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.