The Journal of Provincial Thought

________________________________________________

jptHome, Issue 3

                P.I. RICHARD POOLE GETS INTO A BIG
                                                    BATCH OF TROUBLE

                               By Willis Quick, writing as Sheamus O’Meenstreet

Poole turned onto Fairlane Drive again, into the whitened quiet purchased by Leeland's Oldest Money.  He passed eagle-topped gates and followed the meandering street.  It wound around the estate, and Poole could look down across the grounds, surveying the whole little empire.

           He parked the Ferret and walked along the low stone wall that marked the outer boundary of Cosgrovia.  The big house and its outbuildings looked as diminutive as Don Cosgrove's playhouse.  Through the bare trees, Poole viewed the snowbound estate as if it were a black and white topographic map.  He was not sure why he skulked like a poacher contemplating a raid.  It seemed like a good idea.

           As he watched the house, a figure emerged from a back door, a woman bundled in a long, dark coat.  She moved quickly down a cleared walk to a long tudor outbuilding that might be a stable.  Poole waited.  After minutes, the figure re-emerged and moved briskly back to the house.  Nothing else moved in the landscape.

           Impulsively, Poole vaulted the wall and walked down the gentle slope toward the house.  As he approached, he saw that the tudor building, with its phony half-timbers and schlocky cupola, was a long garage with five bays.  A garret-like half-story ran above.  Poole found a glazed door on the side and peered in:  a narrow staircase slanting up into dimness.

           He tried the door and found it unlatched.  He glanced back at the house.  Nothing moved.  He stepped in and tiptoed quietly upward toward a solid door at the top of the stairs.  He tried this door, and it too opened.  He cracked it and squinted in.  A square anteroom, littered with tools, boxes and game paraphernalia—a croquet set in a wooden case, a volleyball net folded in a corner, a long workbench on which lay fishing tackle, rods, a baseball glove.  Across the room another solid door.  He felt trapped in Bluebeard's Castle—so many doors to open unbidden.  What lurked behind the next—or last—door?

           Poole crossed the room, returning the glassy stare of a ten-point buck's head on the  wall, a dismal trophy flocked with dust and shriveled with age.  He tried the door, which opened.  Inside was a studio living room cluttered with cast-off art deco furniture.  Sitting in an old easy chair was Don Cosgrove, wrapped in a faded flannel robe, his hair uncombed, unslicked.  He gripped the armrests like a man about to be executed or a white-knuckle flier hearing the pilot announce take-off.  He faced Poole, staring uncomprehendingly.

           Poole stepped into the room, and Don shook his head slightly, as if to clear it.  He croaked, "Poole?  They sent you?"

           "Nobody sent me.  But I've been trying to find you all day."

           "They won't hurt me, will they?  Don't let them hurt me."  Poole inspected  Cosgrove.  His eyes were unfocused, bloodshot.  The robe was several sizes too small, its mock-Navajo pattern faded almost to oblivion.  Cosgrove released his grip on the chair and raised one hand to his pudgy face, touching it as if to reassure himself of his corporeal solidity.

           "They said they'd kill me if I didn't do it.  Just ask Lainey—she knows.  She's in it, too, all the way.  Take her.  Leave me alone.  She's always been a worthless bitch.  I tried to do everything they said.  That lousy Chance . . . he's crazy, and Lainey would do anything to protect him."

           Poole sat on the edge of a sprung sofa-bed.  The room smelled of damp, mildew and dead air, an ancient sepulcher reopened.  Cosgrove babbled in a reedy voice.

           "My father would do anything for her.  And Chance.  My God, the money he's pissed away on them!  And that bitch Margo's even worse.  It's not fair, damn it."

           Cosgrove ran down, an old gramophone at the end of its spring. His hand trembled like a small animal writhing for freedom.

