The Affair of the Bottled Deuce. Harry Stephen KeelerЧитать онлайн книгу.
known he would find. Namely, that Butterball’s sequence of photon-like observations about the room had completed the room for him in three seconds flat, and that he was already in the bedroom, or alcove, calling it the latter because of its wide and doorless entrance. Lou proceeded, therefore, to join his right-bower, else the man to whom he himself was a right-bower. The bedroom window also, as was derivable from the phalanx of keys in that other room, had its grating; the fire-escape platform was visible through this one, too. The room held only the cot partly visible from the doorway earlier, a chiffonier in a far corner, and one kitchen chair to undress on or dress on. Butterball, riffling about in the chiffonier drawers, was flinging them back practically as fast as he opened them.
“A very clean young man, Lousy,” he commented. “Note his bed linen. And plenty more here, for changing.”
Lou did draw back the coverlid, more or less gingerly. Saw clean linen indeed. Replaced it, equally gingerly. Came back into the main room. Waited while Butterball clatteringly drew further drawers open, and banged them to again.
Butterball was coming back in.
“Clothes and clothes,” he said. “Underwear—all clean—and wash cloths. Papers, none. No, no papers.”
He turned to Lou.
“What did you find, Lousy, when you—”
“—when I pulled back the cot coverlid? Oh quote noth—”
“No, when you ran your hand over his mattress pad purely as routine exam—”
“Why, I didn’t,” said Lou, dignifiedly. “I knew that a guy sophisticated enough to write a novel—or try to—wouldn’t put his 98 cents worth of loose change under a—”
“Ah me, Lousy! Such carelessness! Well, I’ll just do it for you, then. So we can report him to be—sophisticated?—was that your word?”
Butterball went back in. And did the job he seemed to think that Lou should have done when Lou had been at the cotside.
Lou could him reaching in under the mattress pad. Flailing around with his extended arm as though it were some kind of a semaphore arm operating in the wrong plane, and not knowing where to settle. He covered all the area, evidently, for he withdrew his arm, and came back into the main room with that arm straight out in front of him as though its hand carried something smelling bad—and in that hand was a roll of currency bills large enough to choke a horse with.
“Icky!” he said disgustedly, to nobody in particular, else to all in the room. “If there’s anything I hate to come upon in a death room, it’s a commodious supply of money—for then, when the case is written up by the press, all the readers say ‘How much money did the detectives keep for themselves?’” He looked, woebegonely, at Lou, and then at Marchesi against the wall.
“Mr. Marchesi,” he begged, “will you take this filthy stuff out of my hand?—and count it—officially? Money—go!”
Marchesi had stepped forward eagerly. Took the money. Counted it affectionately. He palpably liked counting money.
Finally announced his count.
“Six hundred and 72 dollars!” he said.
“Now I will take it,” pronounced Butterball with relief. “Since it’s been counted by a disinterested observer. And is thus officially registered. Six hundred seventy-two, gentlemen. Six, seven, two. Property of the State of Illinois. From now!”
He put it into his hind pocket, and buttoned some flap on it.
“That boy there,” he said, almost reprovingly, “must have got an advance on that novel he’s writing.”
“Not that one!” said Lou. “I read the one page of it there, and that was enough—for me. I don’t presume to be a critic, but—no, he didn’t get that moolah from that novel.”
“Well, wherever he got it,” declared Butterball, waxing sardonic and even sarcastic, “he sure hid it deep, didn’t he? And safe! ’Way down in the deep recesses of the earth! Under—his mattress pad—all that dough!—enough for a guy to live on for—all that dough—kept under a mattress pad. Lousy, you know something?”
“If I did I wouldn’t be here,” Lou repeated the old bromide.
“Nor I. Well, that young man sitting there, Lousy, now dead as a doornail, is—was—the most naïve person on the face of the earth.”
“Naïve?” said Lou.
“Naïve, I said,” said Butterball. “So naïve, in fact, he—he hadn’t been born yet.”
“So naïve—he hadn’t been born yet?” echoed Lou, highly amused. “Butterball, you have just branded him as possessing the ultimost most of naïveté. With accent tick over the last letter thereof. So naïve—he hadn’t been born yet. Butterball, go to the head of the class!”
CHAPTER VI
Discovery Strange, Discovery Odd!
Butterball made a curtsey. To show complete modesty on the part of a Chicago Avenue police station detective possessing far too large a stomach. He did it well. He should, Lou reflected, have been doing it in the Follies.
Butterball threw a question now toward Marchesi.
“Did this well-heeled well-garnished plutocrat here have any visitors, to any extent?”
“I never saw one in my life,” declared Marchesi. “I am up—I am down—many times a day. I never saw any of such.”
“Yet he’s been here a long time?”
“Since early last fall, yes.”
“Has he relatives here in Chi? Maybe some multimillionaire uncle who gives him chewing gum money—to put under mattresses?”
“He said, when he came here, sir, he had no relatives.”
“Lone wolf, eh? Well, I might as well go back in to his bedroom, and examine the tags on his clothing. See how much he paid for same. Sometimes you can find out more about a man from his cloth—”
He said no more. But turned and went back into the bedroom.
Lou, therefore, strode down the room toward the kitchen. Strode through the doorway containing apparently a sliding door. Found, as he got into the kitchen proper, that the sliding door slid back only on rails, above and below, that lay in the kitchen itself—that it wasn’t even an honest God-fearing sliding door—was an 1890 phony imitation of one.
The kitchen bore a softwood floor as did the other room, and had an old zinc-lined sink on its left wall. From the wall above it protruded a single faucet. At the window side of the sink was a cast iron handpump that had been necessary to get the water to the 4th floor back in the ’90’s when everybody below was washing his neck at the same hour. With today’s pressures, the giving ’way of a single Fuller ball would have ejected a stream of water from the one faucet of the sink big enough for a fire hose.
Off from the sink pump was—ahem!—a toilet seat affixed hydrostatically to the same vertical drain pipe that took care of the sink, and placed here obviously in the long ago for purposes of plumbing economy. One drain pipe—for one flat. It seemed, from marks in the floor, that once, in the long ago, the toilet seat had been modestly encased in a matchboard cubicle. Which presumably had been torn away during the years, by some former tenant, during some cold period when coal was scarce in this flat, and burned in a coal-burning stove. Here now today, in this room, a man could cook or reign—reign or cook. Lou wrinkled his nose. Swung his gaze on beyond it. Saw the other bathroom facilities which this particular flat afforded. A round zinc wash tub, standing off the wall, that could be filled partly under the cold-water faucet, and put on the stove and warmed; in it was a long backscrubbing brush, a colored bottle of bubblebath powder, and a pink washrag. Fit for Cleopatra herself. Maybe!
Practically in the entrance of the kitchen yet, Lou swung his