Robert Henry

I Ain’t So Dumb

This here corpse of Mr. Eurich didn’t look so good. He hadn’t been such a good-looking man, anyhow. He had more thousands of dollars than any man ought to have and he bought fine clothes and cars and stuff to make him smell good. He lived in a house the likes of which you’ve never seen before, with all its thick rugs, special made furniture, and oil pictures of nigh-naked women in those three rooms he called the library and the den and the game room. But for all his money, Mr. Eurich was a fat, evil-looking man. He had no shoulders much, and that made his stomach look all the bigger. His skin was about the color of dead-white calcimine on a plaster wall.

And there he was laying now, smack in the middle of his living room floor. He had bled all over the place, worse than a stuck hog. He had been shot three times in his big, soft face. I straddled a chair over in the corner and thought as how it was enough to make a-body shudder.

I raised my eyes and took a gander around the rest of the room. Some of the hired help was here, looking white and green and quiet. Mrs. Groat, who cooked, kept gulping so hard it looked like she was going to have to digest her tonsils. Barney Thomas was here too, a big, heavy man with meaty eyelids that kept his eyes about half covered all the time. He was smoking a cigarette, letting the smoke spout out of his nose in a slow way and just looking at the room. As Pa used to say about people, I had Barney Thomas pegged. He worked for Mr. Eurich, but you could easy call Barney a grade-A snake, if you wanted to throw off on snakes that way.

And of course the policemen were there. Seven of them in all, counting the two young fellows in white coats messing around with the corpse. They were taking pictures with those bulbs that explode and one was dusting powder around and talking about “prints.” But the one who called himself Sergeant Lumsden was the kingpin. They all scuttled around him like a bunch of chicks taking orders from a red rooster with a yen to strut.

After he had talked with this one and that one of the policemen for a couple minutes, Lumsden came walking over to me. He was a slim, wiry looking man, all dandied up in a blue suit, white shirt, and tie that was about as red as his hair.

“Your name?” he said to me. One of the policemen had walked over to me with Lumsden, had a notebook in his hand, a pencil ready, looking at me.

“I told you my name,” I said.

“Then tell it again!”

“Yes, sir.” The way he shot those words at me, I gulped about as hard as Mrs. Groat. “Willie Hickens, sir.”

“You worked for Arnold Eurich?” “Yes, sir. When I first got in town, I got a job washing dishes in Mr. Eurich’s nightclub. Then I happened to meet him in person one night when he came back in the kitchen and he learned I used to garden some for the rich folks back home. He had me come out here to his house and do some work on his shrubs. After that, he give me a little extra to run errands now and then.”

“What sort of errands?” Lumsden demanded. I felt Barney Thomas watching me with the smoke spouting out of his nose.

I said, “Just errands. Here and yonder over town.”

Lumsden smiled like he had bit a rotten lemon. “All right, Willie, I won’t press the point. I don’t need to. He was using you as a messenger on particular occasions to his number writers scattered over the city. You know he had the numbers rackets in town sewed up, of course? You knew his club was just a front for practically any kind of crookedness the mind of man has ever invented?”

My eyes bugged. “I had my suspicions,” I said. “Yes, sir, I sure did. But all I know about is washing dishes and pruning trees and taking care of snowball bushes.”

Lumsden got a cigarette out of a fancy case and fired it with a lighter just as fancy. He got friendly. He laid his hand on my shoulder. “Willie, I like you.”

He waited for me to keel over. I keeled a little, and he said, “Willie, a young man like you has to be careful in the big city.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “It sure ain’t like the hills of Kain-tuck.”

Lumsden nodded. “Willie,” he went on, “you made the phone call that brought us here just a few moments ago. You’ve stated already that the front door was standing slightly open, spilling light out in the night, and when you reached the door, you saw Mr. Eurich lying on the carpet.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Then I busted on in the house and grabbed the phone. By that time I had aroused the house help — Mrs. Groat and the other help live in the little house out in back. They hadn’t heard the shots. They were already done with supper and had called it a night here in the big house.”

