The Devil's Stocking

by Nelson Algren

“We been friends since we were kids. We ran the streets together in short pants. We fought on the streets together. We were locked together. I was his sparring partner till he lost a fight and quit. I started winning. But he never held that against me. He accepted that.”

  “It’s what I mean, Ruby,” Dovie-Jean tried to draw reassurance about Red from Ruby’s characterization, “he’s really generous. He ain’t the kind, he does you a favor, he wants a favor right back.”

  Ruby took his arm from about her waist and repeated the warning he had already given her:

  “He will, honey. He will.”

  They fell to sleep like brother and sister. When she wakened he was gone; but he’d left a ten-dollar bill, for cab fare, on the dresser.

  At the hospital Ruby found himself to be the father of a seven pound girl.

  Early on the evening of June 16, 1966, Calhoun kissed Jennifer and drove, in a rented white Buick, to the Paradise.

  Matt Haloways was at the front bar. Nobody was at the back. There wouldn’t be enough drinkers to require the help of another bartender for several hours.

  Dovię-Jean Dawkins was the only barfly at the moment.

  “Congratulations, daddy-O,” she greeted Calhoun, and sounded as if she meant it.

  Calhoun handed her a dollar for the juke. While she was asking the old man to break it into quarters Calhoun told him, “We want you to be the baby’s godfather, Matt.”

  The old man nodded and seemed pleased.

  Dovie-Jean put on a song called “Kung-Fu Fighting Man.” It made a great deal of noise but very little music.

  “Turn that thing down a little, Dovie-Jean,” Calhoun asked her, and turned back to Matt.

  “I’ve signed against Rocky Olivera,” he told him, “in Buenos Aires in October. You ever been down that way, Matt?”

  The old man shook his head, No. “I got to New York for some fights once or twice, but that’s the farthest I ever got. This Mexican, is he rough?”

  “Not too rough,” Calhoun assured him confidently, “just a good opponent. Got a big following down there, I’m told.”

  “Hope you’re getting paid good.”

  “Trouble ain’t the money. Trouble is sparring partners. Hard to find.”

  “Take Red along.” But the old man laughed uneasily when he made the suggestion.

  “Red isn’t of any use in the ring anymore, Matt,” Ruby told the old man what the old man already knew.

  “There was a time I thought he was going to get somewheres,” the old man recalled, “but it didn’t work out. Put your money on Hardee.”

  “I’m bringing in a German heavy who moves pretty good,” Calhoun told the old man, “but I need at least one more around one-sixty.”

  Dovie-Jean was dancing by herself before the juke. She’d put on a roaring record and was enjoying its roar. The old man walked over and turned the record down several decibels. When he looked up he saw a white man, carrying a rifle, coming in the door. Haloways walked up to him.

  “How are you, Vince?”

  “None of that. I come for my money.”

  He was an undersized fellow who could look unkempt even when wearing clothes just out of the store. He needed a haircut.

  “I’ll have some money for you next week, Vince.”

  “Not some. All. All of it. Not next week. Now. I want it all. Now.”

  He pulled back the gun and fired. Haloways spun half around, hit in the right shoulder. Dovie-Jean stopped dancing but the juke kept roaring. The little man pulled the gun back and fired again. The shot took off half of Matt Haloway’s head.

  He fell across the front of the bar with his head on the bar rail. Dovie-Jean came up and stood beside Calhoun, both looking down at the old man. Neither understood.

  The little man understood perfectly. He laid the rifle carefully on top of the bar and went behind it. He picked up a bottle of Old Crow then couldn’t locate a shot glass.

  “To your left on the shelf,” Dovie-Jean instructed him.

  They watched him pouring himself a shot and, as he poured, the old man dying on the bar rail began a strangled gasping as though he were trying to keep time to the juke:

  Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone…

  the juke cried out, and the old man gurgled something in his throat trying to carry the tune. Then he stopped and Dovie-Jean knew he was dead, and the juke’s song sank down to a whisper, then died too.

  The little man held the bottle toward Calhoun. Calhoun shook his head, No. Dovie-Jean walked to the door. A dozen people had heard the shots and come running; now they were so near they had become afraid.

