LITMIR.BIZ

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III

      Two Birds Without a Thought!

      The Captain opened the door. Stepped in. Swung it to in back of him. Stood there with arms critically folded.

      For two men were playing some kind of cards at a small portable table, exhaling generous clouds of smoke from cigarillos hanging from the corners of their mouths. Their background was a dusty window looking out onto an alley. Their floor was softwood like that of everything in this old station.

      The leftmost man was, beyond doubt, the homeliest man in creation. Or nearly so. He was thin, for one thing, thin like a spaghetti straw, and being tall also had actually to slump down in his chair even to play cards. He had badly misshapen and almost mismatching features, including several face-warts and a nose far too large, and with high cheekbones under somewhat bleak and hollow eyes. Those eyes, which were brown, were, it would have had to be admitted by anyone, friendly eyes, and with even a touch of laughter in them. The man was about 43, and his nondescript hair was commencing to thin, yet had no grey. He was clad in a badly rumpled dark grey or black tweed suit with decidedly baggy knees.

      The Captain gave him a gelid look.

      “Would I possibly be addressing,” he asked disarmingly, “Mr. Lou Ousley?”

      The other looked up, a card in his hand. Didn’t play it, however. Brought it back to his own side of the table. Removed his cigarillo to a cracked glass dish off to one side.

      “Are you kidding, Cap?” he asked. “Or have you got amnesia? Yes, my name’s Lou Ousley—what can I do for you?”

      “You are,” went on the Captain, still quite unsmilingly, “if I’m not mistaken, a detective assigned to this station by the Detective Bureau? Is that correct?”

      “Correct as correct, Cap. But what is all—”

      “Your salary is charged to this station, if I’m not mistaken?”

      “Well, it’s chargeable. I don’t know whether they make the charge—”

      “Well, I do! Because I have to subtract it from my budget. Well, now you are supposed to have to do with investigations off the routine, are you not? Like murder, mysterious stuff—anything involving violence with causes not evident or—”

      “Right, right, right. Trouble is, in this now-today obscure down-at-heel station nothing like you describe ever happ—don’t take that trick yet, Butterball. I didn’t play my last card.”

      The Captain had turned dourly to the other man. This one was a definite human dumpling. Though only about 35 he weighed, obviously, all of 275 pounds. He had badly ruffled nondescript hair atop a round spherical head, in which two greenish eyes were close together. A brown derby hat sat nearby him on a chair, explaining why he was known as a “pulp-paper magazine detective”. He wore a wrinkled brown coat with pants of not the exact same shade of brown, and a wildly pink shirt.

      “Your name, sir, is Homer Tomaroy?” the Captain inquired coldly. “Or could I be wrong!”

      “What—the—hell—goes on here, Cap?” said the latter. Withdrew his pudgy hand that was just about to rake in an unearned trick. And put his cigarillo, too, into the cracked glass dish. “Is this a game or—well, it was Homer Tomaroy five minutes ago. Why?”

      “You are a detective of this station if I mistake not? Not assigned to it, but of it. Is that right?”

      “Right, right, right, right, Cap. I—play your ace, Lousy, or whatever you’ve got there to play, and let’s get this trick off the table and out of the way. It—”

      “You are supposed,” the Captain drove on to the speaker, “to investigate crimes, and other affairs of violence or illicitness of enigmatic nature and so forth? Is that right?”

      “Yeah, but only with and in company of Lousy here. For most enigmatic crimes take place in bad districts, and they don’t want one dick sashaying around by himself, nor—”

      “Correct,” acknowledged the Captain. Drove on. “Well, here we got two nice good unused detectives, capable of investigating, appraising, diagnosing, enigmatic crimes and what have you. Two such detectives, sitting here, playing gin rummy or some fool game. And—”

      “What can we do, Cap?” said the man Lou Ousley frankly. “There isn’t anything up to our caliber around this funereal dead-end dump, and—”

      And now the Captain roared forth answer instead of talking in cold gelid reserved tones.

      “I’ll tell you what you can do! Both of you. Get out! Get on the job—right this minute—now!—this very second—get—on—the—job.”

      “Job?” said Butterball contemptuously. “There hasn’t been a Grade-A investigating job around this mausoleum-crypt since Hector was a—”

      “There’s one right now. Young guy, renting a flat in Little Italy, to write a novel in, has just bumped himself off. The Marchesi Flats. You can see him, hand and arm with gun in the hand, hanging down, through a gap or crack or something in the door—but you’ll have to bust in. For it’s locked. By personal lock of his, plus hand-bolt. The owner’s standing there in the downstairs doorway right now, waiting for two fine wonderful professional detectives to come up and officially bust the door open. And find why the young man did what he did. And—”

      “Oh,” said the man called Lousy, “he did it because he couldn’t pay the landlord his high rents. I know those rat-holes without rats. $25 a month. And worth $15—maybe only $12. He couldn’t—”

      “He did it,” almost yelled the Captain, “because he had just received a sealed bottle with a—a deuce of diamonds in it. From Lord knows where, or whom. Within 20 minutes or so after he unwrapped it, he blew his brains out—what brains he had after doing his daily stint on the Great American Novel. Now mooch—both of you. Shake the creases out of your behinds. Get on the job. Get on the job or I’ll—I’ll—”

      Both men had risen with alacrity to their feet, with some covert, half amused, yet half uneasy glances at each other. The thin tall one might better be said to have unfolded himself like a jackknife. The rotund one with the round head was already putting on that head his brown derby hat. Now the first man was putting on a grey felt hat he retrieved from somewhere behind him.

      “To the fray, Butterball,” said the tall thin one ironically. “To the fray!”

      “Forward, forward, and never say die!” echoed the rotund heavy one, with a grimace.

      The Captain opened the door and stood meaningfully aside. The three men moved heavily, in unison, from the room, the Captain to go reluctantly and disgustedly back to his desk and high stool to handle dull and mundane things. The two ill-assorted ones to survey, at close hand and under observant eyes, the surveyable, and to analyze the unanalyzable, as all of such might present itself this day in the Flats Marchesi!

      CHAPTER IV

      At the Marchesi Flats

      Lou Ousley, known to his familiars better as “Lousy Lou”, bent forward, considerably compressed as to his frame, over the wheel of the light runabout leaving the station, circling quite adroitly off of Chicago Avenue into the traffic of North LaSalle Avenue. Here, the street had once been widened—the staid old residences of that once-aristocratic street had all been given new fronts of compressed orange brick. But room-to-rent signs were to be seen in profusion. Stumps protruded from sidewalks off of narrow strip-like front yards which once had been trees growing in front gardens. Progress!

      Lou was speaking to the other man with him.

      “The old boy really softened up before we took off, didn’t he, Butterball?”

      “Meaning, Lousy, that he told us all that he’d just got—over the phone?”

      “Yeah. He’s got an amazing memory for details, that old boy. And can thumbnail facts like nobody’s business.

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