Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 38, No. 4. Whole No. 215, October 1961

Spook Money by J. C. Furnas

It all started in Lower Two of a Pullman sleeping car named Mt. Minnequamagog... Don’t miss this gay and ghostly caper!

You talk about these old-time millionaires lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills to show off. Well, I’m no show-off and I never been what you could call rich, but I’m way out ahead of that kind of caper. I mean, sixteen years ago I lit a cigarette with a five-hundred-dollar bill and never regretted it. It don’t matter if people know about it now. Nobody’ll believe it anyway.

I come from Callao, Indiana, which is a tank town on the Vandalia railroad, or was. The Vandalia was swallowed up years ago. For all I know, Callao’s gone too, but my hailing from there had a lot to do with this deal.

I went to Chicago when I was seventeen and got a job in a wholesale grocery concern called Blatch & Cummings. They got branches for three hundred miles around, and I moved up the ladder and traveled for them, checking up on local managers. Never married, just worked days and went out nights some, but never hooked up with any girl that got steady ideas same time I did.

Well, November, 1928, I had to go shoot some trouble in the Columbus branch. I disremember what the trouble was, but I never forgot much else about that trip.

I left Chicago in Lower Two in a Pullman named Mt. Minnequamagog, on the men’s washroom end, right over the wheels. They said it was coming on Thanksgiving and travel was heavy and I was lucky to get that.

Half an hour before we pulled out, I was on board and brushing my teeth and crawling into my nightshirt — I never been comfortable in pajamas yet — and bedding down for the night. I reckon I might have got to sleep and missed it all, only when they hooked the engine on, the engineer come back too heavy and gives us a shaking up that fetched me broad awake and sore about it.

I was still wide-awake and sore when we were already fifty miles on our way. I had a bottle in my grip — Canadian rye, stronger than most you got those times — so I had a snort, and then another one, but it just made me wakefuller, like I had something bothering me but couldn’t recollect what.

One trouble was the train noises — first a stretch of whacka-whacka-whacka-whacka, and then a string of clicks and rattles that was worse. Usually those ordinary train noises don’t trouble me ten cents’ worth, but this stuff kind of latched on to my attention and pretty soon I commenced hearing tunes in it, only the tune wouldn’t stay put long enough to help you drowse off. It would start Turkey in the Straw and switch to I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles and then to Marching Through Georgia, fit to drive you nuts. And then it seemed like it started sending Morse code.

I know Morse because when I was a kid, me and another kid next door named Myron Brinton, only we always called him Puggy, pooled our junk money and sent away for one of those Learn-to-be-a-telegrapher layouts: two keys and some wire and dry cells and a code book. We rigged her up and sent stuff back and forth from each other’s bedrooms. Puggy was smart but in a low-down kind of way and I don’t know as I ever liked him exactly, but he was a couple of years older and always up to something and some ways I guess he was kind of a hero to me too. His call letters was MB and mine was TK, for Tom Knox, which is my name. And I reckon once you know Morse you never forget it, like swimming.

Well, these rattles on the train hit a Morse letter now and again — just V and some hash, then P and more hash, and so on. Then over and over again, like these things they shake in rumba orchestras, they started up: Da — daditda... Da — daditda... Da — daditda... And that’s Morse for TK.

That’s right, I thought it was the whiskey. I hadn’t had much, but a little bad booze sometimes goes a long way. But the more I listened, the queerer it got, because the rattle even sent that TK with a little slur, just like Puggy used to. I never got up to. a sending speed that would faze him, but he was always a sloppy sender compared to me.

Then I figured I was asleep and dreaming without knowing it, so I shook myself awake for sure, and the rattles kept right on sending. It seemed like the noise was back of the head of the bunk somehow. So I got into my pants and checked up, and what was back of the head of the bunk was the washroom wall and the steel closet where they keep sheets and towels.

I prowled the men’s room, and the only soul in it was the porter catching a nap. I was feeling kind of cool round my bare feet, but I stayed with it and woke him up and offered him a dollar to open up the closet, though it didn’t seem reasonable there was any room in it for a practical joker.

He did it, but it was pretty plain he thought I was drunk or nuts, and I wasn’t arguing the point; I just waved the dollar at him. And, like I expected, there wasn’t any little green men in there sending Morse. There was nothing but stacks of linen.

