The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “Go on, Sergeant.”

  “Under Lieutenant Kovacs’ orders, I examined the pond’s banks and the immediate area, with Peterson and Curtis. Eliminating the marks made by Dr. Chalmers, Miss Welsh and myself, only two sets of footprints were found near the pond. Mrs. Doherty’s were identifiable by the high-heeled print of one shoe, and the stocking print of the other foot. The second set was size six, low-heeled, blunt-toed, the right shoe showing a slightly different sole-pattern from the left. I assisted Trooper Curtis in making casts of the prints, and initialed them as he did. Mrs. Doherty’s footprints ended on the spur path, at the top of that slope I mentioned. Where they ended, a blurred mark on the fairly soft ground suggested that someone had fallen. It was not a very clear mark; all it really indicated was some recent disturbance of the earth. And from my experience of woodcraft and trail-reading—I think I can honestly claim a bit of expert knowledge there, by the way—I would say that all the marks from the beginning of the slope to the edge of the water were quite indefinite; that is, I think they could be interpreted in several different ways, all except one.”

  “And that one?”

  “A heel-print belonging to the second set, the low-heeled set, superimposed on the blurred mark where someone had apparently fallen. And this mark told nothing except that whoever made it set her heel—that is, the heel of a low shoe, size six—on top of the other mark.”

  “Only one heel-mark?”

  “Only one. The sole, and the other foot, must have rested on the hemlock needles and other loose stuff. The ground was only partly bare.”

  “Could you tell whether the person was standing or squatting?”

  “Not for certain. I’d say standing, but I could be wrong.”

  “Where else were the footprints of that second set?”

  “On the left bank of the pond—that is, left as you approached by the spur path. Two fairly clear imprints, left and right, pointed toward the water. The ground was somewhat moist there. We found a few other, partial prints of the size six shoes in that area, all partly obliterated by other footsteps. That left bank is the place where access to the water is easiest. That’s where Miss Welsh had stepped in and out, and Dr. Chalmers had stumbled out on the left bank, slipping once by the way, although he had approached the pond from the other side.”

  “You say the marks on the slope of the spur path were indefinite. But would you describe them a little more, Sergeant?”

  “They just weren’t readable, Mr. Hunter. Mere disturbances of the earth. Let me put it this way, sir: simply on the basis of the trailmarks, Mrs. Doherty might have fallen and rolled into the water—it’s just about steep enough for that; or she might have been pushed after she had fallen; or she might even have crawled or dragged herself into the pond. At the bottom of that slope, by the water’s edge, the top of a wide flat boulder is exposed. Most of it’s under water, but the top is bare, a shelf of rock that would show no marks if a person slipped over the edge into the water. And the water there is almost as deep as in the middle of the pond.”

  “Did you extend your search beyond the pond area?”

  “Yes, sir, with Sergeant Peterson. We went to the Doherty house, examining the footpath. In the brush by the path, we found two marks of falling; at one of these places, evidence of vomiting. At the ditch where the pond’s outlet intersects the path, I found a blue shoe, a right, matching the left one on the body. The footpath ends at a gravel turning circle in front of the Doherty house. There we found a blue and white four-door Pontiac sedan, later identified as belonging to Mr. James Doherty. The front bumper was almost in contact with a pillar of the porch. Tire gouges on the gravel indicated the brakes had been slammed on at the last minute. The front door on the driver’s side was open. The ignition had been turned off and the key removed; because of the open door, the inside light was still burning.”

  “Does the gravel drive extend to Summer Avenue?”

  “Yes, sir. We examined it for signs of another car, but found none. That drive would take no mark when dry except the kind the Pontiac made.”

  “Did you find anything else by the house?”

  “A key ring, on the porch by the door. After the leather case of the key-holder had been checked for fingerprints, I tried the keys. They fitted the Pontiac and the outside doors of the Doherty house—those doors were all locked at that time, when Sergeant Peterson and I arrived there. On the driveway, near the opening of the path into the woods, I found a woman’s blue handbag, monogrammed A.P.D. Its catch was open, and a lipstick pencil and compact had tumbled out.”

