Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2, July 1959

Double Talk by Mil Bigsby

The stickup required some real cool thinking. But not the “Hey, Rube!” kind, exactly.

John Shaw took off his shoes and lay down on the bed in his house-trailer. It was two o’clock on the morning of July fifth and he had just finished twenty hours of hard work on the lot. The sun had shone brightly and the carnival midway had been crowded. Now his tired assistants were pulling down the front flaps of the tents over the joints, and the ferris wheel men were covering up the seats. The last music box had been turned off and the lights on the carnival ground went out one by one.

It had been a good day. John had hidden the bags of money in the bottom of the refrigerator, shoving an unwrapped loaf of bread in front to hide them.

Tomorrow Martha, his wife, would be discharged from the hospital. The money in the refrigerator would pay all of the outstanding bills, with a substantial sum left over.

He rose to answer the knock on the door, his mind still on his wife, and her long illness. It was probably Carl with the rest of the money collected from the concessions.

He stood in his stocking feet, his graying hair rumpled, his tall form bent. He spoke through the door. “Carl?” he asked.

“Yah,” came a low voice.

John unlocked the door, then quickly tried to close it when he saw the two strange men standing there. The dark little man thrust a gun into John’s stomach and jerked the door open with his free hand. “Back up,” he said, in a cold level tone. “And keep your hands up!”

His companion followed close behind him. “This is a stickup!” he added.

John looked around him. Only the light over the sink was on, and the two men had moved into the murky darkness in the front part of the trailer. He rubbed his shirt sleeve over his sweating forehead, and the man with the gun rasped instantly: “I told you to keep your hands up!”

John could not see their faces well. They wore hats pulled low over their eyes and turned-up coat collars. He wondered how he could keep them from finding the money. In the sacks hidden behind the loaf of bread was more money he had collected in three previous weeks.

It had been a rainy season, and a tornado had blown the merry-go-round top all to pieces, and he’d had to replace that. A drunk had hit his wheel operator over the head and put the unfortunate man in bed for five days with cuts from the broken bottle. And now these vicious thugs!

“Let me sit down!” he said, and flopped on the couch, his hands still above his head.

“Get me that money,” said the man with the gun.

John looked into beady black eyes that returned his stare mockingly. The nose was long, the eyebrows bushy in the lean, cruel face.

“What money?” asked John, sparring for time, visualizing the loss of most of the ‘take’ — the payment on the trailer, Martha’s hospital bill... But wait! Carl was somewhere out there with still more money to be brought in. The bulk of the money was in the refrigerator, however. Carl would only have about three hundred dollars when he came.

The man with the gun said: “Where’s the money the woman who sells tickets at the merry-go-round gave you? I saw you carry it in here under your coat.”

John knew the man was no carnival worker or he would not have said “Merry-go-round.” He would have said “Jinny”. If only Carl would come, so that he could give him some kind of high sign.

The younger man was getting impatient. He yanked open the knife-and-fork drawer and threw the eating utensils on the floor with a clatter.

“Where is the dough?” demanded his companion, prodding John under the arms with the gun so viciously that the carnival owner cried out in pain.

“Under the pillow,” he groaned. The younger man stepped over the knives and forks and began to tear the bed apart. He threw the two pillows on the floor, shook out the covers and pushed the mattress off the bed.

“Ain’t no money here,” he said disgustedly. “You’d better come clean if you want to go on living.” His face was stubble-darkened with a week’s growth of beard, his leather jacket frayed and oil stained.

“Try the couch where he’s sitting!” said the man with the gun. He prodded John again. “Get over on the chair!” he ordered.

There was a knock on the door and Carl’s voice called, “John, let me in!”

The gunman said in a low voice, “Get rid of him. If you try to warn him I’ll blow you apart.”

John licked his lips, spoke just loud enough for Carl to hear outside the trailer. “Carl, take that stuff from the joints with you. Rube wants the nut from the gate. You take care of this for me!”

“What the hell?” asked Carl in a puzzled voice. “Are you off your rocker?”

“Rube came here, complaining, bothering me. You take care of him!”

They heard Carl leave.

“Now where is that money?” the man with the gun demanded.

“Look in the top cupboard over the sink,” John said. “There’s a sugar bowl there with money hidden in it.”

He’d remembered that Martha always kept the grocery money up there, and the thugs would find perhaps three or four dollars. That would keep them busy until Carl came back.

The younger man pushed the dishes angrily on the floor before he found the sugar bowl. John sighed with relief. Every minute he could keep them occupied weighed in his favor.

The younger man found the tea pot. “A lousy four dollars and twenty cents is all,” he muttered. The two thugs stopped to divide the find between them.

“Now where’s the rest?” said the man with the gun. “I’m getting tired fooling around with you.”

“Look in the ice box,” said John. The older man still held the gun on him, while the younger hood dumped the few groceries on the floor. John thought of his own gun near the door. Maybe he could shoot them down as they left the trailer.

The two thugs eagerly grabbed the bags and started out the door. There were two dull thuds, and a loud scream. Someone turned on the outside light, and it shone on a group of carnival workers gathered around the fallen stickup men.

A police patrol car squealed to a halt and two officers ran over. John scooped up his bags of money and threw them back into the refrigerator again. Then he went to the door.

“Boys, I don’t know how to thank you,” said John. “What did Carl tell you?”

The police were busy handcuffing the two thugs and putting them into the radio car.

“He says, ‘Get over to the boss’ trailer and catch a couple rubes as they come out. John’s getting robbed. Somebody run quick and call the cops.’ ”

“Thank God, you understood me, Carl!” said John grasping his chief assistant’s hand. “Pete, you and your men sure laid them out!”

“Will somebody explain all this to me!” said the Chief of Police who had just come up. “Some half crazy guy called on the phone, and told us where to come. He talked about ‘Nuts on a gate’ and ‘Rubes’ and a few other things I couldn’t make head or tail of.”

“It’s simple to a carnival man,” John said. “When I told Carl, ‘Take that stuff from the joints with you’ he knew what I meant. ‘Joints’ to us means ‘concession stands’. I knew Carl was out collecting the money due me from the concession men and was going to bring it to me. There is nobody named ‘Rube’ in this outfit and sometimes we call people who are not with the carnival ‘Rubes’. ‘Nut on the Gate’ means the admission fee at the gate, so he knew I meant money.”

John laughed. “I suppose it does sound like double talk to somebody who ain’t a carney.

“I knew these men were not carnival people because one of ’em said ‘merry-go-round’. A carnival man would call it a ‘Jinny’. When I said, ‘Rube wants the nut from the gate’ I was sure Carl would guess somebody was trying to get our money. You see, we understood each other!”