Laurel and Hardy Murders (3 page)

It was a ventriloquist’s figure, a dummy fashioned to resemble W. C. Fields.

When the Two Tars saw it, a great collective groan rose from many throats. Butler, who showed no sign of having heard, tromped to the microphone, deliberately planted his feet squarely behind it and opened his mouth to speak. I figured he was going to apologize for Poe.

Instead, he belched.

“Sorry,” he grumbled, “good eats.” He regarded Poe frostily. “Lookit, boy,
I
gotta save this show! You shoved it right where I stick Sani-Flush!”

Poe stared in blank amazement. Who
was
this idiotic amateur?! The comedian’s mouth opened in protest, but whatever he was going to say was drowned in Butler’s peremptory bellow.

“Get me that chair, boy! I’ll show you how to entertain!”

As he said it, the leader of the combo leaned over and whispered to the other instrumentalists. Maybe he was ashamed of what he’d done to Harper; at any rate, Poe’s next retort went unheard because the band suddenly blared out the first strain of “The Entertainer” triple fortissimo.

Poe jumped off the platform, grabbed the indicated chair, and hauled it up as he mounted the stage again. He held it for Butler, but just as the ventriloquist’s ample butt neared the seat, Poe yanked it away. Butler hit the floor with a wham.

There was scattered laughter, but the most audible sound was the colorful stream of remarks uttered by Frank Butler.

He and Poe wrangled as Butler scrambled to his feet. Then, shoving the comic to one side, Butler motioned for the band to fade out. He started his routine.

Poe did not leave the platform, as he should have—whatever the group thought of Butler, it had had enough of Poe. But he remained there, glowering. His presence clearly boded Butler no good.

But Butler ignored him, now that he was embarked on his vent act. As a performer, he was creatively putrid, and he sounded about as much like W. C. Fields as I resemble Hilary’s fat father.

Dummy:
You ever hear the expression, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing?”

Butler:
Yep.

Dummy:
Well, relax, you’re practically invulnerable!

Or:

Dummy:
I know a man who bought a no-nose goat.

Butler:
If the goat doesn’t have a nose, how does he smell?

Dummy:
TERRIBLE!

Yuk, yuk, yuk.

Not only did the material stink, but Butler didn’t come anywhere near imitating Fields’s incomparable drawl/whine. Furthermore, he didn’t know how to coordinate the dummy’s jaw movements with the words. On the other hand, Butler’s lips flapped so much that his cigar waggled up and down like a baton.

He was so unashamedly inept that I found him perversely funny. However, the rest of the group must have been treated to far too liberal a share of Franklin Butler’s questionable talents on past occasions. There was grumbling, fidgeting, and a lot of extraneous talking.

When Butler finally stashed the dummy under the chair, he swung into the “joke” portion of his act. His mode of presentation consisted of rooting around in his pockets for dingy 3x5 file cards on which he had written various punch lines as memory aids. After the umpteenth story, he put away the cards and announced he was about to close his act—

(Loud cheers)

—“with some
real
singing!”

A universal groan.

Imagine the noise of an alleycat indulging unwillingly in a
ménage à trois
in the middle of a marble factory and you will have evoked a faint notion of the unique caliber and timbre of Franklin Butler’s lusty rendition of “Last Night I Stayed Up Late,” which he shouted to the tune of “Funiculi, Funicula.”

I noticed Wayne Poe finally quitting the platform, a wild look in his eye. He dashed out of the room.

Without pause, Butler segued into a medley of bawdy parodies of all-time-favorite song hits. The most innocuous was:

Oh, give me a home where the beer bottles foam

And the blondes and the redheads all play;

Where seldom is heard a discouraging word

’Cause my wife is out hustling all day.

I figured Poe couldn’t stand the noise. Neither could anyone else. Some people started getting on their coats. Hardier (drunker) souls took up a chorus of jeering to drown him out, but he just got louder.

And then Wayne Poe came back. Heads turned as one person after the other nudged his neighbor and pointed to the comic. Poe had something behind his back and was sidling up to the platform without showing what he was holding.

Just as Frank Butler vigorously began the opening verse of “The Bastard King of England,” Poe bounded onto the platform and whipped out two objects he had been concealing. The first, a pair of scissors, he used to sever the singer’s microphone cord.