  “Did you check the other contents of the handbag?”

  “Yes, sir.” Sergeant Shields at last opened his notebook. “Lipstick pencil of a light shade, gold compact monogrammed A.P.D., one handkerchief unused, three Kleenex folded, engagement book of red imitation leather, mechanical pencil with chromium finish, single stub from motion picture theater, fifteen dollars in bills, one dollar and fourteen cents in coin in change purse, page torn from a memorandum pad with date August 15, 1959 and with writing evidently a grocery list, four bobby pins, a scrap of green rayon possibly a dressgoods sample, identification card belonging with handbag but not filled out, a—a paper clip.”

  Warner watched the histrionic tenderness of T. J. Hunter’s hands. They moved over the already identified garments, not quite touching but with the sense of a caress. Corn, of course, but how marvelously served up! Gently the hands lifted a plastic bag.

  “Sergeant, this bag has a tag with your initials—is this your identifying mark?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And do you identify what I show you here, a woman’s blue slipper, size five?”

  “That is the slipper I found on the path in the woods, between the pond and the Doherty house, the morning of last August 17th.”

  Sit still, Old Man! No protest possible that the jury would not resent. How can you make legal protest against the gentleness of a pair of hands? Against a voice that by its very restraint compels the subject to cry aloud? Ann’s garments, her poor fallen possessions, needed no advocate: four bobby pins, a paper clip. Best to sit still, the face a little hidden, as Callista was still, and hidden.

  And to wait, because the defense never rests.

  “Your witness, Mr. Warner.”

  He wondered whether it was worth the trouble of rising. Maybe. As a fact-lover, the Sergeant understood the existence of grays between black and white. One dim blur of gray across the clarity of Shields’ testimony might stir a slight wonder in a few jurors. “Sergeant, when you found Dr. Chalmers on the back porch, did you speak first?”

  “Yes, sir.” Quite as polite as he had been to the prosecution.

  “He roused at once and answered you?”

  “He did, sir.” Yes, polite, and well aware of what was coming.

  Mildness and indifference were needed here: “What did he say?”

  Then the expected noise: “Objection! This conversation wasn’t introduced in direct examination.”

  Mildness, indifference? “Your Honor, I submit that the substance of the conversation was introduced.”

  “Yes—admissible in cross examination. Objection overruled.”

  T. J. Hunter shrugged and let it go. A masterly shrug.

  “Well, Sergeant, what did Dr. Chalmers say?”

  Sergeant Shields also was mild. Not indifferent; on the contrary, the level fact-loving eyes were kind. A contemplative kindness that could do the defense no service even if the jury were able to glimpse it and grope at the meaning of it.

  “Dr. Chalmers said to me: ‘Sam? My God, Sam, I can’t believe it.’ I said: ‘I just got here. What’s happened?’ And he said: ‘Ann—Ann Doherty—she’s killed herself.’”

  II

  Weariness had grown like an external pressure, the encroach
ment of a rising tide, the waters of darkness. Callista had supposed that when Cecil walked over there to cross-examine the tide might recede, even release her entirely. It had not, not entirely, but it might be no longer rising; maybe this was the turn. She had heard Cecil speak, and had listened. Listening, she had felt within the weariness that hint of inarticulate continuing surprise which is an element in any manifestation of love. It did not seem to her that she had actually understood what he said, or what the Sergeant said. “Ann Doherty—killed herself.” What? Oh—he was repeating what poor Herb had said to him. Herb could always be trusted to say something idiotic.

  Important as testimony?—nobody thinks she killed herself. But the tide might very well be turning. Her eyes were no longer blurred. She could discover the thousand crow’s-foot wrinkles in Cecil’s face over yonder. Callista understood that she would not faint, nor collapse, nor die for some little time to come.

