Conspiracy of Silence (15 page)

“So why did you kill your brother William?”

I was sitting across a tale from James Allen Crawford in the interrogation room at Rahway State Prison.

Maybe I shouldn't have been so blunt. His response was explosive.

He shot up violently from the chair, sending it hurtling back against the wall. He himself, after making an initial move in my direction, backed himself into a corner like an animal at bay. His eyes blazed, and a curious choking sound emerged from deep in his throat.

The tumult roused the guard, who was standing outside the door. He made a move to enter, but I stopped him with a gesture of my hand.

I turned back to the prisoner.

“I know the whole story, Mr. Crawford,” I said. I didn't, but I had to claim that I did to get Crawford to cough up what had actually happened.

Still cowering in the corner, but seeming ready to leap in my direction at any moment, Crawford said: “What do you know? How could you know anything?”

I closed my eyes for a moment and let out an exhausted sigh.

“I have the goods on you, Crawford. I dug up your brother Frank's empty grave—and I found Frank himself, alive and kicking, in Mexico. And I now know that it wasn't him you killed, but William. The sainted William whom everyone said died in the war.

“The only thing I don't know, Crawford, is
why.

“Why did you weasel out of a murder you
did
commit and confess to a murder that you
didn't
commit?

“What gives with you, Mr. James Allen Crawford?”

For a time, Crawford just looked at me, his expression mutating from outrage to a kind of crestfallen self-pity. His face crumpled in wretchedness, and his slipped to the floor, burying his head in his hands.

I just stood there looking down at him.

After a long time he peered up in my direction. He seemed to want to plow himself as deep into the corner of this stark little room as he could, as if he could somehow vanish from my sight, and from the sight of the world.

Finally he said very softly: “Scintilla, can you even begin to imagine what kind of hell my whole life has been?”

“Oh, come off it, Crawford,” I snapped. “You mean to tell me you can't buy happiness with all that money you and your family have?”

I didn't mean that, of course: I was beginning to have some inkling of the truth of what he had just said. But I needed to prod him into spilling the beans.

My tart comment may have done the trick.

Now enraged again, he sprung up from the floor and seemed intent on throttling me with his bare hands—just the kind of throttling he pretended to have given his own brother a dozen years ago.

I stood motionless, and some innate restraint held him in check. Trembling from head to foot, he quietly picked up the fallen chair, carefully restored it to its position by the table, and sat down in it.

“You want to know the score, Scintilla?” he almost whispered. “OK, I'll tell you. If you want to be my father confessor, then you'll get the whole story. God knows I've kept it locked inside me long enough. Maybe that's why I've become what I've become . . .”

Those last few sentences seemed to have been spoken to himself, and he wasn't even looking at me anymore.

I quietly sat down in my chair as Crawford resumed.

“Do you know what it's like to have a brother who overshadows you in every way? ‘The sainted William'—yes, that's exactly what he was. Bright, quick-witted, handsome, good in sports—and you better believe my parents made no secret of the fact. Bill was always being groomed as the head of the family and the natural successor to his dynamic father. And after Dad died, just before the war, Bill became the savior of the Crawford clan—the great white hope for the next generation.

“I don't know that Bill ever regarded me as anything but a joke. Everything came easy to him—the girls, the honors, the adulation of his peers. I had to fight tooth and nail for everything I got—and that wasn't much. I was only two years younger, but it could have been a century. He never wanted me hanging around him—he looked at me as if I were some kind of worm or insect; said I ‘held him back.'”

Crawford looked at me with a kind of pleading look.

“Scintilla, do you know what it's like to look upon someone with this twisted mix of love, hate, envy, admiration, and longing? I wanted to
be
William more than anything in the world—and I wanted it all the more exactly because I knew I never could be.