“I see,” Lumsden said. Some of the other policemen had ambled over to tune in on the talk. Lumsden said, still acting friendly, “Willie, you haven’t any bad habits, have you?”

“Well, no, sir. Except I talk in my sleep sometimes when I got something heavy on my mind. It must run in the Hickens family. The landlady at my rooming house...”

Barney Thomas laughed in his throat, looking at me. Barney is one bright booger, only that ain’t a compliment. Always poking fun at me, I mean. He’s the kind to send a country boy loping off to find a left-handed monkey wrench and that kind of stuff. But I’m nobody’s booby, and Barney’s jokes have never took with me.

Sergeant Lumsden looked like he had bit a little deeper in that rotten lemon. “No, no, Willie! Not talking in your sleep. I mean — really bad habits. Such as lying?”

“Me?” I said. “I try not to, Mr. Lumsden.”

“Fine, Willie. Now — exactly why did you come here tonight?”

The room got as quiet as a wooded mountainside when a hunter’s passing by. The deep night outside seemed to poke its fingers in the room, tightening my throat. “Why... I... Just come here. Mr. Lumsden.”

The way Lumsden looked at me brought sweat out on my face. He knew I was lying this time, even if it wasn’t a habit. But I set my chin and made up my mind. I wasn’t going to bring her name into it. Not Madeline Lester’s. I wasn’t going to tell Lumsden that she had come here tonight, too, and that I knowed about it. I reckon I’d just walk barefoot through the fires of hell for Madeline.

Barney Thomas was still watching me with the smoke spouting out of his nose. Lumsden was watching me, too. All of them. “I... I wanted to talk with Mr. Eurich about paying me more money,” I said. It sounded feeble and sick. Thinking about Madeline, I felt just about the same way.

“All right,” Lumsden said, his voice like silk. “We’ll take that, Willie — for now.”

Then he turned to Barney Thomas. “And how about you, Barney? Why are you here?”

“I wanted to talk a little business with Cal Eurich,” Barney said.

“What kind of business?”

Barney’s meaty lids dropped over his eyes. “Personal. But it had nothing to do with this.” He jerked his head toward Mr. Eurich’s corpse.

I wondered. Barney had got here just minutes after I had phoned the policemen. Could be that Barney had seen Madeline Lester hurrying through the night, down the sidewalk — if he had come up in that direction. Yes, could be. But I knowed he wouldn’t say anything about it, any more than I would. In lots of ways he treated her like hell. Once he’d hit her and that night at the dub, she’d had a purple bruise on her cheek — which is how I’d found out he’d hit her. I hated Barney like poison for that — and because Madeline Lester couldn’t seem to get the varmint out of her system. She still, I guess, wanted him to love her...

When Lumsden got nothing much out of Barney Thomas, he turned on the hired help. And right there cold worms began walking around in my stomach, because Mrs. Groat, who cooked, had seen her. So had the tall, sour gent who was the butler.

“I admitted Miss Madeline Lester shortly after eight,” the butler said. “She went immediately to Mr. Eurich’s study. She opened the door herself, before I had the chance to announce her. I heard her and Mr. Eurich begin talking. She had said to me that he had called her, but he seemed surprised to see her, or perhaps it was... ah... the way he took her hands in his, just before he closed the door.”

There was more from the butler. Then Mrs. Groat said, “Yes, I saw Madeline Lester in the house. She came out of Mr. Eurich’s study to the living room, and he followed her. They seemed to be... arguing. He saw me, told me and the other servants we could retire to our quarters, the little house in back.”

There was more from Mrs. Groat, too. She was sure cooking right along. Only it was Madeline Lester’s goose...

And there was some from all the other official men who had come with Mr. Lumsden, and who, meantime, had been ambling over the room and messing with the corpse.

