by Jim Thompson
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I think the world of him, too.”
“Good. Keep right on thinking it. Now, go to sleep.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
And I did.
I didn’t wake up until around ten the next morning; and she’d gone, of course, but there was a note for me propped up on the dresser. It read like this:
Do… Don’t…
Eat breakfast in warming oven Worry
Sandwiches (lunch) in refrig. Attempt housework
Rest as much as possible
Make yourself at home
Miss T.
She’d washed and ironed my clothes, and laid them out on the chair. I took a long hot bath, put them on and went down to the kitchen.
There was a platter of ham and eggs and biscuits in the oven, and the coffee pot was half full and still warm. I sat there eating until there wasn’t so much as a crumb of biscuit left, and the coffee pot was empty. Then I put the dishes in the sink, and went back upstairs with a book. I took my shoes off, and stretched out on the bed; but the way I was feeling I just couldn’t read. I was feeling so good, that is. I was still pretty stiff in the legs but in my mind, the only way that really counts, I’d never felt better in my life.
This time yesterday, I’d been wading up that icy creek on a pair of twisted ankles and I hadn’t had a hope in the world. And now, here I was, all nice and clean and warm, and I had hope and something better. When you just hope, you’re not sure, and I was sure. I knew everything was going to be all right.
I reckoned that there wasn’t a man in Oklahoma that had two finer friends than Miss Trumbull and Mr. Redbird. And I wouldn’t let them down either. I’d make ’em proud of me; I’d show ’em I had the stuff in me that they believed I had.
I lay back with my hands locked behind my head, wiggling my toes, grinning and squirming now and then out of pure good feeling. I thought back over the past—the times I’d gotten way out of line—but I wouldn’t any more; and I’d do what I could do to swing the others around to the right way of thinking.
Because our thinking, it looked like to me, was at least two-thirds of what was wrong with us.
We were trying to support two civilizations side by side; three, if you counted the Indians. And there wasn’t any land ever good enough to do that. And we were always halfsore and suspicious of each other—fighting each other instead of getting at the root of the trouble.
Looking back, I could see that just about all the mess I was in was due to the wrong kind of thinking.
Abe Toolate had tried to get me in trouble. But I could have avoided that trouble if I hadn’t prodded him about his race.
Chief Sundown had tried to whip me off the plantation, and naturally I didn’t like it. But what had really riled me—the thing that I’d dreaded having known and couldn’t stand teasing about—was the fact that he’d done it.
And Mr. Ontime. Cantankerous and mean as Pa was, he’d never have talked and argued that way with a white landlord.
And—
But I wasn’t going to go along that way any more. I’d get some kind of little job around town so’s I could finish high school. I’d go on to college—get some law training, anyway. That was the place to begin, to start changing things: the law. And…
And Donna. Well, she’d feel pretty strongly about Pa, naturally, but she wouldn’t feel any stronger than I would. And I had a few things to forget myself. So that would be all right; it would all work out in time. And if I could see that I was going someplace—and I would be—it would be all right about her money…
I raised my head a little, and looked at the clock on the dresser. It was almost noon, but I wasn’t even half-way hungry.
I yawned and lay back down. I pulled the comforter up over me. I sighed, real long and deep and slow, and closed my eyes.
Friends, I thought; the finest a man could have. It takes real trouble for a man to find out who his friends are.
I went to sleep.
I woke up at five-fifteen when the alarm on the dresser clock went off. I guess Miss Trumbull kept it set for that time and forgot to change it when she brought it into my room. It was hard to believe I’d slept that long. I wondered what was keeping Miss Trumbull and Mr. Redbird.
I went into the bathroom and washed and combed my hair. I came back into the bedroom and put my shoes on. I began to get a little worried. I didn’t see how anything could go wrong, but—and it wouldn’t either! How could it with them on my side? I snatched up the book, kind of mad at myself for worrying, doubting, and tried to read.
