The Affair of the Bottled Deuce. Harry Stephen Keeler
interior, with thick Oriental rug on its floor, overstuffed purple davenport, old paintings in gilt frames on the walls, and a handpainted lamp big enough to have lighted up a street. Mr. Marchesi was demonstrating how one could live with comfort and luxury in the Flats Marchesi!
And on they swept, all three, to the top landing, where indeed light came in, neither generously nor parsimoniously, from a small skylight of ground-glass panes covered today on their outer surfaces with the oily soot that only Chicago could deposit.
Mr. Marchesi now spoke. And sadly, resignedly.
“The door frontmost there—or leftmost, I’ll put it, since you both would hardly know now how you stand with respect to the streets outside—that door leads into his parlor and—and writing room, if we wish to call it that. Facing out, however, on the street by which we did not come in. The door to this side of it, facing same way, is his kitchen door, which room looks out rearwardly on an interior court. These two other doors—” He inclined his head in two curious right-angled bobs that should, due to their angularity alone, have dislocated his bovine neck. “—lead into a now-unoccupied flat which looks out on the street that we did come in by, but rearwardly onto the same interior courtyard his does. It—”
“I’m getting confused, Mr. Marchesi,” pleaded Lou, with a grimace. “Let’s take it on trust.”
“Let us—yes,” granted the older man. “The old builders of these buildings—”
“—had a Roman holiday when they built this rat trap. The modern movies sure would love to use the inside of it for a chase-scene. Wonder why none ever has? Now you say you can look through a gap or crack into—”
“There’s a very slight gap between the door and its encasing framework, left,” said Mr. Marchesi, apparently not at all ruffled to hear his place called a “rat trap” by the Law. “Also a crack in the door’s leftmost upper panel. You can look in either one.”
“Oke,” said Lou. “We’ll look in them—before we crack in!”
He strode over to the door in question. Tried its knob, purely experimentally, finding what he had been warned by the captain he would find. That the door was quite locked. And the disc of shiny nickelplated steel above it, with a keyhole in it, showed it was indeed a Yale lock. The crack in the panel and gap described were easily findable,—by the blaze of yellow light inside made by the full pouring in of the afternoon sun outside. He selected the gap instead of the crack. Poised his eye just above where, plainly, a powerful hand-bolt, fully three-quarters of an inch in diameter, had been shot.
He saw, as though it were 6 or 7 feet or so from his eye, a kitchen table desk with a young man, clad only in pale green bathing trunks and heelless grass slippers, his back to the front windows, slumped face down across the desk, his right arm and hand hanging down, a black revolver, plainly of gun-metal, in the pendant hand. The young man himself would have been just about 7 feet, no more, no less, from Lou’s eyepiece. The young man was blond. The size of the jagged hole in the upper right side of the slumped forward head where the temple had once been showed a destruction of bone and integument too great to permit assumption that the man at the desk was any longer alive, or had ever been since the second his now-pendant hand had pulled the trigger of the black gun. Indeed, there was no dripping of blood anywhere now. Blood was congealed around and about the wound, mixing with ugly irregular powder mark stains. It trailed down the face sort of chinward. But congealed. Lay on the table top. Congealed. The trail of the blood led to the inner table edge. And it was on the floor below this point. But not dripping there now. He’d been dead a comparatively long while.
Lou saw too, in his wandering gaze which he achieved by moving slightly left and right with respect to the gap, an adumbration of the room itself. But for a couple or so pieces of furniture, in line with his eye, it was apparently devoid of all or most of such. Inordinately high as to ceiling, the floor was without carpeting, and was of soft wood boards. There was no paper on the walls—just what appeared through the gap to be yellow calcimine. Windows there were plainly to the front of the room, a half dozen feet back of the figure at the table—but only the furthest half of the furthestmost one of which could Lou make out from his vantage point, this one covered by a powerful grating running from top to bottom, and made of “spread steel” with diamond-shaped “gaps” so large that, as the sun now was in the Western sky, it was not occluded in the least, or was there even a shadow, reticulated or not reticulated, cast on the floor. Directly beyond the table and in direct line with it, by 6 or 7 feet, was the also inordinately high doorway of an adjunctory room containing a cot of some sort, the apartment’s apparent bedroom. Bringing his focus forward again, Lou studied the table. A typewriter stood neatly on the furthest outside corner away from the door. A sheet of paper protruded halfway out from its platen. A stack of sheets lay inward from that by just enough margin not to abut the machine. Still further inward, and still out on the rear edge of the table, stood a brass thing which Lou recognized as a home paper-burner, Woolworth’s, $1.98. For it was of brass, cylindrical, and stood on tiny legs. And on the table top, even further in—thus directly in front of the young man—was—
Lou surveyed the object as best he could from his vantage point of vision. Taking in all he could of it. It was a roundish glass flagon-like bottle with sufficient base to be able to stand upright, for standing upright it was. It was sealed, at its neck, with some kind of clay or something. And in it stood a playing card. A deuce of diamonds! For it was turned sufficiently in the bottle to show its face.
Lou’s eye swept automatically rearward of the young man. On the floor, thereof. Yes, there were wrappings there—gold-spiculed white paper—a folding carton—excelsior. The thing on the table had, quite obviously, just been taken from those wrappings.
He detached his eye. To see none other than Butterball doing the same thing as himself at the other door. Butterball was, however, detaching his own eye. Returning to Lou’s side. Saying, “Hand-bolt shot there. No entrance.”
“Same and like here, Butterball. But more to see—and how! Want to look? After all, the order for cracking the joint has to come from the lips of the local station dick—you!—and not the supernumerary dick from the downtown division assigned to the station—me!”
Butterball leaned forward. Applied his eye. Took what was virtually a true lightning-like look! For it lasted no more than 1/100th of a second. He jerked his eye away with a scowl.
“Whooie!” he said. “What a mess! I mean—that he made of his sconce. That bullet was really—a gate-crasher!” He made a futile gesture with his hands. “But that’s the way things go, I guess.”
And now Butterball showed how amazingly much he could take in—in a lightning glance. Revealing for the first time why such a rotund and too-well-fed individual as he remained successfully on the police department.
“And now,” he said, “to find out who sent him that lavender-tinted Spanish flagon—with the French playing card in it. And thus and thus only, eh, Lousy, find out why the kid in there did—what he did. All right, Marchesi. That crowbar you got there. And start writing out your bill to the Police Department—for one door-frame!”
CHAPTER V
Observation Sage, Observation Philosophic!
Damage to the Flats Marchesi turned out not to be too vast! For insertion of the crowbar by Butterball between door and casement, and pressure by both men, finally aided by Marchesi himself pressing against them, resulted in a loud fracturing and popping and splitting of ancient wood, where wood had encased both hand-bolt shaft and Yale-lock bolt-shaft, and inward the door swung.
Lou was in the lead, Butterball behind. Now came Mr. Marchesi sadly taking mental notes at side of door as to what his bill might be able to be made. He now stood off to one side, out of the way of things, arms folded resignedly, the while Butterball swung the door closed to keep out onlookers of which there were none to keep out.
Lou, having had, so he decided, probably more experience in medicine in the medical corps of the United States Army, than had Butterball, in changing bedpans once, in the County Hospital, stepped over towards the body sitting