The Chinese Doll

Chapter 6

  Boone, Ill.

  Early Thursday A.M.

Dear Louise:

Baby, I’ve been places and had my eyes opened!

As you can easily guess from that, things are beginning to pop. I’ve been to Chicago and back, I’ve just paid a very informative visit to our county jail, I’ve been picked up by another girl in a coupe—

But wait a moment; if I keep on like this I shall succeed in only confusing you. For clarity’s sake, perhaps I had better start yesterday afternoon before I caught the Chicago train. Bear with me, this might be rather long-winded.

The inquest into the death of Harry W. Evans had gone as I’d predicted and the pronouncement meant nothing at all. I immediately called the Croyden attorney to point out my honors as a prophet, but he had commented nothing at all. A second telephone call to the boys’ agency in Croyden had found Rothman in, but he knew nothing at all. He promised to wire if anything turned up; he said Liebscher was out scouting around.

By midaftemoon Boone was giving me a gorgeous case of the jitters. And over nothing at all. That’s what rankled: there was nothing stirring. I had been in and out of Thompson’s so often Judy was giving me the suspicious eye. The colored porter audibly made remarks about my tracking in the snow.

The upshot of it was a clean shirt and a pair of sox stuffed into my traveling bag and a quick trip to the railroad station. The station was jammed. The Illinois Central man behind the ticket agent’s window was wearing a pained expression even before I asked about getting a ticket. He pointed out in rather helpless tones that apparently everyone in Boone and their grandmother was trying to get to Chicago that afternoon, and what in the hell was going on, anyway?

I paid for that ride! The train was a local, one of those milk-and-mail casuals that stopped at every wayside station it happened across; if none were to be found the engineer imagined he saw one and stopped anyway. If I didn’t know better, I’d be willing to swear the train crew often climbed down and helped the farmers with the milking.

I never succeeded in getting a seat, but a woman with five children — the lot of them occupying two adjoining seats — allowed me to sit on the arm of the seat which held three of the kids. All of the kids were sucking noisily on large chocolate suckers. My suit is going to the dry cleaners as soon as I can get out of it.

It required four hours and forty-five minutes for that train to reach Chicago, which is a record the road may be proud of: Boone being only a hundred and sixty-odd miles south of it.

In the LaSalle Street station I sought out the Travelers’ Aid booth and told the girl the address I wanted to find. She dug out from racks beneath the counter a huge map of Chicago and turned it around to me. She read it upside down.

“Go right outside and take the elevated,” she rattled rapidly. “Out that door. Get a Loomis train and ask for a transfer. Ride all the way to the end of the line. A half-block north, get a 63rd streetcar going west. Watch for Sacramento, it’s just past the third traffic signal. Two or three miles, maybe four.”

And she folded up the map and put it away, mildly surprised to find me still standing there.

I said thanks and walked out “that door.”

I made my escape from the streetcar two blocks after passing Sacramento; she hadn’t told me they stop only every other block. It was colder in Chicago and so were the people. I walked back the two blocks.

On the corner of Sacramento and 63rd a sprinkling of citizens were loosely gathered around a drugstore window. Being somewhat the curious type I joined them.

In the window, stomping mechanically to and fro, meanwhile moving his hands and arms in small, jerking movements, was a zombie-like something in striped trousers and frock coat billed as

A thick and too obvious electric cable snaked across the floor from an electric outlet and vanished into the bottom opening of his trouser leg. It constantly got in his way as he moved. In one white-gloved hand Roboto carried an illuminated 25-watt bulb that had no visible socket.

The “Is He Human or Is He Monster” moved back and forth from one end of the long window to the other, putting across his commercials by suddenly stopping every so many steps to bend stiffly and mechanically from the middle and pick up a small sign from the floor. The upper half of the body would remain suspended at an unbalanced angle for long seconds, giving the impression counterweights hidden somewhere inside him prevented his toppling over.

Then he would continue the movement to the floor, or back upright, the sign clutched in his fingers.

I studied the faces around me. They were going for it, hook, line, sinker and pole. In a scientific age, anything went. They obediently read each sign he held up.

The sign usually implored the good citizens looking on to rush inside this minute and purchase large quantities of this and that, or anti-something, while the limited supply lasted. It was guaranteed of course on the money-back principle.

I watched the guy with open admiration. For all the human qualities Roboto displayed he might as well have been glass and gears inside instead of flesh and blood. No muscle twitched, no eye winked. Roboto reached over and picked up a card directly in front of me. As he or it straightened, he or it chose to pause at an extremely difficult angle and ogle me. I ogled back. After all, he could find something strange in me, too.