They’d be here any minute now. Any minute. I listened to the clock ticking the minutes off. Any minute and—sure enough.
They came up the stairs together, Miss Trumbull walking in front; and they seemed to be coming awful slow. But, naturally, it would seem slow to me.
They came in and I started to stand up. And then I let myself down on the bed again.
“Is… There’s something wrong,” I said.
“Bosh!” said Miss Trumbull. But her eyes shied away from mine. “Nonsense! How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I said. “But…”
“We’ve had a little setback, but we’ll work it out. Just don’t go getting yourself in an uproar. All we need to do is keep our heads—and…” She turned quickly and started for the door. “Mr. Redbird will explain to you. Now, you heed what he says, Thomas!”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, “but…”
“No buts about it. You just—I’m going down and fix dinner.”
She hurried out, bumping into the door jamb as she left. Mr. Redbird sat down and began filling his pipe.
“Tom,” he said slowly, “will you do me a favor, something that’s very hard to do?”
“What about Mary?” I said. “That’s all I want to know. Did she…”
“No, that isn’t all you want to know. Miss Trumbull and I and the sheriff spent most of the afternoon out there. She and I have gone over all the circumstances of Mr. Ontime’s death. We’ve found out…”
“But that doesn’t matter!” I said. “All I want to… It’s like Miss Trumbull said last night. All we have to do is…”
“And perhaps you remember my attitude last night.” He gestured with the pipe stem. “Now, listen to me, Tom. I want you to understand exactly what you’re up—what the situation is.”
“But—”
“Will you listen to me, Tom? Will you start doing me that favor right now?”
“But I…” I swallowed, and broke off. “All right,” I said.
He took a long pull at the pipe, then leaned forward, his arms resting on his knees. “So far as can be determined,” he said, “Matthew Ontime went to bed at ten-thirty. Just when he got up and went outside again, no one knows. No one heard him or saw him. His rooms are at the rear with their own entrance, so arranged that he could go in and out without disturbing the household. Thus, he may have got up a few minutes after he supposedly retired or it may have been immediately before the murder…”
He paused a moment, frowning down at the carpet.
I said, “I still don’t see…”
“Let me tell you. Or let me ask you a question. You’d been seeing Donna secretly for a long time. You were sweethearts, and obviously you’d talk a lot together. Personal, intimate stuff. Did she tell you—were you familiar with the living arrangements there at the plantation? You knew where her room was, you say, but did she tell you…?”
“I—I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t remember that she did, but she might have.”
“I see.”
“What does she say?”
“Well”—he hesitated—“now, she’s understandably overwrought, and she’s not absolutely positive, but…”
“She’s probably right,” I said. “Go on. Let’s have the rest of it.”
“Take it easy, Tom. I’m not telling you all this because I like to.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Redbird.
”
“Now, the night of your fracas with Chief Sundown. After he’d interfered, did Mr. Ontime tell you he wanted to talk to you?”
“I guess you know he did,” I said.
“And you simply walked off without answering him?”
“Yes,” I said, “and I didn’t make any appointment to see him later. I didn’t go back up there and…”
“Tom.”
“Well, I didn’t,” I said.
“I know that. Now, will you let me go on? Good!… Mr. Ontime wasn’t fully dressed. He was wearing house-slippers, and he had a jacket pulled on over his undershirt. But he did have his trousers on, and his wallet, containing approximately two hundred dollars, was in them. And it was still there, intact, when his body was found. In other words, robbery wasn’t the motive for the murder…”
“Of course, it wasn’t!” I said. “I told—go on.”
“He was stabbed from the front. Obviously he was acquainted with the man he had to deal with and he wasn’t alarmed by him.”
“He knew him, all right,” I said, “and he wouldn’t have been afraid of him.”