           "All my life, somebody's been chasing me.  That was a dream, Poole.  Yes!  I woke up from it and heard the fire engines.  I can't turn and look, you see.  Something keeps me from turning my head, but I know they're right behind me.  Feet pounding, breath wheezing.  God—it's huge, whatever it is. Like a steam engine. And then I woke up and there were fire engines everywhere, all that red and gold in the dark. And smoke I could taste."

           Poole tried to follow the spilling words.  He patted Don's arm.  Cosgrove shrank away.

           "My father sent you, you bastard!  He'd do anything Lainey and Margo asked.  They won't let me see him, you know.  I'd just upset him, they say.  My own father!  Oh, he calls on the phone.  Yes sir, every day.  But...how do I know it's him?  His voice has changed.  It's . . . old and shriveled.  They have these machines now, you know.  How do I know I'm not talking to an answering machine?"  He coughed and then laughed caustically.  "Oh no—I'm the answering machine!  Yessir, no sir, three bags full sir.  That's the answer they want.  But they won't let me see him.  It would make all the difference in the world . . . "

           He stopped and looked down the front of his robe, tracing the faded pattern with a finger. He frowned as if amazed at the sight.

           "My sick robe," he said.  "The one she always put me in when I was . . . bad.  I spent half my childhood in it.  Do you know that poem ‘The Land of Counterpane^’?  She'd come and read it to me.  I learned it by heart, even though I hated the damn thing.  I mean, she was really good at pretending to be my mother.  That must have been a hard job.  I'll give her credit.   I'm not a small person.  Well . . . I am a small person.  See?  I'm growing into my robe."  He held up a sleeve.  "Give them a few months working on me, and I'll grow right backward through it.  They'll have little Donnie back in diapers.  In my playpen.  Crawl right back into the womb.  But whose?"

           He stared listlessly around the room.  The thin light from the windows made him seem sunken into himself.  Poole tried to soothe.

           "Who are the people who threaten you, Don?  I understand about your mother—Margo—and Lainey.  But who else?  Who did you think sent me?"

           Cosgrove smiled craftily.  "This is a test, right?  You want me to say certain things you can report back.  Let's see . . . if I tell you names, you'll mark down that I'm a tattletale, a snitch.  Right?  If I don't, you'll put down that I'm crazy, deluded.  Can't remember names.  Temporary amnesia, created by acute anxiety.  Oh, I got good at taking those tests.  Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory.  See?  You won't box me in.  I can slide right through those boxes.  Just lines on paper, you know.  But there are other kinds of boxes, my friend.  This room is a box.  It's impossible to walk through the walls. .I've  tried.  My office is another box.  The whole goddam mall is a big, big box.  That policeman said the elves came out of boxes.  Amazing.  They just popped up, probably on springs."  He smiled bitterly. "And you see what good it did them?  They're still dead, aren't they?  I'd have heard if they came back to life."

           Poole nodded wisely, trying to seem a master of nondirective interrogation. "I agree," he said. "But who were the people who frightened you?"

           "No, no, no," Cosgrove said, "you won't get me that easily.  I've got to tell you—the womb is a box, too!  See?  They made a big mistake in ever letting me out.  Oh, they can push me back inside, if they really want to.  Brute force.  They fold up your arms and legs and cram you in.  God, I'll bet that hurts!"

           Poole felt himself losing it, patience evaporating.  He tried to keep sweet reason in his voice.  "Forget the boxes a second, Don.  You've got important things to tell me."

           Cosgrove lurched upright and stared around.  He shuffled forward, and Poole saw his feet were stuffed into old, cracked leather slippers of the same scale and vintage as the robe.  He crossed the room and opened a big square pine chest.  It was stenciled in faded enamel with clown-faces and stylized flowers, a child's toy chest.  Cosgrove knelt and rummaged in the chest, emerging with a long cardboard box.

           "You don't know anything, Poole.  You listen to what people tell you, as if the words were important."  He clasped the box against him.  "So I'll have to show you.  Then you'll know.  Your eyes will know."

