The Affair of the Bottled Deuce. Harry Stephen Keeler

is playing low music! “—who is laid up with a slight indisposition on our couch. And then sit down and chat with her. Continuing, indeed, to do so. For all of twenty minutes. Or maybe thirty—let’s call it between twenty and thirty, yes? When suddenly—I hear a shot! A shot, yes. One only. And above me. It—the sound of it, I mean—comes through my and my signora’s ceiling. I think—first of all—that Mr. Crockett has had an accident with a gun merely going off in his hands—and I wait to hear casual footsteps up there. To be quite frank, I do not believe I would have heard such had there been such—for the floors of my old building are thick and staunch and—Anyway, I heard nothing suggesting footsteps, anyway. I wait. I wait a little longer. My signora urges me to go up and see if all is right. I wait a little longer. Then I decide to go straight up, and ask him if everything is all right. So I go out. Upstairs. And knock I do. No answer! I knock louder. No answer. Whereupon I peer through a sort of gap at the side of the door—yes, a gap between the door and its casing, on the lock side—it is wide enough to see plentifully. He is sitting there at his kitchen table desk, slumped forward upon it, sidewise to me. He is, in distance from my eye, actually no further than about 7 feet, if that. He had been facing rearward of the flat—away and off from the too-brilliant front windows—and the bright sun from the afternoon sky is full upon his bare back—his bare torso—his bathing trunks—his writing table or what of same is not occluded by his slumped person. Off to the further rear corner of the table, neatly laid out like a trio, are his—his literary accouterments, if I may call them such!—his typewriter with even yet a presumed page of his novel in it—stack of already written pages alongside it—the brass desk incinerator alongside them. But in the fullest of visibility is—or shall I say now was?—the big red gory hole in his right temple—rather destruction in that area, and from which blood was dripping, dripping, dripping to the table, and therefrom off to the floor below—the unmistakable powder burns about the area—the black gun-metal gun in his right hand, his hand and arm hanging downward. All tell the tale. If not indeed the wrappings of that package he had taken in, on the floor back and off from his chair a few feet.”

      “The stuff with the gold spiculies in it, eh? And doubtlessly protecting carton that had been inside? And maybe stuffing, too?”

      “All that, yes. The paper with the gold spicules. Carton. And excelsior, yes. While on the desk directly in front of him was—still is, of course—a flagon-like glass transparent bottle that had not been there at all, at all, when I had talked to him earlier—a glass bottle sealed with something at the top, and containing inside itself only a playing card—a deuce of diamonds, as I said, for it is turned sufficiently doorward to make it out. And—”

      “Well, why didn’t you go inside at once—and examine him closer? From your description to me of that destruction in the temple region I fancy he’s deado as dead ever was. Still, why didn’t you go in, on general principles, and examine closer? Feel his pulse, anyway? For of course you must have duplicate keys. And—”

      “For two reasons, Captain,” said Mr. Marchesi dignifiedly. “One being that I would prefer that in any violent event occurring in my flats, the police themselves be first to enter—or to examine. But, whether or no, I had no choice in this matter. For Mr. Crockett had put a special Yale lock on this door, when he came, and a powerful hand-bolt to boot. The hand-bolt is shot. You can see that, on looking through the gap.”

      “Well, how about the one other door of that particular flat, leading on to the same hall? The—the kitchen door, it would be?”

      “Same thing! A Yale lock. And a hand-bolt. Also shot. For I took a look there, too. Also thanks to a very slight gap between the door and its casing. Nobody could get in.”

      “I suppose you thought to go downstairs and out one of your own windows—front or back—and up the fire-escapes to his—for on a balmy day like this he undoubtedly had his gratings open—some of them—”

      “Not for one single minute, sir, did I think of doing anything like you say. I—I am too old myself to be clinging to precarious fire-escapes, and stumbling along the platforms lying at each level. And besides, these steel gratings on all Mr. Crockett’s windows are as impenetrable on a balmy day as on another kind of a day. In short, he would open the windows for air—but keep the gratings locked and—”

      “I guess I am an idiot, at that. After all, a grating will let balmy air through just as well locked as open. Well, how about the people in the other flat that leads out to the same hallway—and have a fire-escape exit on same level platform as his? They know anything?”

      “That flat is vacant just now. I—I have been asking too much for it, I fear. It being a fourth story. I must come down on it a bit. I—”

      “That’s an economic law, Mr. Marchesi. It’s called the Law of Demand and Supply. Well, how about the flat under that, but on your floor level—the one adjoining your own? Do its occupants know anything at all? Like—”

      “The man and woman occupying it both work. Are never home daytimes.”

      “Yes, I see. Well, have you anything further you can tell me now?”

      “Quite nothing, Captain. I have related everything from—from the proverbial A to the proverbial Izzard. I am myself, just now, here in my own flat, where we have a phone. A private phone. And on which I am doing my talking.”

      “Very good. Well, it kind of looks, offhand, Mr. Marchesi, as though your tenant, Mr. Lythgoe Crockett, Esquire, just didn’t like the gift that was sent him, doesn’t it? Yeah, the deuce of diamonds sealed up in a bottle! Whether it warned him, or scared him, or what, is at present something of a guess. The wrappings, however, will have a corner-card on them. And the sender can tell us why he sent the contents. In fact, will have to—if he doesn’t want to taste the taste of rubber ho—ah—of intensive interrogation. Well, now I’ll send over two men, who will have authority to bust in the door. And for all damage done, you can bill the department. For we pay for those things, now. Yeah, out of yours and other taxpayers’ money! Now have you got a jimmy on your premises—ah—a crowbar—”

      “I have a crowbar, yes, a powerful one, on the premises.”

      “Well, one of these men,” went on the Captain, “was a male nurse in the County Hospital long ago, and the other was in the medical corpse in the late war. The two together are’s good as any doctor. Now you stick right around there from here on.”

      “I will even stand downstairs in the doorway—so they can see, as they come up, which is the entrance to where they are going.”

      “Do that. Stand down there. Have the crowbar back inside. Be very casual. So that we don’t drum up a crowd!”

      “Will do all that, Captain. Will, incidentally, be in the Leaf Street entrance.”

      “Oh yeah, Leaf Street. I remember. All right. Goodbye.”

      And the Captain hung up. Went wearily through the swinging wooden gate in the wooden railing which closed in, for most of its extent, the wicket-encased “desk”. Here he turned toward a closed room diagonally across the station area. A young man in bright lavender suit, and Panama hat, came up the low stairs leading from off the street.

      “Hi, Cap? I’m Spayley. New man on the City News Bureau. Anything of interest breaking, broke—or to break?”

      “Not a damned thing, Spayley,” said the Captain with a moue.

      “Okay. I’ll run on then.”

      The Captain continued his progress toward that further closed room.

      “If there’s anything I hate,” he said emphatically to himself, “it’s the Press barging in and messing in on even such a mere thing as a suicide. Least of all a suicide because of—of a bottled deuce. Phooie! Now the case can be in the exclusive hands of two guys who’ve had some experience in crime, suicide, murder, whatnot.”

      To which he added:

      “Lousy Lou—and Butterball!”

      He had reached the room