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The Fabulous Clipjoint
 About the Book
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Preview
Cast of Characters
Ed Hunter: he went after his father´s killer.
Wally Hunter: a quiet drinker and a quiet man.
Madge Hunter: Wally´s wife, poison to all men, but she liked her stepson, Ed.
Gardie Hunter: her daughter, a man-crazy gal.
Am Hunter: Wally´s brother and one-time private dick.
Bunny Wilson: Wally´s co-worker, the only one of Wally´s friends Madge ever liked.
Hank: just a cop.
Hoagy: sex-spieler at the carnival.
Bassett: a dick from homicide, neither dumb nor honest.
Kaufman: a short, heavy-set barkeep with arms hairy as a monkey´s.
Bobby Reinhart: a sleek little punk who thought he was a lady killer.
Dr. William Haertel: coroner´s physician.
Dutch Reagan: common everyday hood.
Benny-the-Torpedo: he´s another.
Claire Raymond: the kind of gal men can´t help making passes at. Her phone number-Wentworth 3842.
CHAPTER 1
In my dream I was reaching right through the glass of the window of a hockshop. It was the hockshop on North Clark Street, the west side of the street, half a block north of Grand Avenue. I was reaching out a hand through the glass to touch a silver trombone. The other things in the window were blurred and hazy.
The singing made me turn around instead of touching the silver trombone. It was Gardie´s voice.
She was singing and skipping rope along the sidewalk. Like she used to before she started high school last year and got boy-crazy, with lipstick and powder all over her face. She was not quite fifteen; three and a half years younger than I. She had make-up on now, in this dream of mine, thick as ever, but she was skipping rope, too, and singing like a kid, "One, two, three, O´Leary; four, five, six, O´Leary; seven, eight ..."
But through the dream I was waking up. It´s confusing when you´re like that, half one way and half the other. The sound of the elevated roaring by is almost part of the dream, and there´s somebody walking in the hallway outside the flat, and -when the elevated has gone by-there´s the ticking of the alarm clock on the floor by the bed and the extra little click it gives when the alarm is ready to explode.
I shut it off and rolled back, but I kept my eyes open so I wouldn´t go back to sleep. The dream faded. I thought, I wish I had a trombone; that´s why I dreamed that. Why did Gardie have to come along and wake me up?
I thought, I´ll have to get up right away. Pop was out drinking last night and still wasn´t home when I went to sleep. He´ll be hard to wake up this morning.
I thought, I wish I didn´t have to go to work. I wish I could take the train to Janesville to see my Uncle Ambrose, with the carnival. I hadn´t seen him for ten years, since I was a kid of eight. But I thought about him because Pop had mentioned him yesterday. He´d told Mom that his brother Ambrose was with the J.C. Hobart carney that was playing Janesville this week and that was the nearest they´d get to Chicago, and he wished he could take a day off and go to Janesville.
And Mom (who isn´t really my mom, but my step-mother) had got that looking-for-trouble look on her face and asked, "What do you want to see that no-good bastard for?" and Pop had let it go. Mom didn´t like my Uncle Ambrose; that was why we hadn´t seen him for ten years.
I could afford to go, I thought, but it would make trouble if I did. I figured like Pop did; it isn´t worth it.
I got to get up, I thought. I swung out of bed and went into the bathroom and spattered water into my face to get wide awake. I always used the bathroom and dressed first, and then I woke Pop and got us some breakfast while he got ready. We went to work together. Pop was a linotype operator and he´d got me on as an apprentice printer at the same shop, the Elwood Press.
It was a gosh-awful hot day, for seven in the morning. The window curtain hung as stiff as a board. It was almost hard to breathe. Going to be another scorcher, I thought, as I finished dressing.
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