           With an odd ceremonial solemnity, Cosgrove handed Poole the carton, a manila cardboard container about a foot and a half long by six inches by eight inches.  It was unmarked except for a faint stencil in pink stamp-pad ink:  PRODUCT OF LATIN AMERICA.  It was not heavy.

           When Poole lifted the top off the box, the sight almost caused him to drop it.  Inside, nestled in a bed of crumpled tissue, was a grotesque fetus, a wizened homunculus folded in on itself like Don Cosgrove's bad dream, staring up with a wicked grin and bright shoe-button eyes.

           "Jesus Christ on a pogo stick!" Poole breathed.

           Cosgrove emitted a cracked cackle, a victory-whoop, "I got you, you smug bastard!"  Poole lifted the curious doll from its nest.  It was a soft toy, almost a sculpture, in lizard-green, representing an old woman in caricature, a tiny twisted gnome of a green woman in a patched dress, with a shark's-mouth grin, stringy carrot-red hair, talon-like fingers, wide lemur's eyes.  Its expression was one of triumphant male violence, mirroring Don Cosgrove. It, too, seemed about to crow, "Got you, you smug bastard!"

           Poole examined this totem.  It wore a dress with rough patches, and under the dress, ballooning Victorian bloomers.  On one arm hung a bulging shopping bag and on the feet were perfectly detailed replicas of worn running shoes.  It was an awful travesty of a bag lady, metamorphosed from an object of pathos to a fetish of fear and terror.

           A lozenge-shaped label dangled like an amulet from the neck, and Poole read its printed text:

                                                        * * GROTTIE GERTIE * *

           BEWARE!  You have just taken into custody one of the most
           dangerous characters in the Universe!  Gertie only seems to be
           a harmless Derelict.  But she is Armed and Dangerous!
           Examine her shopping bag.  Find the secret pockets where she
           carries her Special Weapons.  She blends into her Surroundings
           as a social Outcast but Gertie is a highly trained Urban
           Terrorist!  Don't turn your back on Gertie!  She spreads
           Disease in a fiendish program of Biological Warfare.  She is a
           Master of self-defense and Killing Arts.  HANDLE WITH
           CARE!!!

           On the obverse of the label was another smudgy text:

                      COLLECT KRAZED KILLER KIDS—SEND FOR ARREST
                      WARRANTS!

                      *     Stevie McSnott—con artist and pervert

                      *     Sarah Sicklee—a Terminal Gal

                      *     Percy Pewkes—the World's Most Revolting Snob

                      *     Limping LuLu--she'll pick your Pocket!

                      *     Ferdie Floo—one cough and you're dead, MacCatalog and
                      official Arrest Warrants from:

                                 DaisyChain Imports Inc. * 1124 Industrial Blvd. * St. Vitus,
                                 LA.

           "Good God!" Poole muttered.  He stared at the fetish.  Holding it made his hands itch, so he lowered the carcass and slipped the lid on the carton.  His impulse was to take the bundle to the garden and bury it.

           Cosgrove, seated again in the old chair, grinned in a mirror of Gertie's lupine expression.  "Welcome to the zoo," he whispered.

           "What on earth is it?" Poole asked.

           He had met Gertie, he realized.  What did that mean?

           "Only the toy sensation of the Christmas season.  Or so I am told.  Retails at thirty-four ninety-five.  Christmas pre-sale price twenty-nine ninety-nine.  Wholesale price, special to me, you understand, ten bucks flat, if I buy the whole line in bulk lots of at least five hundred per model.  That's five grand per model, thirty grand for a shipment.  Two hundred percent markup."

           Cosgrove smiled thinly and tapped his fingers on the chair arm.

           "Of course, I'm not a merchandiser, am I?  If I merely funnel the deal into toy concessions, it's not quite so rich.  So—I could merchandise them directly through big displays in the atrium.  SantaLand.  You get the idea.  Maybe hire little people to hawk them.  Mount a campaign.  Exclusive regional rights, see—none of the toy franchises will have them.  Simple and sure.  Right?"