“The man killed him, stabbed him to death. Then he lifted his body up over a five-foot fence and dropped it down inside. That’s it, Tom. That’s the whole story. You need and are entitled to all of it, and I’ve given it to you. Let’s go through it again, point by point:
“One”—he held up a finger—“your father wasn’t familiar with the Ontime living arrangements. Two: Mr. Ontime would never have left the house to see him; he’d had his say to your father, and that say was final. Three—and this is the real clincher, Tom—he simply couldn’t have lifted Mr. Ontime over that fence. It would have been a physical impossibility for him to do it.”
He nodded to me soberly; and I felt the blood moving up into my face. My hands trembled and I shoved them into my pockets.
“He did do it!” I said. “He was the only one that could have. It wasn’t a robbery. Mr. Ontime got along fine with everyone else. Pa was the only one that had any reason to kill him. I don’t know how he did it. I know it looks like I did, and I don’t need anyone to tell me or go out and see how much more they can dig up against…”
“Tom! Stop right there!”
“I thought you were going to talk to Mary. Make her tell the truth. That’s all you had to do. She’d have broken down fast. Why didn’t you just do that instead of…”
“Tom. Tom!”
“I… yes, sir,” I said.
“We did talk to Mary. The sheriff took her back and forth through her story a dozen times, and he couldn’t shake it. And he would have if she’d been lying. You’ll have to face it, Tom. Your father did not kill Matthew Ontime.”
“But I—he…”
“I know. He and Mary could have removed you from suspicion—largely removed you from it—with a word or two. And they did the opposite instead. But that is no evidence at all that he killed Matthew Ontime, particularly in view of the evidence to the contrary.”
“B-but—but there’s no one else,” I pointed out. “No one but me.”
“Yes, there is. There’s the man who did the killing.”
“But who—No one else had any reason to! If Pa didn’t do it, then it has to be me. Everything about it looks like it was me! They’ll never look for anyone else. They’ll never find…”
“They don’t need to, Tom. We don’t need to. All that has to be done is establish your innocence.”
“All?” I laughed kind of wildly. “All?”
“Yes, and we’ll do it, too. This case will look entirely different in the hands of a good lawyer. And we’ll see that you have a good one.”
I stood up. “I appreciate that, Mr. Redbird,” I said. “That’s mighty fine of both of you, but it wouldn’t do any good. The best lawyer in the country can’t change facts. I wouldn’t stand a chance. All I can do now is…”
“No, Tom.” He shook his head. “That’s the one thing you can’t do. That’s tying the rope around your own neck. Don’t you see? People only think, now, but if you run they’ll know. They’ll conclude that you don’t dare face trial.”
“And they’ll be right,” I said. “Gosh, Mr. Redbird, I don’t see how…”
“Sit down,” Tom, he said quietly.
“I don’t think I’d better. The quicker I…”
“Sit down,” he repeated.
“Well, now,” I said, sitting down. “Well, now, I sure hope you won’t try to stop me, Mr. Redbird. I’ve trusted you. You and Miss Trumbull are my friends, all I’ve got in the whole world. But you’re not me, Mr. Redbird. You’re not the man who’s maybe going to the chair. You’re…”
“You’re not either, Tom. You’re innocent and we’ll prove it. But if we let you run away—then that would be the end of you. They’d catch you in no time at all, and you’d stand convicted before you ever had a trial. Or they’d hunt you down and shoot you trying to escape. I…”
“I’ll take the chance. At least I’ll have a chance.”
“No, Tom.”
“Mr. Redbird,” I said. “I’m asking you to get out of my way.”
“No.”
We were both standing, now, and I was trying to move around him. He put his hand against my chest and pushed. He kept saying, “No, Tom, no,” and I didn’t want to do what I could have done. So I just elbowed his hand down and grabbed him by the shoulders. I started to swing him around, and—
Someone was pounding up the front steps, banging on the door; three or four people it sounded like. And I stood listening, still holding on to Mr. Redbird, staring into his eyes.
And I could feel my own eyes getting wider and wider.
