by Clark Howard
“Let me pose this theoretical question, gentlemen: Suppose the birth of Dr. Joseph Lister had been aborted through the encouragement of a person like this Mr. Keyes? Suppose this great man had never walked the earth at all, never lived to give to civilization the principle of antiseptic sanitation. Perhaps no other human would have been able to uncover the secret of germs as he did. If this were so, we would all still be living in dread fear of simple bacteria, and countless millions of humans would have lost their lives due to the lack of simple antiseptic solutions.
“I use Lister only as an example. Select any well-known scientist or inventor or statesman, and if you subtract that person’s contribution to the advancement of civilization, just look at what a void it would leave in our lives.
“So who can say how much humanity loses when we permit even a single unborn child to be aborted. Our destinies here on earth, in a life that is all too brief, are controlled by many things: many unknown factors, many quirks of fate. Can we as human beings, in the face of all that is deadly in our world today, chance throwing away even a single human life, when that very life might possibly be the salvation of us all?”
He paused again to scan the faces of his peers. His voice lowered almost to a whisper, brief and urgent in its utterance of his final question.
“Is it possible, my friends,” he asked solemnly, sadly, “that the unlived life of Molly Carlyle’s child might have brought us the cure for cancer, the solution to the mysteries of mental illness, or even more encompassing, the source of permanent world peace?”
He stood for a moment, looming over them, his large, usually genial face almost tragic in the reflection of his inner grief. Of all in the room, it was obvious that this man of God suffered more than any other what was being said and done there in the name of humanity. The others in the room, save Keyes, stared at him with an intentness that mirrored their understanding of what he had said, and their compassion for how he felt.
“Thank you, Mr. Theologian,” the Moderator said, breaking after a moment the spell of silence in the room. Then, clearing his throat, he directed himself to the prisoner.
“Mr. Keyes you now have heard the Movement’s evidence against you with respect to the charge of Aiding and Abetting Moral Degeneracy. It is your privilege at this time, if you care to exercise it, to deny that evidence, or to show mitigation of any kind which you feel might reflect on the extent of your guilt. You are reminded again that the Examiner is allowed to rebut, if he can, anything you say in your defense. Do you wish to speak in your own behalf at this time?”
“Yes,” J. Walter Keyes said very quietly, “yes, I do.” He lowered his head slightly and manufactured a forlorn, worried look with which he favored only the Examiner and the Moderator. He had decided by now that in those two lay the power of the panel, and had during the past day prepared himself to try a new approach with them. It was useless, he had found, to try dissuading them with splendid shows of personality or professions of sincere innocence or, even more so, forceful reminders of his wealth and position. None of these tacts, it was brilliantly clear to him, impressed them in the least, and it behooved him, he had realized with not a little nervousness, to find some course of action that did.
So for the purpose of his defense to this second ridiculous indictment, he became—but only temporarily—a humble J. Walter Keyes.
“Gentlemen,” he addressed himself exclusively to the Examiner and the Moderator, “I cannot deny the things that have been said about me by poor Abby—Miss Daniels—and I admit that I did aid Molly and Dan in their scheme to get rid of that baby. But I ask you, I even beg you, to believe that it was not my idea alone, that I am not exclusively to blame in—”
“We have not said you were, Mr. Keyes,” the Examiner interrupted. “You are charged only with aiding and abetting; it is not necessary to defend yourself against any act more serious in nature.”
Here the son of a bitch goes, Keyes thought, interrupting me before I can even make a point. Well, let him. It won’t work tonight, not with the humble J. Walter Keyes.
“Yes,” he said in the same quiet voice, “I see. Thank you.” He paused intentionally. “Well, since you know that it was their idea as much as mine, may I tell you why I went along with it?”
“You may.”
“All right. Now, I’ll admit at the very beginning that part of my motive was to protect a financial interest; I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that right off. I could explain my reasons for that, too, if it mattered. I mean, I worked hard, very hard, building up the clientele I have, and it’s only natural for a man to try and protect what he’s labored years to make. But I won’t go into that part of it because that’s not the real point of it.
“The truth of it, the whole truth, is that I liked those two kids; I felt sincerely sorry for them and didn’t want to see them hurt by having to make it known to their friends and families and the public that they had done what they did—”
“Are you saying, Mr. Keyes,” the Examiner asked, “that your justification for the part you played was primarily the fact that you wanted to protect Molly Carlyle and Dan Merritt from the harmful consequences of their wrongdoing?”
“Exactly.”
“Then why did you advise them in a course of action that involved an even greater wrongful act and possible consequences of a much more serious nature?”
“What?” Keyes frowned. “Oh, well, I didn’t—I mean, I couldn’t see any other way out. Anyway, I didn’t know they’d take it so hard. Other people who—”
Keyes halted his words sharply, gently biting down on his lower lip.
“Yes, Mr. Keyes?” the Examiner asked calmly. “You were about to say—?”
Keyes did not answer. Goddamn it! he raged silently.
“Were you about to compare Molly Carlyle and Dan Merritt with others for whom you have arranged abortions?”
