Dead Man's Shoes by Day Keene

Author:Day Keene [Keene, Day]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lunches

$ .60

Cigarettes

3.00

Gasoline

4.89

Hotel (Amr. plan)

120.00

He remembered the week. It had really begun on a Tuesday. He had come to work that Monday but Monday night Mary had cried so hard he had begged the rest of the week off and had driven her up to Santa Cruz in the hope of, if not assuaging her grief, getting her away briefly from the rows of little dresses in the closet, and the stubbed-toed little shoes, and stamp sized underthings that had to be packed away or given to a more fortunate family.

* * * *

Hard-eyed, he dropped the book back in the drawer, kicked the drawer shut and twirled the combination on the vault. He couldn’t live in the past. In twelve months he would be one with it. He had those twelve months to think of and he must act now.

The vault door open, he reached for the bag. What did it matter to him, a man with twelve months to live, if he was betraying two trusts, that he was running out on Mary, that he was failing a firm in whose employ he had risen from stock boy to cashier? Grace was waiting for him. All he had to do was put the money in the bag, close the door of the vault and walk out of the store. No one would question him. No one would stop him. By the time the theft was discovered he would be safe in Mexico City. Beyond Mexico lay Guatemala and Peru.

He reached for a sheaf of money, then knew that he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t steal. He couldn’t walk out on Mary. He hadn’t lied to Al when he had tried in a fatherly way to impress on him the well-stated fact of unknown authorship that—

Sow a Thought, and you reap an Act;

Sow an Act, and you reap a Habit;

Sow a Habit, and you reap a Character;

Sow a Character, and you reap a Destiny.

He had lived on the right side of the fence too long. Cashiers worthy of the name didn’t abscond with their firm’s money. He had promised his God and Mary to love, honor, and support her until death parted them. He would have to keep his bargain. He wanted suddenly to keep it. Mary was suddenly lovely in his eyes. He didn’t want to part from her. Their flesh was one. Her spirit and her love had never wavered. Even in the matter of the insurance that had started this whole thing she hadn’t been thinking of herself. She hadn’t been thinking of him. She had insisted it be an endowment policy, something for them to live on when he could no longer work. Us, We, Mr. and Mrs. Al Murray, an inseparable entity.

He closed and locked the vault, sat down at his desk and taking the account book from the jumbled drawer read through it page by page—

The first payment on the house…the time Al had broken his arm…the new davenport for the living room…a grocery

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