A Thousand and One Afternoons in ChicagoHecht, Ben
General
A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago
Hecht, Ben
Chicago (Ill.) -- Literary collections; Hecht, Ben, 1893-1964 -- Homes and haunts -- Illinois -- Chicago
"Offhand, though," sighed Sergt. Kuzick, "it's difficult. I ain't got it
clear in my head what you want either. Of course I know it's got to be
interestin' or the paper won't print it. But interestin' things is pretty
hard to run into. I remember one night out to the old morgue. This was
'way back when I started on the force thirty years ago and more. And they
was having trouble at the morgue owing to the stiffs vanishing and being
mutilated. They thought maybe it was students carryin' them off to
practice medicine on. But it wasn't, because they found old Pete--that was
the colored janitor they had out there--he wasn't an African, but it
turned out a Fiji Islander afterward. They found him dead in the morgue
one day and it turned out he was a cannibal. Or, anyway, his folks had
been cannibals in Fiji, and the old habit had come up in him so he
couldn't help himself, and he was makin' a diet off the bodies in the
morgue. But he struck one that was embalmed, and the poison in the body
killed him. The papers didn't carry much on it on account of it not bein'
very important, but I always thought it was kind of interestin' at that.
That's about what you want, I suppose--some story or other like that.
Well, let's see.
* * * * *
"It's hard," sighed Sergt. Kuzick, after a pause, "to put your finger on a
yarn offhand. I remember a lot of things now, come to think of it, like
the case I was on where a fella named Zianow killed his wife by pouring
little pieces of hot lead into her ear, and he would have escaped, but he
sold the body to the old county hospital for practicin' purposes, and
while they was monkeying with the skull they heard something rattle and
when they investigated it was several pieces of lead inside rattling
around. So they arrested Zianow and got him to confess the whole thing,
and he was sent up for life, because it turned out his wife had stabbed
him four times the week before he poured the lead into her while she
slept, and frightened him so that he did it in self-defense, in a way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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