           Poole nodded, and Cosgrove  frowned, saying, "Wrong.  It stinks.  It's a rig—come-on.  Nobody does business that way."

           At a slight noise, Poole and Cosgrove turned.  Margo Cosgrove stood in the doorway in a long blue coat, her hair under a loose scarf.  She cradled a short rifle across her bosom, which Poole recognized as a .30-caliber M1A1 carbine.

           She smiled and said, "Why, Mr. Poole, it was nice of you to return so soon.  But I wish you had come to our front door.  Don needs his rest and quiet, and I fear you're bothering him."

                                                                             * * *

           She hustled them downstairs and back to the big house.  They entered a back door and descended to the cellars.  Margo Cosgrove gently herded Poole to a room crowded with old office furniture and stacked cardboard boxes.  An overhead fluorescent fixture but no window.

           "This is Charles' home office," she said cheerily.  "He likes to come down and play overseer, managing our household books and so on.  A harmless pastime.  I'm the head accountant and auditor here.  But it has the virtue of a strong-room door—to keep out thieves, moth and rust.  It will also keep you securely in."

           Margo held up a dainty hand, the other securely on the carbine, a finger inside the trigger guard.  "Oh, it's not durance vile, exactly.  Just a breathing space for me, so I don't have to divide my attention and wonder where you'll pop up next.  A bit of time for a quiet talk with my son."

           Don stood behind his stepmother, shifting fretfully from slipper to slipper.  He looked like an outsized urchin deprived of his prize teddy bear.  "Mother," he said, "Mother..."

           "Not now," she said, without looking.  "Not yet, sweetheart."

           "Bye for now," she said with a smile, closing the heavy door with a solid thump.  A key turned, a deadbolt shot home.

           Poole surveyed the room, a narrow space eight feet wide by twenty long.  An old partners desk in the middle.  Walls lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves.  A dusty swivel chair, an old mimeograph machine under a hood, an L.C. Smith typewriter like an organ console.  Ranks of boxes and files, sprinkled with the dust of inattention.  The fluorescent fixture shed a dull, uniform greenness.

           Poole examined the room carefully, checking desk drawers, peering at shelves, baseboards, the heaped boxes.  Fifteen minutes' search convinced him he was in a seamless space.  The door was metal painted to resemble oak, unyielding to shoulder or fist, hinges concealed in the wall.  The handle turned but a bolt froze the door.

           A phone jack in the baseboard skirting—but no phone. A ventilation grille in the end wall, sighing brackish air.  Less than a foot square.  He had once read that a man could crawl through any space larger than his head, but he knew this for a base canard.  Houdini might be able to do it, but he was dead, and no wonder.

           Poole sat in the swivel chair.  He could pretend he was a captain of industry and while away the hours building an empire of imagination.  He found pencil stubs in the desk:  he could indite his autobiography, or a journal, or a novel onto the whitewashed walls. Some of the world's great literature, he recalled, was written in prison—Don Quixote, Pilgrim's Progress, The Gulag Archipelago.  He remembered that Tom Sawyer insisted Nigger Jim write a work of pathos while awaiting deliverance.  But he had always hated Tom Sawyer, a snotty little prick who should have been thrashed and sentenced to life in Dotheboys Hall.

           He could write coded notes and slip them out by a clever ruse, when his warders brought food and interrogation.  Always provided things went on that long.  Or they could come in and bolt an iron mask over his head and keep him in Chateau D'If for thirty years.

           "I am the real Dauphin," Poole muttered.

           They.  He realized he was thinking like Don Cosgrove.  When you are locked up, the whole world is a conspiracy, every man's (and woman's) hand raised against you.  Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Gloom.  He drew a frowny-face on the wall with a pencil stub.  Take that!

