Authors: Fredric Brown
"And then you go to Joe's sleeping top; he'll be there waiting for you, don't worry. Then you and him can talk it over, the details. Okay, I'll tell Joe to look for you." He stood up, knowing that he'd said everything that was necessary and that Dolly wouldn't eat or act natural while he was there. He carried his coffee back to the counter and sat down there, his back to Dolly, drank the rest of it and shoved it across to Hank for a refill.
He was just stirring sugar into it when he happened to glance at the entrance. Quintana was coming in. That had been a narrow one! Not that Quintana would really have started anything, with him sitting well across the table from Dolly. But he'd have been suspicious, and therefore surly and nasty, and he'd have taken his suspicions out on Dolly later, maybe even scaring her out of the courage his pep talk had just given her.
But Quintana was in a good mood, smiling. "Good news, Dolly. Chance for you to make a little extra tonight, doubling. Opal ain't here. She thought this morning it would rain all day and we wouldn't open and her folks live a hunnert miles from here so she took off to visit 'em. So you take over on illusions. Rope tie for the bally and Spider Girl inside."
"All right, Leon." The Murderer was glad that Dolly's voice sounded normal. "How much extra do we get?"
"You let me worry about the money. I take care of that, remember. And listen-"
"What, Leon?"
"Joe Linder'll have to show you the gaff on that rope tie trick for the bally, but it's gonna be with me around watching, see? I'll make sure he don't put his goddam hands on you when he ties you. C'mon, get outside the rest of that grub and let's go get that over with right now."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHEN MAYBELLE HAD LEFT, Dr. Magus dressed again. Regretfully for now, after that unpremeditated and delightful interlude, he felt now that he could sleep a while and sleep soundly. But fortune beckoned. Maybelle's answers to the questions she hadn't even realized he asked her had been everything he hoped. He felt sure now that his hunch had been right.
So this time instead of putting on the rainy day clothes he'd taken off he dressed himself meticulously in his best suit, added spats and a Panama, took a Malacca stick from the foot locker and made his way across newly spread shavings to the nearest street. Dr. Magus did not leave the carnival lot often and when he did he liked to do it in style. Except for somewhat anachronistic spats, you might have taken him for a specialist in some highly remunerative branch of medicine, perhaps a top-flight psychiatrist, or a college president. But the spats, and to a lesser degree the cane, marked him as none of these; no doctor or professor dares dress anachronistically lest his public assume that his ideas date back to the same eras as his dress. Obviously, then, Dr. Magus was a man of means for only the wealthy dare be eccentric and only the eccentric wear spats.
He enjoyed the deference with which he found himself treated at the office of the Bloomfield Sun. He was shown to a table and there was given and left with a bound volume of issues for July 1st to date.
The accident had been late July, and on a Friday. Maybelle had told him both Charlie and Mack had been gone all day the day before that. If they'd pulled a caper, that would probably have been when.
He decided to see first if the accident itself had made the paper here in Bloomfield, a hundred and twenty miles from Glenrock but in the same state. Besides, it would help him verify the date if he could find mention of it.
Nothing in the paper for Saturday, July 30th. Nor for Sunday the 31st. But on the chance that, although the accident had been a bit too far away to rate a separate story, it might be included in a Monday round-up he tried Monday, August 1st, and found it on the front page:
TWELVE IN STATE DIE IN WEEKEND ACCIDENTS
He ran rapidly down the column until he saw the side head: "Two Killed Near Glenrock" and from there he read carefully.
Two men were killed and one injured in a head-on collision three miles east of Glenrock on Highway 42 a few minutes before midnight Friday. George Slater, 40, of Reedsville, driver and sole occupant of one of the cars, was killed instantly. The driver of the other car, Charles Black, 34, died shortly after admittance to Glenrock Memorial Hospital. His companion, Mark Irby, 29, suffered a broken leg, cuts and bruises, but is reported by the same hospital to be out of danger. Both Black and Irby were employees of Wiggins & Braddock Combined Shows, a carnival which played in Glenrock last week.
Nothing there he hadn't known before except the name of the driver of the other car, if that mattered
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and even it might be wrong since they got both Charlie's last name and Irby's first incorrect. But at least he had the date for sure. Friday the 29th.
He could work backward from there.
Except that he started with the Friday paper and didn't have to work back. It was there, right on the first page. Just what he was looking for. Just the show he'd come to see.
MASKED DUO ROBS UNION CITY BANK
Union City, (July 28) ENS
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Two armed men held up the First National Bank of Union City this afternoon at 2:25 and escaped with $42,000 in cash.
Both men wore handkerchiefs tied bandit style over their faces just below the eyes and wore hats with brims pulled down. They entered with drawn guns and ordered four employees and two customers to lie flat on the floor. One stood guard while the other rifled the vault and the tellers' cash drawers, taking only cash in the form of bills and stuffing it in a musette bag.
On leaving the bank they were seen to drive east toward the downtown section of Union City in a bla
ck or dark blue Chrysler sedan.
Smart work, Dr. Magus thought. They'd headed into and not away from the downtown district, where they'd quickly have lost themselves in traffic. The Chrysler sedan would have been a stolen car, of course. Somewhere downtown they'd have abandoned it and switched to Charlie's old green Chevrolet and from that moment they'd be safe. With forty-two thousand lovely dollars, all in cash. Dr. Magus whistled silently and read on. Carefully.
One of the men was described as medium height, medium build, brown or black hair, wearing a gray suit. The other was slightly taller, perhaps twenty pounds heavier, blond hair, wore a blue suit. Such as they were, the description
s fitted. Or were close enough.
