The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “If it please the Court, the prosecution is ready to read the transcript of the interrogation of Callista Blake on August 17th, which has been admitted in evidence and which I have here.”

  Judge Mann said drily: “It will be read by the clerk of court.”

  Something accomplished anyway, in that side-bar huddle before Rankin’s cross-examination: the transcript would not be read with baritone sound effects. Hunter passed the pages to Mr. Delehanty with good enough grace, having no choice. To the hearers, Warner knew, much of it would be dull, a repetition of what had already been said. A welcome dullness, allowing time to rest. Mr. Delehanty would begin smartly, then fall to droning as the question-and-answer rhythm caught hold of him. The duller the better. Keep my hand, Callista.

  Cecil Warner drifted into bewilderment, a sense that at some point there had been an illogical reversal of roles. Must he draw on the strength of this girl who in a few months might be butchered by the State, as if there remained in him no power at all, not even the power of wisdom? As if it were natural, and right, that in her danger and misery, in her green youth too, it should be Callista who possessed a power to heal and save? The defense never rests, but—

  Can anyone save another? Maybe, with good fortune.

  Or help another? The heart says yes. Keep my hand, Callista.

  He came alert with a frightened start. Mr. Delehanty’s voice had already sagged into a singsong monotony, and might have been burbling on a long time.

  QUESTION (by Mr. Lamson): Can anyone support your statement that you were experiencing what you call a suicidal depression for a month or more, from early July to the middle of August?

  ANSWER: No, I never spoke of it to anyone.

  Why not to me? I might have—

  Near his eyes, Callista’s face took on a momentary immensity, like a great image on a softly brilliant screen. She must have had her teeth clamped a while on her underlip. It looked swollen as though from a bout of love.

  QUESTION: Was anyone aware of your taking those monkshood roots?

  ANSWER: No one.

  QUESTION: Not even James Doherty?

  ANSWER: I have had no communication with James Doherty since receiving that letter of his you took from my desk. In that time I’ve seen him only once—at the picnic when I got the monkshood. I didn’t talk with him then, he did not talk with me, he knew nothing of what I was doing.

  “You’ll come to see me tonight, Cecil?”

  “Yes.”

  “Something I must tell you.”

  “What, dear?”

  “Not now. Tonight.”

  QUESTION: You had these roots, this poison, a week ago Friday. What about the suicidal depression?—change your mind?

  ANSWER: I don’t know how the mind works.

  QUESTION: Now, Miss Blake! Anybody knows if he’s changed his mind.

  ANSWER: Does he?

  QUESTION: All right. I can assume you gave up the notion of suicide?

  ANSWER: Not a notion. An uncompleted decision, perhaps. Which did lose its importance after a while.

  QUESTION: Did you, or you and James Doherty acting together, intend that poison for Mrs. Doherty?

  ANSWER: Must I answer that again? James Doherty knew nothing about any poison, or my possession of it. I intended it only for myself.

  QUESTION: But kept it there more than a week, where I suppose anyone might have stumbled on it?

  ANSWER: Not exactly. Back of a shelf. Nobody visiting me was likely to go get a drink from a back shelf without invitation.

  QUESTION: But you say that’s just what Mrs. Doherty did.

  ANSWER: Why, I think her idea was to get the drink for me. Then I guess she understood I’d locked myself into the bedroom. With the drink in her hand, and upset by what I’d been saying, I suppose she just tossed it off, maybe not even knowing she did. It would be natural.

  QUESTION: Didn’t she knock? Call to you? Try the door?

  ANSWER: I don’t know, Mr. Lamson.

  QUESTION: Don’t know. I can’t accept that.

  ANSWER: It’s the truth, and all I can say. Partial amnesia.

  QUESTION: Do you have any idea how many professional criminals try that amnesia thing? Everything went black—yeah. You’re not a professional criminal, you’re a very intelligent girl. How do you think that amnesia stuff is going to sound in court?

  ANSWER: Bad.

  QUESTION: Well? Don’t you care?

  ANSWER: I can’t invent for you. I don’t know. I can’t remember.

