Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

Thanks to this new acquaintance, Bair soon learned to revise his opinion of there being no down-and-outers in Grimley. Although he found no trace of what might be called the respectable poor, he did discover a rummy enclave of old soaks who idled their time away in the sleazy beer joints around Fenton Square. Bair was appalled by the apparent dullness of their lives. My God, he thought, what do they do on Sundays? Yet on none of their faces did he find that look of spiritual despair he’d anticipated, but only a soft glaze of boozy detachment.

Dragging his shadow through the cheerless streets, Bair was now able to brave the stares of the respectable with a jauntily obscene leer, and one afternoon while studying the modus operandi of a panhandler working the south side of Market Street, he surrendered to a rollicking urge to try his own hand at it, but with only indifferent success.

If there was little visible evidence of grinding poverty in Grimley, neither were their obvious signs of evil. Only occasional intriguing glimpses.

In a bar so nondescript it didn’t even boast a name, a woman calling herself Alfreda Drapenheimer bawled into Bair’s captive ear the story of her exceedingly tiresome and determined fall from grace.

“Do you know Deuce?” Bair asked her while she was still sober enough to concentrate, for Bair was almost certain he’d caught another glimpse of the young man through the window of a nearby poolroom.

Alfreda favored him with the juiciest of bawdy winks. “Ah, Deuce. Do I know Deuce.”

“You do?”

“Deuce is wild.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Buy me a drink first.”

It being the happy hour, Bair bought her a twenty-five-cent draft. She lowered her voice. “That Deuce, he’s what’s called a freelancer.”

“What kind of freelancer?” Bair suspected it might have something to do with prostitution.

“Don’t ask. Don’t ask nobody about Deuce, Mr. Man. He’s got connections.”

“To what?”

The woman shrugged. “Don’t ask. Steer clear of that boy Deuce. He is bad news.”

Having spent the last of his five dollars, Bair was forced to flee from the bar an absolute pauper and none the wiser.

Later, at the Hope of the World Mission, he was obliged to listen to an endlessly dreary homily as the air became suffused with the gripping aroma of steaming soup. At one point he groaned with boredom and hunger and the man sitting beside him whispered, “What the hell, soup for a sermon. Best deal in town.”

Sleeping in the rough had grown intolerable, so that Bair was forced to bed down in the reeking dormitory upstairs in the Mission, where one morning he awoke to find that a thief had stolen his jacket and the laces out of his shoes — though not, oddly enough, the shoes themselves — as well as his return ticket to the Center. This alarming loss seemed to crystallize a vague sense of having been spied upon and followed, or was this no more than that paranoia of the dispossessed he’d once read about in some psychology text? Surely it could be only paranoid fantasy that would suggest the theft of the ticket had been some deliberate means of testing his resourcefulness.

This whole adventure seemed witless to Bair. What could it possibly prove? He’d heard of organizations holding retreats for staff members, sending them off to consciousness-raising seminars and such activities, but what could this program accomplish? It might have made sense to send him and Nobbs and the others to some drought-ridden area of Africa where the sight of the starving masses might indeed inspire them in their work. But where were the hungry in Grimley? Whatever had possessed the director to send him here of all places?

Bair himself felt starved for companionship, so acutely that he’d overcome his squeamishness about frequenting crummy bars. Venturing into one of these, he was astonished to find himself in the midst of a carnival atmosphere. The place was packed, the noise deafening. What could be the occasion? He must have said this aloud, or words to that effect, for someone yelled into his ear: “Check Day!”

Suddenly someone pinched his cheek and, recoiling with a start, he looked into the face of the Drapenheimer woman.

“Mr. Man! You look like you need cheering up.”

“I seem to have come to the right place.”

“This here’s Big Mike.”

A man not much taller than a dwarf, with shaggy ginger-colored bangs and thick glasses, offered a tiny pale hand.

“Pleased t’meetcha, friend. What’s yer game?”

“Game?”

An irresistibly compelling urge to recapture his sense of pride and dignity overcame Bair’s scruples against breaking the Director’s rules. Who was to know?

“I’m in research,” he said grandly. “Soybeans.”

The pair laughed uproariously. “What the hell are soybeans?” Alfreda asked.

“The hope of the world.”

“That’s a mission on Market Street, not a bean, pal,” said Big Mike.

“No, no. I mean they hold the secret of relieving the world’s food shortage. Think of it. No more famine in the Third World.”

Alfreda pinched him again. “You on drugs, Mr. Man?”