It made you bleed inside — if you knew Madeline. She was on the spot. She’d had every opportunity to murder Mr. Eurich. Fact is, it looked sort of like she was the only person who had had the opportunity to kill him. The gun that had shot him had been a twenty-five, Lumsden said, a woman’s weapon. They found a handkerchief she had dropped, a footprint of a woman’s shoe outside. And Lumsden kept narrowing the time, trying to fix it so Madeline was the only one who could have killed Eurich.

Me... I sat and hurt and bled inside. She wasn’t anywhere around this room, naturally, but it seemed like I could hear her voice, soft and low, like a clear mountain stream. I could see her face floating off yonder between me and the wall. Mister, it was a face a man would sell his soul to Satan for, with the kind of long hair that is so black it looks blue. And they were going to put her in the electric chair. You could see that in Lumsden’s eyes.

Then he was crossing the room, back to me. His voice was like a sharp plow point driving into a big rock hidden under sod. “Willie, you saw her, didn’t you?”

“No, sir.”

“Damn you, Willie! Damn you! You saw her running away as you approached the house!”

I hung to the arms of my chair, pushed halfway to my feet. You’re doggone tooting I had seen her — but let Lumsden try and make me say it! “No, sir. I swear, Mr. Lumsden...!”

He grabbed the front of my coat and shook until my teeth rattled. “You’re lying, Willie! Tell us. Damn you, tell us! Say that she was running from the house and you saw her, and then found Mr. Eurich dead! Say it — and it’ll be the last link, Willie. Well have enough statements about the time element to prove she did it. To show that Cal Eurich was alive when she came, alone with her the entire time, and dead when she left!”

“I can’t say it, Mr. Lumsden. ’Cause I didn’t see her.”

He glared at me like a red-headed chicken hawk for a second, then slammed me back in the chair. “Okay, Willie” he said. “Okay.” He beat his fist in his other palm, then said. “Come on, we’re getting out of here. You, Barney — I’m still not satisfied that you came to Eurich simply to talk business. And you, too, Willie. We’re going on a little joyride!”

I’m glad he thought so. The only joy I got out of it was getting away from Mr. Eurich’s corpse, which seemed to look worse and worse as the minutes went by.

Me and Barney Thomas and Mr. Lumsden all left the house and got in a black sedan at the curb, Lumsden saying there was plenty of room in the front seat for all of us. I ain’t so dumb, and I knowed that Lumsden was keeping me and Barney right with him so that if he found Madeline nobody would have a chance to make up a story in private.

A little rain had started falling, and the windshield wipers pecked along and the tires make sucking sounds in the night. I was cold and felt bad and shivered once in a while. Barney Thomas sat and smoked and looked out at all the lights we were passing.

I sat and thought about Madeline. Seems as if she’d been born in the country herself. She had told me. She’d come to the city, had plenty of tough times. But Madeline Lester could sing and once she got started, she went right up the ladder. She was the best singer that had ever warbled a song in anybody’s night club. Mr. Eurich had even said himself that he’d lost money on his club until he hired her. So she sort of had an inside drag on things. I knowed it. So did Barney Thomas, and a lot of other people. Lumsden amongst them, as he remarked during that ride through the rainy night. And Cal Eurich had been stuck on Madeline, too, in his way.

I thought about all that. I thought about the first time I ever talked to her, one afternoon when I was working on Mr. Eurich’s rose bushes and she had come to the house. It was like talking to a story-book person.

She let me come to her apartment a time or two. She said I was different She used to run her fingers over the muscles in my long arms, muscles which can bust a shirt sleeve, and she would shiver a little, and a time or two I kissed her and it damn near stopped my heart.

And now Lumsden was pulling the car over to the curb in front of her apartment house...

Lumsden showed his Detective Sergeant’s badge to the colored janitor, who had a woolly white head, and the janitor got out his pass keys. We rode the elevator and the janitor opened the door of Madeline Lester’s apartment.

You could feel that somebody like her lived here. You could smell her perfume some and when Lumsden turned on the soft light, you saw the big, square furniture in her living room.