“There was a time”—Crawford almost choked at the memory—“when, as teenagers, we were swimming in the lake behind our estate. Yes, yes, Bill was a great swimmer, and I was only average—dogged but mediocre. And for no reason at all but for the fun of it, he held me down—with one hand—under the water until I almost drowned. I can still hear that dreadful laughter of his as I was blubbering under the surface. Was this to be the end of me? Was I going to die hearing my own brother laugh at me while he killed me for sport?

“That's how it was, Scintilla. He got everything, I got nothing.

“And so the war came. My mother couldn't keep all of us out of it, but she still managed to pull enough strings to get Bill into a safe stint at Fort Standish, where there wasn't the slightest chance of his coming into harm's way. She said she needed me at home to help run the business, so I got exempted altogether. And even that was a humiliation: Bill could parade around in his shiny officer's uniform, while I was stuck being a glorified accountant.

“And then there's Florence . . . .”

At this point Crawford's expression turned from self-pity to blazing anger.

“That was in some ways the most humiliating thing of all.... Mother of course wanted to make sure that at least one of her boys produced offspring to carry on the family name. But the sainted Bill could never just be set up with a suitable female like a stud thrown into a field with a heifer: he was given the luxury of finding his true love—so long, of course, as it was one of our own class. But as for me . . . well, it was just fine for me to get paired up with Florence, a kind of consolation prize thrown into my lap as good breeding stock. We'd known the Bislands for years, but they were decidedly second-tier—almost like poor relations. . . .

“So there I was, working like a dog to keep the family business going while Bill was playing at being soldier. . . . And as for Frank—well, he dealt with things in his own way. He didn't seem to care that Mother thought him even more contemptible than me; he just wanted to have a good time. Was he a skirt-chaser? So what? He didn't care! As long as he had enough money to buy an endless parade of willing female flesh, he was happy.”

Once again Crawford peered into my face with eyes slitted and blazing.

“So you want to know what went down that day in 1918, Scintilla? OK, here's the scene. . . .

“So my wedding had been set for March. I can't say I was looking forward to it; not that I disliked Florence—then—but I resented being some kind of pawn that my mother was moving around as if she owned the board. Nothing mattered to her save that everyone play the parts she had assigned to them; and woe betide anyone who struck out on their own! . . . Well, the joke of it is that, after all this careful planning, everything blew up in her face!”

He laughed mirthlessly at the memory.

“Florence was already ensconced in Thornleigh . . . God knows there was enough room for her in that cavern of a house, and she and Mother were planning the whole wedding themselves, no expense spared. Not that she cared one way or the other about our happiness; but she knew that a Crawford wedding at Thornleigh had to be a spectacle if it was to bring due credit to the family.

“And so Bill shows up on a furlough. And what does he proceed to do? He seduces my own fiancée under my nose.

“Oh, it was nothing so crude as what Frank would have done—and I can assure you that his advances were fully returned by their recipient. Florence had known Bill for years, of course, but I suppose something about that uniform he strutted around in turned her head. Or maybe it was just that she saw that he was in every way a new and improved version of me—money
plus
brains
plus
good looks, and now an army career to boot. Who wouldn't want that over a dull plodder like myself?”

I sat silent, letting Crawford wallow in self-pity for a few moments. If he was going to get things off his chest, he had to do it in his own way.

“So, yes,” he resumed, “I could tell that Bill was getting pretty chummy with his future sister-in-law. He actually came up and told me that she had just the kind of delicate good looks that always appealed to him. I was on the verge of saying, ‘Well, why don't
you
marry her, then?' but didn't have the guts. Anyway, I knew that, as far as Mother was concerned, Florence wasn't quite well-connected enough for her favorite son.

“But that didn't stop him from paying a visit to her bedroom one night in February.

“How do I know?” he snapped in reply to a phantom question from me.
“Because I saw him coming out of her room the next morning!”

He was clutching the table with both hands in a vise-grip, eyes boggling, nostrils flaring, and mouth working.

“Is that so?” is all I could think of saying.