           "Even paranoids have real enemies," he said.  The sound of his voice was a teeny comfort.  He saw a motion out of the corner of his eye.

           A biggish black cockroach scooted like a mechanical toy across the linoleum floor.  Oh, boy, Poole thought, the Roachman of Leeland.   I could tame him and have a friend to talk to.  Me and Mehitabel.  Teach him—it—to fetch and carry.  Have him (it) bring friends to form a labor force and dig our way out, in a few eons.

           He stamped his foot, and the hexapodal arthropod raced to the end wall, scampered up the baseboard, scaled the wall in even strides and disappeared into a crack where the ceiling joined the wall.  Poole sat for a moment, depressed that he was poor company for even a lowly bug.

           A faint idea shimmered.  He dragged the swivel chair to the wall and blocked its casters with a file.  He stood gingerly on it, bringing his head to the low ceiling.  The room, he realized, had a false ceiling laid in under the rafters.  He poked it.  It was as hard as . . . sheetrock.  He wound up and delivered a short jab.  It dented.  He jabbed again, and his fist penetrated.  It also hurt like hell.  A few minutes searching yielded proto-tools:  a thin sheet-metal paperknife wedged back of a desk drawer, emblazoned LEELAND SEED & FEED CO. * 1907-57 * A HALF-CENTURY OF SERVICE TO SOUTH-CENTRAL ILLINOIS.

           God bless advertising giveaways!  He also found a ballpoint pen long dead, a 1937 buffalo nickel, a small pot-metal box, evidently a portmanteau paperweight/paperclip-arsenal, a styrofoam coffee cup and two more pencil stubs, one with red lead.

           He surveyed these implements, thinking that if he were Robinson Crusoe, Thomas Alva Edison or Tom Swift, he could build from them a nuclear-powered escape auger and drill his way straight to freedom through the concrete-block walls.  If he were James Bond, he could fabricate a crude pistol which would propel unerringly lethal pencil stubs.  If he were not a patent idiot, he could figure out what to do with this trove of technological detritus.  He wished he had spent boyhood hours reading Popular Mechanix. 

           He pocketed the things, noting that he had in his pockets more potential tools—a hardly-utilitarian fingernail-snipper-cum-keychain-fob, a handful of coins, another defunct ballpoint pen.

           Eschewing finesse, he stood again on the chair and bashed the ceiling with his fist, now handkerchief-wrapped.  Overhead punching was heavy work, but he managed to open a hole bigger than his head, showering himself with debris and gypsum dust.  He hoped there was no asbestos inlaid or in fifty more years he'd be dead.  He grasped the ragged edges and yanked, putting a hundred and eighty pounds of his dead weight into it.

           A great raw chunk of sheetrock ripped loose.  He stared into a cavity backed by oak and pine rafters.  Now what? he asked.  He could keep going straight up, try to rip or chew his way through the rafters, sub-flooring and flooring, to emerge like Mole Man in the comix in the Cosgrove parlor—or whatever was up there.  He could go sideways:  he peered into the gap.  The cement-block walls went right up to the flooring.  To hell with it!

           Tired of standing tipsily on the chair, Poole sat and surveyed the damage.  His impotence irritated him.  His best bet was to rip up sheetrock.  Take that, you tyrant!  Sh*t!

           The solid side wall was (presumably) the house's foundation, several feet thick.  The back wall ditto.  The further side wall, with the ventilation duct, was inside the basement and new.  Ditto the wall containing the vault door.  He thought about drawing a plan of the cell for prolonged study.  If the walls went right up to the floor-or-ceiling, he was screwed, with little point in wasting energy in dismantling the false (i.e., sheetrock) ceiling.

           "Think, sh*thead!" he said aloud.

           He found a matchbook from the Carnahan Hotel in his pocket, mounted the chair again, struck one and peered back into the cavity.  Old wiring in metal-flex conduits, a small length of furnace ducting, dust, dirt, despair.  The match flickered out, after frying his fingertips.

