by Otto Penzler
He’d arrived back at his own doorway from the opposite direction by now. He slackened a little, hesitated, on the point of going in and letting the paper go hang. Then he went on anyway. “I’m out now. It’ll just take a minute longer. There and back.” Trifle.
The delivery truck had just arrived. He saw the bale being pitched off the back to the asphalt; for the dealer to pick up, as he rounded the corner once more. By the time he’d arrived at the stand the dealer had hauled it onto the sidewalk, cut the binding, and stacked the papers for sale on his board. A handful of other customers who had been waiting around closed in. The dealer was kept busy handing them out and making change.
Gary Severn wormed his way in through the little cluster of customers, reached for a copy from the pile, and found that somebody else had taken hold of it at the same time. The slight tug from two different directions brought their eyes around toward one another. Probably neither would have seen the other, that is to look at squarely, if it hadn’t been for that. Trifle.
It was nothing. Gary Severn said pleasantly, “Go ahead, help yourself,” and relinquished that particular copy for the next one below it.
“Must think he knows me,” passed through his inattentive mind. The other’s glance had come back a second time, whereas his own hadn’t. He paid no further heed. He handed the dealer his nickel, got back two cents, turned and went off, reading the headlines as he went by the aid of the fairly adequate shop-lights there were along there.
He was dimly aware, as he did so, of numbers of other footsteps coming along the same way he was. People who had just now bought their papers as he had, and had this same direction to follow. He turned the corner and diverged up into his own street. All but one pair of footsteps went on off the long way, along the avenue, died out. One pair turned off and came up this way, as he had, but he took no notice.
He couldn’t read en route any more, because he’d left the lights behind. The paper turned blue and blurred. He folded it and postponed the rest until he should get inside.
The other tread was still coming along, a few yards back. He didn’t look around. Why should he? The streets were free to everyone. Others lived along this street as well as he. Footsteps behind him had no connection with him. He didn’t have that kind of a mind, he hadn’t led that kind of a life.
He reached his own doorway. As he turned aside he started to drag up his key. The other footsteps would go on past now, naturally. Not that his mind was occupied with them. Simply the membranes of his ears. He’d pulled out the building street-door, had one foot already through to the other side. The footsteps had come abreast—
A hand came down on his shoulder.
“Just a minute.”
He turned. The man who had been buying a paper; the one who had reached for the same one he had. Was he going to pick a quarrel about such a petty—?
“Identify yourself.”
“Why?”
“I said identify yourself.” He did something with his free hand, almost too quick for Gary Severn to take in its significance. Some sort of a high-sign backed with metal.
“What’s that for?”
“That’s so you’ll identify yourself.”
“I’m Gary Severn. I live in here.”
“All right. You’d better come with me.” The hand on his shoulder had shifted further down his arm now, tightened.
Severn answered with a sort of peaceable doggedness, “Oh no, I won’t go with you unless you tell me what you want with me. You can’t come up to me like this outside my house and—”
“You’re not resisting arrest, are you?” the other man suggested. “I wouldn’t.”
“Arrest?” Severn said blankly. “Is this arrest? Arrest for what?”
A note of laughter sounded from the other, without his grim lips curving in accompaniment to it. “I don’t have to tell you that, do I? Arrest for murder. For the worst kind of murder there is. Murder of a police-officer. In the course of an attempted robbery. On Farragut Street.” He spaced each clipped phrase. “Now do you remember?”
Arrest for murder.
He said it over to himself. It didn’t even frighten him. It had no meaning. It was like being mistaken for Dutch Schultz or—some sort of a freak mix-up. The thing was, he wouldn’t get to bed until all hours now probably, and that might make him late in the morning. And just when he was so tired too.
All he could find to say was a very foolish little thing. “Can’t I go inside first and leave my paper? My wife’s waiting in there, and I’d like to let her know I may be gone for half an hour or so—”
The man nodded permission, said: “Sure, I’ll go inside with you a minute, while you tell your wife and leave your paper.”
A life ends, and the note it ends on is: “Can I go inside first and leave my paper?”
On the wall was a typical optician’s sight-chart, beginning with a big beetling jumbo capital at the top and tapering down to a line of fingernail-size type at the bottom. The detectives had been occupied in trying themselves out on it while they were waiting. Most, from a distance of across the room, had had to stop at the fourth line below the bottom. Normal eyesight. One man had been able to get down as far as the third, but he’d missed two of the ten letters in that one. No one had been able to get down below that.
The door on the opposite side opened and the Novak woman was brought in. She’d brought her knitting.
“Sit down there. We’d like to try you out on this chart, first.”
Mrs. Novak tipped her shoulders. “Glasses you’re giving out?”
“How far down can you read?”
“All the way.”
“Can you read the bottom line?”
Again Mrs. Novak tipped her shoulders. “Who couldn’t?”
