The Marceau Case by Harry Stephen Keeler

Author:Harry Stephen Keeler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery;detective;crime;sleuth;classic
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-02-27T15:58:41+00:00

DOCUMENT LIII

Title-page, cut by Dink Huff from book entitled “Etchings,” in private library in the town of Little Zanesville, Ohio, U.S.A.

Etchings

_______________________________________

A COLLECTION OF 11 UNIQUE

AND UNUSUAL SHORT-STORIES

WRITTEN BY

FAWCETT N. BROE

SINVILLE STONEROOD, PUBLISHER

_____________________________________

41 FLEET STREET

LONDON

(Monomark Kl-196073-M)

DOCUMENT LIV

Letter, of date January 20, 1937, from Dink Huff, 2439 Overlook Road, Cleveland, Ohio, addressed “G. Alexander Snide, F.R.C.I., Hotel Russell, London, England.”

Dear Alley:

Yours received as per my 6-word cable to you—including, of course, your beautiful gummed label with the high sounding title that I’m supposed to stick on the important package to go back to you—and which title I infer I am to use—and have—on cables and letters: but I’m opening up my little story here by calling your attention to the fact that I’ve stuck your beautiful label atop a measly little government 5-cent envelope which means that there isn’t any package to go back to you.

Pretty fancy name you’re using, isn’t it? And the F.R.C.I.? Fellow of the Royal Criminological Investigators? Or what? By God, you always were a queer one, Alley. However, it’s none of my business what my stepbrother does. Nor what degrees he sticks after his name. D. Huff, with no alphabet soup after it—is good enough for me, and always will be!

Before I go on further, though, I want to take occasion to say what I couldn’t say in my cable, namely, that I don’t exactly like that crack you pulled about my seeing that I didn’t sit on my behind and just send you a lot of hooey in exchange for your fifty bucks. I’m not so dumb, Alley, that I couldn’t grasp, when you said you’d been ordered to follow up this line of investigation on a case by somebody who had the full say on your salary checks, that you couldn’t afford to hand out b.s. Anyway, you can send on the fifty at once—and add $3 for certain expenses—also $2.80 train fare—$1.20 for meals—and $1.21 for my cable. And herewith, in exchange for it, all the dope—plus 1 enclosure which you—or whoever is above you—will want, I take it—plus one additional piece of proof that I’m not bilking you with “hooey.”

I went out to Little Zanesville the day after I got your letter. And of course, took the old dame’s picture with me. They didn’t have an A & P store, but had a National Tea store, and I hung around across the corner diagonally from it, and sure enough she showed, in mid-afternoon. There was no mistaking that bonnet—not in a million years! I asked a boy near by if that wasn’t Mrs. Cynthia Peacock—and he said no, it was old Mrs. Hannah Broe, who lived in the “white cottage” out where “York Street” veered off into the country and became “York Road.”

So—to York Road, yours truly.

She invited me into her little parlor as soon as I gave her my name—“Aloysius Wendeth”—and told her I had come from Cleveland to see her on business.

And, once seated, I told her I was a second-hand book dealer on Euclid Avenue who had heard she had inherited an old library.

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