           A horizontal space or layer about two feet thick between rafters and lowered ceiling.  He could crawl up and hide, so his jailers, upon entering, would see an empty room and decide (a) he was Jesus Christ and had pulled the old empty-tomb gambit again; (b) he had vanished into thin air by exerting secret powers learned in the Orient; (c) they were going mad and should turn themselves in pronto to an appropriate mental-health officer.  They would—in any event—run away crying havoc, while he could slip down and find egress via the left-open door.  He had seen it work dozens of times for everyone from Lash LaRue to Abbott and Costello.

           He wondered what Margo Cosgrove was doing.  Lining up her family and plugging them full of carbine slugs?  Calling in a squad of Chicago goons to do same?  Convening whatever confederates fit in this ungodly Chinese puzzle of a case?  Undoubtedly the latter.  She would be finding out that Heinie—aka. Chance—her . . .what was it?  step-grandson?—was jugged for arson, mayhem, resisting arrest, kidnapping, extortion, theft, murder, etc.  Or she would be contacting . . . who?  Or whom?

           Poole squinted into the crawlspace.  A small heating duct ran across the area, terminating in an upward bend at the wall.  A floor-vent, doubtless, in whatever room was above.

           A stupid idea struck Poole with the force of divine revelation.  He could reach this duct at arm's length and found in its side a small, square indentation—a sheet metal knockout placed for the use of the sheet metal-worker installing said ducting, to allow vent or branch openings.  He pressed on the square.  He pounded it.  Eventually, he bent it inward till it popped loose.  He had made a square opening, about six inches on a side.  If he could reduce himself to the size of his pal Archy the Roach, he could scamper into the duct and run all over the frigging house.  He hummed "We Shall Meet Then in That Upper Room."

           Working with blind concentration, Poole gathered the handful of pencil stubs, a sheaf of ledger sheets from a file box, the styrofoam cup and his handkerchief.  With the paperknife as tool-of-all-work, he poked the rubbish into the duct, around the corner of his opening toward the upper vent.  He struck another match and started a ledger sheet ablaze, noting idly its heading:  HOUSEHOLD INVENTORY—JUNE, 1951.  He reached his improvised torch into the duct and prayed to Zeus that the debris would burn, hopefully with many fumes.  He was rewarded with a puff of black and acrid smoke in his face.  A draft ran in the duct, all right.  He saw orange flames, more smoke billowing.  He clambered down, found a ledger book, clambered up and clamped it over the opening.

           Poole was sure, surveying his mental schematic of the house and its probable system of hot-air ducts, that he was sending at least a minor cloud of noxious fumes to some overhead room.  He remembered Don Cosgrove's history of fire-buggery, or at least putative pyromania, and the family's sensitivity thereto.  With his free hand, he whanged the metal paperknife on the duct, bellowing "Fire! Fire!” at the rafters.

           He paused and waited, smelling a stench of scorching.  The magnificent stupidity of kindling a ceiling fire while locked inviolably in a tiny room struck him.  If this didn't work, he would be reduced to a fritter in a welter of paper-ash and charred office furniture.  The pathos of this idea enraged him, and he resumed his sheet metal percussion and fortissimo shouting.

           When he paused again to listen for the pounding of feet and the wholesale panic he presumed to have instilled in the household over him, Poole heard a light voice say, "For goodness sake!"

           He looked down to see Margo Cosgrove, out of her coat and into an elaborately-embroidered silk dressing gown, with her trusty carbine pointing accusingly at him.  She stood inside the opened door and wore a quizzical expression.

           "Why, Mr. Poole," she chirped, "what on earth are you doing up there?"

           Glumly, Poole answered, "Ralph Waldo, what are you doing down there?"

                                                               #####

jptHOME Issue 3

Copyright 2007- WJ Schafer & WC Smith - All Rights Reserved

Back to Storyteller's Space

from Deck the Malls with Murder. . .

jptArchives