I formed a silent sentence with my lips, “Hot in there, eh bud?”

Roboto’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly and he held the stance some seconds longer before standing upright to dangle the card at me. The card informed me of a tremendous sale in hair oils now going on, and suggested I dash in.

One citizen dashed in, the others dashed for an east-bound streetcar, and I found myself alone with a good-humored young fellow in his early twenties. We looked at each other in silent, mutual agreement.

Finally he broke the silence, “People are suckers.”

“People are,” I agreed, because basically people are people. You can’t get around good, solid logic like that.

“Roboto is good,” the young man said.

“I can see that. He’s put a hell of a lot of practice into that act. I wonder if he sells any hair oil?”

“I imagine he does. I’ve stopped to watch him every day this week. There is always a crowd around.”

“And nine out of ten think he’s a robot?”

“Make it nine-and-a-half out of ten. That last man is only half sure he isn’t. They don’t stop to think. A real robot wouldn’t be wasted in a drugstore window selling hair oil.”

“Yeah. Say, maybe you can help me. I’m looking for 6636½ south Sacramento.”

He grinned at me. “Four blocks down, next to the last house in the block, this side of the street.”

“You sound as if you’d been there.”

“I live there.”

“The hell you say. Then you know Joquel Kennedy?”

“I’m Joquel Kennedy.”

I pretended I wasn’t surprised and introduced myself.

“I wrote you a card this afternoon, wanted to let you know I was coming to Chicago, but changed my mind and came up a day earlier. How are you?”

“I’m fine, thank you. Are you a fap?”

“A... what?”

“Excuse me. I see by your answer that you aren’t. A fap. That’s a slang term to designate a member of the fantasy amateur press fans. I’m an amateur publisher.”

“So I found out. That’s why I’m here to see you.”

“Do you publish?”

“No.” I paused and then told him, “I’m a detective.”

He scratched the smooth underside of his chin but his face never changed.

“You don’t look like one.”

“That’s a compliment. Thanks. But I’m a private detective. I live in Boone.”

“I’ve been through there.” He nodded. “Well, you might as well tell me. I knew something like this was coming. I have flashes.”

“Flashes?”

“Prescience. The ability to see something that is going to happen before it happens. I dreamed of policemen last night.”

“Like that, eh? Well, I wanted some information on this amateur publishing. Particularly on a man in Croyden named Evans.”

He looked at me quickly. “Is Evans in trouble?”

“Not trouble.” The kid looked like he could take it. “Evans is dead.”

He could and did take it, but not without a reaction. He seemed instantly dazed, as if I had slapped his face.

“Dead?”

I nodded slowly. “Yesterday afternoon. Car hit him. The driver got away. I’m checking on his background. When you’re hunting for somebody or something you check the background. The clues can be found there.”

“A hit-and-run? Evans?” He couldn’t snap out of the daze. “Why... why, he was a good friend of mine.”

I said nothing.

Kennedy went on, “You mean he’s really dead?”

“He’s dead all right. I saw the body.”

“Harry dead...”

Absently he moved away from the drug store window. I followed him but not without one backward glance at Roboto. He was human all right. He stood staring after us, some what shocked. He had been reading our lips. I waved good-bye and he so far forgot himself as to wave back.

“Damn it to hell!” Kennedy exclaimed. “I liked the man.”

“You knew him well?”

“Yes, certainly. But not the way...” He stopped and looked around him. “I don’t want to talk here. Let’s go down home.”

“Wait a bit. I haven’t eaten. Is there a good restaurant in the neighborhood?”

Kennedy waved his hand vaguely. “A couple of blocks. Place where I eat. A good place.”

“Have dinner with me?”

“No, thank you. But I’d like a bottle of beer.”

“It’s on me. Lead on. You were saying—?”

“That I knew him well. But I’ve never met him in my life if that’s what you mean. We had an extensive correspondence, swapped a few books and things like that. Each of us always said we were going to run over and see the other, but we never got around to it.”

“How long have you known him?”

Again that vague wave. “Perhaps three years. We joined the amateur journalism society at about the same time. Newcomers are placed on a six months probation period during which time their work is judged by the other members.

“Naturally, Evans and I wanted to gain full membership so we helped each other with our magazines.” He fell silent for a block. Then, “He put out a mighty neat magazine.”

He led me into the restaurant. It was a long, narrow job with indirect lighting, and thick, red leather on the booth seats. The news I had brought continued to depress him. He went at the beer slowly like a good beer drinker. My steak was called a “Green Mill Special” and it didn’t remind you of something that ran in the Kentucky Derby last year.

