The Fabulous Clipjoint by Fredric Brown (free ebook reader TXT) 📕

Maybe he was reaching for a cigarette; I didn’t know. He’d hardly have been reaching for a gun, out here in the open, even if there was nobody within half a block. But I didn’t wait to find out. Maybe I was just looking for an excuse.

I grabbed him by the shoulder and whirled him around, and I had hold of his right wrist from behind, twisting it. He made a noise that was half-cursing, half-squawking, and something hit the concrete with a metallic clink.

I let go of his wrist and got the back of the collar of his coat. I jerked to keep him from stooping down, and as our shadows got out of the way, I could see the thing on the sidewalk was a set of brass knucks.

He gave a hell of a hard lunge to get away and the cloth of the coat tore in my hands. It ripped all the way down the back, and the right side of what was left of it fell down from his shoulder, and a notebook and a billfold fell out of the inside pocket.

He was backed up against the building now, and he looked undecided. He wanted to take me apart, I could tell, but without those brass knucks, he knew he couldn’t do it. And that torn coat was in his way.

He stood there, panting, ready if I came for him, not daring to try to pick up the things that had fallen from his coat, not willing to run away without them.

I gave the knucks a kick that sent them halfway across the street, and then took a step back. I said, “Okay, pick up your marbles and scram. Open your yap and I’ll knock your teeth out.”

His eyes said plenty, but his mouth didn’t dare to. He came forward to get the stuff, and I looked down at it, and said, “Wait a minute,” and reached down and picked up the billfold before he did.

It was Pop’s wallet.

It was tooled leather, a nice one, and almost new. But there was a diagonal scratch across the polished leather. That scratch had been from the sharp corner of a hard-metal linotype slug. The wallet had happened to be lying on Pop’s stand at the lino, and he’d let some slugs slide off a galley onto it. I’d been there.

I heard a car swinging in to the curb, and Bobby took a look past me and started running. I started after him, shoving the wallet into my pocket. A voice yelled, “Hey—” The car started up again.

I caught him as he was trying to cut through a vacant lot, and was beating the hell out of him when the car and the squad coppers got there, and one of them got each of us. One caught my coat from in back, pulled me away from Bobby Reinhart, and slammed me alongside the face with the flat of his hand.

“Break it up, punks,” he said. “Down to the station for you.”

I wanted to kick out backward, but that wouldn’t do any good.

I gulped air as we were headed for the squad car, until I had enough of my mind back to talk, and then I started to talk fast.

“This isn’t just a fight,” I said. “This is part of a murder case. Bassett of Homicide is in a tavern two blocks east of here. Take us there; Bassett’ll want this guy.”

The copper that had me was running his hands over the outside of my pockets. He said, “Tell it down at the station.”

The other one said, “There’s a Homicide dick named Bassett. What case is it, kid?”

“My father,” I said. “Wallace Hunter. Killed in an alley off Franklin Street last week.”

He said, “There was a guy killed there.” He looked at the copper that had me, and shrugged. He said, “We can look there. Two blocks. If it is a homicide case—”

We got in the car, and they didn’t take any chances on us. They collared us again when they marched us into the tavern. It made quite a parade.

Bassett and Uncle Am were still in the booth. They looked up, and neither of them showed any surprise.

The copper who knew Bassett beat me to the punch. He said, “We found these punks fighting. This one said you’d be interested. Are you?”

Bassett said, “I could be. You can let go of him, anyway. What is it, Ed?”

I took the wallet out of my pocket and tossed it on the table of the booth.. I said, “Pop’s wallet. This son of a bitch had it.”

Bassett picked up the wallet and opened it. There were a few bills in it. One five and several singles. He looked at the identification card under the celluloid and then looked up at Bobby. “Where’d you get it, Reinhart?” His voice was very mild and calm.

“Gardie Hunter. She gave it to me.”

I heard Uncle Am let out a long breath that he’d been holding. He didn’t look up at me. He kept his eyes on the wallet in Bassett’s hand.

Bassett asked, “When was this?”

“Last night. Sure it had been her old man’s. She said so.”

Bassett folded the wallet back shut and put it carefully into his pocket. He took out a cigarette and lighted it.

Then he nodded to the squad-car men. He said, “Thanks a lot, boys. Look, I’d sort of like to keep track of Bobby here till I can check that story. Will you take him and book him on disorderly?”

“Okay.”

“Who’s on the desk tonight?”

“Norwald.”

Bassett nodded. “I know him. Tell him I’ll probably phone in pretty soon and tell him he can let Reinhart go.” He took out the wallet again and handed Bobby the bills and identification from it. He said, “I guess we won’t need these, son. The wallet’s evidence, for a while.”

Bobby looked around at me when they were taking him to the door.

I said, “Any time. Any place.”