When I got back in the bunk, the TK business had quit. But naturally I sneezed as my cold feet warmed up and here it was again: Dadadit — dit — dididit — diditda — dadit — dadidit — didididit — dit — didit — da. And that’s Morse for Gesundheit.

That finished me. I reached over to the window sill and tapped back with my middle fingernail, like handling a key: Dada — dadididit, meaning MB.

Puggy come right back — it was him, all right — with a stream of Morse that swamped me, I had to break in and send how I was rusty as an old gate and he always was a lousy sender and slow down! Then I did one of those double-takes, like in the movies. Here I was, holding conversation with the rattles on a train!

He slowed and begun sending pretty clean code for him. First off, he made it clear he was dead. “But I ain’t in the other world,” he says. “Seems to be one but I ain’t there yet. I can’t go there till I get something off my mind.”

So I asked him where he was; I had to send it twice before he got it. I guess I was pretty jittery.

“Calm down, Tom,” he says. “I ain’t going to bite you. I’m too glad to see you. If you stay jumpy, I can’t read you and I got no time to waste. Where am I? I’m right here in the bunk with you. You need a shave and you got on an old-fashioned nightshirt, like the hayseed you always was. But you don’t feel crowded because I ain’t here in the flesh, like they say. And no squawks about its being your bunk because I been first citizen of this Lower Two for seven years, and if anybody’s an interloper it’s you, see.”

He said he’d died in 1921, when he was thirty. Seems he’d left home after I did and gone bad and turned professional gambler and done all right on long-distance trains sometimes and in joints sometimes and then when he was in France with the A.E.F., cleaning up on the boys paydays. He said he never asked for trouble with amateur stuff like marked cards but he never saw the beat of the second deal he developed.

Well, this car had been on a Florida run in 1921 and Puggy and his partner had quarreled over money in the washroom; the partner had knifed him and he’d staggered out and fell into Lower Two and died there. “I been here ever since,” he says. “When you’re dead and got something on your mind, you stay where you died till you get it off. That’s the rules. And that’s where you come in, chum.”

I said, “Why pick on me?” There must of been hundreds of people in that bunk in seven years.

“Ain’t you my friend?” he says. “You’re the first familiar face I seen since I got mine, boyhood pal.” He sent that with a kind of a sneer. “Besides, I ain’t the kind of spirit that can moan or holler or talk right out. Some can, but I’m the rapping kind, and the run of these passengers don’t know Morse. A couple of times I tried the regular spirit system, rapping the alphabet by numbers, five for E and thirteen for M and such, but it’s too monotonous to catch their notice. They’d just go to sleep on me. I don’t see how those uneducated spirits get anywhere with it.”

I asked if the train crews didn’t know Morse.

“They don’t sleep in Pullman berths,” he says. “Now, if I was haunting a house, maybe I’d get somewhere pounding and hammering, but nobody pays any attention to noises on trains. I been trying Morse on them all this time and I never found a one that knew code, barring an old fellow that begun to tumble five years ago and got so scared he threw himself off the train. They put it down to suicide. He never said yes or no, just skinned out of the bunk and out to the vestibule and wrestled the door open and dived out and broke his neck. Served him right,” he says. “He didn’t have no call to panic like that. I wasn’t going to hurt him.”

Well, about that point I got out my bottle, poison or not.

“I ain’t had a drink since I died,” Puggy says, sort of wistful. “But don’t you go getting plastered. I got a proposition for you.”

I asked him was it honest.

“Your end is,” he says. “Anyway, you got no choice. I’m asking polite, like one pal to another, but you try saying no and see what happens to you.”

His trouble was money and his wife. Seems he’d eloped with a Callao girl named Velma Burke in 1912 and she was kind of up against it after he got killed. She was working in a roadside place called Virgil’s outside Lansing and getting along the best she could and he wanted to see she was done right by. He wanted her to have a nest egg he’d stashed away that she didn’t know about, and I was to go lift it and take it to her.

I asked him how he knew where she was if he couldn’t leave Lower Two, and he blew up at me.