I ate in silence; he stared at each bare spot on my plate uncovered by the vanishing steak. His beer was followed by two more but he never noticed it.

After awhile he snapped partly out of it. I was having a second cup of coffee, letting him find his own way.

“Well — I’ll be glad to help you in any way I can.”

“That’s appreciated. Do you have a file of his magazines?”

“Yes, complete.”

“Good. I want to read them. There may be something in them that will tie into something else. That’s the way this business works.”

“I can’t imagine what.” Kennedy turned the glass around and around on the table top. “He printed a lot of book reviews, a few amateur scientific studies, poetry.”

“Poetry. What kind of poetry?”

“Free verse.”

“No — I mean poetry about what?”

“Love.”

Maybe the man had been frustrated.

I offered in amplification, “The car that hit him was driven by a woman.”

“That’s ironic. He loved women. By that I mean he idolized them; women as a class, not any particular person. He often said that a woman was the most beautiful thing in the world. Quite frequently he printed poems dedicated to his daughter.”

Evans had no daughter. “What’s her name?” I asked the young man.

“Eleanor, I believe.”

I got back to, “The car was his own machine.”

“It was? How do you account for that?”

“Stolen — or loaned to the driver. Apparently a woman friend of his. And something went wrong between them, something serious. So she ran him down.”

“You seem so positive it was deliberate.”

“I am, and it was. I was an eyewitness, luckily. I could read the tire tracks left in the snow. And later on the car was abandoned, ditched. Familiar pattern.”

“It seems incredible, doesn’t it? I don’t mean that he would have women friends. I knew he was married; neither of us are prudes, although he never paraded his morals — or lack of them — in print. But it seems so incredible that a friend of his would actually murder him.”

“It may sound incredible, son, but people do it all the time. It happens among friends, in families... I want some more coffee.”

The waitress caught my glance and interpreted it.

Kennedy was gazing off into space.

“What else,” I interrupted his thoughts, “did Evans publish in this magazine?”

“Nothing else that I can remember offhand. Oh yes — he was running discussions on the languages of the various peoples of the world. It was becoming a rather bitter debate. Something to the effect that one universal language would eliminate the mistrust between nations. But I don’t believe that would help you.”

“I don’t think so, either. I’ve met Evans, and I’m learning things about him I never dreamed existed. That old adage about appearances often deceiving is hitting the nail on the head. Let’s get back to this poetry. I still can’t picture him writing poetry.”

“That is an advantage I have over you. Never having met him, I was forced to construct my image of him from his letters and his magazine. They impressed me favorably. And poetry seemed a part of him. It was as natural as... as...”

He broke off and stood up. I left a tip, picked up the check and paid it. Kennedy and the cashier exchanged a few pleasant words and we left. The poetry angle continued to stick in my craw.

Picture that man, Louise. Picture him standing there in my office that first day, his back to the wall, away from the glass door. Picture him figuring his way out of a frame-up. Or maybe landing in jail and being pushed around a bit.

And then picture the same man writing poetry.

Outside the restaurant the wind hit us. The wind is a devil of a lot colder in Chicago, too. We tramped in silence to Sacramento and turned south. A huge brick school building loomed up on the left.

Kennedy’s earlier remark about his prescience came back to me as we strode along in the wind. Scientists are careful not to admit any such thing exists, but that doesn’t prove anything. On the other hand, there are probably thousands of occultists and just plain people who would claim it did exist. Like Kennedy.

Did Evans share the gift? Or was it actually a gift?

It could be a galling saddle and Evans might have been saddled with it. At least it might explain his coming into my office with that crazy-sounding story. It might explain his belief that he would be arrested. And like Kennedy, what he foresaw in his “flash” could have been sufficiently different from what was to actually happen that he failed to recognize the real danger.

I asked Kennedy, “Did Evans mention prescience?”

“What—?” He had been several miles away from me.

“This prescience; did Evans have it, too?”

“I don’t know. I don’t recall him saying so, although he took part in the discussions concerning it. Most of us are pretty frank in our discussions, you see. We know we have a limited, sympathetic audience.”

“People laugh at you, eh?”

“Outsiders? Yes. So our society is limited to a membership of one hundred and the primary rule is that you be interested in our subjects or membership is denied. We print only enough copies for the membership; except of course a copy for the museum. There is a museum in Philadelphia which collects amateur publications.”

We walked another block in silence. He broke it the next time.

“Do you know,” he asked me as though I was as well acquainted with his publishing world as a full-fledged member, “I believe the most beautiful poem Evans ever printed was a love lyric he dedicated to a Chinese girl.”