“I always do.”
“Pick ’em better. Slow down. Forget about the machines for Brocius if you have to. I’ll tell him you had an attack of arthritis.”
“Not necessary. I’ll get two more IBM’s without any sweat. One in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on Wednesday. The other in Livingston, New Jersey on Friday. Not even Matt Garrett can stop me short of 500. I’ll be retired to Frisco within three years. After that the whole business is yours, new and used. You can count on it.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Masterson said, brushing an imaginary spot of dust from his gaudy sleeve. “Look, I’ve got a few phone calls to make, and then I’m going to hit the trail for Westchester. See you tomorrow.”
Billy Claiburne returned slowly to his cubicle, pondering. How could the police — how could Big Matt Garrett — know anything about the identity of The Quick Red Fox? Claiburne had never been fingerprinted. There had been no photographs taken of him within the last five years. He used a galaxy of aliases: Clyde Older, Hank Galton, James Frank, N. E. Oakley, John Wesley Bass. He was cautious, always cautious. Except for Bats Masterson, Jesse Plummer, Alex McSween, and maybe the blind junkie on the corner, no one knew who the thin shadowy typewriter rustler was.
Why, then, would Garrett be concerned with C&M? What could he know about The Quick Red Fox? Matt Garrett, a young lantern-jawed prosecutor from upstate, a hot-shot lawyer, had recently been named the Governor’s new super-D.A. for the five boroughs of New York. He was supposed to be cleaning up organized crime, including organized crime among the five D.A. offices. But mainly he was after the syndicate, the Big Boys whose careers ended in automobile trunks. He wouldn’t be likely to concern himself with a one-at-a-time typewriter thief.
So then, could the police be onto Bats’s operation in Mt. Kisco? Now there was a thought. Was it possible that Masterson’s typewriter-building enterprise was the real target? Not Billy’s small-scale peccadillos but Bats’s large-scale ripoffs? Had the clever organizer, Bernard Aaron Theodore Sheldon Masterson, the mastermind, somehow managed to slip up? Could it be that this flamboyant cottage-industry tycoon, this ex-typewriter foreman, now self-employed In Apartment 7-E, was under surveillance? No. Not a chance. The man was a pro.
Claiburne knew, with a cynicism born of observation, that criminals of Bats’s magnitude, the Mr. Bigs of Big Town, the Large Worms in the Big Apple, were always sought but never caught. It was the independents, the unconnected, the sly but vulnerable foxes who ended up in the Tombs. He figured Alex McSween must have said or done something to give him away. Never trust a cop, even a crooked one. Drat and double drat.
Quitting time came at six P.M. and Claiburne stepped out the front door into the eye-searing smog of an April evening. Outside he heard a voice call softly, “Hey, Fox.” He looked around. It wasn’t Bats, it might be McSween, but he wasn’t taking any chances. No one was in sight.
As he started to trot toward his car, a voice behind him — it didn’t sound like McSween’s — yelled in an urgent stage whisper, “Hey, Quick Fox, you dope. I’ve got a note from the Dumb Ox.”
It was the blind junkie’s voice. Billy kept going.
Shivering, he jumped into the driver’s seat, snapped on the ignition, and raced off in a cloud of debris.
What was going on? “Hey, Fox... Quick Fox.” A message from McSween through the blind junkie? Incredible. Was his ordered life, his careful routine, about to fall apart? He didn’t like the way things looked.
Did he dare go to his apartment? Not at the moment he didn’t. For an hour he drove aimlessly around lower Manhattan, fuming, quaking. Houston Street never looked drearier. At 7:05 he flipped the wheel toward the East Side, 63rd Street off the park. Why not? He had nowhere else to go.
Billy’s imperious doorman, Loomis, the most superficially distinguished man in the apartment building despite his lack of a first name, handled the car through a junior partner. Billy handled the self-service elevator himself, but not before looking hard into the convex metal mirror.
Claiburne’s studio apartment, richly furnished in rosewood and cowhide, glowed a serene welcome. He was home, safe for the moment, ready to relax in the only place in the world that meant anything to him. Despite all his talk of Frisco, this one-room studio was his permanent home, his only possible home. He loved it as he had loved little else in his 45 years.
This apartment, plus his growing list of typewriter thefts, represented the whole of reality to him. His bold robber-baron dreams of childhood had faded, contracted, narrowed to two small passions: a chromium room in Manhattan and a glittering goal of 500 typewriters. Both were vital to his existence. Everything else was dross.
Here above 63rd Street he could live quietly, obliquely. He could enjoy his vast collection of stereo tapes in total seclusion. He could peer out toward Central Park and see a thousand faceless specimens of humanity, contaminated with their silly, insoluble problems, scurrying below him like insects in a bell jar. A wall of glass protected him.
He crossed the red carpet, lifted an Orrfors tumbler from the wall-hung bar, and poured a double shot of Scotch. He selected a Tex Ritter tape from his shelf of country-and-western favorites. As he started to flip the switch on his stereo set, the telephone began to ring. Strange. No one should be calling.
He drank the Scotch suddenly, at a gulp. A shudder, a wheezing cough swept his narrow frame, and a thin frightened face, his own image in gray parchment, looked back at him from the mirror over the fireplace.
He walked toward the phone like a wary Dodge City gunman at sundown. He lifted the receiver off the hook on the fourth ring. A woman’s cheery voice trilled through the earpiece. “Hello, Western Union calling. Is this Mr. Billy Claiburne?”
“Yes, it is.”
“I have a telegram for you, Mr. Claiburne.”
“Yes?”
“It’s from a Mr. O. K. Earp of Long Island City.”
“Never heard of him, miss. I’m sorry.”
“Well, he’s heard of you, and he’s sent you a telegram. A very weird telegram, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” Billy wanted to hang up.
“Well, I mean, it’s like a singing telegram. Only it’s a poem.”
“A poem?”
“So help me, Mr. Claiburne, it’s a poem, and Mr. Earp said to read it like a poem. So here goes.”
She cleared her throat, waited for an interruption but got none. She delivered the lyric in a voice that sounded solemn, determined, and vaguely puzzled.
Another Case of Identity
by R. R. Irvine[11]
Niles Brundage was the actor who played the role of Sherlock Holmes in the newest TV series, and he played it with a lilt. In fact, Niles Brundage became The Master Detective... an appetizer for Sherlockian aficionados and a hearty entree for mystery fans — not at all, as “Dr. Watson” remarks in the story, “an hors d’oeuvre at a smorgasbord for lunatics”...
“Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot!” With those words Sherlock Holmes, wearing a flap-eared traveling cap, hurried past me.
“Tape is stopped!” shouted the stage manager.