this would be a five-way split, just between the four of us and the girl. Nobody else’s involved, see!”

  “It sounds like a good business proposition,” Bingo said. He tried to look very casual. “The only trouble is, we don’t know what stuff you’re talking about, or where it’s buried. All we know is, we’ve been gypped out of a thousand bucks, and we want it back. Or else I’m going to call a cop.”

  “Call one,” Clancy said amiably. “Just pick up the phone and dial a number, or stick your head out the window and whistle. I’m getting very tired of hearing about that thousand bucks. Trivial sums always did bore me. Tell me, did the old guy say anything before he was shot?”

  “I don’t know,” Bingo said. “We didn’t talk to him before he was shot. We just found him. Did you shoot him, or isn’t that any of our business?”

  “Of course I didn’t shoot him,” Clancy said. “His being murdered has messed everything up. Are you sure you don’t know where it’s buried?”

  “Where what’s buried?” Bingo said in a cross voice.

  Clancy looked questioningly at Gus, who shrugged his shoulders. “I told you they didn’t know anything about it,” Gus said. “They just happened along and wanted to buy a flock of prize turkeys.”

  “A couple of city slickers, huh?” Clancy said. “Still, I’d like to be sure.”

  “How could they know anything about it?” Gus said. “They don’t come from anywhere around here. They don’t know who he was.”

  “I wish you’d either tell me what you’re talking about,” Bingo said, “or stop talking about it. One or the other, and I don’t really care which.”

  Clancy smiled. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I just dropped in to bring you a message from a girl. She wanted me to tell you she thanks you for your hospitality. She apologizes for borrowing your hundred and seventy-two dollars without asking you first, and she wants to give it back to you.”

  Bingo looked up and said, “Where is she?”

  “She wants to meet you,” Clancy said. “I’ve got the directions written down.” He fumbled in his shirt pocket, brought out a slightly soiled piece of paper. “Turn off the concrete road on state highway 42, drive two miles, turn off to the right on county highway H. Drive about four miles to—” He handed the paper to Bingo. “Here, you can keep it and read it yourself. She wrote it down carefully, so you won’t get lost.”

  Bingo took the paper, looked at it suspiciously, and said, “No tricks now!”

  “You want your hundred and seventy-two bucks back, don’t you?” Clancy said. “Besides, she’s a nice girl and she likes you. The least you can do is oblige when she asks you for a date.”

  “We’ll oblige all right,” Bingo said. He folded the paper and tucked it into his wallet. “And now, how about my thousand bucks?”

  “Don’t be greedy,” Clancy said. “Gus here will discuss that with you next time we come to call.” He backed toward the door and Bingo realized that he still had the gun in his hand.

  “Wait a minute,” Handsome said.

  Clancy smiled at him. He said, “It’s been a real pleasure to meet you, and I hope we’ll meet again some time. It’s too bad you’re not one of the Milwaukee Kusaks. Otherwise we’d probably be related by marriage.”

  A moment later Bingo and Handsome heard a car start and drive away.

  “There’s a lot of things I’d like to have asked those guys,” Bingo said. “Only it sort of slipped my mind while they were here.”

  “They’re out after the money from the bank robbery,” Handsome said, “and they don’t know where it is, either. Anyway, it’s nice to know we’ll get our hundred and seventy-two bucks back.”

  “If it isn’t a trap of some kind,” Bingo said. “I’m beginning to develop a very suspicious nature.”

  “If they’d wanted to kidnap us or murder us,” Handsome said, practically, “they could have done it while they were here.”

  “We’ll go all right,” Bingo said. “Even if we don’t get the money back, we’ll have a nice ride, and I can think of a lot of questions I’d like to ask Henny.”

  “Bingo,” Handsome said, “she isn’t the girl.”

  Bingo sighed. “Handsome, you’ve got the most wonderful memory of anyone I ever knew, but even you can make a mistake now and then. If that wasn’t the girl—the one we saw with Clancy—it’s her double. Probably even to the two small moles in the small of her back. And I don’t believe in doubles. This is once you’ve been wrong, and I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

  Handsome subsided and said, “Sorry, Bingo, do you suppose we could find some more customers between now and sundown? There’s almost an hour left.”

  “As Clancy remarked,” Bingo said sourly, “don’t be greedy. Tomorrow is another day and, besides, we ought to take that bullet right in to the sheriff. He’s a nice guy and I’m glad we can help him out.”

  If they did get back the hundred and seventy-two dollars, they could still pack up and leave, tonight. They could drive all night and be miles from Thursday County by morning. True, they might be leaving a possible fortune in buried gold behind, but on the other hand, unpleasant strangers wouldn’t come popping around corners and pointing guns at them.

  It wasn’t that he was frightened, he reminded himself. No
thing like that. It was just that he felt such a great sense of responsibility for Handsome.

  They were just passing the sign that read YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THURSDAY, when Handsome said, “It looks like there’s a lot of guys trying to find that money from the bank robbery. Not working together, but everybody for himself, sort of. And maybe the guy who got murdered did know where it was. Only then, Bingo, why should anybody have murdered him?”

  “Maybe the murderer forced him to tell first,” Bingo said, “and then shot him, so that nobody else would know where it was. Or maybe it was just a personal shooting. It’s hard to tell about these things.”

  Handsome drove in silence until he’d parked the convertible in front of the jail. Then he said, “It would be nice if the sheriff could find out what kind of a gun that bullet came from. Then, if we could find who had that kind of a gun, we could follow him around. If he had found where the money is, sooner or later he’d lead us to it.”

  “Handsome,” Bingo said solemnly, getting out of the car, “you’re a genius.”

  “And you know, Bingo,” Handsome said, “if we could find that money, I bet the bank it was stolen from would give us a reward.”

  Bingo paused halfway up the walk and stared at his partner. He realized for the first time that it had never occurred to Handsome that they could keep the money for themselves. He realized, too, that it was going to be a little difficult to explain the ethics of the situation.

  “And,” Handsome said, “I feel sort of sorry for the guys who are going to so much trouble to find that money. Because even if they do find it, it isn’t going to do them much good.”

  Bingo glanced sharply at Handsome. It sounded suspiciously like the beginning of a sermon on the subject of honesty being the best policy—or, at least, a policy that was highly recommended by all experts.

  “On account of,” Handsome went on serenely, “nobody is supposed to have any gold coins any more. I’d hate to try to spend that much money in gold and keep having to explain where I got it.”

  This time Bingo stopped dead in his tracks, staring at Handsome. That aspect of the situation simply hadn’t occurred to him before.