The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “Coming down that path, Ann fell several times, she vomited, she lost one of her shoes. She fell again, half-way down the spur path leading to the pond. Why did she go that way, and not straight on to the Chalmers house? We don’t know, for certain. Took the wrong turn in the moonlight, being sick and confused?—possible. She was found in the water, drowned. Stumbled and fell in, couldn’t get out?—that also is possible, remotely possible. Admittedly the circumstantial evidence is imperfect at this point, and it’s one of the questions of fact that you, members of the jury, will be called on to decide.”

  Grim, slow, brooding, Hunter returned to the prosecution’s table for another sip of water, and Warner’s gaze wandered to the face of Judge Terence Mann. What are you going to do to us, Terence?

  In a sense, the Judge would do nothing. Warner assumed without reservations that the quiet introspective man up there would try his best to preserve an ideal impartiality. It seemed to Warner that Mann was almost devoid of vanity, incredible as that might seem in a judge. No fanaticism in Terence Mann, no insistence on the rightness of a view because it was his own, no false identification of self with idea. Incredible until you remembered that Terence was a judge more or less by accident, an interim appointment later confirmed by an election in which he had peacefully refused to do any serious campaigning.

  Warner recalled their first meeting ten years ago, soon after Mann had been appointed special prosecutor for an investigation into county road construction frauds. The rats were running, and Terence, a youngish thirty-seven, appeared to be enjoying it. In the book-leather and walnut surroundings of Mann and Wheatley, Terence had looked at first like a revised version of his uncle Norden Mann who had died the year before. A superficial resemblance. Old Norden had been a born pettifogger, loving legal labyrinths for their own sake. Terence, skeptical, a bit sharp, would look for the simplest way to pass through a labyrinth and come out on the other side. Terence had served his apprenticeship in Norden’s firm, re-entering it after his discharge from the Army. Until that graft-hunting appointment no one had heard much of him. Warner had gone to the office on Wilson Place off Main Street—“Lawyers’ Hollow”—for a luncheon engagement with Joe Wheatley. Terence had been halted for a handshake, and Warner had fallen into a pose he could not always avoid: the aging lion. Terence wasn’t scared. “Do you intend to be a famous prosecutor? Scourge of the unrighteous, huh?”

  The loaded questions—they came out too, Grandfather roaring. Terence hadn’t minded. “No, sir, I don’t exactly see that ahead of me.” No word of what he did see. Later they met at the University Club and began a more relaxed acquaintance over a few drinks. Then an invitation to Terence’s apartment that became an evening of Chopin and Bach. Music was an aspect of Mann’s life unsuspected, discovered by Warner with the abruptness of an opened door. The lawyer vanished; the hands were “beyond technique”; the keyboard voice spoke with the authority of intense feeling governed by insight.

  And Warner recalled another meeting with someone else, in an almost empty bar, a few days after the election that confirmed Terence Mann in office. Idle for the afternoon and in a cool beery mood, he had glanced down the damp mahogany and noticed a sagging red-veined blob, the face of Boss Timmy Flack of the Third Ward—who, in a way, was the politics of Winchester, the half-submerged and partly useful human force, neither honest nor demonstrably a crook, The Man You Went To See. Himself honored and ancient, professionally secure, in any case seldom giving a damn what others said of him or of the company he kept, Warner had moved down the bar and bought Timmy another drink before The Man could buy him one. “Hear tell we got a new judge.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Happy, Timmy? Civic virtue and so on?”

  “Shit.”

  “If not happy, what are you going to do about it?”

  “You needling me, Counselor?”

  “Little bit.”

  “What the hell’s anybody going to do, now he’s in? The son of a bitch doesn’t want anything!”

  Which was certainly not true, but just as certainly true in Timmy’s sense. And Cecil Warner understood that he now feared Terence Mann only because Terence’s mind demanded demonstration, when a demonstration of relative truth may be more arduous than any labors of the gods.