  QUESTION: All right. Mrs. Doherty was upset by what you’d been saying. What had you been saying?

  ANSWER: I told her about my affair with her husband.

  QUESTION: Just like that?

  ANSWER: Yes. I think I was very stupid. I hoped to persuade her to allow a separation. I knew her church doesn’t allow divorce, but I thought she might permit us that much. I wanted my baby to have a father, married or not. It’s bad, trying to grow up without a father. Mine died when I was seven. I wanted mine to have a father.

  QUESTION: Yes, that was in the letter you wrote him.

  ANSWER: Wrote but never mailed. I should have destroyed it.

  QUESTION: Why didn’t you mail it?

  ANSWER: I’m not sure I can explain that. An obsession is a strange thing, and so is suicidal depression—and so’s pregnancy. You don’t just sit quiet and work out the mathematics. Your mind shifts and struggles like a thing in a web, tries to decide what matters most. The answers don’t always stay the same. The day after I started that letter, I didn’t go on with it because then I didn’t even want Jimmy to know I was pregnant. I saw it wouldn’t work out even if he were entirely free. Too different. We couldn’t possibly have lived together. Then later I was trying again to think it might work—and so on.

  QUESTION: Go on, please.

  ANSWER: How? Mr. Lamson, I know ten million more things about myself than you ever could, but you’re asking me to explain things that even I don’t know. How can I? Well, the night before Ann came to see me, Saturday, I had a time when everything looked possible. I wanted to have the baby, I was almost happy, I wasn’t thinking of suicide—I even forgot about that poison. Next day, Sunday, I was imagining again that Ann might permit a separation so that he could be with me. Crazy, but that’s how I had it lined up that day, that’s why I telephoned her, that’s how it looked right up until I began to talk with her. Then—card-house fell down.

  QUESTION: You told her you were pregnant?

  ANSWER: No, I didn’t even get that far. I saw it was no use, waste of time. We had not enough words in common.

  QUESTION: Not enough words?

  ANSWER: Oh—oh—whatever I said meant something else in her mind, the way everything I say now means something else to you, heaven knows what. No such thing as a common language. We all talk in the dark. If a bit of light breaks we’re frightened and try to blot it out.

  QUESTION: I don’t follow you.

  ANSWER: Don’t try. I’m not going your way.

  QUESTION: This isn’t an occasion for humor, is it?

  ANSWER: People will tell you I laugh at the damnedest things.

  QUESTION: If you didn’t say you were pregnant, how much did you say?

  ANSWER: All she understood was that we’d had an affair.

  QUESTION: Did you quarrel?

  ANSWER: No.

  QUESTION: She wasn’t angry?

  ANSWER: No, very forgiving. That’s when I was sick to my stomach.

  QUESTION: Really, Miss Blake! Are you saying—

  ANSWER: I don’t know what I’m saying any more.

  QUESTION: Yes, I realize you’re having a bad time. I’m not intentionally cruel, it’s merely my job to enforce the laws of t
his community. Naturally your pregnancy entitles you to every consideration, but—

  ANSWER: Mr. Lamson, didn’t I say I was pregnant? I had a miscarriage last night.

  QUESTION: Oh. I’m sorry, I don’t think you did tell us that. When did it happen?

  ANSWER: Out there, after I’d found her in the pond.

  QUESTION: A result of shock, or—exertion?

  ANSWER: Shock maybe. Is this the fourth time I’ve told you I didn’t push her in the water? I found her, I knew she was dead, I came away.

  QUESTION: The miscarriage—I’m sorry, but I must ask—

  ANSWER: Why, frankly, Mr. Lamson, it hurts.

  QUESTION: You know very well that’s not what I meant. Where exactly were you when it happened?

  ANSWER: First pain, there by the pond. I went back to my car because I thought I might be able to drive home somehow—

  QUESTION: You mean to your mother’s house?

  ANSWER: I do not, I mean my apartment. But it was getting worse, and at the junction I did turn that way on Walton, because I remembered the woods across the road. I left the car by the pines, and got over there, into the woods. It was over pretty soon.

