Nelson Algren - The New Black Mask Quarterly (№ 1)

A day like this brought a whole new meaning to the phrase “Detroit iron.”

“You’re the dick, let’s see your I.D.”

I held it up.

“Okay. I’m checking out tonight anyway.” The door closed.

I waited until the lock snapped, then walked back downstairs, making plenty of noise. I could afford to. I d had a good look at Shoe and at an airline ticket folder lying on the lamp table next to the door.

I passed the reader in the lobby without comment and got into my crate parked across the street in front of a mailbox. While I was watching the entrance and smoking a cigarette, a car parked behind mine and a fat woman in a green dress levered herself out to mail a letter and scowl at me through the windshield. I smiled back.

The streetlights had just sprung on when Shoe came out lugging two big suitcases and turned into the parking lot next door. Five minutes later a blue Plymouth with a smashed fender pulled out of the lot and the light fluttered on a big-nosed profile. I gave him a block before following.

We took the Lodge down to Grand River and turned right onto Selden. After three blocks the Plymouth slid into a vacant space just as a station wagon was leaving it. I cruised on past and stopped at the next intersection, adjusting my rearview mirror to watch Shoe angle across the street on foot, using both hands on the bigger of the two suitcases. He had to set it down to open a lighted glass door stenciled ZOLOTOW SECURITIES, then brace the door with a foot while he backed in towing his burden.

I found a space around the corner and walked back. Two doors down I leaned against the closed entrance to an insurance office, fired a Winston, and chased mosquitoes with the glowing tip while Shoe was busy striking a deal with the pawnbroker.

He was plenty scared, all right.

It was waiting time, the kind you measure in ashes. I was on my third smoke when a blue-and-white cut into the curb in front of Zolotow’s and a uniform with a droopy gunfighter’s moustache got out from behind the wheel.

The glass door opened just as the cop had both feet on the pavement. He drew his side arm and threw both hands across the roof of the prowl car. “Freeze! Police!”

Empty-handed, Shoe backpedaled. The cop yelled freeze again, but he was already back inside. The door drifted shut. A second blue-and-white wheeled into the block, and then I heard sirens.

A minute crawled past. I counted four guns trained on the door. Blue and red flashers washed the street in pulsating light. Then the door flew open again and Shoe was on the threshold cradling a Chicago typewriter.

Someone hollered, “Drop it!”

Thompsons pull to the left and up. The muzzle splattred fire, its bullets sparking off the first prowl car’s roof, pounding dust out of the granite wall across the street and shattering windows higher up, tok-tok-tok-tok-tok.

The return shots came so close together they made one long roar. Shoe slammed back against the door and slid into a sitting position spraddle-legged in the entrance, the submachine gun in his lap.

As the uniforms came forward, guns out, an unmarked unit fishtailed into the street. Lieutenant Alderdyce was out the passenger’s side while it was still rocking on its springs. He glanced down at the body on the sidewalk, then looked up and spotted me in the crowd of officers. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Mainly abusing my lungs,” I said. “How about you?”

“Pawnbroker matched the guns this clown was selling to the hot sheet. He made an excuse and called us from the back.”

I said, “He was running scared. He had an airline ticket and he checked out of the hotel where he was living. He was after a getaway stake.”

“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.