Dead Man’s Shoes
    Patrick Millikin
I awoke to the sweet smell of mesquite. It had rained sometime in the night and dew still clung heavy on the scrub brush. From where I lay bleeding in the ditch, I watched purple and black monsoon clouds move off to the north, carrying their freight across the border. In another couple of hours the sun’s glare would be formidable, sending all but the most recalcitrant creatures slithering for shade, but for now the warmth felt good on my face, easing the night’s chill. The earth rumbled and I heard the clanking of nearby tracks, but I couldn’t see the boxcars rushing past.

I felt around in the dust for the pint flask, but it wasn’t where I’d stashed it inside my bedroll. The bastards must have taken that, too. I held up my hand and struggled to bring it into focus. The skin seemed to be moving. I blinked and looked again. A colony of ants had taken up residence during the night and were busily feeding off the dried blood of my wounds. Lurching to my feet with a curse, I slapped the hand against my pant leg. The pain in my head nearly knocked me back to the ground.

Stretching my arms and legs, I took stock of my injuries. Nothing seemed to be broken. It hurt a bit when I took a deep breath, but I’d been through worse. Aside from a couple of bruised ribs and a championship hangover, I was okay. At least I was breathing, which was more than I could say for the man lying facedown in the brush next to me. That son of a bitch was stone dead.

*
I knew the first time I laid eyes on Maureen Stanton that I was a goner. She’d stepped down from the running board of the shiny new Packard and tossed her cigarette to the curb. Pausing for a moment, she removed her sunglasses and looked across the street at an elderly Indian man slowly making his way down the street. His long gray hair was matted and he peered up at her with dull, rheumy eyes. She frowned, looking back impatiently at her husband, who had unlocked the trunk and was handing the keys to the bellhop. James Stanton then took his wife’s hand and the couple passed beneath the façade of the Hotel San Carlos and into the lobby.

She wore a smart two-piece number, powder blue gabardine blouse tucked into a trim gray skirt, the fabric straining in all the right places. Her chestnut tresses had been gathered and pinned up under a Panama hat that would have cost me two weeks’ pay. The eyes were what really got me though -- pale green and sparkling with mischief. As she passed by the lounge, she glanced in at me, her look lingering a few seconds longer than appropriate. I turned back to my work, drawing pints for a couple of newspapermen standing at the bar.

“Forget it, Dan. She’s too uptown for a poor mick like you,” one of them said.

“The hell you say.”

My eyes followed her progress up to the front desk. She was a looker all right.

The second man piped in, nudging his friend. “Guy mixes a highball for Mae West and suddenly he thinks he’s the Playboy of the Western World, eh Tom?” Both wore the standard reporter’s uniform: sweat-stained dress shirt rolled up to the elbows, tie loosened and hanging limp, dusty, lint-infested fedora.

“You can take the lad out of the bog, but ye can’t take the bog out of the lad,” Tom chuckled, imitating my accent. My folks brought me over from Sligo back in ’17 when I was only six years old, but I still retain the slight lilt that, despite my best efforts, won’t completely disappear. It tends to surface most when I’m tired.

“Now, Ed, don’t you think you’re being a bit unfair to our Hibernian friend here. I mean, after all, she did tell him to ‘stop and see me sometime,’ didn’t she?”

“Yeah, him and half the men in the bar. Christ, that broad was bombed.”

The men chuckled, lit Chesterfields. Each downed another beer and shot before heading back to the Arizona Republic building to finish up the day’s stories.

Mae West’s appearance in Phoenix had been the city’s biggest news for the past several weeks, replacing the headline-making escape and subsequent capture of a group of Nazi POWs from a local internment camp. The starlet had been brought in for a weekend engagement at the Orpheum Theater around the block on Adams. Back in ’29, she’d appeared as part of the theater’s gala opening, and in the years since had gone on to major Hollywood stardom. Now, as her movie career was beginning to stall a bit, West returned to her roots in vaudeville, touring the country’s stages. She and her entourage stayed at the San Carlos, spending most of the weekend in the bar, where I mixed them an endless succession of highballs, whiskey sours, gimlets. At one point I overheard the tipsy actress lean into her manager’s shoulder and slur, “Christ what a fucking armpit this town is. When did you say we were going back to LA?”

*
Later that afternoon, the Stantons stopped in at the bar for a quick one before heading over to the show. The midday crowd had long since departed and I was finishing up my side work, restocking the bar and rinsing down glasses before the dinner crowd began to arrive. The man had changed into a cream-colored fleck suit and shiny white- over-black spectators, the sharp outfit cheapened by a bolo tie he’d obviously just purchased at the hotel curio shop. His steel gray hair was combed straight back and pomaded into place, his mustache trimmed pencil thin. His wife wore a slinky chartreuse silk evening dress, a sable stole thrown around her shoulders despite the heat. An emerald necklace completed the ensemble, showing off her exquisitely sculpted collarbone and neck.