  “He got a gun, Gallegher,” Dovie-Jean warned a white plain-clothesman coming in the door.

  Gallegher drew his police special.

  The man was facing the bar mirror, putting ice into a glass. He grinned, in the mirror, at Gallegher.

  Gallegher had arrested Vince Le Forti before.

  “I’ve got you covered, Vince,” he gave the man warning.

  “I don’t have anything against the Jersey City police,” he assured Gallegher, turning to face the officer. “You mind if I toss down a shot?”

  “Toss it.”

  “Have one on the house?”

  “Hold out your hands, Vince.”

  Le Forti drank his shot, then held out his hands for the manacles. They waited side by side in the doorway until the ambulance rolled up, with the police photographer just behind in the police van. Gallegher got Le Forti into the van before the photographer had gone to work.

  “What was the reason for the trouble?” Gallegher asked Le Forti in the van.

  “I sold them niggers the place,” Le Forti told Gallegher, “I give them a liquor license. I give them the tavern. I had a contract with them. They refused to pay me. They only paid me seven hundred out of five thousand I was suppose to get. I went down there to collect the rest of it. They begin laughing and making jokes whenever I show up there. They weren’t going to pay me.

  “That redheaded nigger is the worst. He used to sing for me when the joint was mine. Some singer. I saw him fight once, I decided he’d do better to try singing. Now he’s behind my bar and he got the big head. Every time I walk in he hollers, ‘Come down to change your luck, honky?’ I know what he means all right. As if I’d have anything to do with a nigger woman.

  “Always joke time with that damned redheaded sonofabitch. He was real polite when the place belonged to me. Oh yeah. Now he pretends I’m down there looking for a black woman. Oh yeah. That’s suppose to be funny. Oh yeah.

  “I went down there and I took my shotgun. Oh yeah. Just one crack out of that redheaded nigger and he’s going to get it. Oh yeah.

  “The redhead ain’t there. So I shoot the old man instead. One is as good as another, they’re all alike, makes no difference which one you shoot. You think I won’t talk to a jury the way I talk to you now? The jury will love me. Oh yeah.”

  Four hours after his father had been shot down, Hardee Haloways walked into the police station in which Vince Le Forti was being held and told the desk sergeant, “If you people don’t do something about this, somebody else will. I want to see Le Forti.”

  “The man is being held incommunicado. When he gets a lawyer you can talk to the lawyer.”

  “You mean you’ve already released him? Did you give him his gun back?”

  “The man has not been released, sir. He is being held on a charge of homicide. He will be tried in court. If he is guilty he will be sentenced in court. I’d suggest you go home and get some sleep.”

  It was then around 10 P.M. Two hours later one Eric Heim, unemployed, thirty-seven years of age, was shooting Loser-Buys-the-Beer eight-ball pool, with one Nick Vincio, forty, in the Melody Bar and Grill, some four blocks from the Paradise. The Melody was strictly white.

  “I beat him the first three games,” Heim was later to recall in court, “then he says, ‘Well, you’re not going to go home now,’ because Nick was a particularly good player. We
went to the bar and had a drink and I still wanted to go home. ‘Why go home now?’ the bartender asks me. ‘We’ll have breakfast and I’ll take you both home.’”

  Dude Leonard, fifty-two, had been tending bar for the tavern’s owner, Mrs. Elizabeth Vaughn. “He was the greatest guy in the world,” Mrs. Vaughn still describes Leonard, “he had a million friends.”

  All Dude’s million friends were white. He’d connected a small buzzer beside the door and he kept the door locked. When the buzzer was sounded, Leonard looked out. If you were white, he opened. If you were black the door remained locked.

  “Around midnight,” Heim was to testify, “Dude looked out but he didn’t open the door. ‘Some nigger gal,’ he told us, and went back to the bar. Before he got back the buzzer sounded again and this time he opened. It was Helen Shane, a waitress who used to drop in for a drink and chat with Dude on her way home. A nigger gal stepped in right behind her and right behind the nigger gal in comes a nigger man.

