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

past the police station with the two blue lights by the door. I looked up the steps as we walked past it, and I didn’t feel so good any more. Mom and Gardie would be having a tough time in there. Or had they taken them to the Homicide Bureau downtown?

But Mom hadn’t done it. Bassett was way off on that.

We rounded the corner to Clark Street. Uncle Am asked, “Cup coffee, kid?”

“Sure,” I said. “But are we going to call that number tonight? It’s getting later.”

“From now on it gets earlier,” he said. “A few minutes won’t matter.”

We ordered a bowl of chili and coffee apiece, in the joint just north of Superior. We had our end of the counter to ourselves; two loud-voiced women down near the other end were arguing about somebody named Carey.

The chili was good, but it didn’t taste good. I kept thinking about Mom. I thought, anyway they don’t use a rubber hose on women.

Uncle Am said, “Think about something else, Ed.”

“Sure. What?”

“Anything. What the hell.” He looked around and his eye lit on the handbag one of the women had lying on the counter. “Think about handbags. Ever think about handbags?”

“No,” I said. “Why should I?”

“Suppose you were a leather-goods designer. Then you’d be plenty interested. What’s a handbag for? It’s a substitute for pockets, that’s all. A man has pockets, and a woman hasn’t. Why? Because pockets—loaded ones—would spoil a woman’s shape. She’d bulge in the wrong places, or too much in the right places. Wouldn’t she?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Why, take handkerchiefs. Women do carry handkerchiefs in pockets sometimes, but little tiny ones, while a man carries big ones. And it isn’t because they have any less snot in their noses than men do; it’s because a big handkerchief would make a bulge. If they did carry big handkerchiefs, they’d carry them in pairs. But let’s get back to handbags.”

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s get back to handbags.”

“The more a handbag holds the better it is, and the smaller it looks, the better it is. Now, how would you design a handbag that would be big and look little? That would make a woman say, ‘Golly, this bag holds more than you’d think’?”

“I don’t know. How?”

“I think the approach would be empirical. You’d design a lot of ‘em just for looks and wait till you heard a woman say one of them holds more than you’d think. Then you’d study it to see why, and try to put the same thing in other bags. You might even reduce it to an equation. You know algebra, Ed?”

“Not intimately,” I told him, “and the hell with handbags. They make me think of wallets. Was Bobby Reinhart telling the truth about Gardie giving it to him?”

“Sure, kid. If he was lying, he wouldn’t tell one that could be checked on that easy. He’d say he found it, or something. But don’t let it worry you.”

“It does, though.”

“My God, why? You don’t think Gardie killed him, took the wallet and then gave it to Bobby, do you? Or that Madge killed him, left the wallet lying around loose, or gave it to Gardie, do you?”

I said, “I know neither of them did it, but it looks damn bad. How did Gardie get the wallet?”

“He didn’t take it with him, that’s all. Lots of guys leave their wallets home when they go out on a bender. They stick a few bucks in their pockets and leave their wallets safe at home. Gardie found it and glommed onto the money in it, and didn’t say anything. Even then it was dumb for her to give the wallet away—but if it was anything worse than that, she wouldn’t have taken the chance. She’d have put the wallet in the incinerator.”

“She should have, anyway,” I said. “She’s pretty damn dumb.” Uncle Am said, “I’m not so sure, kid. She’ll get what she wants out of life. Most people do. Not all of them, but most people.”

“Pop didn’t,” I said.

“No,” Uncle Am said, “Wally didn’t.” He spoke slowly, as though he were choosing his words one at a time. “But there’s a difference. Gardie is selfish; she won’t mess up her life for the same reason Wally messed up his. If she marries the wrong guy, she’d just walk out on him.

“Wally was the kind of guy who was loyal, kid, even to lost causes. He was also the kind of guy who should never have married at all. But your mother was a real woman, Ed, and he was happy with her. And she died before he got too restless, if you know what I mean. And Madge caught him on the rebound.”

I said, “Mom is—oh, skip it.” I realized that I was going to stick up for her just out of loyalty. If I thought back about Mom and Pop, I remembered things, and Uncle Am was right. I was being soft, because she was in trouble now, and because she’d been different—a lot different—since Pop had died. But I shouldn’t kid myself that would last.

Mom had been poison to him, and she’d have been poison to any man as decent as Pop was. Or had been, before she drove him to drink. And even his drinking had been quiet and not ever quarrelsome.

I finished my chili and pushed the bowl aside.

Uncle Am said, “Not yet, kid. Let’s have another cup of coffee.” He ordered them. He said, “I’m trying to think out how to handle talking to that phone number. I think best when I’m talking about something else. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Ladies’ handbags?” I suggested.

He laughed. “They bored you, huh? Kid, that’s because you don’t know anything about them. The more you know about something, anything, the more interesting it is. I knew a leather-goods worker once; he could talk about handbags all night. Like a carney could talk about carnivals.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’d rather hear about carneys than about handbags. What’s a blow?”