I’ll admit it. Some folks would have called Madeline tough. She had her cold, stony streaks, times when her eyes would flash and her lips get tight. I reckoned that she would have — committed murder, if she’d wanted to. But I’d seen her at times she was scared and helpless, and most anybody could lead her around then. Anyhow, she was Madeline...

Lumsden started prowling over the place. Me and Barney Thomas sat down in the living room. We watched Lumsden go over the room like a dandified bloodhound. Then Lumsden went in the next room, and Barney Thomas jerked himself over to me on the big couch.

“All right, punk,” he said in a rough whisper, “did you see her?”

I said, “Did you?”

“I’ll ask the questions,” he said. “Do you know why she went to Eurich’s place tonight?”

I said, “Do you?”

His eyes got nasty under their meaty veils. “Do you know why I went there? Why Cal Eurich called me?”

“No,” I said, “why did he?”

Barney scorched me a second with his gaze, like he was trying to read my face. “You didn’t know about the un-declared dough? The income tax? That he wanted me to cache the money for him?”

Before I had a chance to say anything else, Lumsden came back in the room. Barney straightened and fired a cigarette and let the smoke spout out of his nose.

But I forgot about Barney, looking at Lumsden. His face was tight and bright, his eyes like black-eyed peas with a polish on them. He was carrying a newspaper unfolded out in front of him, like a tray, and on the newspaper was some pieces of charred paper.

“These were burned in the fireplace in the next room,” Lumsden said. “But the boys in the lab have got ways and means of bringing charred words back to life. I guess we better let the tech squad have a look at them.”

A little more than thirty minutes after we had left Madeline’s apartment, we were leaving the main police station. Lumsden still had me and Barney Thomas by the ears. We went down the big stone steps to the sidewalk, got back in Lumsden’s car. He’d left me and Barney in charge of some fellows downstairs while he’d gone upstairs with the charred pieces of paper to the scientific men.

“Did they bring out the words, Mr. Lumsden?” I asked.

“Will you never learn proper titles, Willie? I’m a Detective Sergeant. When you want to speak to me, address me as Sergeant Lumsden.”

“Yes, sir, if it makes any difference.” He looked like he was really feeling his oats, after the time he’d spent with the scientific men. He pulled away in the wet night. Traffic wasn’t so heavy now. It was a little after midnight. I said again, “Did they bring out words?”

He laughed and said, “They dropped a motive right in my lap. Willie, your silence has done her no good. According to those papers, Cal Eurich had socked away, unknown to anyone but a chosen few, over thirty thousand dollars of crooked money. Catch? If he had declared it, the source of his income might have been exposed and a lot of his crookedness brought to light. But not in declaring it, he was running the risk of tangling with the Feds. He was planning on stashing the dough in some trustworthy, secret place. Evidently, he had it at his house tonight and she killed him for it. Some of it is guess work, I’ll admit, but I’d lay six, two, and even that I’m dead right. It has to be that way.”

Then he twisted the wheel, and I had a hunch where we were going. To Mr. Eurich’s Golden Swan night club, where Madeline Lester sang her songs. To pick Madeline up for murder. I felt sick and my heart thunked until I was gagging on it.

When we got to the Golden Swan, we didn’t go in the front way. Lumsden parked in the alley, told me and Barney to get out, and herded us through the back door.

We were in a dim hallway. The far end was covered with heavy drapes, opening out in the club. We could hear music, Madeline singing a soft tune. It made your breath hot and thick in your throat, the way she sang.

We passed along the dressing-room doors that opened off the hall. Lumsden pushed back the fancy velvet drapes, and we took a look out in the club. It was pretty dark in there, with just tiny lights on all the packed tables. Except for her singing you could have heard a pin drop. The customers were all leaning forward, smoke trickling up from cigarettes, drinking her in.

And, Mister, she was something to drink in. That blue-black hair of hers was falling around her bare shoulders. In the changing colors of the spotlight her skin was like some of the cream Ma used to skim off rich milk. She was wearing a long white dress and her body didn’t move. It flowed along. There wasn’t a man in the place; she was a witch who’d turned every last one of them into a panting wolf.