Stanton pulled out a chair for his wife and joined her at the table. He lifted two tailor-mades from a gold-plated cigarette case. Tapping them on the table, he lit both, and handed one to his wife. I stepped up to the table and slipped cocktail napkins in front of them.

“Evening, folks,” I said. “What’ll it be?”

“Hiya pal,” the man said. “I’ll have a Macallan. Neat. One ice cube. What about you, hon? Tom Collins?”

“Yes, dear. That’ll be fine.” Crossing her legs, she took a deep drag on her cigarette and glanced up at me.

“Very good,” I said, and walked back to the bar to mix their drinks. It took me a minute to find our dusty bottle of The Macallan . We didn’t have much call for the expensive single malt around here. I noticed Stanton and his wife whispering back and forth, periodically looking over at me.

“Say,” the man said as I brought their drinks to the table, “my wife says that you look a bit like a young James Cagney. Anyone ever tell you that?”

I’d recently seen Angels With Dirty Faces and for the life of me couldn’t see the resemblance, but I played along. “Oh yeah?” I joked. “I usually hear Errol Flynn.”

That brought a chuckle from the man. “Hear that, honey? Errol Flynn.” He extended a soft, manicured hand. “Jim Stanton. This is my wife, Maureen.”

“Dan Flaherty. Pleased to meet you both,” I said, shaking his hand and nodding to his wife.

“The pleasure’s ours, Mr. Flaherty,” Maureen said, her right brow rising ever so slightly.

“What brings you folks out to the desert this time of year?”

“My husband’s in the picture business. MGM. He’s trying to interest Mae West in a new project.”

“That’s right,” Stanton said. “We’ve already got Field’s commitment, but so far Mae’s people have been difficult to deal with. I thought I’d cut through the middle-man, as it were, and go directly to the source. We’re old friends, you see.”

“Is that right?” I said.

*
Later that night in bed, Maureen told me the real story. She and her husband had returned to the hotel bar after the show with a crowd of fellow onlookers hoping to catch a glimpse of Ms. West. By the time she finally did show up at 2 A.M., the place was nearly empty, the few remaining patrons so polluted that they wouldn’t have been able to tell Mae West from Ethel Waters. The actress was in a sour mood, requesting that a bottle of champagne and two glasses be sent up to her room immediately, and reminding the desk clerk that she wasn’t to be bothered under any circumstances until 3 P.M. Stanton had passed out in a corner booth several hours earlier, his wife dragging him up to bed and dumping him there before rejoining me at the bar.

“This is his last chance to go legit, the poor bastard,” she said, her fingers tracing gentle figure eights on my chest. We lay naked together in the darkness, smoking filters and passing a bottle back and forth.

“Legit?” I asked, turning towards her. “I thought he was some sort of big muckety-muck at MGM.”

“Lord, you really are a sucker, Dan Flaherty.”

“Huh?” I said, my extensive vocabulary ever at the ready.

“The closest thing my husband’s ever come to producing pictures is a blue movie or two. In fact, that’s where I come in,” she said.

Like so many other farm girls from rural America (in her case, Murfreesboro, Tennessee) she’d been seduced by an image of California gleaned from pulp magazines and nickel romance novels; a swell place where pretty young girls could make it big with a little determination and persistence. Arriving in the heart of Gomorrah (i.e. the bus station at Hollywood and Vine) just days after her eighteenth birthday, Maureen Woodrell discovered quickly how deluded she had been.

For the first few weeks, she dutifully took the bus to auditions, trying out for even the smallest bit part. Her looks got her through the door, but as soon as she opened her mouth, Maureen was cut off with a curt Thanks very much. We’ll let you know. Next! Her savings gone, she was nearly destitute until an older girl from the rooming house took Maureen under her wing, showing her a simple, foolproof way to make money. The first few tricks were awkward, but within weeks Maureen had established a steady clientele of repeat customers. One of these was a Beverly Hills trust funder named Jim Stanton.

She finished the story standing before the open window, looking down at the deserted streets. Moonlight pooled upon the wooden floor, illuminating the soft contours of her body. I quietly stepped up behind her, encircling her narrow waist with my hands. She felt my breath on her neck and turned to meet my lips. I gently led her back to the bed.

Within hours we were in her husband’s Packard, racing for the border.