“Rot you,” he says, “I don’t want no questions. We got ways of knowing things. I never see her, but I know what her situation is. If I can just fix this up, I can have some peace,” he says with a kind of a sigh. “I sure can use some after doing sixty thousand miles a year in this old crummy. Just back and forth, back and forth. Now, dry up, and here’s your marching orders,” he says. And he give them to me.

The cash — ten thousand dollars in big bills — was in a couple of waxed flat-fifty cigarette tins nailed up inside a big hollow sycamore in the creek bottom on the Cass place outside Lebanon, Michigan. “Biggest tree anywheres along,” Puggy says. “Way high in the dark of the hollow.” And he sends “Dididitdadit — ditdit,” which is “30” and means a sign-off.

I spent the rest of the night tapping, trying to raise him again, but I reckon he just squatted there and laughed at me. Between bad company and original cussedness he was a pretty mean lot. I didn’t want any part of him, or Velma Burke either. I remembered her. She was kind of an angelic knockout to look at — green eyes and red hair and rose-petal skin, and blow-away slim — easy to fall for, I guess if you didn’t know her the way I did, from being in the same high-school class.

I wasn’t likely to forget her, because she did me real low-down dirt once, whispered to me for an answer in a history test and I gave her my guess, which was it was Benedict Arnold shot Alexander Hamilton. It sounded reasonable to me, but it was wrong, and when it come up that way on both papers they had us both on the carpet and Velma made out she’d guessed wrong and she’d seen me peeking at her paper. And that was the girl I was to drop everything and do a big favor for.

Well, I wasn’t much use to Blatch & Cummings in Columbus, and I didn’t sleep coming back next night, though I made sure the car wasn’t Mt. Minnequamagog but Polecat Springs. Then that Thursday, while I was still groggy inside, old J.M. Blatch told me to get over to Bay City and find out about spoilage trouble there with our canned beets. Yes, Bay City is in Michigan and Lebanon is close by. I was crazy enough, to wonder if maybe Puggy and his spirit friends hadn’t fixed it to spoil those beets.

I went. And, after I’d smelled enough sour beets to last a lifetime, I hired a car and spent the weekend looking for the Cass place near Lebanon. And what beat me, being in the state of mind I was in, I couldn’t get track of any Cass place within fifteen miles of that town.

I didn’t just check the courthouse records and then drive around aimless. I covered the local real-estate men and the editor of the paper and the oldest inhabitants. If anybody named Cass had so much as dickered for an acre of land near Lebanon since Methuselah’s time, I’d have got wind of it.

So I was sure I was crazy. Only, on the train coming back to Chicago, I got a queer feeling on my right thigh like nothing I ever had before. And when I took my clothes off that night, there, neat as you please, in red on my skin, branding me like a steer, not to be rubbed off or washed off — I found that out fast — was Puggy’s call letters: Dash-dash — dash-dot-dot-dot.

I still recollect how that place felt — not like a burn or an itch or a sting or a prickle, but more like the way you feel in the back of your neck when you suspect somebody is staring at you and you turn around and sure enough they are. It was real, all right. I should know. I lived with it for years.

I got salve from drug stores and goop from advertisements about “blotched skin” and “stubborn blemishes.” I gave up swimming because I didn’t want people to see it. Finally I took it to the best skin doctor I could hear tell of and gave him the story.

He looked at my leg and said something about “interesting stigmata” and told me to come back Friday and he’d have a colleague there to look at it. Well, before Friday I looked up “stigmata” in the dictionary and it said stuff about “certain mental states, as in hysteria.” So I never went back.

Next thing was to have it out with Puggy. So I wrote the Pullman outfit asking for sentimental reasons if they could locate me a car named Mt. Minnequamagog, and they wrote back short but polite that there was no longer any such name on the list. That made sense. She was probably overdue for scrapping. But that letter disappointed me so I didn’t hardly bother to wonder where Puggy was hanging out, now that they’d put the blowtorch to his old home on wheels.

Always and forever I had that feeling in my leg, and it looked like there was no chance at all of ever getting rid of it. I took to drinking heavier and going out with a class of people I’d never liked before. I hung on to my job, but it was plain that old J.M. had stopped thinking of me as a comer the way he had. And even though I knew Puggy’s old car was gone for good, I worked up a creepy feeling about trains so strong I took to driving or flying wherever I had to go — planes were coming in by then. For years I never set foot in a railroad car.

