And then it was my turn.
And the whole time I was listening to these men I was thinking, they think they have it bad? Really? Because none of them had a wife as rotten as mine. Oh, I guess we all think now and then that we’ve picked a lemon off the tree of love, to get poetic for a moment, but compared to those men with their crummy complaints I really did have the all-time booby prize.
I’d figured when Morgan got up to speak it would be ray turn next, so I rehearsed what to say. It wasn’t, you understand, that I wanted to impress anybody. But to be actually able to say it out loud, to tell the world what she’d done to me — pure heaven!
I took my place on the dais and looked at Russell.
“You can begin now,” he said kindly.
“Fred Norton. Her name was Annie and she was my secretary and she was twenty-three years old and I loved her more than anyone else on earth and I knew I always would and my wife who is cold like you wouldn’t believe found out and told everyone on the west coast what I’d done and said we’d have to move a thousand miles away from ‘that tramp,’ only Annie wasn’t a tramp and I’ll never in my life see her again and I still love her so much and my wife keeps bringing the whole thing up and I try to forget her because it hurts so much, but I know I’ll never be able to, especially with my wife reminding me all the time.”
“One minute, Fred.”
“I can’t stand my wife!” I yelled into the microphone as I left the platform.
Never in my thirty-nine and three-quarter years had I felt so good. Almost laughing from the deep pleasure of getting it all out of my system, I took my seat and half listened to the others. Owens, with his wife who told his kids he was a dummy, and Quenton, whose wife had gone back to college and now thought she was smarter than he was, and Smith, whose wife slept until noon and made him do the housework, all the way down to Zugay, whose wife made all his clothes so that he went out looking like a holdover from the Big Depression. Which he certainly did.
One guy, who hadn’t spoken, interested me. He was smiling. Actually sitting there with a big grin on his face. I was staring at him, wondering if his face was familiar, when Russell spoke.
“All right, men. Time to vote. George, hand out the paper and pencils, okay?”
Vote?
“Vote?” I asked the man sitting next to me, whose wife hid his toupee when she didn’t want him to go out.
“Sure. Vote for the one who has the lousiest wife.”
I scribbled down the name Fred Norton. After all, I did have the lousiest wife.
Glenn Russell collected the slips of paper and sorted them. In a few minutes he turned to face the men.
“For the first time, men,” he said, “a new member has won. Fred Norton. The one with the wife, you remember, who called his nice girl friend a tramp.”
Then he smiled. “Congratulations, Fred!”
I half rose, feeling somewhat foolish and yet proud. It was indeed an honor.
And then all of them, all the sad-faced, beaten-down men, gathered around me and shook my hand. Some of them actually had tears in their eyes as they patted me on the back.
Later, as we all went to the lounge to have a drink before going home, I found Glenn Russell at the end of the bar and went over to him with my drink.
“This is some deal,” I said. “It really, really felt good to get it out of my system. Whose idea was this club?”
“Mine,” he said. “We’ve met once a year for the last six years. I control the membership and I wanted you to be included this year. That wife of yours is really something, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “She sure is. How come you didn’t speak? Because it’s your club?”
“Oh. No, my wife passed away a few years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling suddenly awkward. “That guy sitting over there, the one who’s had the big smile on his face all evening, who the heck is he?”
“Gary McClellan? He’s the vet in our fair city.”
“Oh, sure, now I remember. Say, didn’t my wife tell me that McClellan’s wife died last year in some sort of horrible accident?”
Russell smiled broadly and patted me on the arm.
“Of course, old man! McClellan was last year’s winner!”
Mr. Strang Under Arrest
by William Brittain[5]
We tend to think of the deductive detective as a “thinking machine” — cold, calculating, detached. But suppose such a detective — especially an amateur who investigates crime not for money but for the love of the game — suppose such a simon-pure detective finds himself in grave trouble with the law? Will he remain the objective, logical, emotionless prober and pursuer of the truth?
Read how Mr. Strang, the little old science teacher at Aldershot High School, faced this unexpected predicament...
Mr. Strang wriggled about on the hard wooden chair, trying to find a comfortable position. He counted the acoustic tiles that made up the walls and ceiling of the small room and then calculated in his head the total number used. With a loud sigh he began drumming his fingers on the hard surface of the table at which he sat. If only the room had a window he could at least watch the rain which he could hear guttering through the downspouts outside the building. But there was no window.
“Coelenterata,” he growled in annoyance.
It was a Saturday morning, following a week of unrelenting rain in Aldershot. Mr. Strang’s high-school students, unable to work off their high spirits outside, had generated a full head of steam and conducted themselves in a manner that might have been suitable to the hordes of Attila the Hun, but which was downright disgraceful in teen-agers preparing for midterm examinations. The advent of the weekend found the old teacher exhausted in mind and body, with his aging joints aching from the damp weather. He had looked forward to sleeping late this morning.
But here it was, only a little after nine, and he found himself in an Interrogation Room of the Third Precinct Police Station.
The detective who had called on him at Mrs. Mackey’s rooming-house, a granite block of a man named Walter Fosse, had been unfailingly polite. He’d been sorry to disturb Mr. Strang, but he was conducting an investigation, and he wondered if the teacher would mind coming down to the station-house to make a statement concerning his whereabouts between eight and ten the previous evening. Oh, yes, there was one other thing. Would he mind driving his own car to the station? He could leave it in the police garage out of the rain.
His mind still foggy with sleep, Mr. Strang had taken his car to the station where he’d dictated and then signed a statement to the effect that up until a little before nine the night before, he’d been in the Aider-shot Public Library. Then he’d driven home and spent the rest of the evening lying in bed and reading one of the books he’d checked out. Fosse had taken the statement when he’d left the Interrogation Room, his parting words being that he’d be “back in a few minutes.”
The whole procedure had been so foreign to Mr. Strang that not once had he thought to ask what the police were investigating.
“Back in a few minutes indeed,” the teacher muttered waspishly. “It must be at least an hour he’s left me here alone.” He glanced at his watch. Ten minutes had gone by since Fosse’s departure.
He rubbed his hands against his wrinkled jacket to dry the sweat that had suddenly begun to pour from his palms. It wasn’t that he was afraid exactly, but the situation was peculiar, to say the least. In the classroom he was fully in charge, but a police station was unfamiliar territory. Fosse had his statement, so why couldn’t Strang leave? He was being treated almost as if he were a criminal. Again he dried his hands on his jacket.