The Just And The Unjust (5 page)

'What about?'

'I'm not clerking for you,' Bunting said. 'Look it up yourself.'

'Ah,' said Harry, 'I know the one you mean. It was a fellow who stole a car and shot a policeman who stopped him.'

'Yes,' said Bunting, 'and that happened to be the next day, and in another state; and the murder was held to be in perpetration of the felony. And that's just exactly what's going to be held in this case. We have all our evidence.'

'Your evidence!' said Harry. 'What is it? That Kinsolving, that F.B.I. man of yours, beats hell out of my client and I can prove it, and where's your damn confession? Roy Leming! Why I can prove he took dope for years. You think anybody's going to believe anything he says? Don't make me laugh!'

'I don't know about making you laugh,' Bunting said. 'You can laugh your head off, if you want. But I don't think Howell's going to do much laughing. All he and Basso will get out of this is one of those currents of electricity they have at the penitentiary, of intensity sufficient to cause death, and the application of such current to be continued until they are dead, and may God have mercy on their souls! They are just as guilty as hell.'

Harry Wurts looked over his shoulder. 'Sure,' he said, 'they're guilty. George Stacey and I don't discuss it, but I even have a good idea Basso fired one of those shots —'

'Oh,' said Bunting. 'That's your good idea, is it?'

'Yes, it is. But let me see you prove it. A man has a right to make the Commonwealth prove it! Where do you think this is? Russia? Germany? Say, what are you trying to do? Sap the foundations of equal justice under law? Destroy my means of livelihood? Now, be off with you! Who's eating?'

Abner shook his head. 'I told Father I'd be home to-day.'

'How is he?' said Bunting. 'Meant to ask you.'

'Pretty good.'

'Give him my best.'

'Give him mine,' said Harry, 'and, say, tell him I sent him this. Hear the one about the dwarf in the sideshow who married the girl in the next booth, the tallest woman in the world? Yeah, his friends put him up to it. See you in church.'

There was a burst of laughter, and they went through the door into the hall, still laughing. Down at the end, by the grill to the passage to the jail, Abner was surprised to see the defendant, Stanley Howell, leaning against the wall. Max Eich, one of the jail guards, was next to him. Max clasped casually in his left hand an empty manacle whose mate was around Howell's wrist. Howell's ghastly, putty-coloured face was turned toward them; his intense sunken eyes fixed on them. Between his pale lips a wet fragment of cigarette was burning.

Everybody stopped laughing suddenly; and Abner went out the side door to his parked car.

5

The big old house was just out of town. Abner turned his car through the stone gate posts, up the neglected curves of the drive through the overgrown masses of shrubbery, and halted it by the porch steps. In the hanging gloom of the long brick-arched veranda, Lucius, his father's Negro man, was polishing the brass handle of the door. 'Look, Lucius,' Abner said as patiently as he could, 'what are you doing that for? If you want to do something, why don't you get some of those weeds out of the drive?'

'This needed shining up. This needed it bad.'

'It's needed it bad for the last five years.'

'Well, Honey said why didn't I.' His wife had actually been christened Honey. He intended no endearment. 'I told her I had twenty other things to do. Judge is down. He's on the side porch.'

'Well, stop now; and tell Honey I have to have lunch right away. I have to get back to court.'

'They try that murder to-day?'

'Yes. Hurry up.'

'Mister Abner,' Lucius said, 'I certainly like to see those gangsters. Kill a man as soon as look at him.' Lucius turned his mild, faintly cretinous gape on Abner. 'I don't guess I can.'

'You needn't ask me,' Abner said. 'The trial's open to the public. But I'm not going to ask Mrs. Boorse to let you off this afternoon, if that's what you mean. Anyway, there isn't anything to see. They aren't gangsters, Lucius; they —'

But they were gangsters, all right. They were the very thing. Abner thought of Howell, sick and white, standing with Max Eich in the hall by the bars of the passage to the jail. He thought of Basso's dark surly face, the empty and feeble looks of menace as Basso bitterly kept whatever absurd pact Basso had made with Basso to get back at something — his invulnerable prosecutors, his own bad luck, fate, the indifferent world; it hardly mattered, for against none of them was any recourse possible — by refusing to answer. Abner thought of Roy Leming, meek, placatory, harrowingly beyond shame or pride, on the degrading anxious seat as state's evidence.