But, come winter of 1935, I was stuck. Ice all over, and I had to testify in a lawsuit about a refused order in Evansville. The airport was snowed in; trains were still running, though. And every train was so jammed, the best I could get was Lower Two. The car was named Mountain Melody, but even so you probably have a rough idea of how creepy I felt about it.

She had plenty of clicks for me to wince at and listen to. Then, right out of Englewood, as speed picked up, they come cold and clear: Ditdidit — ditda — da, and that’s Morse for RAT.

I just froze.

Dididididit — diditda — dadit — daditda, says the clicks, and that’s Morse for PUNK.

I unfroze enough to work my nail on the sill. “This not your car.”

“My car, chum,” says Puggy. “Renamed years ago. Some professor of Indian stuff noticed her and wrote the company did they know what Minnequamagog meant in Indian and they found out it was something you’d blush to chalk on a fence. How’s your right leg, you double-crossing swindler?”

Well, it was jumping and pulsing awful, that’s how it was. I could scarcely keep from hollering. But I got a grip on myself and sent him all about how I’d combed Lebanon, Mich., and finished up: “I’m not spook enough to make out how you figure I get your mark on me because you don’t know what you’re talking about. But I do know there’s no Cass place in that end of Michigan, nor ever was.”

No answer for a spell. Then very slow: “What state was that?”

I sent: Dada — didit — dit-didit — didididit, meaning “Mich.”

There was another long break, then a string of bad language sent sloppy but heartfelt, then: Didit-didit — dit-dit — diditda — ditdaditd — dit-dit — dit-dit — daa — didit — a — dididit — dada — didit — dididit — dididit, making: “You fool, it’s Miss.”

I might have known. Practically every state in the Union has a Lebanon, and Puggy’s dots were always unreliable. The string of dots on the tail of Miss. could easy make Mich., if the sender was careless. Or maybe I read it wrong. That was Puggy’s idea.

I said it was his fault, and we had it backwards and forwards all the way to Terre Haute. I don’t reckon any such language ever got into code since old man Morse invented it. But I didn’t argue about what I did next. My leg was leaving me no choice but to hightail it for Lebanon, Miss., first chance.

Soon as I got back from Evansville, seeing thawing weather had cleared the highways, I told J.M. I had family trouble, borrowed a week against my 1936 vacation, and took out in my own car. With me went a big flashlight, a stout claw hammer, and a short stepladder.

This time it was a breeze. The day I struck Lebanon, it rained cats and dogs, so there wasn’t anybody much outdoors to wonder about me. Three questions located the old Cass place — a played-out little cotton plantation five miles from town on a miserable road, with nobody living there.

It took time, and I hadn’t seen mud like that down along the creek since France in 1918. Raincoat or not, I got soaked to the skin. But here was my tree, big as a circus tent and hollow as a night-club smile. And here were the cigarette tins, each with a big rusty nail through a corner. I sure was relieved. I could just see myself convincing Puggy they were gone.

It come to ten thousand dollars, like he said: six five hundreds and seventy hundreds, all in those oversize, pre-Depression bills. They were going to cause comment at a bank, but I reckoned a story to fit could be cooked up when the time come.

I drove hard, but the weather was nasty and highways weren’t what they are now, so I didn’t make Lansing till afternoon the third day. The gas station I asked at said Virgil’s had changed hands a while back but anyway it was the third joint on the right going north.

That turned out to be a little eatery painted blue and white, very neat, and with a big sign: Velma’s Kitchen. No cars parked that time of day, no customers when I went in, which was fine. I was feeling good, even if I was kind of puzzled why Puggy thought Velma needed help so bad when it looked to me like she was doing all right.

Two girls in white uniforms were mopping up back of the counter, but what I was looking for was back of the cash register. Only it jolted me when I saw it. It was Velma all right, blazing red hair and bright green eyes and even the complexion pretty fair yet, but in her white uniform she was big as a house. In all those years she’d got a build like a plunging fullback — no fat but plenty of muscle on a solid frame.

I just stood and gaped at her.

After a while she says, kind of hard, “All right, what are you selling?”