  QUESTION: You must have a good deal of courage, Miss Blake.

  ANSWER: Enough, I hope.

  QUESTION: I hope so too. By the way, Miss Blake, you might glance at this folder, if you will.

  “That’s where he flashed the morgue pictures at you, Cal?”

  “Uh-huh. I was a—what’s the term?—a cool customer. Oh yes—he’s reading my intelligent comments now. Not bad for a beginner, don’t you think? Like Lizzie Borden.”

  “Hush, dear.”

  “Well, Lizzie was a beginner too. What’s more she had to operate on a breakfast of mutton broth.”

  Cecil Warner could wonder then whether it had been Callista’s wry and thorny humor that saved her during the moments last August—there must have been such moments—when she had drawn that dark bottle forward on the shelf and perhaps set out a single glass.

  IV

  As Joe Bass emptied the ash tray and made gentle needless motions with a dustrag at the bookshelves, Judge Terence Mann glanced at the handful of doodle scraps he had taken out of their temporary shelter in the minute book at the close of the day. None of them pleased him now, except possibly his sketch of the fingerprint technician Sergeant Zane scratching the lens he wore in place of a head. Drawing the toxicologist Dr. Ginsberg with his smooth face modified into a chemical retort had not turned out well. There was no comedy in solemn Dr. Ginsberg, unless it might be in his very self-conscious aloofness, his volunteered declaration on the stand that he never listened to anything about a criminal case except the facts immediately pertinent to his specialty. He had said in effect: “That for your emotional involvements!”—but it was a valid attitude if you happened to be Dr. Ginsberg, and not very funny.

  “Did you stick it out, Joe?”

  “No, I wanted to tidy up in here, so I slipped out after Mr. Delehanty finished reading that statement. Did I miss anything important?”

  “Not much. Fingerprints. Mrs. Doherty’s and Callista Blake’s on the brandy bottle. It should even help the defense slightly, showing that Mrs. Doherty handled the bottle and that no attempt was made to wipe it or dispose of it. Callista Blake had all night and next morning to get rid of anything incriminating, if she’d been so minded. Then we had Dr. Ginsberg. Nothing new, he just made it official. Four milligrams of aconitine in the organs he studied, and they say one milligram is enough to kill. Wound up the day with Mr. Lamson; he testified to receiving those three other letters of Miss Blake’s, direct from James Doherty. It seems Doherty simply walked in and dumped them on Lamson’s desk, following the advice of his priest. I hadn’t known it was quite like that. Lamson seemed to imply it was an example of civic virtue. No comment, Joe. I’m unhappy. Well, Lamson identified the letters, and they went in without protest, but won’t be read till tomorrow, which will wind up for the State, I guess. Defense ought to open tomorrow afternoon, or sooner. Oh—you would have liked this. When Mr. Hunter asked if Mr. Warner wanted to cross-examine Lamson, the Old Man said: ‘I believe I will decline the privilege.’ But nobody laughed.”

  “Do you think Mr. Hunter will put James Doherty on the stand?”

  “No. Not needed, and too likely to blow up in his face. Doherty couldn’t testify to anything but the affair, so far as I know, and that’s been proved and admitted.”

  “I was watching Mr. Doherty a little this afternoon, Judge. One of his knuckles is bloody, from biting it.”

  “Another casualty of the case. Nobody will be the same after it, not even you and I.”

  “I, Judge? I’m too old to change much. I already knew the world’s full of sadness according to where you stand.”

  “I suppose I knew it too,” said Judge Mann, and watched Joe’s small crinkled hands spread out on the other side of the desk resting on the fingertips, and felt not only uncertain but immature. Bring out the inner voices.

  I should have taken another road, Mr. Brooks—other roads. I should have married, maybe.

  Where does anyone find the vanity to become a judge? No, that’s not it. I have vanity enough, or too much. But in me, I suppose other forces balance the native vanity, cancel it out. There was never anything in Judge Cleever to make him doubt he’s God’s own right hand man.