It didn’t help much. Butler was too loud. However, Poe’s next action was much more ameliorative. Butler found it decidedly difficult to continue the song while a stream of seltzer water was being directed into his big mouth. He replaced the rowdy lyric with a generous mixture of sputtering and swearing.

Poe’s stratagem had an electric effect upon the remaining members of the company. The audience rose in one corporate body and applauded, stomped, yelled “bravo,” and in general produced an enormous quantity of noise.

Poe smiled his Cheshire-cat grin and bowed. Which was a mistake. It presented an irresistible target to the outraged performer behind him. Poe sprawled on his face on the floor in front of the platform.

I told the story to a couple of the Sons in New York, and they agreed it was the best way to get Wayne Poe offstage.

C
AMAC STREET IS NOT
the worst street in Philly, but it would place amongst the ten finalists. What it lacks in picturesqueness, it more than makes up for in narrowness. Maybe two pygmies
can
walk abreast in the middle of it, but it would help if they were both narrow-shouldered.

The most famous commercial establishment on the street is the Camac Baths, a combination Russian-Turkish steambath known to local clientele as the
shvitz,
or, in rough translation, “the place where one sweats.” Less than two blocks away, on the same side of the street, there is a dilapidated town house with a weather-worn sign jutting over the entranceway to identify the sole occupant:

DJINN INVESTIGATIONS INC.

B. F. Butler, proprietor.

I had planned to talk about the regional convention with Jerry Freundlich, president of the Two Tars tent. But after the Butler-Poe battle, he was so busy assuaging feelings, apologizing to members and guests, and in general doing what he could to avoid lawsuits, that he asked me to go along with Butler and get the pertinent details from him.

It was in his decrepit Packard that Butler mentioned his occupation. I might have gagged, but at the moment I was too busy white-knuckling the dashboard and the edge of my seat, whatever I could wrap my hands around.

Butler drove like a hotfooted demon. He confided he once drove race cars, and his biggest ambition was to raise enough scratch to compete at Le Mans. Meanwhile, until he realized his dream, he pushed the poor heap to the limit of endurance, hairpinning corners, weaving intricate curlicues around the center line of the road, braking unmercifully and capriciously. The wind whipping into the car ruffled up the sparse graying hair from his head, revealing the bald pate that Butler took pains to minimize.

“Just wait’ll I fix that crap Poe!” he snarled, tramping on the brakes so hard I almost sailed through the windshield.

“Take it easy! You almost gave me a concussion!”

“Sorry, my nerves’re jumpy, boy. Open the glove compartment and grab me a tranquilizer.”

The “tranquilizer” turned out to be a pint of Colt 45, one of five cans of it stored where he told me to look. The empty sixth can on the floorboard rolled back and forth under my feet. The glove compartment was stuffed with road maps, greasy rags, and debris which turned out to be pieces of walnut shells.

I tried to dissuade Butler from drinking while driving, but he snatched the can from my grip and scowled.

“Hell, boy, this ain’t drinkin’! When we get over to my place, I’ll show you drinkin’!” He guzzled the malt beverage.

His place turned out to be the dingy walk-up on Camac Street. It took us a good hour to reach it from the country club, even with his supersonic-speed driving. (I had to admit to myself he took it easier once he’d gotten his mitts on the brew, but I was damned if I’d give verbal sanction to the harrowing habit.)

The car scraped to a stop along the curb and Butler lumbered out. I followed him as he wobbled down the street in a pattern reminiscent of the way he drove the Packard. Every other step or so, he mumbled something derogatory about Wayne Poe beneath his breath.

(Later I learned the only reason Poe had been asked to appear at the Two Tars dinner was because he’d been recommended to Butler by O. J. Wheete, president of the SOTD parent tent. It figured; O. J. would probably find something nice to say about Jesse James while handing the outlaw his wallet.)

Butler led me up a narrow stairway past empty flats that probably once were places of business. At the top, on the wall, I saw a sign,
DJINN
INVESTIGATIONS INC.
, with an arrow pointing to the sole door on that level. There was a bell-push in the portal, but it hung loose, gutted.

