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Copyright © 2011 by the Estate of Harry Stephen Keeler.
All rights reserved.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
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CHAPTER I
“Riddle Me This!”
Police-Captain Michael Simko, day-chief of Chicago Avenue Police Station, raised the telephone on his battered desk as it rang raucously.
“Chicago Avenue Police Station,” he said wearily.
A male voice, suggesting itself strongly, somehow, to be Italian, answered.
“I wish to report a suicide, if you please.”
“Suicide? Where’s the body hanging? This is Captain Michael Simko speaking.”
“It’s not hanging, Captain. It’s shot through the head.”
“I see. Well, is the victim dead? Assuredly so, I mean?”
“Madre Dei!” ejaculated the speaker, now revealing fully he was Italian, and at the same time carrying, in that one moment, a tonal quality which was that of a mature man of 63 or more. “Is he—dead? Well, never is he going to live again—with the bullet hole he has in his right temple. The whole temple area is gone, in fact.”
“Is, eh? Well, is there a doctor nearby who can tell that?”
“No. No, Doctor Giatempo, across the street, he did drive away a little while ago. No, no doctor.”
“Well, while I hold the phone—I suppose you’re right at the body?—feel its pulse. And see if you feel—”
“Cannot do, Captain. He is behind a locked door.”
“Behind a locked door? How do you know what kind of a hole’s in his head, or what?”
“I can see through the crack—or gap—at the side of the door.”
“Can, eh? Well, what else can you see?”
“I see the wrappings of the package he took in from the postman—just before he bumped himself off. Yes, the wrappings—on the floor. I see what he took from the package. I see—”
“What did he take? What did you see?”
“A bottle—an empty, sealed bottle—with a playing card in it. It’s—it’s the deuce of diamonds.”
“A sealed bottle—with a deuce of diamonds in it? And so some gazabo killed himself—right after receiving same? Well, I guess this calls for some detailed questions. Hold the wire till I get my scriptograph pencil laying over on the windowsill.”
And the captain laid the phone down.
“I can figger lots of reasons,” he said to himself sagely, “why a guy might kill himself. But certainly not because he received a bottle containing a deuce of diamonds. Not, not, not, period!”
CHAPTER II
Report by Mr. Marchesi
The captain strode across the splintered soft-wood-floored, railed-off office to the windowsill that looked out on Chicago’s today dowdiest thoroughfare, West Chicago Avenue. Outside, motor trucks were rumbling, snorting, weaving in both directions, making a huge commotion, rattle and clatter, on the degenerated street that led into the North Side’s Honky-Tonk Row just around the comer. Passersby, in garments ranging from hand-me- downs to the loudly checkered suits of race-track poolroom “bookies”, shuffled or trailed lackadaisically by in each direction on the dirty sidewalk underneath the two now-unlighted purple lamps that hung on the front of the smoke-stained old greystone building, and marked it as one more police station. Directly across the street the grease-smelling hamburger stand, with once white-painted front now a dingy yellow, gave off with odors that reached clear to the open window of Captain Michael Simko’s office—the while the hands of the enormous clock on the hamburger stand’s front bespoke the hour to be a quarter to 3 in the afternoon, and time for all good men to eat hamburgers.
The Captain found his crimson-hued plastic pencil on the windowsill just where he had left it when the phone had rung, and which had been squarely atop the torn-off leaf from his Daily Weather Prognostication Calendar which he had been checking against the outside weather, a thing he did meticulously and religiously every day. The calendar leaf said, in huge black type, June 3rd, and the daily prognostication beneath it—and which doubtlessly had been written a year before!—and which was in the finest of print perhaps to discourage people from reading it—said: “Sunshiny. Balmy. Neither too hot nor too cold.” And had, as in more cases than not, been 100-percent correct. Alongside this item, he found also the pocket handmirror with which he had been about—also as the phone rang—to signal the hamburger joint across the way to bring over “two on rye”. He picked up the pencil and the calendar leaf, the latter so he would have something on which to sprinkle notes, also the handmirror, noting, as he glanced dourly into its reflecting surface, his 66-year old self, two years short now of retiring, with his bald head surrounded by the capuchin-like ring of greying hairs, the suggestion of a paunch under the tarnished brass buttons of his faded blue uniform coat.
With his retrieved objects, he repaired back over to the phone, in front of the wicket that faced inward of the station, put the mirror disgruntledly into his side coat pocket, the calendar leaf down blank side up so he could write on it, took up the phone again, poised his pencil-pen.
“Still on there, my informative friend?” he first assured himself.
“Waiting, Captain.”
“A’right. Well, let’s start right straight from the beginning now. A’right. first, what’s your name?”
“Mr. Marchesi, Captain.”
“The whole of it? First name, too?”
“Oh, it’s Joseph Marchesi. Joseph A. Marchesi.”
“Joseph—A.—Marchesi? That sounds kind of, sort of, familiar to me. Where have I maybe heard it—before?”
“Well, if you’ve ever been about Little Italy, Captain, in your police work—in other years, that is—you would have heard of me as instructor, in English, in the elementary Garibaldi School there. For I have had normal-school education in this country, you see. I flatter myself I have converted more little Italian boys, fresh over from Italy, into English-speaking Americans, than anybody. Later, I quit the schools—was in real-estate. Still later I acquired—”
“Where do you live, Mr. Marchesi?” the Captain out off what might become an extensive business biography.
“I live in the Marchesi Flats, on the corner of—well, they used to, once, long long ago, be called the Benedetto Apartments—”
“Then they’re in Little Italy, on the corner o’ Pelligrini and Leaf Streets. Big gangling 4-story red-brick dump, with rusted fire-escapes, and about 4 entrances, all in all, giving out on two streets, three on one, one on the other, and full of 3-room walk-up, coal-heated, cold-water, gas-lighted flats!”
“You do know Little Italy, eh, Captain?”
“Covered it in a squad-car for some years. And on foot before that. I know those flats. Raided many of ’em in my day, for illicit alky cooking during Prohibition, and to take in tight-lipped Mafia members with long knives! And—well, you must own those flats today, eh?—if they got your name today?”
“I own them, yes. For many years. I live in one myself. So I can watch my tenants, and all that goes on.”
“Good for you, Mr. Marchesi. If more slum-owners did as you do, there’d be less crime in slums. Most slum landlords I know live in Lake Forest or Winnetka. And—well, now who is this bird who’s killed himself? Roomer? No, not a roomer, for those flats only have three rooms in each, so—”
“Right, Captain. Well, he is a young man—oh, about twenty-three years old—who rented the particular flat that’s directly above me to write the—as he called it—the Great American Novel in.”