I took off my hat and come close, beginning to think about what I should have been thinking about before — how was I going to get any sane woman to swallow my story?

“Velma,” I says, “don’t you know me?”

One look down and one look up and she says no and bit it off sharp too.

“I’m. Tom Knox,” I says. So she looked again.

“Well,” she says after a while, “I guess you could be, at that. Little Tom Knox,” she says, “still sneaking round after people. How’d you know where I was?”

“Puggy told me,” I says.

“Puggy!” she says. “He’s been dead fourteen years. What is this, anyway?”

“I know he’s dead,” I says. “He told me that too.”

Well, if you can imagine a Shorthorn bull looking scared, that was Velma for a couple of split seconds. But she got hold of herself quick and began to look like that bull fixing to charge. I don’t know yet just how she’d muscled Virgil out and taken over, but then and there I begun to feel sorry for him.

“Tom,” she says, “I never had much opinion of you, but I wouldn’t of thought you’d go crazy. What are you talking about? And what’s more, I want to know how you got here. I’m through with Callao and everybody that ever come from there — through for keeps. And I don’t want—”

I busied in on her. “I’m sane as you are,” I says, “and I haven’t been in Callao since before you and Puggy left town. Keep quiet and I’ll tell you how I got here.”

I felt like a fool, but I hoped the wad of money would put some backbone in it, so I stood there like a bad boy in front of teacher and sang her my song, short enough so she wouldn’t lose patience and low enough so the counter girls wouldn’t hear. Things looked just rough enough so I took the precaution of not giving details of where I lived or where I worked. It seemed like a good idea at the time but I didn’t know till later just how good.

She frowned heavy and heavier right along, which was no help, and neither was the way Puggy’s mark on my leg was heating up, just the way it had on the train.

About halfway through my story she reached under the cash register and got out a Colt 38 and laid it handy, and I was willing to believe without being shown that she could handle it. But I kept on swinging my jaw and finished by passing her a manila envelope jam-full of Puggy’s spook money.

She took it and pulled the wad out halfway and says, “I thought this was a racket. Real money isn’t this big.”

I explained and told her she was plenty old enough to remember the old-size currency. She glared at me and says, “All right, now, on the level, where’d you get it?”

“Velma,” I says, “I been telling you. If you got the time, I can run through it again but it won’t make it sound any better.”

“Oh, no,” she says, pushing the wad back in again. “I take no money from lunatics or crooks that can’t think up better yarns than that. It’s a new wrinkle to me, but I’m not buying. Get out,” she says, “and take this bait with you, Tom Knox. The one thing I’m sure of about you is you aren’t drunk.”

Well, it was all right by me if she was going to suspect herself out of ten thousand dollars — not that I couldn’t see her point under the circumstances — but I knew I was branded for life if I couldn’t get shut of Puggy’s orders. I did everything but get down on my knees to her, and I’d have done that if it wouldn’t have alarmed the girls behind the counter.

Finally I asked if she’d believe me if she saw the marks on my leg. She said she’d bet every dollar in that envelope, if it was real money, that nobody but me could see those marks.

“I can’t cover all that without long odds,” I says. “But I’ll bet you five hundred, even money, those marks are there and you can see them.” I saw her eyes flicker. “Velma Burke,” I says, “you take me where I can get my pants off and you got a bet on your hands.”

“Let’s see the dough,” she says, “and not in this stage money.”

Well, just in case, I’d cashed a thousand before I started South, so I could cover, though I don’t generally carry such amounts. She looked my five hundred over, tucked it into the envelope, put it in the cash register, and picked up the gun. I started to duck, but all she did was call over the counter, “Girls, I’m going into the stock room with this character. If you hear me scream or shoot, call Sergeant Mickle. If I’m not out in ten minutes, call him anyway.”

The girls gulped, but one of them says, “Okay, Velma.” I took it what Velma said went around there, few questions asked.

“And if you don’t think I’ll get quick service,” Velma says to me, “Sergeant Mickle is my fiancé and the barracks is only three quarters of a mile.”

“He must like ’em big,” I says, too sore at her to use good sense when it came to the backchat.

“He does,” she says, “and he’d make two and a half of you. Now, we’ll see about that bet.”