  “Yes, she might have stumbled and fallen in. The State contends this is not probable. You will of course hear all the evidence that has led us to this conclusion. The State contends that Callista Blake followed Ann Doherty, searched her out, found her there helpless on the path, dragged her the rest of the way into the water. Perhaps even held her under, the way you might drown an unwanted kitten.”

  Chilled by the voice in spite of forty courtroom years, Warner saw Callista gazing down at her fingertips, frowning slightly as if bothered in the midst of concentration by an irrelevant uproar in another room.

  “On Monday, August 17th, Detective Sergeant Lloyd Rankin of the Winchester Police was sent to Callista Blake’s apartment, acting on information received from the State Police at Shanesville. The poison aconitine was found there, in two forms—in an opened bottle of brandy, and in a canister that held chopped-up monkshood roots, the source of aconitine, steeping in brandy. The State will prove Callista’s opportunity to secure monkshood roots ten days earlier, from her mother’s flower garden in Shanesville.

  “The State contends that Ann Doherty could not have received that poison by accident. The State contends that Callista Blake gave it to her with malice aforethought, with full intent to cause her death. The State contends that the final act, the drowning, was done by Callista Blake, and that she is guilty of murder in the first degree.”

  Hunter was sitting down and mopping his face. Warner discovered that he himself had risen, for now his body was wavering in vertigo and he must grab the back of his chair and wait. The clock hands stood at three minutes past five. The Judge was gazing distantly down the slant of an unmoving pencil. “Your Honor, a word before adjournment if I may?”

  Terence’s voice was soft and friendly. “Certainly, Mr. Warner.”

  “The defense will waive the opening. At this time, before evidence, before the jury has had opportunity to learn the truth, I have nothing to say except that my client is innocent.”

  Whereto answering, the sea,

  Delaying not, hurrying not,

  Whispered me through the night, and very plainly before daybreak,

  Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word DEATH…

  IV

  Judge Mann followed Joe Bass to the elevator that clanked them gravely to the relative holiness of the sixth floor, where Mann’s chambers occupied a corner with a north view. The windows were dark, under a windy spatter of unexpected rain. Mann glimpsed gold blurs of downtown windows, white hurry of headlights, a flow of them two blocks away at the corner of Main and Court, Winchester going home to suburban bedrooms. “Nasty night,” said Joe Bass. The red eye closed, the green eye opened; a file of wet bugs poured up the Court Street hill. “Going home directly, sir?”

  “I think so. You were in court, weren’t you, Joe?”

  “Yes. I ducked out before the end of Mr. Hunter’s speech. Did Mr. Warner waive the opening?”

  “More or less.…” Joe Bass never hovered, or clucked. A sure instinct had told him Judge Mann preferred to light his own cigarettes. But he did not like to be dismissed before the Judge went home, preferring to read or meditate in the anteroom until any hour of the night. He had not much to go home to—a boarding-house bedroom uptown, his wife dead, children married and gone. “I wish Mr. Warner would cut down that belly. Too much work for the heart at sixty-eight.”

  “Sixty-eight, Judge?—I hadn’t realized.” Joe chuckled faintly in the shadows. “I’m sixty-seven. Apropos of old age, I took the liberty of browsing through your Thucydides a while ago—have the same paperback edition at home,
and very good, I’d say—may I?” He was already drifting to the bookshelves. For Joe, there was always a quotation. It seemed to Judge Mann that this was at least the magpie instinct at its noblest, for Joe did not gather them as random bright beads, but for personal use and to be shared. “It’s from a speech of Pericles at the funeral of those who first died in the war—and I wonder sometimes if the Peloponnesian War wasn’t as great a disaster as the latest? If the Greece of Pericles could have survived—well.… Here it is: ‘As for those of you who are too old to have children, I would ask you to count as gain the greater part of your life, in which you have been happy, and remember that what remains is not long, and let your hearts be lifted up at the thought of the fair fame of the dead. One’s sense of honor is the only thing that does not grow old.’”

