On the street we got a hack and in ten minutes were at her place. A shabby parlor fronted on the street; in back of it was a bedroom. On the bed, fully dressed, lying crosswise with feet on the floor, was the body of a man. Well dressed, about fifty, he might have been a clerk. I went out the back door and to the alley. There was no one in sight. When I came back she was shivering in a chair. I put the dead man’s hat in my pocket and asked her to help me lift him to my shoulder. She refused to touch “the thing.” With an effort I got it to my shoulder, the head and arms hanging down my back. Clasping my arms around its legs, I staggered out the back way toward the alley.
Stumbling up the dark alley over tins, wires, broken boxes, and other rubbish, I carried my dangerous burden almost to the cross street and threw it down, leaving the hat beside it. Annie Ireland, or “Irish Annie” as she was called by the street girls, was still huddled in the chair in a corner of the room farthest from the bed when I returned.
“Where did you leave it?” she whispered.
“Up the alley,” I told her shortly. I had no stomach for this business, and wanted to be away and done with her. I felt sure she had dealt the man a jolt of chloral or some other stupefying drug.
“Look here, Annie,” I warned her, “if you’ve got any of that guy’s junk around here you’d better ditch it. They will find him in the morning, and every crib in the block might be searched.”
“No, no,” she protested. “I didn’t touch him. I picked him up on the street. When we came in here he stretched out across the bed and went to sleep. I took my hat and coat off and tried to wake him, but couldn’t. After a while his hands turned cold and I saw he was dead. Then I went for you.”
I went out, and she followed me. “Where are you going now?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know—outside, anywhere. I can’t stay in there. I’ll go down the line and get drunk, I guess.”
I left her at the corner, resolved to see no more of her. But that wasn’t to be, for there came a day, years after, when she held up her hand in a court and perjured me into prison. The next day I moved to another part of the city and kept away from the blocks she walked at night. I met her no more, and she soon fell into the background of my memory. I watched the papers, but saw nothing except a few lines reporting the finding of the body of an unidentified man in an alley. A dead man in an alley didn’t mean much in Chicago then and his body probably went to the potter’s field or a medical college.