“Nine out often people couldn’t,” one of the detectives murmured to the man next to him.
She rattled it off like someone reading a scare-head, “p, t, b, k, j, h, i, y, q, a.”
Somebody whistled. “Far-sighted.”
She dropped her eyes complacently to her needles again. “This I don’t know about. I only hope you gentlemen are going to be through soon. While you got me coming in and out of here, my business ain’t getting my whole attention.”
The door opened and Gary Severn had come in. Flanked. His whole life was flanked now.
The rest of it went quick. The way death does.
She looked up. She held it. She nodded. “That’s him. That’s the man I saw running away right after the shots.”
Gary Severn didn’t say anything.
One of the detectives present, his name was Eric Rogers, he didn’t say anything either. He was just there, a witness to it.
The other chief witness’ name was Storm. He was a certified accountant, he dealt in figures. He was, as witnesses go, a man of good will. He made the second line from the bottom on the chart, better than any of the detectives had, even if not as good as Mrs. Novak. But then he was wearing glasses. But then—once more—he’d also been wearing them at the time the fleeing murderer had bowled him over on the sidewalk, only a few doors away from the actual crime, and snapped a shot at him which miraculously missed. He’d promptly lain inert and feigned death, to avoid a possible second and better-aimed shot.
“You realize how important this is?”
“I realize. That’s why I’m holding back. That’s why I don’t like to say I’m 100% sure. I’d say I’m 75% sure it’s him. I got 25% doubts.”
“What you’d like to say,” he was cautioned, “has nothing to do with it. Either you are sure or you aren’t. Sureness has no percentages. Either it’s one hundred or it’s zero. Keep emotion out of this. Forget that it’s a man. You’re an accountant. It’s a column of figures to you. There’s only one right answer. Give us that answer. Now we’re going to try you again.”
Gary Severn came in again.
Storm moved his figures up. “90% sure,” he said privately to the lieutenant standing behind him. “I still
got 10% doubt left.”
“Yes or noT’
“I can’t say no, when I got 90% on the yes-side and only—”
“YES or NO!”
It came slow, but it came. It came low, but it came. “Yes.”
Gary Severn didn’t make a sound. He’d stopped saying anything long ago. Just the sound of one’s own voice, unheard, unanswered, what good is that?
The detective named Rogers, he was there in the background again. He just took it in like the rest. There was nothing he felt called on to say.
The news-dealer, his name was Mike Mosconi, set in jackknife position in the chair and moved his hat uneasily around in his hands while he told them: “No, I don’t know his name and I’m not even sure which house he lives in, but I know him by sight as good as you can know anybody, and he’s telling the truth about that. He hasn’t missed buying a paper off me, I don’t think more than once or twice in the whole year.”
“But he did stay away once or twice,” the lieutenant said. “And what about this twenty-second of June, is that one of those once or twices he stayed away?”
The news-dealer said unhappily, “I’m out there on the street every night in the year, gents. It’s hard for me to pick out a certain night by the date and say for sure that that was the one out of all of ‘em— But if you get me the weather for that night, I can do better for you.”
“Get him the weather for that night,” the lieutenant consented.
The weather came back. “It was clear and bright on the twenty-second of June.”
“Then he bought his paper from me that night,” Mike Mosconi said inflexibly. “It’s the God’s honest truth; I’m sure of it and you can be too. The only one or two times he didn’t show up was when—”
“How long did it take him to buy his paper each time?” the lieutenant continued remorselessly.
Mike Mosconi looked down reluctantly. “How long does it take to buy a paper? You drop three cents, you pick it up, you walk away—”
“But there’s something else you haven’t told us. At what time each night did he do this quick little buying of the paper? Was it the same time always, or did it vary, or what time was it?”
Mike Mosconi looked up in innocent surprise. “It was the same time always. It never varied. How could it? He always gets the midnight edition of the Herald-Times, it never hits my stand until quarter to twelve, he never came out until then. He knew it wouldn’t be there if he did—”
“The twenty-second of June—?
“Any night, I don’t care which it was. If he came at all, he came between quarter of and twelve o’clock.”
“You can go, Mosconi.”
Mosconi went. The lieutenant turned to Severn.
“The murder was at ten o’clock. What kind of an alibi was that?”
Severn said in quiet resignation, “The only one I had.”
Gates didn’t look like a criminal. But then there is no typical criminal look, the public at large only thinks there is. He was a big husky black-haired man, who gave a misleading impression of slow-moving genial good-nature totally unwarranted by the known facts of his career. He also had an air of calm self-assurance, that most likely came more from a lack of imagination than anything else.