They took him out.

Bassett stood up. He said to Uncle Am, “Well, it was a nice try.”

Uncle Am said, “You know it doesn’t mean anything. About that wallet.”

Bassett shrugged.

He turned to me. “Kid, ‘fraid you can’t sleep home tonight. You can bunk with your uncle, can’t you?”

“Why?” I asked.

“We’ll have to do something we should have done right away. Search the place. For the insurance policy, and anything else we might find.”

Uncle Am nodded. “He can stay with me.”

Bassett went out. Uncle Am sat there and didn’t say anything.

I said, “I guess I went off kind of half-cocked. I threw a monkey wrench in things.”

He turned and looked at me. He said, “You look like hell. Go wash your face and straighten yourself out. I think you’re going to have a mouse, too.”

I said, “You ought to see the other guy.”

That got a snort out of him, and I knew it was going to be all right with him. I went back to the washroom and cleaned up.

He asked, “How do you feel?”

“About that high,” I said.

“I mean physically. Can you stay up all night?”

“If I can get up, I can stay up.”

He said, “We’ve been piddling along. We’ve been kidding ourselves we’ve been investigating. We’ve been babes in the woods. We’d better start chopping down some trees.”

“Swell,” I said. “What’s Bassett going to do—arrest Mom?”

“He’s going to take her in for questioning. Gardie, too, now that wallet business came up. I had him talked out of it; he was going to give us another few days to crack Kaufman.”

“He’ll let them go when he’s questioned them?”

“I don’t know, kid. I don’t know. If he finds that policy, maybe he won’t. We got two kicks in the teeth tonight—that insurance receipt and the wallet. They both point the wrong way, but try to tell that to Bassett.”

I had the red rubber ball in my hand again, playing with it. He reached over and took it from me and started squeezing it. Each time, it went almost flat. He had tremendously strong hands.

He said, “I wish we’d never found this stuff. It—Oh, hell, I can’t explain. I just wish Wally hadn’t kept it.”

I said, “I think I know what you mean.”

“He must have been a hell of a mess, Ed. I hadn’t seen him in ten years. My God, what can happen to a guy in ten years—”

“Listen, Uncle Am,” I said, “is there any way he could have done it himself? Hit himself with—say, with one of the bottles? Or—this sounds screwy except that he used, you said, to juggle Indian clubs—thrown it up high and stood under it when it came down? I know it sounds crazy, but—”

“It doesn’t, kid, except for one thing you don’t know: Wally couldn’t have killed himself. He had a—well, not exactly a phobia, but maybe you could call it a psychic block. He couldn’t have killed himself. It wasn’t fear of death—he might have wanted to die. I remember once when he did.”

I said, “I don’t see how you can be sure. Maybe he didn’t want to badly enough, then.”

He said, “It was on our trip through Mexico, south of Chihuahua. He was bitten by a Cugulla adder. We were alone, on a lonely road across wild country, not much more than a trail. We didn’t have any first-aid stuff, and it wouldn’t have mattered if we had. There isn’t any antidote for a Cugulla bite. You die within two hours, and it’s one of the worst and most painful deaths there is. It’s unadulterated hell.

“His leg started swelling and hurting like hell right away. He had the only gun between us, and we—well, we said so long, and he tried to shoot himself. He simply couldn’t—his reflexes wouldn’t work. He begged me to do it. I—I don’t know; I might have if it had got much worse, but we heard someone coming. It was a mestizo, riding an ancient burro.

“He said the snake wasn’t a Cugulla—we’d shot it and it was lying there in the road. It was a local species that looked almost exactly like a Cugulla. And it was poisonous all right, but nothing like the real McCoy. We got Wally tied on the burro and packed him three miles to a medico in the next village, and we saved him, or the medico did.”

I said, “But—”

“We had to stay there a month. That doc was a swell guy. I worked for him to help pay for us staying there while Wally was getting better, but evenings I read his books—mostly the ones on psychology and psychiatry. He had a flock of ‘em, in English and Spanish.

“That’s where I picked up a good start on what I know about stuff like that, and I’ve read a lot since—besides the practical angles you get working a mitt-camp. But, kid, we sort of psychoanalyzed Wally and he had it. There are people who couldn’t kill themselves—it’s a physical and mental impossibility, no matter what. It’s not too common, but it’s not too rare either. It’s an anti-suicide psychosis. And it’s not something that would wear off or change as he got older.”

I asked, “That’s straight; you’re not kidding me?”

“Not on any of it, kid.”

He squeezed the rubber ball some more.

He said, “Kid, when we go in, you lean against the inside of the door. Don’t say anything at all.”

“Go in where?”

“Kaufman’s room. He isn’t married; he lives in a rooming house on LaSalle Street, a little north of Oak. He walks home. I’ve been there and I know