It was no fiction to say that they were killers. They furtively carried guns, and very little was enough to panic or confuse them into shooting and then they were liable to hit someone. Because they were perpetually nerve-racked and lived always in danger, they were cruel. Abner had come slowly, through a lengthening experience, to understand that side of it. Criminals might be victims of circumstance in the sense that few of them ever had a fair chance; but it was a mistake to forget that the only 'fair chance' they ever wanted was a chance for easy money. When they remembered all that their own dumbness and greed and desperation had made them go through, and yet how little of the thing they were trying to get their suffering and effort had brought them, some of them — specifically, a man like Bailey, who had the cunning to contrive, with only such poor material as Howell and Basso and Leming, the kidnapping of Frederick Zollicoffer, and the cold nerve to shoot Zollicoffer afterwards; and yet who also jumped at a knock, ran at a word, and entertained hysterical fancies about being betrayed — would indeed, what with the one and the other, kill a man in a paroxysm of malignity and terror as soon as look at him.

Abner did not see how any of this could be explained to Lucius. He left his sentence unfinished and went in through the high dark hall, around the little open-work elevator that had been installed by the stairs for his father, and out on to the screened side porch.

Judge Coates sat in a wheelchair, a light blanket wrapped around his legs, a newspaper propped on a metal frame on the table. Beyond the frame were several leather-bound law books and some paper-covered printed records. He had insisted on sending in his resignation as a Judge of the Superior Court; but it had, at least temporarily, been refused, and the records of cases he would normally have been hearing this term helped to occupy some of his time. Beyond the books was an earthenware jug full of fresh rose buds; and beyond the table sat Mrs. Boorse, who, as well as being a so-called 'practical nurse' (and a good one), was the Judge's second cousin. Abner said, 'Hello, Father. Morning, Aunt Myrt.'

'Well, son,' Judge Coates said. He turned from the paper and looked over the top of his spectacles. His high broad forehead shone a little. His grey hair, longer now than he would have worn it if he had been well, was in some disorder. The good side of his face worked, dragging the other with it, and he said thickly, 'You home?'

'There, now,' Mrs. Boorse said, 'I told you he'd be along directly.'

Judge Coates' expression changed, and Abner could see that he didn't like the remark, which might mean (though Mrs. Boorse would never mean it) that he had been silly or childish to say whatever he had said.

Mrs. Boorse went on, 'Abner, you father's had his lunch. I'll have Lucius bring yours out here, why don't I? You can have a good talk. Philander, have you got everything you want? Well, I expect Abner could get anything for you. Honey's waiting to start the jam. You just give me a call when you go, Ab.' She swept her glance around, professionally, checking up. She said, 'Aren't those roses pretty? Janet Drummond brought them.' She folded up her knitting and went into the house.

'Talk, talk, talk,' Judge Coates said. Though hushed, he spoke explosively, as though he had contained what he could not or would not say to Mrs. Boorse's solid, good-natured face as long as it was physically possible. 'Talk your ear off! Yes, Bonnie brought the roses.' He looked at Abner again over the glasses, turning the sagging side of his face away a little.

'How are you feeling?' said Abner.

'All right, I suppose.' He brought up a handkerchief and touched the side of his mouth. 'Mosher was in. It's hard on a doctor. There isn't much he can do. He's very patient with me. I talk to him as if he could help it.'

'What's he say?'

'Oh, what they always say. Getting on very well. Little things annoy you. Astereognosis.'

'I can imagine,' Abner said.

'You don't know what that is!'

Abner, who had taken it for some unintelligible enuciation, smiled and shook his head.

'You ought to know Greek. How can you have any education if you don't know Greek?' He spoke censoriously, fixing Abner with a sharp look of impatience and reproof; but Abner doubted if his father had found the Greek he had been obliged to learn by switchings and boxings of the ears at Mr. Sutphen's long-gone Academy useful enough for him to remember much of it. The Judge was repeating something he must have heard often from the 'Old Judge' — not, in his harsh age, a man to neglect the duty of admonishing that young son of his who now with his dragging face and half-paralysed body sat there, indescribably old, admonishing in turn his son. Picking up a match box from the table, Judge Coates said, 'You can't tell what shape it is. Not by the sense of touch. Things like that. You don't like it.'