The door opened, and Miss Trumbull was saying, “Oh—oh, my goodness! Would you gentlemen mind waiting just a few minutes. I’m afraid…”
And another voice, “Well, now, I reckon we’ve waited a little too long already, Miss Trumbull, and I can’t say as I appreciate the way…”
I took my hands away from Mr. Redbird’s shoulders.
I rubbed them up and down against my shirt.
“I trusted you,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Tom. We’re only doing what’s best for you.”
“I trusted you,” I said. “You were my friends.”
Then they were in the room, and I was holding out my hands, my wrists. I was still staring at him, my eyes getting wider and wider, as they snapped on the handcuffs.
14
They kept their word to me, Miss Trumbull and Mr. Redbird did. They got me a lawyer and he was a good one; one of the best criminal lawyers in Oklahoma or anywhere else.
I didn’t want them to do it. I wouldn’t talk to them when they came to see me. And the judge made it clear to me that I was entitled to counsel of my own choosing. So I’d just about made up my mind to take an attorney appointed by the court. But this lawyer, he was from Oklahoma City and his name was Kossmeyer—“Caustic” Kossmeyer the papers called him when they weren’t calling him something worse—this lawyer came to see me, and the first thing I knew…
I didn’t speak or look up when the jailer let him into my cell. I just sat on my bunk, looking down at the floor, like I’d been doing; and the jailer locked him in and went away. But I couldn’t sit that way forever—and it looked like he was prepared to stay that long—so finally I looked up.
And it sounds crazy, the spot I was in, but I burst out laughing. I just couldn’t help myself.
He was a little fellow, barely five feet if he was that, and he wouldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds with his clothes wet. He didn’t actually look like me at all, but he was looking like me now; in a way, say, that a cartoon will look like a man. He had his lips pushed way out, and his mouth pulled way down until the corners almost met under his chin. His eyes were rolled down and in, looking at the wisp of hair he’d pulled down over his forehead.
I didn’t want to laugh; I was in pure hell and he was poking fun at me. I tried to scowl, and his face
shifted a little, and he was scowling. And looking twice as funny as he had before.
And I couldn’t hold in any longer. When Kossmeyer wanted you to laugh, you laughed, and he wanted me to. And I did.
He tossed his briefcase into the corner of the bunk and sat down beside me.
“I’m Kossmeyer,” he said, as though he was telling me something he didn’t really need to: like you might say, I’m the President of the United States. “I’m your attorney. You’re my client. Now where can I buy about a thousand feet of calf rope?”
“Calf—?”—I’d stopped laughing. I said, “About your being my attorney, Mr. Koss…”
“A thousand feet,” he said, “and we’re going to need every goddam inch of it. Because we’re going to screw ’em, kid. They’re going to be screaming calf rope from here to Red River.” He tapped me on the shirt front. “Yessir, we’ll go through ’em like salts through a widow woman.”
I laughed, blushing a little I guess; and he grinned and nodded.
“That’s better,” he said. “Did you kill that guy, Tom?” And the way he put it, I wouldn’t have minded telling him if I had done it.
“No,” I said. “I don’t care how it looks, I…”
“Right the first time,” he said. “Wrong the second. Looks are all we do care about. Now, it looks like you killed Ontime, and frankly that side of the picture we can’t change much. We can scramble it up, throw in all kinds of doubts, accuse the prosecutor of wanting to stick you because you’re a Baptist and he’s a… Belong to a church? Well, that’s all right. I’ll dig up some kind of angle. But we can’t really change those looks much. All we can do is make ’em harder to see, change the looks of something that can be changed. Know what I mean?”
“I guess I don’t,” I said.
“I understand there’s lot of hunting down here. What’s the penalty for shooting a possum hound?”
“Huh?” I frowned. “Why no one would do a thing like that. They’d throw you so far into jail you’d never find your way out.”
“What about rattlesnakes? Any penalty for shooting them?”