Lumsden punched me and Barney, and the three of us turned, quiet as snakes, and went back down the dim hallway to her dressing room.

Inside the room, Lumsden closed the door and said, “She’ll finish with her number in a couple minutes more. We’ll just make like a reception committee.” Then he started prowling over the cluttered room, pulling her fine dresses around on the rack in the corner.

The mirror over her dressing table was a big one, with lights all around it. I looked in it, then at her dressing table, at the jars of cream and rouge, and I began touching things with my finger. You know the way you’ll do sometimes, just standing around like that and thinking hard.

Then I picked up the big box of face powder, and I stopped thinking all at once. Cold chills went over me. My hand shook a little, and I put the box of powder down as easy as I could.

Lumsden was watching me, and my eyes couldn’t meet his. I licked my lips, and he stared hard at me. He came over to the dressing table, picked up the big powder box himself, hefted it, and his mouth turned down at the corners, like he was smiling upside down.

Then he dumped the powder in the middle of the dressing table and the heavy thing in the bottom of the box plopped in the middle of the pile of powder, sending a little cloud of the stuff up in the close, hot air.

It was all covered with the powder, but you couldn’t mistake it. A small gun, a twenty-five automatic, had been hid in the bottom of the powder box.

Lumsden laughed, and it sounded like that bite of rotten lemon had hung in his throat. “Well,” he said. “Well!” He picked up the gun, wrapped it in his handkerchief. “I’ll do a little more guessing,” he said. “Except it really isn’t that. It’s just plain reasoning. One will get you a hundred that this is the gun that killed Cal Eurich. She was going to face it out, maybe got herself some kind of alibi. Or maybe thought it would take us a day or two to get on her trail. Anyhow, she decided it would be better to come back here and do her show tonight, as if nothing had happened; then poof! She would vanish and no one would know she’d gone until it came time tomorrow night for her show. In twenty-four hours she would be a long way off. Thus by taking time to do her show tonight, she’d actually gain a whole day without rousing any sort of suspicion.

“But she had a problem — the gun. One will get you another hundred that it’s registered, could be traced to her. Maybe she bought it to protect herself from muggers, since her work makes her keep such late hours. It’s that kind of gun, a purse gun.

“And she’d used it for murder. She couldn’t just toss it away. She couldn’t afford ever to have it found. She needed to get it at the bottom of a river. Or buried down, deep, in some forgotten place. But she didn’t have time to do that and still make her show tonight. So she was either stuck with the gun or faced with a premature search to see why she hadn’t appeared for her show. She needed time. Later she could handle the detail of the gun with no worries.”

You can see that this here Lumsden was one smart man. He didn’t miss a trick. I thought about her, singing like a white flame, and Lumsden putting her in the electric chair.

And I looked up, and she was standing in the door. She slammed the door. She looked hard-boiled, staring at Lumsden. “What the hell is this?” she asked.

Lumsden smiled his upside-down smile and showed her the gun and started talking. Like a dandied spider he put a web around her and she got white and all the hard-boiled shell went away. She looked helpless and scared, like she wished somebody would take her hand and lead her away.

Barney Thomas watched her and smoked. She looked at him, saw no mercy in his eyes. Then she looked at me and said, “Willie.” Like a hurt puppy pleading. My fare got tight and I felt my arm muscles busting my shirt. Lumsden slammed himself back away from me. He knew that with one lick, I could knock him in the next county.

But I didn’t get the chance. He was too quick on the draw. I stared down the muzzle of his gun and let my arm fall. I felt like hell. I had to get Madeline away. I was going to. I looked at her, and she caught the message in my eyes. I didn’t see how I was going to do it, but I knowed she’d be ready.

“Willie, you watch yourself or somebody will have to buy you a coffin,” Lumsden said as the room sort of cooled down.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I will, Mr. Lumsden. I’m sorry.”

He snarled a bad word at me, herded us out in the hallway, turned toward the back door of the club.