On Judge Coates' face appeared what he meant. His face displayed the realities behind that fretful understatement. He rebelled, still incredulous and angry, against the humiliation of being nearly helpless. Incredulity and anger were part of the means he used to hold up under those burdens of the mind, the hopeless and melancholy thoughts, the deadly moments of insight that showed him his state, the qualms of fear that must be met with repeated short efforts of control. Abner put a hand on his father's shoulder. He said with what heartiness he could, 'Want to hear a story Harry Wurts said to tell you?'

'No,' said Judge Coates, 'certainly not. That young man. Mind like a cesspool.'

'This one isn't so bad,' Abner said. He repeated it slowly. His father laughed, the paralysed cheek shaking, the tears coming into his eyes. 'I'm a bad old man,' he said with difficulty. 'Like to know who thinks those things up.' He held his handkerchief to his mouth. 'There's your lunch,' he said. He called out, 'Bring it here, Lucius! Put it down. Don't hang around out there!'

'Yes, Judge. I was coming as fast as I could. You want some milk, Mister Abner?'

'Yes,' said Abner. 'What's your case there?' he asked his father.

'Oh, stupid affair. It's before the court on a stipulated set of facts — insurance contract. Waste of time. The test has always been whether there's a risk against which indemnity's given. Plaintiff's brief is practically illiterate, into the bargain. How are you getting on?'

'Not far this morning. We got the jury. Opened. Costigan and one witness have been on.'

'How did your opening go?'

'So-so, I guess. Marty said it was all right.' Abner paused, cutting at a lamb chop. 'We have a pretty clear case. I'd have been bothering you about it quick enough if —'

Judge Coates grunted. 'You don't have to tell me everything you're doing,' he said. 'Was Bonnie in court?'

'I didn't see her.'

'She said something about it. She might have liked to hear you.'

Abner said, 'In that courtroom, nobody can hear anything. The defendants are a bad lot. I don't think we'll have much trouble disposing of them.'

'Who's sitting? Tom? Yes. You told me. I suppose Horace didn't want to sentence anyone to death.'

'Judge Irwin might not like it, but from what I've seen of him, he wouldn't try to get out of it. I think the real reason is, he was busy. I know he has three or four opinions to write.'

Judge Coates said, 'That's one thing I never had to do. It just happened, all the time I was on the bench here, we never had a capital case. Well, we did have one; but the defendant hanged himself in jail. We just had a county lockup in those days without proper arrangements.

There was quite a lot of agitation —' He broke off, as though pulling himself back to his subject. 'Well, your grandfather used to say, "I hanged 'em; and when my dinner was ready, I ate it, too." He'd say you were soft about other people because you were soft about yourself. I used to think he was very wise — he wasn't any fool, either; but he spoke and acted a good deal on impulse — well, I suppose you think I'm foolish a lot of the time, too.'

'No,' said Abner. 'I've thought you were darn stubborn on occasion.

'I'm afraid as you get older you'll find I've said a lot of foolish things.' Judge Coates made a restless movement.' Yes. Bonnie was in. I only saw her a moment. Takes so long to get me fixed in the morning. I don't think those exercises do any good.' He picked up his left arm by the wrist and let it drop. 'I don't know why she bothers to bring me flowers.' A suggestion of tears appeared behind his glasses, but he winked his eyes and drawing up his lower lip onesidedly, bit it.

Abner said, 'She does it because she likes you.'

'Sorry for me!' said Judge Coates. 'Aren't you two ever going to get married?'

'I don't know,' Abner said, somewhat embarrassed. 'You'll have to ask her.'

'I wish you'd get settled. It's time you did.' He hesitated. He then said quickly, 'Great mistake for a lawyer to marry too early. Always hard to get established. But you aren't still a boy, and you ought to have something more than good prospects. Is Marty going to run for another term this fall?'

'I haven't the faintest idea,' Abner said. He filled his mouth with apple pie; but since his father waited, saying nothing, until he had finished chewing, he added, 'I know he had a talk with Jesse Gearhart. I don't know what about.'

'The Attorney General sent for a number of county chairmen a month or so ago. I was told Jesse was one of them. They badly need some special deputies. It's an eight thousand dollar job.'