“Look, what is it you want from me, anyway?” the captive suddenly blurted out. He twisted in his confining chair to let his angry eyes sweep the heretofore ignored members of the panel. “What do I have to do to satisfy you people?” he demanded. “I’ve admitted that I did everything you say I did. I’ve admitted that part of my motive was the money that was at stake. And I’ve tried to explain the rest of it as best I can. Now, you can’t put all the blame on me for what’s happened to those two! I had no way of knowing that things would turn out the way they did. I can’t see into the future, you know, anymore than you can!”
The Examiner leaned forward in his chair, folding his hands on the table before him. His face was composed; his words, when he spoke, calm.
“No one here is charging you with the lack of ability to foresee the future, Mr. Keyes. But we do place upon you the responsibility for reasonable awareness of the possible consequences of your premeditated acts. You are not an ignorant person, Mr. Keyes; on the contrary, you are quite knowledgeable, quite intelligent; your obvious perception of the strengths and weaknesses in other individuals is very keen; your capacity for exerting control over others has developed, either naturally or by training, almost to perfection; and your cleverness, diplomacy and versatility all combine to form a most accomplished cunning.
“In short, Mr. Keyes, you are, to say the least, a very capable, competent individual—and it is because of that status that you sit before this panel tonight. If you were a person of low intelligence, a person of weakness, the justification you offer for your evil deeds might be in part acceptable, and the acts you have committed mitigable to some degree. But as it stands, there is no doubt at all, at least in my mind, that everything you have done, you have done wantonly, and with full awareness that the consequences of your various acts might not only possibly, but indeed probably, be tragic.
“The charge against you in this portion of the hearing is Aiding and Abetting Moral Degeneracy, Mr. Keyes—and just as surely as there is good and evil on this earth today, you are wholly and clearly guilty of that crime.”
Keyes fe
lt his body go almost limp in the chair. His chin lowered slowly to his chest and he let his eyes close.
It’s no use, he thought, no use at all. No matter what he said, what excuses he offered, they ripped them apart. They meant to persecute him and nothing was going to stop them. They were insane, insane—
Thirteen
In his apartment, lying on the couch in near-darkness, with but a single narrow shaft of light entering from his tiny alcove kitchen, Devlin slowly smoked a cigarette and stared at nothing.
The fireplace before him was cold and dry, its aged bricks looking stark and lifeless in their abandonment. On the table next to the couch, convenient to Devlin’s reach, rested a brandy bottle, half empty; the glass next to it, a heavily detailed goblet from Dublin, produced a faint hue of red from the syrupy residue that clung to its bowl. They would have made a pretty picture, the bottle and the glass, side by side as they were on the grained marble of the tabletop, had it not been for an unclean ashtray, cluttered with the leavings of Devlin’s chain smoking, which set near enough to them to spoil the effect with its ugliness.
Devlin’s face was fixed and unrelaxed, evidence that he was disturbed over the thoughts that were troubling him. His eyes were perhaps a little more narrowed than they would have been in ordinary concentration, and the line of his jaw more firm, steadier, than usual; all of which was due to the fact that what was on his mind at that moment involved not only the common element of trouble but also the uncommon element of the involvement of a friend: Todd Holt.
It was almost a certainty to Devlin, however unreal the proposition seemed, that Todd was somehow involved in the J. Walter Keyes case. To what extent exactly, he had not the vaguest notion. It might be only a superficial involvement, or it might be very complex and complicated; but there was no point at this stage in even speculating as to the degree or, for that matter, the reason behind it. Todd had changed: that much was certain. His ideas—his philosophy, if you wanted to call it that—seemed to have altered radically. Where in the past he had always voiced the most ardent respect for law and justice and the courts, he now, practically in one fell swoop, condemned them all, jointly and severally.
And those two friends of his: that psychologist Price, and that human calculator Barry Chace: those two, in Devlin’s opinion, were far from being ideal associates for even a mature person, much less an impressionable young man whose final standards had yet to be formed. Devlin wondered how Todd had come to know them. A case he had worked on, perhaps, or through mutual friends of Jan’s and his—
Even more important than that, Devlin carried the thought a step further, was how Todd had fallen in with Dr. Fox and the enigmatic Reverend Abraham O’Hara. Was it possible that they had some kind of hold on him, something that forced him to do their bidding: some dark, scandalous thing about Jan, perhaps, that Todd was concealing from her father—
Damn, he thought, abruptly sitting up, the thing was like a live bacteria in his mind: each thought fiendishly multiplied into half a dozen new ones. He snatched up the brandy bottle and half filled his goblet. Throwing its contents into his mouth, he held it there, letting it lie over his submerged tongue, feeling its bite slowly assault the sensitive inner lining of his cheeks until it burned too bitterly to retain. He swallowed, and immediately sucked in on the nearly gone cigarette he held, relishing the mixed tobacco-alcohol affect it created.
Abigail Daniels, he thought, was the key to the whole puzzle; she had to be. No one else served to even vaguely connect Keyes with the three men whom Devlin now strongly suspected were involved: Fox, O’Hara, and Holt. So she definitely was the link, the interlocking part that could group the other jumbled pieces into some sort of picture or pattern. But she was the one person he could not get to, the one source of information he could not tap, the one factor which, as long as she was in the custody of Dr. Damon Fox, he would have to work around.