“Yeah, that's so, Scintilla,” Crawford said snidely. “And Bill couldn't even be troubled to be ashamed of it. He just gave me this crooked smile as if he were saying, ‘I'm just getting a little advance taste, little brother,' and walked off with a snicker.

“That did it, Scintilla. From that point I vowed that Bill wouldn't live to enjoy his cuckolding of me. I just didn't realize how quickly I'd get my chance.

“Later that morning I found myself near the lake, fuming with rage. What could I do? Call the whole wedding off? My mother wouldn't hear of it. Even if I told her what had happened, all she would do was say something like, ‘Oh, get over it, Bill has a right to everything that's yours anyway.' But the idea of my having to spend the rest of my life with a wife and a brother who had betrayed me was too much. Something had to snap. And it did.

“So the next thing I know, Bill is standing right beside me. There was still a bit of a grin on his face, but at least he had the decency to look a bit chastened. Maybe he was going to apologize—I don't know. I didn't give him the chance.

“The moment he came near me, I lashed out at him, throwing a punch that didn't even connect. He backed off a bit—I don't think I'd ever hit him except in self-defense—but by this time I was pretty near insane with fury. I struck out at him in every way possible—with blows, kicks, scratches, everything I could think of that would inflict even a tiny fraction of the injury that his very existence had wreaked on me for twenty-five years.

“But it was useless. The army had trained him well, and he fought me off with ease on that cold February day. Finally he seemed to lose patience and dealt me a vicious blow to the chin with his fist.

“I went down in a heap. I think I may have passed out for a moment. I was quite literally lying prone at his feet. I looked up at him, and he gave me this look of mingled pity and contempt that I'll never forget.

“I felt like a cornered rat. I knew I could never beat him physically. So I had to use cunning.

“I moaned and groaned, writhing on the ground and holding my jaw as if it were broken. The trick worked. Bill bent down to see if I was OK, and at that moment I grabbed a rock that I'd seen before and dealt him a vicious hit to the side of the head.

“Now it was his turn to fall down in a heap. Scintilla, I don't think I've ever felt such a surge of pleasure as at that moment. Yes, I know it's reprehensible to fight with your own brother, but a lifetime of humiliation seemed wiped out with that one blow.

“He was only stunned, so I knew I had to act fast. He was a big man, but I managed to drag his body into the frigid lake. I knew that just a minute or two would be enough for the job. The moment his body felt the cold water around him, he roused himself a bit; but he was still so dazed and hurt that it wasn't hard to hold his head down under the water—just as he'd done to me a decade or more ago—until he stopped moving.

“That was it,” Crawford said. “It proved surprisingly easy to kill someone. But I knew this was only the beginning. I also wanted to escape the consequences of my crime.

“So I ran back to the house, screaming that Bill had fallen into the lake and that I couldn't get him out. Everyone knew he was a good swimmer, but that water was freezing cold, and no one could blame me for not being able to rescue him. Everyone also knew that my own capacities as a swimmer were modest at best.

“Here again it was surprising how easily things went. And the funny thing is that Mother proved a big help. You know, Scintilla”—he peered at me sharply—“I'm convinced that woman has no morals at all. All she cares about is herself and the family. I'm sure she knew what I'd done; I caught her looking askance at me for months, maybe years afterward. Oh, she knew all right—but right from the beginning she was determined to take action to protect her interests.

“The easiest part was dealing with the police. That brainless ass Myron Franklin was no obstacle.”

“Did you buy him off then, just as you did later with Frank's ‘death'?” I said.

“Didn't have to,” Crawford replied shortly. “Franklin knew he had to tread lightly when there was anything involving the Crawfords. He wasn't going to make waves unless he was forced to. And, as it happens, a case of ‘accidental death' was the most plausible scenario anyway, and there were no witnesses who could have told a different tale.

“So that seemed to be the end of that,” Crawford said with a kind of sigh. “But of course, it wasn't the end. . . .”