Little Guy's Lady

Little Guy's Lady The world never appreciated Eli Shonbrun. He was a little guy with plenty of talent, he figured, but the world never gave him a decent break. That was the way he saw it. Just after he was married, his job folded up on him. He went to his greasy Uncle Murray Hirschl, who was a schlemiel with a dirty reputation in the jewelry business. Big-hearted Uncle Murray took him into "partnership." The pay: $10 a week. With all Eli's talent. ...

One day he held out a little of the dough he had collected on jewelry, and he was arrested for larceny. That was the kind of break Eli got. Eli dropped the jewelry business -- he had been let off with a suspended sentence -- and tried night club singing. His wife took their kid and left him. Then he met Madeline.

Madeline Webb lived on the soiled fringes of Broadway. She had had a shot at Hollywood. Before that she had been a college girl back in Stillwater, Okla. She was good-looking, the pouty kind with heavy, half-open red lips and a little girl's big, wide eyes and a kind of Hedy Lamarr hairdo. Two of her teeth had been knocked out in an automobile accident, but she was good enough to be a model for a while and even a peep-show dancer at the World's Fair.

Eli fell hard. Madeline fell for him too. He was not bad looking in a Broadway way. So Eli and Madeline lived together in inexpensive hotels, skipping out when they got too broke to pay the bill. That happened every so often. Finally they had hardly a nickel for a cup of coffee. They talked it over, a little desperate now, with a pal they had picked up, John Cullen, who was a West Side punk with a petty police record from way back. They consulted also with the greaseball, dirty Uncle Murray Hirschl.

Noise. A couple of days later employes at the Hotel Sutton in Manhattan heard the blaring radio in Eli and Madeline's room. The funny part was that it blared all one afternoon, through the night and into the next morning. Finally someone took a pass key, opened the door to look in. The suite was empty--except for a big woman all trussed up, lying on the floor in the bedroom.

The woman was identified as Mrs. Susie Reich, a Polish refugee. Someone had overpowered her and stolen her jewelry, and the noise of her struggling had been drowned by the radio. Adhesive tape had been plastered as a gag over her face and her head wound up in a flowered scarf and a Paisley muffler. She had suffocated. Police rounded up Eli, Madeline and Cullen.

Dirty Uncle Murray had squealed. He told how he had helped Cullen swipe a roll of adhesive tape from a 5-c--&-10-c- store and buy some other odds & ends they might need in robbing Mrs. Reich.

They had needed a few dollars, so they had hocked Eli's overcoat. When the actual murder was committed, Uncle Murray was somewhere else, he said, but he put the finger on Eli and Cullen. "Eli felt a little sick," said dirty Uncle Murray.

He also put a fat finger on Madeline. He said she had been in the room.

Eli screamed right out in the courtroom: "You'll never sleep again, Murray!" He tried to comfort Madeline. She broke down and wept and ran her fingers through her Hedy Lamarr hairdo. She sobbed, beat her fists on the table, and sobbed again. He wrote notes to her about how he loved her and how she was the loveliest and most beautiful woman in the world.

Worry. Eli was worried about her acting like a lady. When she talked she generally remembered to talk in the way that is considered very ladylike by one & all on Broadway. Once she screeched, in answer to a question from the prosecuting attorney: "I never file my nails in the presence of others. You're just trying to ruin my character." After all, the pair of them were fighting for their lives--even if their lives hadn't been so much.

Eli sometimes showed off, sometimes said such things as: "I am addicted to verbiage." But at one point he was almost noble. He tried to make a sacrifice by confessing the killing, thus clearing Madeline and even Cullen. He would have died, he said, if Madeline had known about it. He had done it--he and dirty Murray.

"Murray and I murdered the woman alone," he shouted. "This was an act I am willing to pay for and I know I will burn. . . ." Cullen, the unsuccessful thief, sat mum throughout the trial. His life too was at stake, but his show of emotion was limited: a couple of times he sneezed a little.

Madeline's pious, sad-looking mother had come from Stillwater to hold Madeline's hand; and old, lean Judge James Springer had also come from Oklahoma to help defend an old friend's flashy little daughter.

Said the old Judge, summing up: "Cleopatra had her Mark Antony. . . . King Edward said: 'I abdicate my throne at long last that I may marry the woman I love.' . . . My helpless client found her Shonbrun. . . . Will you lead her to the dark doors of the dungeon or will you lead her to the green pastures and by the still waters. . . ?"

The jury was out five and a half hours. They decided to take the State's story, that Madeline had invited her friend Mrs. Susie Reich over to her hotel so that Eli and Cullen could pounce on her and rob her. When they filed in again, they found all three guilty of first-degree murder, with a recommendation of mercy for Madeline. Eli's girl forgot again about being a lady. She pounded the table and screamed: "Please . . . please, I didn't!" Eli wept: "You have crucified her. . . ."

When they asked him for his pedigree, the little guy who thought he had plenty of talent, but never got a break, snarled: "My business is a murderer. . . ." Eli and Cullen will die in the chair. His little lady will finish her life in prison.

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