The Fabulous Clipjoint by The Fabulous Clipjoint (retail) (epub)

Author:The Fabulous Clipjoint (retail) (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Penzler Publishers

CHAPTER 8

“LISTEN,” I SAID, when the guy had taken our order and had left. “Mom couldn’t have done it. She’s got an alibi.”

They both looked at me, and Uncle Am’s left eyebrow went up half a pica.

I told them about Bunny.

I watched Bassett’s face while I told it, but I couldn’t tell anything. When I got done, he said, “Maybe. I’ll look up the guy. Know where he lives?”

“Sure,” I said. I gave him Bunny Wilson’s address. “Gets off work at one-thirty in the morning. He might or might not go right home. I dunno.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll hold off till I talk to this Bunny guy. It might not mean anything, though. He’s a friend of the family’s—that means of hers, too. He could’ve stretched the hour a bit to do her a favor.”

“Why would he?”

Bassett shrugged. The kind of a shrug that doesn’t mean you don’t know, but that it’s nothing you want to talk about.

It told plenty. I said, “Listen, damn y—”

Uncle Am put his hand on my arm. He had a grip.

He said, “Shut up, Ed. Take yourself a walk around the block and cool down.”

His grip got tight and it hurt.

He said, “Go ahead. I mean it.”

Bassett got up to let me out of the booth, and I got up and went out fast. The hell with them, I thought.

I went out and walked west on Grand.

It wasn’t until I started to take out a cigarette that I found I had something in my hand. It was a round, red, rubber ball. Bright shiny red, one of the half dozen that had been in the suitcase.

I stopped by the staircase leading up to the el, and stared at the ball in my hand. Something was coming back to me. A vague picture of a man juggling some of them. I’d been a baby then. He was laughing and the bright balls were flashing in the lamplight of the nursery room in the Gary flat, and I stopped crying to watch the whirling spheres.

Not once, but often. How old had I been? I remember I’d been walking, once at least, walking, reaching out for the bright balls, and he’d given me one to play with, and had laughed when I put it to my mouth to chew it.

I couldn’t have been over three—not much over, anyway—the last time I’d seen them. I’d forgotten completely.

Only this ball in my hand, the size and the feel and the brightness of it, brought back the lost memory.

But the man, the juggler—I couldn’t picture him at all.

Only laughter, and the bright flashing spheres.

I tossed it up and caught it, and it felt good. I wondered if I could learn to juggle six of them. I tossed it up again.

Somebody laughed and said, “Want some jacks?”

I caught the ball and put it in my pocket, and turned around.

It was Bobby Reinhart, the apprentice at Heiden’s Mortuary, the guy who had identified Pop when he’d come to work on Thursday morning and found the body there.

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