  “Dude walked right up to the nigger man and told him, ‘We don’t serve niggers here.’

  “The nigger man didn’t answer Dude. ‘Go to the bar,’ he told his nigger gal, ‘order what you want. I’ll see you get it.’

  “‘I’ll see you both get it,’ Dude told them, and came up with his .38 police special from behind the bar. The nigger gal took one look and walked out. The nigger man studied Dude. He was heavyset. He had a mustache. He was wearing shades. He was wearing some sort of hat. Finally he walked out too.

  “An hour and a half later, there were three people at the bar, Dude was behind it, there was no buzz.

  “I didn’t see the door open, I don’t know how the man got inside. I didn’t see or hear the door open. All I seen was Dude pitching a bottle toward the door and then shots—wham-wham-wham—like that.”

  “You saw the bartender throw a bottle? At whom?”

  “At whoever was in the door firing into the tavern, that’s who. I seen him throw something, a bottle, whatever you want to call it, I don’t know what it was. I heard it crash. I looked at where he’d throwed it. I seen a man with a revolver, a pistol, whatever you want to call it. He fired so fast I never got a clean look—wham-wham-wham—and he was gone. A black man.”

  “The same black man who’d told the black girl to go to the bar and order what she wanted and he’d see that she got it?”

  “No, not that black man. This one was tall. The first black man wasn’t tall, he was husky. And he was black. The one with the gun was slim and light-skinned. All I know is I felt a pain in my head. I looked around. Nick Vincio was still sitting at the bar with a cigarette burning in his hand. Only he was leaning a little forward like he was half-napping.

  “Mrs. Shane had changed her position. She wasn’t sitting at the bar. She was lying on the floor. I looked around for Dude but I didn’t see him. There was a blue-and-white Schlitz sign above the door and it kept flickering blue and white, off and on, on and off. The door must have been still open. It was. It was swinging a little. The neon kept flickering off and on, on and off, blue and white, white and blue.”

  A bullet had caught Dude Leonard in the lower back, as if he had turned to run. He had died before he’d hit the floor.

  Vincio’s foot remained upon his stool’s footrest. The lighted cigarette remained between his fingers. But he wasn’t going to light another.

  A broken beer bottle lay shattered on the air conditioner beside the door. Heim, blinded in one eye and his skull fractured, stumbled about the tavern.

  “I felt this pain in the side of my head,” he recalled in court, “there was a column there or a post, whatever you want to call it. The man didn’t know what he was doing and smoke came out and most likely shot the bartender or the other man. I only seen the man briefly. When I seen that pistol, whatever it was, I was in shock. I says, Well my God, what happened here? I heard a door open while I was lying on the bar. I don’t know what door it was but a door opened and I heard Helen Shane hollering. Help! Help! Help! Then this door closed. I found myself sitting right back on the stool where I was sitting before.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I had a bowel movement. And I went into the men’s room and did what I had to do. And I came back out and I seen Nick Vincio.”

  “Where was he?”

  “Still sitting at the bar.”

  “Where was Helen Shane?”

  “Lying on the floor.”

  “Where was Dude Leonard?”

  “On the floor behind the bar.”

  “Who else was in the bar?”

  “I didn’t see nobody else. I just held my head in my hands. I was bleeding and bleeding. I heard someone using the phone but I didn’t look up. I knew the cops would come soon. That’s all I know. I can’t tell you no more than that because that’s all I know.”

  When Ruby Calhoun saw the .38 police special in Dude Leonard’s hand, he had second thoughts about forcing the bartender to serve his girl friend. He followed Dovie-Jean out to the car. It was the white Buick.

  It had been rented from a New York City agency the week before. He drove off slowly, saying nothing. They drove out to the same motel they’d rented twice before, but there was no sex play this night.

  He slept only two or three hours, rose and began dressing. He was putting on his shoes when Dovie-Jean wakened and asked, “Are you leaving?”

  He told her, Yes, and she’d replied, “Wait. I’ll go with you. I don’t like sleeping alone in these little honky joints.”