“Short for a blow-off. It’s a show for inside money, usually inside a freak show, I mean, say, you pay two bits to get into the freak show, and the spieler takes you around the platforms and then starts an inside bally for another two bits or more to see a special show on the inside, down at one end of the top. Why?”

I said, “I remember back at the carney you asked Hoagy to take over your ball game. He said he was sloughed and if Jake got a chance to use the blow after Springfield, he could get a cooch. What was he talking about?”

Uncle Am laughed. “You got a memory, kid.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I remember something out of tonight’s talking, too. Wentworth three-eight-four-two. Have you got an angle yet?”

“Any minute now. Back to Hoagy. Hoagy’s a sex spieler. The bally for the inside money at the freak-show top is a sex lecture with living models, for men only. Two bits each and money back if they’re not satisfied.”

“What do you mean, living models?” I asked.

“That’s what pulls in the mooches. They want to know, too. Oh, he’s got a nice spiel—but you could read it in any book on what a young man should know. And he does use living models, a couple girls in bathing suits. Discusses what types they are, as a reason for having them on the platform.”

“Don’t the mooches want their money back?”

“A few, a darned few. They get it, and so what? On a good night, he’ll still take in a hundred bucks up and over the nut.”

“What’s the nut?”

“The overhead, kid. Say your expenses on a concession run thirty bucks a day; well, you’re on the nut until you’ve taken in that much. The rest of it is profit; you’re off the nut.”

I drank the last of my coffee. I asked, “Why would a bank-robber have been looking for Pop?”

“I don’t know, kid. We’ll have to find out.” He sighed and stood up. “Come on; let’s start.”

We walked down Clark Street to the Wacker and went up to his room.

He moved the chair out from the wall before he sat down. He said, “Stand behind me, Ed, and put your ear down to the receiver. I’ll hold it a little out from my ear, and you can hear as well as I can. Use that memory of yours on what’s said.”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s the angle?”

“The hell with it. I’ll ad lib. What I say depends on what they say.”

“What if they say ‘Hello’?” I asked him.

He chuckled. “I never thought of that. I’ll wait and see.”

He picked up the receiver and when he gave the number to the operator, his voice was different. It was low-pitched, gruff, with a completely different intonation. But I’d heard it before somewhere. It puzzled me for a second and then I placed it. He was imitating Hoagy’s voice; we’d been talking about Hoagy and that had been the first voice he’d thought of to imitate. It was perfect.

I heard them ringing the number. I leaned closer, resting my weight on the chair back to put my ear as near the end of the receiver as I could.

It rang about three times and then a woman’s voice said, “Hello.”

It’s funny, sometimes, how much you can tell—or anyway, guess—from a voice. Just one word, but you knew she was young, that she was pretty, and that she was smart. In all the senses of the word “smart.” And just from the way she said that one word, you liked her.

My uncle said, “Who zis?”

“Claire. Wentworth three-eight-four-two.”

“Howya, baby?” my uncle asked. “‘Member me? This’s Sammy.” He sounded very drunk.

“Afraid I don’t,” said the voice. It was considerably cooler now. “Sammy who?”

“G’wan, you r’member me,” Uncle Am said. “Sammy. In at the bar th’other night. Look, Claire, I know ‘sawful late to call you, ‘nail that, but, honey, I jus’ cleaned up a crap game. Took th’ boys for two G’s, an’ it’s burning a hole. Wanta see th’ town, Chez Paree, the Medoc Club, n’everywhere. Want th’ prettiest gal in Chi with me. Nothin’ too good. Might even buy ‘er a fur coat if she likes rabbit fur. How’s ‘bout can I come out ‘n’ getcha in a cab an’ we’ll go—”

“No,” said the voice. The receiver clicked.

“Damn,” said my uncle.

“It was a good try,” I told him.

He put the receiver back on the phone. He said, “They don’t pay off any more on good tries. Guess I’m not so hot as a Romeo. I should’ve let you try.”

“Me? Lord, I don’t know anything about women.”

“That’s what I mean. Hell, kid, you could have any woman you want. Take a look in the mirror.”

I laughed, but I turned around to the mirror over the dresser.

I said, “I am getting a shiner. Damn Bobby Reinhart.”

Uncle Am grinned at me in the mirror. He said, “On you it looks romantic. Save it; don’t put a steak on it. Well, now we try something that won’t work.”

He dialed a number and asked for the Wentworth exchange clerk. He asked her for the listing on three-eight-four-two. He waited a minute and then put the receiver down with an “Okay, thanks,” that sounded discouraged.

“Unlisted number,” he told me. “I thought it would be.”

“So what do we do now?”

He sighed. “Work from the other end. Find out what’s known about this Harry Reynolds. Bassett’ll know something about him, or be able to dig it out of the morgue. Only thing is, I was hoping that phone number