W. C. ROBERTS
A promissory note, good in any man’s court, if this W. C. Roberts has got $5000.
I look at the thing and finally stick it in my pocket. After all, Tony Druhar, dead or alive, owes the Mid-West Finance Company about $156.00.
I back out of the house and I’m on the porch when I see the taxicab that is pulled up behind my jaloppy. The prince is coming across the sidewalk.
Of course I don’t know that he’s a prince then. I find that out later. But he certainly dresses the part. He’s wearing a black, single-breasted coat, which is open, showing a fawn-colored waistcoat. Under it is a pair of striped trousers and below that, believe it or not, white spats. On his head he’s got a pearl-gray Homburg. He’s carrying a pair of yellow pigskin gloves and a cane. So help me, he’s coming up to Druhar’s house.
“Good morning, sir,” he says to me in a voice that drips with some foreign accent. His face is long and very sad and aristocratic. “I’m looking for Mr. Druhar.”
What I want to do is jump into my jaloppy and get the hell out of there, but I know how cops are, and it’s just my luck that either the prince or the taxicab driver will remember the license number of my car, so I figure I may as well face the thing out.
“Mr. Druhar,” I say, “is inside the house. He’s dead.”
The prince’s mouth falls open, but only for a second. Then he reaches into his waistcoat and brings out a monocle and sticks it in his eye. He looks at me and says, “I do not understand.”
He lets out a sigh. “That is too bad. I am Prince Peter Strogovich. This Druhar had applied to me for a position, and I was just about to employ him. It is sad.”
The prince takes the monocle out of his eye and polishes it with his gloves. “You say he is inside? The police do not yet know?”
They know soon enough. Some of the neighbors have been attracted by the triple event — my jaloppy, the taxicab and the prince in his fancy outfit. They have gathered and they’ve heard some of our talk, so there’s a lot of chattering and running around.
In about five minutes, a squad car rolls up. In a few minutes more, there are ten or twelve cops around, an ambulance, and the emergency squad from the Fire Department.
There’s a lot of excitement and when it all sifts down, the prince and myself are down at Headquarters, and Captain Riordan is swearing and asking a lot of questions.
Most of the swearing is at me. “I don’t like your story at all,” he tells me. “You were pretty sore at this Druhar. According to the neighbors, and his friends, you cut a pretty scene yesterday at the funeral of his grandmother. My idea is that you went there this morning to collect the money and you got into a fight with him.”
“Wait a minute, Captain,” I cut in. “Call up Oscar Berger, who’s the Argus Adjustment Agency. Ask him if I’ve killed any of my skips before.”
“There’s always a time to start, you know.”
The captain grunts and picks up the telephone. He calls the office and says, “Hello, Mr. Berger? This is Police Headquarters. I’ve got a man here by the name of Sam Cragg who says he works for you... What’s the charge? Why, he said he was after a fellow who owed some money and it seems that the fellow got his neck twisted. What?” He listens for a minute, then he turns to me. “He wants to know if you collected the money.”
I give the captain my opinion of Oscar Berger, which the captain translates into “No.” He listens a minute more and then says, “O.K.,” and hangs up.
“Berger says he fired you a couple of days ago.”
I really get sore then. That was about the kind of loyalty you can expect from a man who’d run that kind of a collection agency.
Prince Peter comes to my assistance.
“Captain, I do not think this man killed Mr. Druhar. I do not think he is strong enough to do it. Besides, there are no marks on him, and Mr. Druhar would not have submitted without fighting.”
“I could figure that out myself,” snaps the captain. “He could have come on Druhar from the back and caught him by surprise.”
The prince shrugs. “At any rate, you are not going to hold me? I have important matters...”
“You can go,” says the captain. He scowls at me. “I still don’t like your story, but I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. If I find out anything more, I can pick you up easily enough.”
That’s enough for me. I get out of Headquarters as quickly as I can. Outside, Prince Peter is just climbing into a taxicab.
I get a street car and ride back to Gardner Street where the jaloppy is still parked. It’s there all right, only it hasn’t got any tires or headlights now. The damn crooks in the neighborhood have stripped them off.
When I start swearing even the kids on the street duck into the houses. I’ve got a good mind just to leave the rest of the junk right there, but when I get to Division Street I go into a saloon and telephone a garage.
By the time I get down to the rattle-trap building on Wells Street where AAA has its lousy offices, I’m in a swell mood — for murder.
I slam into the office and Betty Marshall, who practically runs the business from the inside, gives me the ha-ha. “So you finally landed in jail!”
“And it’s no thanks to our boss that I’m not still there. Is he inside?”
He’s trying to lock his office door, when I push it open and knock him halfway across the room. “Listen, Berger,” I says to him, “what kind of a double-crosser are you?”
He ducks behind the desk. “Now take it easy, Cragg. I was just going to call Goldfarb, my lawyer, and have him spring you.”
“I’ll bet you were! Every day of the week I do things for you that keep me awake nights, and that’s the kind of loyalty you give me.”
“Now, now, Sam,” he soft-soaps me. “I got a nice bunch of easy skips for you. To make it up, I’ll pay you the regular five buck rate on them, although these are so easy you oughtn’t to get more than three on them. It’s the new account I landed, the O. W. Sugar Jewelry Company.”
“You call those easy skips? Hell, three-fourths of the people that buy jewelry on the installment plan pawn it before they finish paying for it!”
“Yeah, but they’re all working people in the lower brackets. You’ve just got to find out where they work and threaten to garnishee their wages and they’ll kick in.”
I take the cards he gives me. Like I said before, I hadn’t any pull and couldn’t get on the WPA.
These Sugar Jewelry skips are no better or worse than others I’ve handled. I find the first one, a middle-age Italian woman, cracking pecans in a little dump near Oak and Milton — the Death Corner. She gets eight cents a pound for shelling the pecans and if she works hard she can shell two pounds an hour. Why a woman like that ever bought a wrist watch I don’t know, but she did — and I make her promise to pay a dollar a week on the watch.