*
I’d drifted down to Phoenix several months earlier from Modesto. Things had gotten pretty hot there for me after a bank job went sour. I made the mistake of going in with John McGoorty, a fellow Irishman I knew from San Quentin. He was an ace card shark and pool hustler but I should have known that he was no professional. Hell, I did know it. McGoorty claimed to have been part of the 1916 Easter Uprising and a former confidante of Parnell’s, but his accent sounded more shite farm Kerry than Dublin. He was an older man in his late 50’s and affected a paternal manner towards me, his “young boy-o.”

We hit the San Joaquin Valley Bank on a Tuesday morning just after opening time. Modesto at its busiest is a quiet town, but at that hour on a weekday morning in July the place was a morgue. We quickly rounded up the four tellers on duty and locked them bound and gagged in the manager’s office. I secured the front doors, taping a hastily scrawled Be Back Soon note in the window. We emptied the registers, stuffing fistfuls of twenties, tens and fives into canvas sacks. McGoorty set to work on the safe in the back room, where the big bills would be stashed. A self- proclaimed expert safecracker, he’d convinced me to let him handle that part of the job. I soon learned that the old crust couldn’t pick the lock on an outhouse door.

Ten minutes later I heard sirens. McGoorty was still busy at the safe, grunting and cursing. “Must be one of them newfangled jobs I’ve heard about. Give me another minute here,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow.

“We’ve got enough, man,” I said, stepping to the door and peering out. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“I’ve almost got it, I tell you.”

Moments later, three squad cars skidded to a stop out front. I heard the breaking of glass and shouts from the lobby. I grabbed McGoorty by the collar.

“C’mon you old bastard! The heat’s here!”

He staggered to his feet and we ran through the hallway to the steel doors leading to the alley. As we crashed into the sunlight we knocked over a bum who’d been passed out on the stoop, sending him arse over tit (as McGoorty would say) into the alley.

“What’s the big idea!?” The man tried his best to assume a threatening pose, but as he struggled to stand, his pants kept falling down and he dropped his bottle of muscatel into the dirt. “Got-dammit!!” he shouted, his arms windmilling about. Losing his balance, he slipped back onto his ass. “Sons of bitches!”

*
McGoorty was pinched less than a week later in the neighboring town of Personville. One of the bank tellers spotted him drinking in a local watering hole. She flagged down a beat cop and pointed through the window at the bloated, red-faced Irishman sipping his Jameson. I hoped he’d at least bought the bar a round or two before the law took him away. Somehow I doubted that he had. Back in the joint we’d dubbed him “Ol’Misery Guts” because he was so tight with a buck.

He and I had agreed to lie low for awhile until the whole thing blew over, but perhaps McGoorty was better off inside; at least there he had a reputation and some small degree of respect. Out here he was nothing but a drunk.

*
I knew they’d lean on him hard to give up my name. I also knew that if they dangled a fifth of Irish whisky under his nose he’d give up his own dear mother, so that same night I caught a southbound freight car on the fly. I jumped off a mile or so before we pulled into the station at Phoenix, brambles bloodying my arms and face as I dropped and rolled. Thankfully, I managed to hang onto my bedroll and knapsack, which contained the scant remnants of the Modesto score, a family bible with Daniel Flaherty written on the flyleaf in my mother’s graceful hand, and what few photographs and letters I’d kept. I also had some hardtack jerky and a plug of tobacco and rolling papers. My steel pint flask was empty, a condition I resolved to remedy with due dispatch. Gathering my strewn possessions, I trotted to the cover of the nearby trees.

Dawn had just broken over the Superstitions to the east. Looking towards the station yard I could make out the figures of yard bulls roaming with lanterns from car to car. The Depression had been over for several years now, and with the war going on there weren’t as many men riding the rails, but the Southern Pacific had devised a strict new policy that was hard on traveling men. The last thing I needed was some railroad dick hauling me in for questioning.

I watched as two detectives rousted a bindle stiff who’d fallen asleep in an empty boxcar. They dragged him by the lapels of his threadbare coat, tossing him to the ground and slapping the bracelets on his wrists. Sure, he’d be back out again within hours, but it was a sobering sight to behold. Times sure had changed.

*
Maureen had made off with my bankroll but she had the common decency to leave my few worldly possessions in a neat pile on the asphalt at a filling station in Bisbee. I heard the squeal of tires from the bathroom as I washed my hands, but by the time I got outside all I could see was the Packard’s round taillights.

*
Oh, the hell with it, I thought, squinting in the morning glare at the body before me. I bent down and untied the laces on the dead man’s shoes, slipping the expensive two-tone Florsheims off his feet and cramming them into my rucksack. I always did have a weakness for sharp-looking shoes, and if I didn’t take them you’d better believe the federales would.




 
 
 
 


 
 
 
 

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