A Fatal Glass of Beer Read Online Free PDF Page A

Philadelphia. If we don’t trap Hipnoodle in his opium den, we’ll try to get to the banks before him. Trap him or convince the banks to let me make withdrawals or close the accounts.”
    “How many banks?” I asked.
    Fields shrugged. “This is not a case of the potential loss of ill-gotten lucre,” he said, rising and patting his straw hat back on his head, “but of a man’s savings, earned by painful hours of learning to juggle in frozen lofts and worse hotel rooms. We’re talking about dozens of banks.”
    I nodded.
    “You have a weapon?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Bring it.”
    I said I would. I didn’t add that I had been the worst shot in the Glendale Police Department and had gotten decidedly worse since.
    “Well, enough of this shilly-shallying, let’s go to my house where I can pack and, if need be, be on our way to the scene of the crime before the day ends.”
    He led the way back into Shelly’s office and looked over at the victim, who still sat in the chair. Her groans had turned to an eerie, distant low moan. Shelly was puffing away and washing his instruments in the sink.
    “Man’s a genius,” Fields whispered to me behind his hand. “Don’t want to praise him too highly. Might go to his head.”
    “I think we got the right tooth,” Shelly said, turning to us and wiping his hands on his bloody smock. His eyes were huge behind his thick lenses.
    “A consummation devoutly to be wished,” said Fields. He tipped his hat to the barely conscious woman and headed for the door, while I told Shelly it looked like I was going out of town for a few days on business.
    “Understand perfectly,” Shelly said, reverting to his abysmal Fields imitation. “I’ll hold down the corpus delicti.”
    In the reception room Violet smiled up at us from her desk, where she was confirming appointments for Shelly’s patients. It would ever be a mystery to me why anyone allowed themselves a second visit to Sheldon Minck’s Tower of London, but they did. Occasionally.
    “Pleasure to meet you,” Fields said.
    “I’ll write to my husband and tell him I met you,” she said. “He thinks you’re funny.”
    “Armstrong takes Beau Jack, ten bucks straight up,” I reminded her.
    Violet nodded solemnly; Fields and I left.
    “Note,” he said as we closed the door and stood on the railed landing of the sixth floor of the Faraday Building, “she said her husband likes me. It has been a source of irritation that women, as a gender, are not particularly responsive to my wit. They prefer a popinjay ballet dancer like Chaplin to honest misogyny.”
    “Hard to understand,” I said, remembering that my former wife, Anne, had refused to see Fields movies with me, claiming that they made no sense, weren’t amusing, were nasty to women and small children. I had agreed with her, but I still thought he was funny.
    Fields moved to the railing and held his straw hat to his head to insure that some indoor breeze wouldn’t take it down six flights to the lobby.
    I was about a dozen feet away from him now and had a good look at the great man. I knew he was over sixty and that he had looked pretty much the same in movies for the last twenty years as he did now. His stomach was a bit larger, his nose probably a little more red, though I had never seen it in color before today.
    “Long drop,” he said.
    The Faraday echo answered, “Drop.”
    Fields turned around, pleased.
    “You came up on the elevator?” I asked.
    “Indeed,” he said, heading for the black steel cage. “Trip took almost as long as a Zambesi safari I was once on with Applejack Strainfinger, the great one-armed white hunter. Almost got me killed.”
    We got in the elevator. I pressed the button and we started slowly down.
    “Rhino charged right at me when I wasn’t looking. Applejack had a mastodon of an elephant gun which he had trouble bringing to his remaining good shoulder. The rhino stampeded closer and I gave serious consideration to addressing