  On Sixteenth Avenue they were curbed by a police car. He made no protest and asked no questions. It was then about 4:15 A.M. The officer, Mooney, checked his registration and let him go. Twenty minutes later, after he’d let Dovie-Jean out in front of Red’s flat, the same officer stopped him a second time, instructed him to follow the officers’ car to the Melody Bar and Grill. Calhoun still asked no questions. Mooney then drove him to the Jersey City General Hospital, and he was confronted with a man, lying on a stretcher, who’d been shot in the face. He sat up, looked at Calhoun, shook his head, No, and sank down again.

  It was not until then, after 8 A.M., that Mooney drove Calhoun to police headquarters in Jersey City.

  “They paraded me in front of witnesses brought down from the Melody,” Calhoun recalled later, in court, “and I still didn’t know exactly what had happened. I decided it was no use asking questions. They wouldn’t give me a straight answer anyhow. So I waited. Whatever it was somebody had to be fingered for, there was nobody there to finger me.

  “It was almost noon before Lieutenant De Vivani walked in. I knew him and he knew me. ‘How you doin’, Ruby?’ he asked me. ‘How are things?’ ‘I don’t know how things are,’ I told him, ‘I don’t even know why I’m here.’

  “‘You can answer these questions or not,’ he told me, ‘that is strictly up to you. But I’m going to record whatever you say and it might be used against you in court—if it should ever come to that.’

  “That was when I first started getting worried. If I refused to answer his questions it would look like I was holding back. I thought the best way to do was to answer him right out front. I hadn’t done anything, and I thought that way it would become clear that I had not. ‘I’d like to phone my wife first,’ I told him, ‘She’ll be worried.’

  “I phoned her, told her it was all right, I’d be home shortly, not to worry.

  “‘What I have in mind,’ De Vivani told me after I’d made my phone call, ‘is to send for a polygrapher from the state troopers’ barracks. Would you have any objection to a lie test?’

  “‘I have no objection,’ I told him.

  “‘If you have anything to hide, don’t take this test,’ the state trooper warned me, ‘because this machine is going to tell me all about it. If it tells me you had anything to do with the killings, I’m going to put your ass under the electric chair.’”

  The test took almost two hours.

  “Do you know a man named Dude Leonard?” Cal
houn was asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you know a man named Nick Vincio?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know a woman named Helen Shane?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know a man named Eric Heim?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been in a bar called the Melody Bar and Grill?”

  “No.”

  The needle remained as steady, at this question, as it had for the previous ones. But a few seconds after it had been answered, and Calhoun figured he’d beaten it, the needle wavered.

  “You can turn him loose, lieutenant,” the state trooper assured De Vivani within Calhoun’s hearing. “This man had nothing to do with the killings.”

  De Vivani tossed Calhoun the keys to his car. “Sorry we had to put you through this, Ruby, but it’s the only way we have. Three people were shot down last night in the Melody. I’m glad you’re not involved.”

  Ruby was vastly relieved. Jennifer was apprehensive. “I don’t think you should have talked into that machine, Ruby,” she told him. “You never know how the police are going to use something.”

  The beauty of that machine lies not in what the suspect says into it, but how he reacts later when he assumes he’s beaten it. Calhoun assumed he had beaten it.

  He hadn’t.

  De Vivani had understood, by the state trooper’s manner in clearing him, that the machine had involved Calhoun in the murders. He would now be watched without being aware that he was being watched.

  De Vivani knew how to take his time.

  Fifteen minutes after Calhoun had driven away, Red Haloways walked in on De Vivani, accompanied by Dovie-Jean Dawkins.

  “We’re here for Mrs. Calhoun,” Red told De Vivani. “We understand you’re holding her husband. What is the charge?”

  “We’re not holding Calhoun, Red,” De Vivani assured him. “We picked him up as a suspect last night but he has cleared himself. I imagine he’s home by now. You want to phone Mrs. Calhoun?” He offered Red his phone but Red didn’t take it.

  “This young woman witnessed my father’s murder yesterday,” he told De Vivani. “She’s ready to tell you about it.”