  Threescore and ten is also a short time. Long enough to wear down a rugged boy’s splendor to a burden of exhausted flesh—Cecil must have been a magnificent youth. Hardly long enough (Edith suggested once) to comprehend the pattern of a May-fly’s wing, since for that you’d have to comprehend the protein molecule. When we can do that, Edith said, we shall still be ignorant, learning all new things with reluctance, initial rejection, stubborn retention of obsolete notions, superstitions, cruelties. Maybe, Edith said, the sickly bromide “at the last analysis” is the most arrogant verbalism human beings ever slung together.

  What? Cecil’s voice had spoken something more. With effort and a little panic, Callista recaptured it out of the counterpoint of thought. It was very simple. He said: “No further questions.”

  Edith had gone on to wonder how the coming centuries would handle their heretics. Burn and hang them like the seventeenth and earlier centuries? Listen to them a little, unwillingly, like the nineteenth, until revolution stiffened into respectability, congealed in half-truths? Wall them off, like the twentieth, with the soft barrier of democratic smugness or a steel barrier such as Marxian demonology? Maybe, Edith grumbled, the twenty-first century would return to punishing dissenters with open savagery: they’d be locked in delightful rooms with plastic food dispensers, ingenious mechanical attention to all the body’s other needs (sure, all of ’em) and not a God-damned thing to do except watch television.

  Cecil was coming back to her.

  Cecil would agree with Edith; and in agreeing would not remind her how much farther his own life had ranged within the threescore and ten, how much of wonder and experience, speculation, pleasure, suffering had burgeoned in him during the half-century that spread between his age and her own: for he was kind.

  Surely if now she cautiously turned her eyes toward the wall clock, the hands would have struggled a little nearer to five. The Old Man was sitting down by her, covering her hand briefly, his own heavy and hot. The clock hands had pushed a small weary way beyond two. “Are you all right, Cal? You don’t look good.”

  “I’m all right. What’s happening now?”

  “Looks as if T.J. was going to try a bit of redirect. Sore too. Nothing makes a prosecutor madder than an impartial policeman.”

  To Callista the suave gentleman in the gray suit didn’t look mad. “Sergeant, when you first saw Dr. Chalmers he was in a state of shock?”

  “He appeared so. Color and breathing bad. Spoke brokenly, with difficulty. And as I said, later he mentioned a heart condition.”

  “In other words he was in a state where you’d hardly expect him to make a clear interpretation of anything he’d seen?”

  “I can’t answer that, sir, because I’ve noticed some people can think pretty straight in spite of a bad shock. I don’t know Dr. Chalmers well enough to say whether he could or not.”

  She heard the Old Man exclaim under his breath: “Brother! good thing I didn’t bother to object.” But after Hunter’s leading question Callista had seen the smooth jowls of juror Emma Beales bobbing with gratification at the way nice Mr. Hunter had gone straight to the point.

  “Has Dr. Chalmers, in any later conversation with you, again brought up the theory that Mrs. Doherty might have committed suicide?”

  “No, sir, he has not.”

  Hunter dropped it there. Callista was aware of the Sergeant rising, meeting her glance for an instant with something in his own not at all unkind. It was not understanding, perhaps not really compassion. He had never spoken to her. She thought she remembered his face among others at District Attorney Lamson’s office during her worst time of questioning. He had said nothing then; would have given Mr. Lamson his information at some other time; maybe he had turned up there (if he really did) just to have a look at her. What she read in him now might be a simple adult refusal to condemn, by a busy man, not involved, not personally much excited or concerned, his thought and daily life filled with a thousand other matters. And now he was marching away. With nothing of the sarcasm that would have distorted the words if she had spoken aloud, Callista thought: Good-bye—nice to have known you.

  The next witness, Sergeant Peterson the photographer, unwound his scrawniness from some part of the outer blur and strode into the arena to take the oath. Dark hair, a pallor as if bleached in his own hypo. Unexpectedly Callista’s fingers itched for a pencil, to draw Peterson’s lank face as an expanded kodak. She could ask Cecil for a pencil—no, he was getting up. Hunter had rather lovingly produced a big Manila folder, and now came Cecil’s sonorous: “May it please the Court—”

  Those would be the photographs of Ann Doherty dead, and Cecil would try to keep out the most lurid ones.