  Exercising a privilege of age and kindness, Joe said softly: “Relax, boy.”

  “Yes, when it’s over, I must do that. Do we ever know where we’re going?”

  “Not to say know, maybe. Just the present road, and good or bad guesswork.”

  “And crossroads?”

  “Same thing, Judge. You try to make the right guess, with whatever good judgment you’ve got at the time. I’ve always been alone at my crossroads—I guess everyone is. Or if there was a crowd, I didn’t see how they could know where I was going. I was better off trying to puzzle out the signposts myself.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Nox est perpetua una dormienda.

  CATULLUS

  I

  “In the prison house are many mansions. This one looks very nice—thank the good Sheriff for me, for us, Cecil. Is it wired for sound?”

  “No, dear, it’s just an office. Sheriff’s working late down the hall—records room—and said we could have this. Nobody’ll bother us.”

  “May I sit at the desk and judge humanity?”

  “Why not?”

  “Or I’ll be a lady of the Abbey of Theleme, where the law was ‘Do what thou wilt.’ No—can’t have anything like that going on in the Sheriff’s own office. And still—flowers on the desk?”

  “The explanation is anticlimax. Sheriff’s good-looking, has a devoted secretary, her brother-in-law runs a florist’s shop.”

  “Like that. Never mind, I hereby make-believe the flowers are for me, the blood-red roses and the little white ones, sweet hot-house children. Not quite real, are they?—no black-spot, no bitten leaves, sheltered children, I guess they don’t understand. But I’ll make-believe. Am I occasionally beautiful, Cecil?”

  “To me, always.”

  “I’ve always loved words, you know. It amounts to a fault. I can’t make them do as I wish. I could never write. I don’t know enough about people, maybe never shall. But I know the power of words. You say I’m beautiful to you, and that makes me so, I believe it, the words shut away everything foreign to the Abbey of Theleme—no, that’s not where we are. But isn’t it strange what words can do? Comfort and terrify, heal and kill. Make out of nothing, something, and another word can send the something back to a nothing. It was my father’s gift, that love of words. I was reading precociously at least a year before he died. Mother (who is definitely literate and past president of the local PTA, no kidding)
felt it wasn’t quite right at such an age.”

  “What’s that paper? Are you tearing it?”

  “Just a blank sheet the good Sheriff left on his desk. I hope he won’t miss it. Not tearing, love, building. It’s my crown, Cecil. I need a pin. Is that a pin in your lapel?”

  “Yes—here.”

  “Thanks. That’ll do it. Ouch! Well, nothing created without pain. How does it look?”

  “Royal.”

  “Does it suit my complexion?”

  “White and ivory—yes, not bad.”

  “Is it all right for a queen to suck a pin-pricked finger?”

  “Rank has its privileges.”

  “Good. So, not a lady of Theleme but a mere queen, I’ll do my best while I have authority. This object shaped like a ruler is my scepter, and this apparent ink-bottle—no, if rank has its privileges, we’ll omit the orb and you give me a cigarette. You may light it for me, and remember you have the right at any time to be seated in my presence. My lord, do you have any defense to set forth in favor of this mewling monster, this three-billion-headed lurching mooncalf humanity?”

  “Your Majesty, I must first know what specific charges have been made.”

  “Item, he stinks of shrewd stupidity like his father Caliban.”

  “A fault that might be remedied by going to school a few thousand years more; at least there’s manifest intelligence.”

  “Latent, you mean, don’t you?”

  “Mostly latent, but a good deal of it overt, liberated.”

  “Item, his fears are inconsistent: he’s afraid of the dark but quite ready to play with matches.”

  “Another trait of childhood.”

  “Also of masturbating monkeys. Item, he talks a great deal about truth, but in the end, what he believes is what he wishes to believe.”

  “At that point I must draw your Majesty’s attention to an essential point in the original indictment, namely the admission that this monster possesses roughly three billion heads. And three billion bodies. In that view of it, it’s good law as well as necessary charity to insist that each head-and-body unit of the monster be tried separately.”