The money had been mostly in old bills of large denomination. According to the president of the bank, the reason for this was that the First National Bank of Union City acted as a clearing house for other banks in the county which wanted to exchange such bills for new or smaller ones, and periodically they were sent to the Treasury Department for replacement.
That was all.
It was enough.
***
Dr. Magus returned the bound volume to the file clerk with grave thanks and took his departure.
Outside he took a long deep breath. It all fitted too perfectly to be a coincidence. Union City was only about forty miles from Glenrock and they were both on a main highway. It was even closer to Campton, the town they'd played the week before Glenrock. Charlie would have started casing the job from there.
The way Mack Irby had acted Monday evening in the mitt camp. Maybelle's story. This bank robbery committed by two men whose description roughly fitted Charlie and Mack and on the very day when they'd been away from the lot all day.
It had to be. It was.
But Charlie was dead and now Mack was dead too and where was the forty-two thousand dollars?
Was it, could it be, hidden somewhere on the carney lot? Not on the lot itself, of course, because the carney had been in Glenrock when the money was stashed or hidden and the carney was in Bloomfield now. But hidden in something that moved each week with the carney?
When Mack had left the hospital he'd headed back for the carney like a homing pigeon. He had no financial reason for doing so because according to what Barney King had told him Mack hadn't intended to try to make a connection to work for the final two weeks. Of course there was Maybelle. But if Mack had been able to put his hands on that forty-two thousand bucks without coming back to the carney, would he have come back just for Maybelle? Possible, of course, but there are women just as beautiful and even more beautiful in Florida or California or Mexico City or anywhere a man with forty-two thousand dollars-forty-four counting the two grand from the insurance company
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could head.
Of course another reason for his coming back could have been to pick up his trunk
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and, by the way, who had his trunk now and had it been searched? Surely the police, investigating his murder, would have found out who was holding his effects
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probably Burt, because he'd have had them with the unborn show
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and would have looked through them. And what had happened to Charlie Flack's effects after the accident?
Dr. Magus realized where he would have to go, and sighed. He'd never before in his life gone to a police station voluntarily. He went to one now.
***
Lieutenant Showalter was in. He said, "Hi, Doc. What's on your mind?"
"Is there anything new on the Irby matter, Lieutenant?"
"Nope. Why? You found out something?"
"No, I haven't. My question was idle curiosity. But I chanced to be downtown and thought I'd drop in to ask you where Irby's effects are, and, whether any relatives have come forward to claim them."
"Nope, and there won't be. He had no relatives."
"Oh? How can you be certain of that?"
"Traced him back. He carried an Illinois driver's license that gave Shiocton, Pennsylvania, as his birthplace, and the date. So we phoned Shiocton police to check on him. They didn't find a birth certificate but there's a big orphan asylum there and they thought to check with it. He was brought up there, parents unknown, and released when he was sixteen. So anybody'd have a hell of a time claiming relationship."
"Except a wife. He could have married sometime and never have been divorced."
"Yeah, there's that. Why? You know of one or did he ever talk about having been married?"
"No, no, I merely mentioned a possibility. Where are his effects? Do you have them or are they still on the lot?"
"We've got them. No relatives and no will so they belong to the state. That is, they'll be held for a year and then go to the state unless somebody's put in a claim. But don't get any ideas, Doc, about sending someone around claiming to be his wife unless she's got a marriage certificate that will stand checking on."
"Nothing was farther from my mind, Lieutenant. Although it's an idea, if I thought I could get away with it. Two thousand dollars isn't hay."
"A little more than that. Eighteen hundred out of the two thousand that he had in traveler's checks plus nine hundred and fifty that he'd put into postal saving during the three or four months before the accident. The certificates were in his trunk. But what's all this to you, Doc?"
"Nothing at all, as far as the money is concerned. But I'm hoping you found something of mine among his effects, a book. It completely slipped my mind until today, what with the excitement of a murder, but it is a very valuable book and I'd like to have it back."
The lieutenant frowned. "I looked through his stuff and I don't remember any book. What kind was it?"
"A book on astrology, a rare old one printed in England in 1810. I don't know that its monetary value was great
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I found it in a used bookstore on Gark Street in Chicago and bought it for a dollar and a half. But it's irreplaceable and there were things in it that I use occasionally. Mack was interested in astrology and had borrowed it a week before the accident. I had in mind to ask him for it as soon as he got back from the hospital but it slipped my mind until today. The book was in English but the title was in Latin
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Astra et Homines, stars and men."
"I'm sure now that there wasn't any such book, Doc. I'm sure I'd remember it now that you've described it. A book with a Latin title I know I'd remember. And now that I come to think of it, I know there weren't any books. Some true detective magazines but no books at all."
Dr. Magus looked disappointed. "Is there any chance that it could have been pilfered from the trunk?"
"Not a chance, Doc. There was a watch, a fairly good one, in that trunk, and a few other small but fairly valuable things that a thief would have taken instead of a book. Besides the trunk was locked with a damn good padlock and was packed away under some other stuff in a truck. Your carney owner, Wiggins, was taking care of it until Irby came back for it."
"Wiggins? I'd have thought Burt would have held it for him."
"I wouldn't know about that. We were told Wiggins was holding Irby's trunk and got it from him."
Dr. Magus sighed. "Well, I guess I've lost the book. Unless Irby had loaned it to someone else before the accident
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I'll ask around the lot. Thanks a lot, Lieutenant." Curiouser and curiouser, he thought. Why had Burt turned the trunk over to Wiggins instead of keeping it until Irby got back? Of course it could be that Burt was short of packing space after Barney King, who no doubt had a trunk of his own, had come to work for him.