  Over Callista swept a weight of memory. Even the smell of the District Attorney’s office—tobacco, book leather, a peculiarly penetrating shaving-lotion stink. She saw again the half-star shape of a spot on the wall behind Mr. Lamson’s shoulder, an imperfection in the paint like a chip flaked off the man’s pinkish face; and the face itself in all detail, slightly ascetic in spite of that healthy glow, under carefully theatrical gray hair. She saw his manicured hand, womanish except for a scattering of black hairs, reaching across the desk to her, in a reek of too much hygiene and primping, presenting a Manila folder like the one Hunter now cherished, possibly the same one. “By the way, Miss Blake—” tone polite, fruity, luscious with some kind of enjoyment that perhaps the man himself did not recognize—“you might glance at this folder, if you will.”

  So I held her in my hand. Ann’s arms reached upward in rigor out of the shadow of earth, for in that first photograph they had let the drowned girl lie on her back while the camera peered impersonally at wet skirt tumbled down from flexed thigh (the knee discolored), and soaked white underpants, the position pointlessly (accidentally?) erotic: Death, my lover. Accidental surely, for the camera had given a sharper focus to the bedabbled mouth, darkened cheeks, empty eyes. Why must the small breasts push up so urgently? Why, a happen-so: she was drifting face down, arms and bent knee probably holding her up a little from the pond’s bottom, when rigor began—all right, I understand. The lifted hands were a blur, foreshortened, ghostly; innocently acquisitive hands transformed to shadows incapable of holding fast to anything, even pity.

  The second picture was an enlargement of the face to life size, no detail spared. Drops of pond water blurred the eyes; a black twig was caught in water-soaked hair. Discoloration, and foam.

  The third picture was one taken at the morgue, after rigor had passed off, and though the face was still a comment on the brevity, the insecurity of beauty and warmth, Ann’s no longer vulnerable nakedness conveyed no great sorrow. It was just a portrait of death; apart from the drowned face, not unlovely. Callista remembered that in Mr. Lamson’s office she had very nearly remarked aloud: “Never knew she’d had an appendectomy.” The lividity, yes; but one could think of that as simply the shadow of death. This photograph, Callista supposed, would hardly go to the jury, fo
r in the morgue nobody had bothered to toss a prudish towel over the innocent little triangle. Maybe they had fixed up another one for the purpose, that wouldn’t distress the sensibilities of Mr. Emmet Hoag. Yes, granted, certainly, that Ann had been very pretty and desirable, a long time ago.

  Callista recalled what it was she actually said aloud in Mr. Lamson’s office: “I’d like to be sure I understand. If these pictures shock me, that’s evidence of remorse, in other words guilt. If I don’t display any shock, that means unnatural coldness; in other words, guilt. Is that correct?”

  Someone behind the chair in Lamson’s office where she sat facing the desk light had made a noise. Not T. J. Hunter; Sergeant Rankin maybe; or could it have been that young Sergeant, Samuel Arthur Shields? An indistinct word or suppressed grumble; not significant, but Mr. Lamson’s cool gaze had flicked upward at the sound, not liking it. “No, Miss Blake, I don’t think you have it quite correct. A girl of your intelligence and background ought not to be taking that world-is-all-against-me attitude. One expects it from common criminals—we look for it—but surely not from you.”

  “I’ve never thought the world was all against me. I used to think it was a place where you could get by fairly well by telling the truth, minding your own business, trying not to hurt anyone.”

  “You don’t think so now?”

  She herself had heard the wiry unpleasant note of pain in her voice: “No comment.” And Mr. Lamson had heard it, and could not quite hide a brief flare of gratification, a thin spear of flame shooting up from an ember behind his eyes. Oh, he was doubtless a decent and respectable man, father of a family, pillar of the church. It would be only her sickened imagination that made him something with a whip out of Krafft-Ebing.