“The murder hit the radio tonight. When his suicide scam went bust he rabbited.”
The plainclothes man who had come with Alderdyce leaned out the open door of the pawnshop. Shoe was acting as a doorstop now. “He had all the handguns in the suitcase except one or two, John.”
“Hey, this guy’s still alive.”
Everyone looked at the uniform down on one knee beside Shoe. The wounded man’s chest rose and fell feebly beneath his bloody shirt. Alderdyce leaned forward.
“It’s over,” he said. “No sense lying your way deeper into hell. Why’d you kill Blum?”
Shoe looked up at him. His eyes were growing soft. After a moment his lips moved. On that street with the windows going up on both sides and police radios squawking it got very quiet.
It was even quieter on Farnum in Royal Oak, where night lay warm on the lawns and sidewalks and I towed a little space of silence through ratching crickets on my way to the back door of the duplex. The lights were off inside. I rang the bell and had time to smoke a cigarette between the time they came on and when May Shinstone looked at me through the window. A moment later she opened the door. Her hair was tousled and she had on a blue robe over a lighter blue nightgown that covered her feet. Without makeup she looked older, but still nowhere near her true age.
“Isn’t it a little late for visiting, Mr. Walker?”
“It’s going to be a busy night,” I said. “The cops will be here as soon as they find out you’ve left the place in Birmingham and get a change of address.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but come in. When I was young we believed the night air was bad for you.”
She closed the door behind me. The living room looked like a living room now. The cartons were gone and the books were in place on the shelves. I said, “You’ve been busy.”
“Yes. Isn’t it awful? I’m one of those compulsive people who can’t go to sleep when there’s a mess to be cleaned up.”
“You can’t have gotten much sleep lately, then. Leaving Shoe with all those guns made a big mess.”
“Shoe? I don’t—”
“The cops shot him at the place where he tried to lay them off. When he found out he was mixed up in murder he panicked. He made a dying statement in front of seven witnesses.”
She was going to brazen it out. She stood with her back to the door and her hands in the pockets of her robe and a marble look on her face. Then it crumbled. I watched her grow old.
“I let him keep most of what he stole,” she said. “It was his payment for agreeing to burgle Leo’s house. All I wanted was the Colt automatic, the .38 he used to kill Manny Eckleberg. Shoe — his name was Henry Schumacher — was my gardener in Birmingham. I hired him knowing of his prison record for breaking and entering. I didn’t dream I’d ever have use for his talents in that area.”
“You had him steal the entire collection to keep Blum from suspecting what you had in mind. Then on the anniversary of Eckleberg’s murder you went back and killed him with the same gun. Pure poetry.”
“I went there to kill him, yes. He let me in and when I pointed the gun he laughed at me and tried to take it away. We struggled. It went off. I don’t expect you to believe that.”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe because it stinks first-degree any way you smell it,” I said. “So you stuck his finger in the trigger afterwards and fired the gun through the window or something to satisfy the paraffin test and make it look like suicide. Why’d you kill the dog?”
“After letting me in, Leo set it loose in the grounds. It wouldn’t let me out the door. I guess he’d trained it to trap intruders until he called it off. So I went back and got the gun and shot it. That hurt me more than killing Leo, can you imagine that? A poor dumb beast.”
“What was Manny Eckleberg to you?”
“Nothing. I never knew him. He was just a smalltime bootlegger from St. Louis who thought he could play with the Purple Gang.”
I said nothing. Waiting. After a moment she crossed in front of me, opened a drawer in a bureau that was holding up a china lamp, and handed me a bundle of yellowed envelopes bound with a faded brown ribbon.
“Those are letters my sister received from Abe Steinmetz when he was serving time in Jackson prison for Eckleberg’s murder,” she said. “In them he explains how Leo Goldblum paid him to confess to the murder. He promised him he wouldn’t serve more than two years and that there would be lots more waiting when he got out. Only he never got out. He was stabbed to death in a mess room brawl six months before his parole.
“I was the one who was dating Abe, Mr. Walker; not my sister. I was seeing him at the same time I was seeing Leo. He swore her to secrecy in the letters, believing I wouldn’t understand until he could explain things in person. The money would start our marriage off right, he said. But instead of waiting I married Leo.”
She wet her lips. I lit a Winston and gave it to her. She inhaled deeply, her fingers fidgeting and dropping ash on the carpet. “My sister kept the secret all these years. It wasn’t until she died and I opened her safety deposit box and read the letters—” She broke off and mashed out the cigarette in a copper ashtray atop the bureau. Do I have time to get dressed and put on lipstick before the police arrive? They never even gave Leo time to grab a necktie whenever they took him in for questioning.”
I told her to take as much time as she needed. At the bedroom door she paused. “I don’t regret it, you know. Maybe I wouldn’t have been happy married to Abe. But when I think of all those wasted years — well, I don’t regret it.” She went through the door.
Waiting, I pocketed the letters, shook the last cigarette out of my pack, and struck a match. I stared at the flame until it burned down to my fingers.
He had all the handguns in the suitcase except one or two.
I dropped the match and vaulted to the bedroom door. Moving too damn slowly. I had my hand on the knob when I heard the shot.
The temperatures soared later in the month, and with them the crime statistics. The weatherman called it the hottest July on record. The newspapers had another name for it, but it had already been used.
Nelson Algren
Say a Prayer for the Guy
Though he never wrote mystery stories, Nelson Algren shared with hard-boiled detective writers a fascination for the inhabitants of the backstreets. His ability to understand his grotesque characters allowed him to sympathize without sentimentalizing them. “Say a Prayer for the Guy” combines two of his favorite subjects — saloons and poker. This uncollected story first appeared in 1958 — nine years after The Man with the Golden Arm.
Nelson Algren died in 1981 at the age of seventy-nine.
That game began as it always began, the drinkers drank what they always drank. The talkers said what they always said, “Keep a seat open for Joe.”
Frank, John, Pete, and I, each thinking tonight might be the night he’d win back all he’d lost last week to Joe. Yes, and perhaps a little more.
Joe, poor old Joe, all his joys but three have been taken away. To count his money, play stud poker, then secretly to count it once more — and the last count always the best — that there is more there than before is no secret.
Joe, old Joe, with his wallet fat as sausage and his money green as leaves. Who needs sports, cats, them like that? That call for mixed drinks and blame God if they’ve mixed too much? Who needs heavy spenders, loudmouth hollerers, them like that? Drinking is to make the head heavy, not the tongue loose. Drinking is for when nobody shows up to play poker. You want to make the feet light? Go dancing. Dance all night.