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Who Killed Wee Willie?

Ever since the leaping cow caper I’ve been jumpy, so when a middle-aged broad knocked on my door I heaved a sigh of relief. I should have known better.

“What is it, Ma’am?” I asked.

Mrs. Winkie told me her son William had had a good job in curfew management, but two days ago he’d disappeared. He hadn’t been seen since.

“Curfew, eh?” I probed, “Anybody you know who likes to stay up late?” She hadn’t a clue, so I hit the streets.

It didn’t take long to garner some suspects. Word was that a rough crowd called the Nine O’Clock Gang had objected to Winkie’s zealous enforcement of the 8 p.m. curfew. They’d tried to buy Winkie off with a sack of suckers.

“Dey even said dey’d trow in some jawbreakas,” Chas told me. But it was no good. I was developing the theory that, at approximately 8:01 last Wednesday, the Niners had offed Willie so they could stay up late.

I cornered the leader of the Niners in a dive near the waterfront. He denied killing Willie. “But we seen somethin’,” he told me. He and his boys had seen Willie knock on a window. The window had opened and Willie had been dragged inside. They hadn’t seen him come out.

I visited the two-story brick house that night. No one was home, so I entered through a back window. When Miss Muffet came home about 4 a.m. I was waiting for her.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked.

“Do what?” she asked innocently. I showed her one of the odd-shaped packages from the freezer and she broke down.

“It was that incessant rapping and calling. Every single night at 8 o’clock! I just couldn’t take it. My nerves haven’t been the same since the spider incident.”

“I sympathise, lady, but you can’t kill people because they’re irritating.”

* * *

Mrs. Winkie took it hard. I tried to cheer her up. “Willie was a martyr for decency, order, and bed time,” I told her, “maybe some day they’ll write a song about him.”

end

Reference:

Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town,

Upstairs and downstairs, in his night gown,

Rapping at the windows, calling through the locks,

Are the children in their beds? Now it’s 8 o’clock!

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