  Judge Mann thought: What of one who dies young?—a child hit by a car? Ann Doherty? What of one who dies young by act of the State, with no fair fame? “I think, Joe, we’ve become a more complex people.”

  “Aren’t the essentials much the same?”

  “Not quite. I think there’s even a new humanitarianism, new in the last hundred and fifty years. In the time of, say, Edmund Burke, there was still officially approved slavery even in England, where they got rid of it before we did. Hangings as public entertainments. Cats burnt alive for fun on Guy Fawkes Day. The modern stomach pukes up that sort of thing. Alongside the mushroom cloud, the decade of insanity that was Hitler’s bloom, the damned impersonal devices for butchering unseen millions by throwing a switch, you try setting up the way people actually live, or try to live, from day to day: there’s a difference. If the difference means as much as I think it does, if we get through another hundred years without blowing up the planet, modern medicine should have a great share of the credit.” Joe looked puzzled. “In a time when any bad sickness or injury was probably a death sentence, a general fatalism would be almost unavoidable, don’t you think?”

  “Mm, yes.”

  “Cruelty and beastliness got taken for granted. If we value life more now, it’s because we know more about maintaining it and reducing its miseries. It doesn’t have to be ‘nasty, brutish and short.’”

  “‘One’s sense of honor’—I liked that part.”

  “Other things don’t grow old. Knowledge. What you learned as a child is with you at sixty-seven. Some kinds of love remain young, so long as the body can support our curious brains where love is born.”

  CHAPTER 2

  It is extraordinary that a system hoary with age, extravagant and wasteful to the highest degree, should not be supplanted by some method of getting at facts directly, and having them passed on by men who understand the controversies that they seek to solve.

  CLARENCE DARROW,

  The Story of My Life

  I

  The wolves sat on their haunches, or stood, or crouched belly to earth with snouts on forepaws, while others maneuvered in the shadow beyond the tree-border of the clearing. On the other side of that border spread such a blackness as the mind imagines for the sea a mile down, yet here and there it was relieved by the gray of stone; everywhere, also, a coldness. Grayness in the clearing too; no flowers, nothing of the sun, but phallic-bodied toadstools and a ground-vine twisting a serpentine life among scattered rocks. Callista remembered being told that someone had died in there, in the blackness where no one could see it happen. The wolves would have eaten the body.

  The wolves were old, possibly several thousand years old. “A geeolawgical malformation,” said the child in her lap, speaking with precocious insight.

  Callista moved her hand with its dangling bracelet over the fine black hair, tiny ear, bony shoulder, indistinct body. Her intention was a caress; likely the child knew it. She grew interested, not urgently, in learning the child’s sex. What was the difficulty?—not a diaper. Apparently the little thing possessed only a negative pink blank between skinny thighs, like the crotch of a plastic doll. “The Merican Ideal,” said the brat, rolling china-white eyes. “See?”

  “Well, shut up, darlin’,” Callista said. The wolves had crept closer during her preoccupation. Such was their habit (she had been told) if you neglected to look them straight in the eye. She watched them in contemplative pain resembling fear, and they continued moving, slowly, a stirring and gliding that seemed aimless until Callista understood one of them was being pursued, a thin bitch wolf, scar-faced, nearly black, with a crooked leg, devil-eyed but in her demoniac way pathetic. Callista was moved to remark: “Hasn’t a chance.”

  And yet, poor beast, her own wickedness was plain. You could see the drip of poisonous saliva from her mouth, and the fetuslike thing impaled on a lower tooth—it couldn’t be her own, so she must have stolen it somewhere. No wonder they were after her. Serve her right! (Or if the fetus was her own she ought to have taken better care of it)—therefore one could understand the primitive justice of it as the gray jaw of a pursuer hooked over her narrow rump. His hind legs massively firmed themselves. Callista could observe the sudden scarlet erection, sense the weight of the one lifted gray indifferent paw; but he did not swing about to rear up and clamp her loins, he merely held her in the angle of his jawbone and under that paw while others closed in to slit her throat—she womanly now lying on her back as a clean white fang thrust out of a surgical mask to run deftly down from the throat along the mid-line of the body, opening up the internal apparatus not for eating but for a better clinical view.