Devlin drained his glass and set it down. With the fingers of both hands he roughly kneaded the temples of his head, where the thick feeling of a headache was beginning. Stuffy in here, he thought; he rose and crossed the room to open a window. The cool late night air drifted in, pleasantly engulfing him. Turning, he studied the tight little apartment, filled as it was with a smoky, brandy-laced atmosphere, the single shaft of light grown hazy and tired, the open bedroom door uninviting despite his weariness; and the fireplace, its bricks often a symbol of strength, of the quality of man, failing him now with its cold, tombstone-like countenance.
Devlin shivered once, briefly, and moved back into the room to a work-table, from the cluttered top of which he picked up an Irish woolen crewneck sweater and slipped it over his head. On a small desk next to the table laid his wallet, keys, notebook, money, and all the other things he habitually emptied from his pockets upon arriving home for the night. On impulse he picked up the wallet and keys and left the apartment.
It was cool and beginning a breeze when he got downstairs and slid behind the wheel of his car. The police radio came on automatically when he started the motor; he reached over to turn it off; he was in no mood at that moment to listen to its static announcements of violence. Guiding the car off the lot, he drove into the quiet night.
He drove for an hour, until it became obvious that neither the coolness streaming in on his face nor the steady motion of the car was going to dissuade the headache that seemed determined to plague him tonight. He eased the car to the curb in a wide residential street, a dark, quiet street with overhanging trees, and parked there to rest.
He had meant to lay his head back against the seat and close his eyes; to consciously let his body relax and hope that the combination of quiet and darkness and coolness would banish the headache. But instead, he sat with both hands on the steering wheel as if still driving, and stared out the open window next to his face at a large, moonlight-bathed house directly across the street.
It was, he knew without thinking about it, the residence of J. Walter Keyes.
The house where, on a night that now seemed a very long time ago, the whole affair had begun. Briefly he wondered why his subconscious had brought him there; why that subtle, all-powerful part of his mind had taken over back in his airless little apartment and sent him driving into the night. Did it guide him here because this was where the key to the puzzle lay? Or did it simply bring him back to her?
A picture of her focused among his troubled thoughts and swept them aside. The tallness of her came easily to his mind, as did the set of her wide shoulders and the lay of her blood-colored hair, and the way her lips parted—
He opened the car door and stepped out. A breeze caught the fine hair at the base of his neck and chilled him with a passing tickle, making him shiver involuntarily. He gently, quietly pushed the door closed and walked away from the car.
The house was dark from the front, with not a sign of light or movement in any of its windows either upstairs or down. The circular drive before it was empty of cars. The surrounding lawn, manicured to splendid perfection, covered the grounds like a taut cloak, disturbed only by a long, grotesquely rectangular shaft of light that split the dark continuity from the far side of the house.
Devlin moved across the drive and toward the spear of light as if it were a hypnotic beacon drawing him to it. He stepped through a hedge and past the thick base of an ancient tree, and in the quickness of a single step left the thick lawn behind and silently crossed a concrete slab of patio.
The light, he saw, came through an undraped glass door pushed halfway back behind a sliding screen. Its source was a large table lamp behind one section of a double couch in a room that looked to Devlin to be a small library or study of some sort.
On the couch, dressed in the same brocaded housecoat as the first time he had seen her, Jennifer Jordan Keyes lay reading.
Devlin remained for a moment in the shadows away from the light, watching the woman, studying the intense set of her face as she rapidly consumed line after line of the page before her. Her eyes, he
noted, were narrowed, her lips tighter than they should have been, almost as if she were searching for some concealed thing that she would not find; as if she were trying to strip the book she held of some secret.
Moving quietly, Devlin let himself enter the light and stood next to the sliding screen.
“Miss Jordan,” he said. She sat up at once, half closing the book; her eyes widened at the sudden, unexpected sound of a voice.
“Who is it? Who’s there?”
“Devlin.”
She rose and walked in long strides over to the door, the ankle-length housecoat slapping at her legs with each step. At the door, she stopped and peered out hesitantly.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” Devlin said.
“You didn’t,” she lied, boldly and coolly. She made no move to unlock the door, but merely stood, looking at him through the screen, making an obviously controlled effort to keep her eyes riveted to his.
“You’re not going to make yourself go through that again, are you?” Devlin said with quiet frankness.
“Go through what again?” she challenged.
“Staring at me until I force you to look away.”
Jennifer Jordan parted her lips to speak, then thought better of it and closed them again.
“No,” she finally said, after a long pause, “no, I’m not.” She reached out and unlocked the door, then turned immediately and walked back to the couch.
Devlin slid open the door just enough to step inside, and closed and locked it behind him. He followed her back to the couch where she had sat down and was looking up at him reservedly.
“I need something to cut the taste of brandy out of my mouth,” he said easily. “You don’t happen to keep any Irish whiskey in the house, do you?”
“Why don’t you see for yourself, Mr. Devlin,” she said icily. “The bar is right across the hall, the room you were in the other night.”