I knew what he was figuring. He’d put me and Barney in the front seat, making one of us drive. He’d put Madeline in back, and he’d sit over in one corner of the back seat, covering us all with his gun. And when he got us to the police station, he’d start in, with a dozen fellows helping him. He’d make me and Barney admit we had seen her leaving Mr. Eurich’s. He’d get every thing, Lumsden would. He was one smart man.

In the hallway Madeline stopped, wringing her hands. “Can’t you see,” she said, “that somebody is doing this to me?”

Lumsden didn’t say anything.

She’d already told him there in her dressing room when Lumsden, like a dandied spider, had been putting the web around her. Now she told him again with tears in her eyes. “You’ve got to believe me! You’ve got to believe what I said about the two phone calls, Sergeant Lumsden. I received the first call shortly before eight. I couldn’t quite recognize the voice. It sounded muffled, far-away, and I simply thought the connection wan bad. The man said he was Cal Eurich.

“I went there, was admitted by the butler. Cal said he hadn’t called me, that I must have misunderstood, but that he wanted to talk a little business with me. I only appear in one show a night here at the Golden Swan. The one I’ve just finished, the midnight show. He wanted me to appear also in the earlier show, and we argued about it a little. No girl wants to work more than she has to, does she? I made Cal’s club in the first place and lie knew it. I expected, demanded, and got special privileges.

“Cal had dismissed the servants right after I got there. Once over our squabble, we had a few drinks. It was late when I left. I’d just arrived at the club here when I got another call. This time it really was Cal. I recognized his voice. It sounded strained. He said he had to see me. So I went back to his house. He was dead. I ran. I admit that. I was frightened, and I bad nobody to help me, tell me what to do. I... I thought my name would never come into it. At least not in this way. So I hurried back here, barely making my show. The gun in the powder box...”

“...is yours,” Lumsden stated flatly. “The papers in your fireplace, your admission that you were at the scene of the crime. This crazy story you’ve told... Hell, you’re so guilty it’s sticking out all over you!”

She sobbed, and Lumsden told us to get on down the hall. I was thinking. Barney Thomas. Mrs. Groat, who cooked.

Then Lumsden told me to open the alley door, breaking in on the thoughts pouring through my mind. I opened the door. The night outside was blacker, thicker, wetter, it seemed.

There was a metal stairway from the door to the alley. Madeline, Barney and me all started down. Lumsden stepped down after us. Lumsden’s car was gleaming wet in the night, just up the alley. In seconds now we’d be on our way to a place where there were entirely too many cops to hope to do anything ever for Madeline.

Well, those metal stairs were slick anyhow with the rain. Lumsden was close behind me. It was almost a natural thing to slip, to bend myself back, my arms going like windmills, to keep from falling.

Lumsden snarled a curse and tried to scramble back. But it was over even before he, could bring his gun up. My fingers closed over his gun wrist. I heaved, and it was like an elephant snapping a cougar over his back with his strong trunk.

Lumsden hit the alley hard enough to crack a rib. It knocked him cold. But I’d really lost my footing with the heave, went to my knees. I was in a prime position. I had no warning. Barney Thomas kicked me flush in the face.

I went back, and he stomped on me, and I heard Madeline trying to scream. It was like having thick sorghum molasses poured over me.

I heard Madeline say, “Barney... You’re hurting me!” and knew he’d grabbed her.

“The hell with that,” he said. “Spill it and make it fast! Where’s the dough, the loot? The thirty thousand bucks undeclared money you killed Cal Eurich for?”

“But, Barney... I didn’t...”

I heard the sound of him hitting her, and she whimpered like a lost kitten. “Barney... I... thought you liked me...”

He laughed and called her a name. He said he’d been thinking for some time of taking over Cal Eurich’s rackets and he’d played up to her what little he had because she had an inside track. Then he said, “And you might as well spill the whereabouts of the thirty grand, baby. There’s a long night ahead, and it won’t be hard to find a quiet corner where we won’t be disturbed.”

