"Dick Tracy": 88 Keyes Trivia Quiz

Answer: kidnaps Johnny

After he swiped Johnny, Nifty spots a police car driving past. Panicking, he sets the child on the rear of the truck which drives away. A blizzard begins, and Nifty finds himself trying unsuccessfully to stop the truck as he follows it through the country to a nearby town.
Johnny falls off the truck and is rescued by a farmer. Nifty wrecks his car and ends up at the same farmhouse. Alerted to the situation, police are trying to follow in the raging blizzard, and eventually arrest Nifty.
What amazes me most is that Johnny Wreath is wearing shorts during the entire blizzard sequence.
Chester Gould excels at drawing the elements. The scenes with the blinding snow must have made readers shiver just reading the strip.

Answer: prayed

This inspired Tracy to pray not for himself, but Johnny Wreath. After leaving the shack, he thought he was hallucinating when he smelled bacon. It was frying in a road workers' shed where men in a snowplow were warming up. They turn for the hospital with Dick Tracy and Johnny Wreath, arriving just in time. Johnny Wreath is at death's door for several days, and only recovers when his dad, Nifty, is brought in. Amazingly the Wreath family is back together and no charges are pressed despite the danger Nifty put so many people in.

This is the last soap opera like story for many years as Chester Gould sets his sights on much more colorful villains and excellent plot lines.

Answer: a man was stabbed

Just as 88 Keyes and his orchestra loudly brought in a new floor show, millionaire meat packer A. B. Helmut was stabbed. He had recently been married.
Although there are several members of the orchestra, the reader soon finds 88 Keyes was the leader and played the piano, his beautiful girlfriend Jinny was the singer and his piano tuner was also involved in a money for murder gang.

Answer: steak knife

Tracy suggested it might be a steak knife so he and Pat Patton get down to police work, one of the staples of the "Dick Tracy" comic strip. Using an acid test, Pat finds the name 'Dove' on the handle of the knife while Tracy interrogates Helmut's widow.
On going to the Dove Club to check on the knife, they recognize the piano tuner (whose name apparently is Piano Tuner) who was at the Club Joy when they investigated the body. Tracy swipes his grinding wheel and further tests confirm the metal bits in it are the same as the murder weapon.
In the meantime we see 88 talking with Helmut's widow on the telephone about her husband's $200,000 life insurance money.

Answer: the piano

Gould is very good with the symbolism. Where else would the piano player hide a body except in a piano? 88 hammers out the soundboard and stuffs her inside, nailing the top down before calling Northside Storage to take it away. He then leaves town with Helmut's widow and her $200,000.
After questioning Piano Tuner, Dick Tracy arrives at 88's apartment just as the movers are taking the piano. The ever observant Tracy sees the nails in the lid and opens it up, revealing Jinny's body. When confronted with the dead singer, Tuner breaks down and talks. He says 88 will likely kill Helmut's widow as soon as he gets his hands on the $200,000.
And so begins one of Chester Gould's greatest chases.

Answer: train

He left the exhausted widow sleeping in her car parked on the railroad tracks. During the investigation he calmly boards the train which is headed back to the city. But police are suspicious and Tracy and company are waiting at the station. After a shootout on the rooftops which entraps Tracy in some reinforced glass, 88 Keyes runs downstairs and into a door, finding himself in an employment agency.

He is soon headed out of town on a bus headed for a farm job before police get Tracy off the roof.

Answer: a milk can

While Dick Tracy moped around headquarters trying to figure out how 88 eluded him, Keyes was causing farmer Wheaton no end of grief. He was a failure at cultivating corn, driving the tractor in reverse once and later burying the small corn. He couldn't milk cows or drive a tractor, but he sure could he play the organ for young Nellie Wheaton who developed a crush on him. Wheaton knew good help was hard to find during the war and eventually asked if 88 could feed the hogs. "You take the can of mash and EMPTY IT-like this, see?"
Writer Chester Gould had sought to put humor into his strip for years with little success. But things had changed. By putting the criminal through mental and physical torture, Gould found his way to the reader's funny bone.
Murderer 88 Keyes put up with Wheaton's tirades without a peep because he knew he had a perfect hideout. But he had made his mistake. The Musicians Union card which fell into the milk can was fished out at the Perfect Milk Company and Dick Tracy was notified.

Answer: corn shredder

The corn shredder is what is now known as a silage cutter. The love stricken Nellie steals her dad's car keys and gives them to 88, then hides in the back seat. They are spotted by the police as they leave, but Nellie tells him to hide the car behind a haystack as the police car speeds past. Stopping for fuel, a man in a navy uniform hitches a ride. Red Bluff knows Nellie and after she tells him 88 is her fiancé, he becomes amused at the situation.

Answer: hits a pig

The collision rolls the car and knocks out Nellie. 88 Keyes and Red Bluff take off cross country. When Bluff tells 88 he is a navy deserter, 88 kills him and waits to hop a train. As he waits, he hears the police pursuit, who have found the body of Red Bluff. He then runs above the bridge he had been sitting underneath, but there is only one place for him to hide, a small railroad shed.
In one of Chester Gould's great 'silent' panels we see Tracy's profile looking down the railroad tracks at the only piece of cover visible - the shed.

Answer: cuts an x with a tommy gun

Chester Gould's detective frequently used bullets instead of diplomacy and it worked well in the comic strip. Tracy yelled at 88 to come out, which he didn't. He cut an x across the shed with a tommy gun and Keyes fell out the door, dead. In defense of this action, Tracy noted 88's gun was cocked with the safety off and anyone opening the door would have been killed. Probably true, but waiting him out would seem to have been a better option to me. Mandy Patinkin played the role of 88 Keyes in the 1990 movie "Dick Tracy".

He portrayed the villain very well from his clothes all the way down to the way he smoked his cigarette.