So she covered me with the gun, backed toward the door, opened it behind her, backed in, and I followed, keeping well away so she wouldn’t get nervous with that cannon. When I closed the door behind me, she was fifteen feet away at the other end of the stock room, against a background of cold cereals and canned corned-beef hash — our own brand, too. Well, I sure needed something to make me feel at home.

“Take ’em off,” she says, motioning with the gun.

I did. I felt kind of screwily pleased I always been choosy about my shorts, even if I do wear nightshirts. Then I out with my right leg, like a girl in a ballet, and twisted sidewise so she could see. She breathed in sharp and come closer.

“Could be a burn,” she says.

“You nor nobody else ever saw a burn like that,” I says. “And it isn’t lipstick or barn paint or ketchup or sealing wax. And it’s gnawing at me like I can’t tell you.”

“Well,” she says, kind of quavery, “my folks were Irish. I got a right to be some superstitious.” She was breathing awful fast. “You mean to tell me,” she says, “that Puggy Brinton went to all that trouble to sec I got his last ten thousand dollars?”

“That’s what I mean,” I says.

“Well, Tom,” she says, “you were a no-account kind of kid but you weren’t a liar. I guess I believe you.” And the moment she said that, the marks plumb vanished and the gnawing quit. “They’re gone,” she says. “But I did see them.”

“You sure did,” I says.

“I guess it’s worth it, having to believe my own eyes,” she says, and then come out of it fast. “The money!” she says, and drops the gun and dives for the door.

I come along out when I had my pants back on. She was counting it slow and careful. My stake and a five-hundred-dollar bill was already laid to one side for me. I took it.

“I might mention,” I says, “that this party’s cost me about three hundred dollars in travel expenses. Never mind the time out of my vacation.”

She didn’t even look up from counting.

“On your way,” she says. “I got no time for childhood friends that know I was married to a gambler. And don’t forget the friends I got around here wear police uniforms.”

So I skipped warning her about how the bank might get inquisitive about that stack of old-time money.

I just put on my hat and was on my way.

Two days later I was driving to Racine, up U.S. 41, with the radio on, and the noon news says: “Mrs. Velma Brinton, of rural Lansing, Michigan, has been held for questioning because ten thousand dollars in old-time currency that she brought her bank for deposit proved to carry serial numbers showing the bills are part of the loot that an unidentified mob took from the Briggs National Bank of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in March, 1920. Mrs. Brinton’s fiancé, Police Sergeant Herman Mickle, says their engagement is off unless she can think of a better story than she has so far managed to give authorities. Previously known as an active committeewoman in local politics and a successful businesswoman, Mrs. Brinton may not be extradited on account of the statute of limitations, but she had already stated she plans to leave town when released. The money will be turned over to the insurance company which reimbursed the Briggs National—”

And right away I picked up a rattle somewhere down below the dashboard and it turned into Puggy, like I more than half expected. “Well, Tom,” he says “that does it. We sure fixed her wagon, didn’t we?”

I didn’t say anything. I was still trying to take the thing in.

“Did I know that was hot money?” Puggy sends, kind of singing it. You can put a lot of expression in Morse if you try. “I sure did. I won it shooting crap with Big John and he was lookout man for the mob that knocked over the Briggs National and I done it with honest dice because I was scared to try anything. Did I know she was going to marry a John Law? I sure did, boyhood pal, I sure did.”

I answered back on the steering column.

“Nice guy you are, planting that kind of trouble on your widow just because she’s getting married again.”

“My widow!” he says. “My poor, bereaved widow. I’d never of been in that kind of crap game except for her. I’d just been home to the little flat in Detroit, Tom. And the furniture was still there, what was too big to carry away convenient. But she wasn’t — and neither was the seventeen thousand dollars I’d left with her to keep for us against a rainy day. I was down to my last hundred when I went up against Big John. And I was mad. I been mad ever since. But now I got my own back.”

“That kind of makes a cat’s-paw out of me,” I says.

“It sure does,” says Puggy. “You were just made for the job, Tom, always were. Thanks, boyhood pal. I’m loose now. I can be on my way. Don’t ask me where, but I reckon it’s a good thing I always liked warm climates.” And he signed off.

Which is why I lit a cigarette with a five-hundred-dollar bill there on the shoulder of U.S. 41.