She was really sobbing now. You could feel her shivering and trembling in the night. We were so deep in the alley, wouldn’t have done her any good to scream. Barney’d never let the scream do more than get started, and then he’d really be mad.

“Barney... You wouldn’t... couldn’t...”

“I’ll find that dough or beat your brains out,” he told her, “just to see if they’re really made of cellophane.”

She started squirming and struggling and fighting him like a crazy thing then. He laughed and was all set to hit her again, when I finally got to my feet. I was quiet about it, and she was making some noise, so he didn’t hear me.

I grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around, and hit him. I pulled the punch some, so as not to break his neck, and he went sailing across the alley, slammed into the wall of the building, and slid down, like grain running out of a gunny sack.

I took Madeline in my arms and talked to her like I would a kitten. There wasn’t any hardness about her now. She was scared. She needed somebody to help her, to lead her along, to show her what to do.

She said so. “Where can I go, Willie?” she said.

I thought about it. She said, “The police... want to put me in the electric chair. Barney will have all Eurich’s men behind him after this. Barney will take over. Barney... believes... I’ve got thirty thousand dollars. But I haven’t... and he might kill me.”

She held onto me and said, “Willie, where can I go?”

I took a breath and said, “With me.”

“But... where, Willie?”

“Everywhere. All over the country. Across the ocean. You can sing. I got a big strong back. We’ll have a helluva good time.”

She cried a little more. I held her and said, “Barney showed you what he was, just now. You don’t think nothing of Barney after this?”

“I hate Barney Thomas!” she said. “I... I was just crying, Willie, because I know — at a time like this when every soul on earth is out to kill me — that I’ve got somebody like you.”

I got all choked up. She ran her hands over my big arms and chest and shivered like she liked it and whispered, “Let’s go, Willie!”

So we scrammed out of town and a justice of the peace married us and we headed down into Jersey.

I guess you’ll admit that I’m nobody’s booby. Mr. Eurich thought I was. So did Barney and everybody else. Mr. Eurich let me come and go in the house when I was gardening for him. He never had the slightest idea how slick I was in pilfering his desk, snitching the combination to his safe, learning about that thirty thousand dollars.

I had to plan it all careful, pick just the right time, but look what I got just for murdering Mr. Eurich. Thirty thousand bucks and the best-looking dame you’ve ever seen!

Sure, it was me called Madeline that first time, to get her to Eurich’s and give me time to get in her apartment, burn the papers, find the handkerchief for the plant in Eurich’s living room, get my hands on the gun where she’d always kept it in a chest of drawers after the mugging scare slackened.

I went to Eurich’s place then, waited outside. I saw her leave. I timed it. I went in and made him call Madeline at the Golden Swan. No wonder she said his voice sounded strained on that second call. I was holding a gun to his head. Then I shot him. I had a taxi a block away, and a package ready to slip the money in, addressed to General Delivery in this little Jersey town that I spoke of. I went to the Golden Swan, planted the gun, dropped the package in the box on the corner, and went back to Eurich’s. I gave the cab driver ten bucks so he would drive like hell, and I made the round trip nearly as fast as Madeline made it one way.

It was a hell of a thing to do to Madeline, but I’m just a country boy and there was a lot of competition around. Anyhow, anything’s fair in love and war.

Yes, sir, as long as I’m awake, I’m sure nobody’s dumb-bell. But when I’m asleep, I guess it’s a different matter.

Like Pa used to say, it must run in the blood for the men in our family to talk in their sleep when they got something heavy on their mind. I figured I was smart enough to throw it off my mind, never think of it, and I did that all right But I must have felt a little too much like congratulating myself.

Madeline didn’t wake me. She just slipped out and when she came back, I woke up. I woke up fast. Nobody could sleep long with that many policemen in the room.

So here I am, and the cot in this here jail cell has got bed-bugs on it. There’s not much I can do either. I can’t even hire a lawyer. The hell of it is, while I was having those swell dreams. I even bragged about where I’d hid the loot!

Content

Robert Henry
I Ain’t So Dumb