Unlocking the door, he motioned me through a cramped green room which he called his office. He parted a dusty bead curtain, flicked on the lights, unstrapped his belt and tossed it in a corner, then invited me into a chilly chamber with patches of plaster peeping out of holes in the wallpaper. It was furnished only by a cot, a table and a few chairs, a hassock, a battered old bureau, and an open safe stuffed with walnuts. There was a great quantity of cobweb and grime and the room stank of cigars.

“You live here?” I asked, incredulous.

Butler shrugged, scratching his ample belly. “Family pressures. I keep this place handy when it gets too hot at home. How ’bout some gin?”

I declined. He shook his head, unable to understand my lack of interest in juniper juice. He extracted a pint from the safe, plunked it on the table, and repeated the question, or so I erroneously thought. I mentioned I’d already had enough to drink, but he shook his head and pulled some cards from his pocket—not the 3x5s with punch lines, but a greasy, dog-eared regulation poker pack.

“Wanna
play
gin?” he elucidated.

I said yes. This was a mistake. In the next two hours, Butler consumed a pint of gin, half a dozen cigars, an innumerable amount of walnuts, and approximately one-fifth of my week’s salary.

I didn’t actually see him pull anything funny, but gin is a game eminently suited to cardsharping. You don’t have to deal with a mechanic’s grip to control the flow of fortune. The ratio of luck to skill is about equal, so anything, no matter how slight, which tips the scale in favor of one player provides him an enormous advantage. I’m sure Butler wasn’t dealing out of the middle, but it was his deck and he might have been able to recognize certain cards from the peculiar striations and bends that age had marked them with. Of course, the condition of the cards could have worked to my advantage, too, after a few hands—except for the insane gin rummy convention that the winner, rather than the loser, deals the next hand.

Having agreed to play, I deserved what I got. I was only angry at myself for not declining the game as soon as I got a glimpse of Butler’s cards. But my brain doesn’t function at its best late at night.

Butler further befuddled me with a smokescreen, both literal and figurative. His cigars made my eyes smart, and the continual cracking of walnuts began to separate the lobes of my brain into two neat hemispheres. All the while, he kibitzed about the proposed plans for the New York Philly joint SOTD convention in the fall. Since this conversation was the chief reason I’d come to Pennsylvania, I had to pay attention, even though it further interfered with my already impaired card sense.

“We’ll throw the whole blast at Valley Forge, if that’s okay with you. There’s a good place there, cheap, plenty room.” He paused to swig gin. “You’ll hafta charter a bus to bring down your members. Whaddaya say?”

C-r-r-rack.

“I’ll bring it up at the executive committee meeting next week,” I replied, throwing away a deuce.

“Gimme!” He swooped down on it; Butler had a habit of picking up my discards. “How about if I drive up to New York next week and sit in on that session, get things done faster, how’s that sound?”

C-r-r-rack.

“Sounds fine to me.”

“Swell, boy, I’ll be there. Gin.”

I paid off while he munched walnuts.

By the time we called it quits, it was nearly light out. I hastily declined his offer to drive me to my hotel. I needed the fresh air, and if there were any muggers still awake, I figured I had a better chance of survival with them than with Butler’s driving.

I didn’t want to insult him, but I felt I needed to know the truth. As I pulled on my topcoat, I asked him point-blank if he’d been cheating. “I won’t get mad if the answer’s yes, I just want to know why I didn’t spot it if you were. You didn’t false-shuffle or misdeal. The only thing I can figure is you recognize some of the cards by their backs.”

He chortled in his joy. “So the Old Man’s too sharp for you, hey, boy? Tell you what...you bring your own deck next week, and I’ll play you again. Fair enough?”

I nodded.

Butler flopped down on the cot and started pulling off his shoes and socks. “Like some friendly advice, boy?”

“What is it?”

“Like Mark Twain says, ‘I was a stranger and they took me in...’ ” He gave me a broad wink and grinned.

The attribution was wrong, but I got the point of the quote.

T
HE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE,
hereinafter known as “the committee” or as “those loud bastards at the corner table,” shall consist of the officers, past presidents, heads of standing committees and delegates-at-large. The latter will only be seated if they are not too fat to squeeze in and if they can refrain from constant catcalls. General members may attend individual committee meetings if they are invited by the president, or if they plan to buy booze all around.