I looked.
"You see, he wasn't carrying a bowling ball in that bag. Bowling balls don't leak."
I sat down on the stool and the room started to spin. I hadn't noticed the blood before.
Then I raised my head. A patrolman came into the tavern. He'd been running, judging from the way he wheezed, but his face wasn't red. It was greenish-white.
"Get him?" snapped the sergeant.
"What's left of him." The patrolman looked away. "He wouldn't stop. We fired a shot over his head, maybe you heard it. He hopped the fence in back of the block here and ran onto the tracks. And smack into this freight train."
"Dead?"
The patrolman nodded. "Lieutenant's down there right now. And the meat-wagon. They're gonna have to scrape him off the tracks."
The sergeant swore softly under his breath. "Then we can't know for sure," he said. "Maybe he was just a sneak-thief after all."
"One way," the patrolman said. "Hanson's coming up with his bag. It rolled clear of the freight when it hit."
The other patrolman walked in, carrying the bowling bag. The sergeant took it out of Hanson's hands and set it up on the bar.
"Was this what he was carrying?" he asked me.
"Yes," I said. My voice stuck in my throat.
I turned away. I didn't want to watch the sergeant open the bag. I didn't even want to see their faces when they looked inside. But of course, I heard them. I think Hanson got sick.
I gave the sergeant an official statement, which he requested. He wanted a name and address and he got them too. Hanson took it all down and made me sign it.
I told him all about the conversation with the stranger, the whole theory of murder as a hobby, the idea of choosing the dregs of life as victims because they weren't likely to be missed.
"Sounds screwy when you talk about it, doesn't it?" I concluded. "All the while, I thought it was a gag."
The sergeant glanced at the bowling bag, then looked at me. "It's no gag," he said. "That's probably just how the killer's mind worked. I know all about him — everybody on the force has studied those Torso Slaying cases inside and out for years. The story makes sense. The murderer left town twenty years ago, when things got too hot. Probably he did join up over in Europe, and maybe he stayed on in the Occupation countries when the war ended. Then he got the urge to come back and start all over again."
"Why?" I asked.
"Who knows? Maybe it was a hobby with him. A sort of a game he played. Maybe he liked to win trophies. But imagine what nerve he had, walking into a Bowling Convention and pulling off a stunt like that? Carrying a bowling bag so he could take the — "
I guess he saw the look on my face because he put his hand on my shoulder. "Sorry," he said. "I know how you feel. Had a pretty close shave yourself, just talking to him. Probably the cleverest psychopathic murderer who ever lived. Consider yourself lucky."
I nodded and headed for the door. I could still make that midnight train, now. And I agreed with the sergeant about the close shave, the cleverest psychopathic murderer in the world.
I agreed that I was lucky, too. I mean there at the last moment, when that stupid sneak-thief ran out of the tavern and I gave him the bowling bag that leaked. Lucky for me he never noticed I'd switched bags with him.
…Said Jack The Ripper
by ROBERT ARTHUR
I wish to direct myself particularly to the realists among you. Dummies — the ones I know at any rate — can be quite vocal. May I ask that you never pooh-pooh the utterances made by them and other inanimate objects. If you, for example, should bark your shins on a chair that gets in your way, kick it, berate it, but, for heaven's sake, do not deny it its right to talk back.
Two weeks before the annual opening, Atlantic Beach Park was a ghost town by night, wrapped in shadowed silence. A mist riding in from the ocean twined itself around the Ferris wheel, hid the deserted roller coaster, made the street lights into shimmering yellow blobs.
Inside the one big room of the rickety building that housed Pop Dillon's Chamber of Horrors — The Waxworks Museum Supreme — a dusty bulb on the end of a long drop cord gave a little light, but left the corners full of shadows that seemed to crouch as if about to spring. A lifetime in the carnival business had made Pop, a wizened little man, a night owl. Now he was getting his assortment of murderers, cutthroats, criminals and victims ready for the coming season — mostly a matter of brushing off the winter's dust or mending a few moth holes in the costumes.
Humming tunelessly, Pop adjusted the flowing necktie of Holmes, the Chicago murder king whose odd hobby had been to cut up pretty young women in his basement. Then he went on to John Dillinger.
"Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream," Pop sang in a monotone to himself, "merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream… Hello, Mr. Dillinger. You're looking fine. But what a condition to let your gun get into. Rusty!"
Dillinger didn't answer. Sometimes he did; sometimes he didn't. It depended on his mood. Pop was always willing to chat when one of his wax figures seemed in the mood, and he had had a number of interesting conversations with some of them, such as the ones he had with Jack the Ripper, who was naturally boastful. Others, though, never spoke a word — they were the silent types. Pop never tried to force them to talk — even a wax dummy had a right to privacy, he figured.
Pop was dusting Jack the Ripper, who with knife in hand kneeled over a female victim, a fiendish smile on his face, when he heard the front door open.
"Pop!" It was Hendryx, the beat cop, a friendly, burly young fellow who came forward into the circle of light as Pop turned. "Got something to tell you."
"Yeah," Pop said eagerly, curiously.
"Want to warn you. It happened just a couple hours ago."
"Yeah?"
"Your old pal Burke Morgan escaped. On the way to the Shore Beach Penitentiary — "
"Morgan escaped?" Pop's creased features registered dismay. "But he's going to the electric chair at midnight."
"Was going."
"You mean he's not?"
"He had the nerve to petition the Governor to postpone his execution. Said he wasn't well enough to be executed. Imagine that. He'd been in the prison hospital with something or other. What do you think of that for nerve?"
Pop could only shake his head.
"Of course the Governor said no. But the way it turned out, that didn't make any difference, far as Burke's getting out. So I thought I'd better warn you."
"That's bad," Pop said. "His escaping."
"It was all set. Then things start happening. The Governor he orders Morgan transferred to Shore Beach Pen when they find the chair up at the state pen's not working."
"But you said he wasn't going to be electrocuted — "
"He got away. Four guards in the prison van, and he got away. A big truck comes along, smacks into the van and knocks it over."
"Oh, that's very bad."
"They had to cut Morgan out of that van with acetylene torches. And these two guys that done it had machine guns — that's the way I heard it."
"Oh, he must be caught," Pop moaned. "My whole summer'll be ruined if he isn't."
"I wanted to warn you. They think he's wounded. And that's not going to help his disposition none. Well, I got to be on my way. Just wanted to tell you so you'd be on the lookout."
"My whole summer," Pop said dolefully. "Look over here, Hendryx, at this new display. It'll be a great drawing card, but only if Morgan is electrocuted."
"Should be going," Hendryx said as he followed Pop to a realistic electric chair set on a platform in the middle of the room. Then he asked, "What's the pitch, Pop?"