He said, “So what do you expect me to say? If I say no, this ain’t the guy, that means / was there but with someone else. If I say yes, it is him, that means the same thing. Don’t worry, Mr. Strassburger, my counsel, wised me up about the kind of trick questions you guys like to ask. Like when they want to know ‘Have you quit beating your wife?’ “
He looked them over self-possessedly. “All I’m saying is I wasn’t there myself. So if I wasn’t there myself, how can there be a right guy or a wrong guy that was there with me? I’m the wrong guy, more than anybody else.” He tapped himself on the breast-bone with emphatic conviction. “Get the right guy in my place first, and then he’ll give you the right second guy.”
He smiled a little at them. Very little. “All I’m saying, now and at any other time, is I never saw this guy before in my life. If you want it that way, you can have it.”
The lieutenant smiled back at him. Also very little. “And you weren’t on Farragut Street that night? And you didn’t take part in the murder of Sergeant O’Neill?”
“That,” said Gates with steely confidence, “goes with it.”
Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody.
He was. He was going to shake hands with death.
He wasn’t particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn’t have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn’t going to be alive any more ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn’t used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he’d always kept it by him in the present. So he couldn’t visualize it. So he wasn’t as unnerved by it as the average man would have been.
Yet he was troubled by something else. The ridges in his forehead showed that.
“Are you ready, my son?”
“I’m ready.”
“Lean on me.”
“I don’t have to, Father. My legs’ll hold up. It ain’t far.” It was made as a simple statement of fact, without sarcasm or rebuke intended.
They left the death cell.
“Listen, that Severn kid,” Gates said in a quiet voice, looking straight ahead. “He’s following me in in five minutes. I admit I did it. I held out until now, to see if I’d get a reprieve or not. I didn’t get the reprieve, so it don’t matter now any more. All right, I killed O’Neill, I admit it. But the other guy, the guy with me that helped me kill him, it wasn’t Severn. Are you listening? Can you hear me? It was a guy named Donny Blake. I never saw Severn before in my life until they arrested him. For—’s sake, tell them that, Father! All right, I’m sorry for swearing at such a time. But tell them that, Father! You’ve got to tell them that! There’s only five minutes left.”
“Why did you wait so long, my son?”
“I told you, the reprieve—I been telling the warden since last night. I think he believes me, but I don’t think he can get them to do anything about it, the others, over him—Listen, you tell him, Father! You believe me, don’t you? The dead don’t lie!”
His voice rose, echoed hollowly in the short passage. “Tell them not to touch that kid! He’s not the guy that was with me—”
And he said probably the strangest thing that was ever said by a condemned man on the way to execution. “Father, don’t walk any further with me! Leave me now, don’t waste time. Go to the warden, tell him—!”
“Pray, my son. Pray for yourself. You are my charge—”
“But I don’t need you, Father. Can’t you take this off my mind? Don’t let them bring that kid in here after me—!”
Something cold touched the crown of his head. The priest’s arm slowly drew away, receded into life.
“Don’t forget what you promised me, Father. Don’t let—”
The hood, falling over his face, cut the rest of it short.
The current waned, then waxed, then waned again—
He said in a tired voice, “Helen, I love you. I—”
The hood, falling over his face, cut the rest of it short.
The current waned, then waxed, then waned again—
They didn’t have the chart on the wall any more. It had done them poor service. The door opened and Mrs. Novak was ushered in. She had her knitting with her again. Only she was making a different article, of a different color, this time. She nodded restrainedly to several of them, as one does to distant acquaintances encountered before.
She sat down, bent her head, the needles began to flicker busily.
Somebody came in, or went out. She didn’t bother looking.
The toecaps of a pair of shoes came to a halt just within the radius of vision of
her downcast eyes. They remained motionless there on the floor, as though silently importuning her attention. There wasn’t a sound in the room.
Mrs. Novak became aware of the shoes at last. She raised her eyes indifferently, dropped them. Then they shot up again. The knitting sidled from her lap as the lap itself dissolved into a straight line. The ball of yarn rolled across the floor unnoticed. She was clutching at her own throat with both hands.
There wasn’t a sound in the room.
She pointed with one trembling finger. It was a question, a plea that she be mistaken, but more than anything else a terrified statement of fact.
“It’s him—the man that ran past by my store—from where the police-officer—!”
“But the last time you said—”
She rolled her eyes, struck her own forehead. “I know,” she said brokenly. “He looked like him. But only he looked like him, you understand? This one, it is him!” Her voice railed out at them accusingly. “Why you haf to bring me here that other time? If you don’t, I don’t make such a mistake!”
“There were others made the same mistake,” the lieutenant tried to soothe her. “You were only one of five or six witnesses. Every one of them—”
She wouldn’t listen. Her face crinkled into an ugly mask. Suddenly, with no further ado, tears were working their way down its seams. Somebody took her by the arm to help her out. One of the detectives had to pick up the fallen knitting, hand it back to her, otherwise she would have left without it. And anything that could make her do that—
“I killed him,” she mourned.
“It wasn’t you alone,” the lieutenant acknowledged bitterly as she was led from the room. “We all did.”