  “Like a theater Oh-doctor,” said the child’s intelligent profile in Callista’s arms. Someone said: “Gentlemen, this is the pancreas—a remarkably pancreative bitch to be sure, aware of nature and consequences. Notice the inadequate uterus, a primipara yes yes, but evidence of miscarriage early in term—and by the way, Potter’s Field is bungfull of that type.”

  “I resent that,” Callista said. Able now to pick up the child and walk away with her through the woods where all light was granite-gray, she did so, seeking her father to show him a long overdue report card on progress in pancreation. The little girl—naturally, a little girl, with that lyre waist and tumbling hair and dainty genital groove—said to her: “I am so sorry, Callista Johnson Blake, I have to stop here and paint a picture. Can I look at that thing?”

  “I got my paw stuck in it.”

  “Irrelevant,” said the little girl. “Incompetent Callista.”

  “All right,” Callista said, and walked away from her through the grayness, uncertain whether she could find her father. He sat (she thought) behind a gray screen, by a lighted window. “Daddy, please!—”

  Now the bracelet on her wrist had caught, snarled itself in a tangle of black vines, and Callista called: “Daddy, I can’t seem to fix it. Can I go now?”

  She could not go, because in front of her beyond the vines were the two doors, so very nearly alike, and someone—NOT Daddy, because Daddy NEVER said anything so unkind—someone said: “It’s one or the other.”

  Callista tried then to scream with all her power: “Daddy! My back hurts—” nothing in her throat but a mumble, hardly even that, a scream in silence without breath: “Daddy! Please come—my back hurts—”

  Callista sat up drenched in sweat that soaked her pajamas, and shivering. No relief at first, rather a frustrated anger, since in another moment her father might have been able to hear and answer. Comprehension then; reorientation; qualified relief—Is waking any better?

  It was, of course. Steadier, anyway. The familiar exchange of selves: What I was in the dream, I am not; what I am, I was and was not in the dream.

  The grayness before her eyes yielded the image of a cross, and a second horizontal bar grew visible—there all the time. A window, the same one through which yesterday, by straining on tiptoe to the limit of pain, she had succeeded in watching the wheeling of doves. The same effort now would give her the field of winter sky before dawn. If the rain had stopp
ed, a few stars incorruptible, indifferent.

  She did not rise, but pulled her feet under her for warmth and drew closer the scratchy antiseptic-smelling blanket. At this hour the cells were quiet. Another prisoner snored, probably the old woman who had been brought in drunk last night, her high defiant monotone of obscenities temporarily hushed.

  A few months ago Callista would have reached for the notebook by her bed to write down what she could recapture of the dream. Edith had wondered if all that intensive reading in psychology wasn’t too one-sided, introspective-making. “Maybe, Cal, you ought to be meeting people more and thinking less about their insides.” But to meet one person is to meet a thousand selves; and it seemed to Callista that she had remained critical, as Edith probably feared she wouldn’t. “Cal, I wish you had more counterbalance, too, for those psychologists in print. I’ve read them. They don’t look out of the windows enough. Why not contrast them with the exact scientists?—who often have the same fault but in a different style?” Something in that.… “There isn’t one of those boys, going back to Papa Freud himself, who wouldn’t be improved by a refresher course in first-year biology.”

  And Edith had gone on to urge her, once more, to go to college next year—Callista, inwardly, very nearly ready to agree. She recalled the crystal April afternoon, and Edith standing, her back turned, looking out the studio’s north window, the light a clear perfection on her red hair—why must Edith imagine herself homely? “Here—may I say it?—you’re not quite far enough away from your Mom.”