Dead Sure

by Herbert Brean

  “What does counsel mean by ‘artificially’?” asked the judge with interest.

  “Well, since both these officers were at the scene, and might be presumed to have handled the physical evidence there even if they do not recall having done so, it is the contention of the defense, your honor, that their clothing might have received some of the dust in question—become impregnated, so to speak. And if so, it is not impossible that during a hand-to-hand struggle such as has been described between Harry Derby and Detective Jablonski it is also possible that minute quantities of dust might have been transferred from Jablonski’s clothing to my client’s. I should like to remind your honor that the spectroscope is an extraordinarily sensitive instrument—”

  “Counsel will confine himself to proper cross-examination.”

  “I’m sorry, your honor,” said Farragut contritely, but he was a cat with cream on its face. The idea had been implanted in the jury’s minds.

  “I asked a moment ago, Mr. Ryan, if you had handled the lamp or any pieces of it,” he went on. “Of course, I realize that in the excitement and tension of a murder investigation—your first, I believe—I realize it is possible you might do something and forget having done so later. Consequently, I am going to ask you whether it is not possible that you might have, say, picked up a fragment or two of the broken lamp and forgotten it afterwards?”

  He looked brightly at Ryan, smiling a pursed-lip knowing smile.

  Ryan had to look away. In the rush of fear that engulfed him like turbulent surf he could not think consecutively. He felt physically off balance as though he might pitch out of the witness chair, and he sensed Sandalwood’s gaze on him like a hot, probing lance. He groped wildly for escape.

  “Will you search your memory, please?” Farragut went on with smooth rapidity. “Don’t you feel it is possible that you might have—”

  Ryan shook his head. He looked toward Tilbury for help, as a boxer looks to his corner. But Tilbury was not looking at him. In the front row of spectators there was a patrician blond girl in a lavish mink coat, smiling brightly and making little finger motions at Tilbury, and he, lounging back in his chair, was nodding understanding at her. His socks and tie were both of the same blue and white checks.

  “Why are you sure neither you nor Jablonski handled any piece of the lamp? How can you—”

  It was almost impossible to pull himself back to Farragut’s truculent face, the eyes pinched ’round with tight wrinkles of flesh.

  Why didn’t Tilbury…?

  “No,” he said lowly.

  “What did you say, Ryan?”

  “Louder, witness.”

  Again he ranged the courtroom. Sandalwood was frowning intently at him. Jablonski’s face was a black-and-white scrawl of fear, a caricature of terror.

  “No!”

  Farragut leaped in with tiger quickness. “Supposing I were to tell you that a beer can was found in the room which also had traces of dust—dust from the lamp. Would you say—”

  Ryan did not hear the rest of it.

  This was the end. Farragut had him.

  He looked beseechingly toward Tilbury. The court was also looking at Tilbury, expecting an objection.

  “Answer, witness,” cried Farragut, and Ryan brought his white face up to confront the green-eyed sneer. Tilbury turned suddenly, uncomprehendingly, back to the cross-examination.

  A low whistle sounded in the courtroom. Ryan knew what it meant. He was dead; there were other sounds, a rising murmur like a boxing audience makes when one of the fighters begins to lurch into unconsciousness.

  There came another whistle. The judge’s gavel banged; he had to answer. Ryan’s wet hands twisted. He looked up; the murmur was louder. And then, dumbfounded, he finally realized that no one in the courtroom was looking at him except Farragut. And Sandalwood.

  For a tall, marvelously shapely girl with a wealth of auburn hair under a chic low-brimmed hat was coming down the center aisle, followed by a short, slick-haired man in a bright blue suit who carried a polo coat and seemed trying not to smile. The girl’s expression was grave until she saw Ryan; then she smiled and waved at him. Her lips were masterpieces of curved lipstick and when she loosened her tightly cinched coat, before seating herself on a front bench, it was with an intimate, revealing air that drew another wolf whistle. The gavel banged ineffectually, two reporters hurried out the side door to telephone the city desk for photographers, and half the courtroom immediately recognized Gee Gee Hawes. Sandalwood smiled indolently at her across the intervening space.

  It had taken less than twenty seconds for her to enter and be seated with the nightclub manager who accompanied her. But that was enough to save Ryan and to ruin Farragut.

  “I had asked you,” said Farragut loudly, trying to recapture the spell he had woven, “if you were aware—” But the court interrupted. “I must remind you, Mr. Farragut, that your question is completely unsupported by any testimony and therefore improper. I will ask the witness and especially the jury to disregard it and its implications.”

  Ryan was a drowning man finding dry earth under his feet.

  Gee Gee smiled at him. The nightclub manager, whose idea this visit had been, tried to appear nonchalant when a reporter asked them to hang around after for an interview. Presently they went out to be photographed, while Farragut returned to the attack with all the irritation of one who knows his chance has slipped. He had led carefully and dramatically up to that last question, hoping it would force a confused, damaging admission. Gee Gee’s entrance had wrecked his effect. Now Ryan answered his questions cagily and steadily.

  After a dozen more Farragut gave up.

  Tilbury quickly paraded the three women witnesses to the stand and all three, with just enough uncertainty to make their testimony convincing, identified Derby. Court adjourned.

  The girl in mink rose at once, beaming, and flung herself at Tilbury. “Oh, darling, you were wonderful.”

  He petted her affectionately. “Wonderful, nothing,” he said. “If they were all as easy as this I’d be ashamed to accept my salary.”

  * * * *

  Flashbulbs were still firing in the corridor when Ryan and Jablonski reached it and people were looking at Gee Gee and asking “Who’s that? Who is she?” as she stood amid the reporters. Her eyes were bright and she was smiling.

  Sandalwood was at one side talking to the nightclub manager. As he and Jablonski passed Ryan heard Sandalwood joking, “Max, you really ought to be ashamed of yourself. Anything for publicity, eh?” Ryan did not look at Sandalwood.

  Then Gee Gee caught sight of him and waved and blew Ryan a kiss, and a photographer asked her to do that again. Ryan waved back and pointed to his wrist watch, meaning he had to go; he did not want to get mixed up in that, or have to answer Sandalwood’s questions. “I’ll call you,” he yelled, and she nodded and blew the kiss the photographer asked for. She did it several times.

  “Boy, what a dame,” said Jablonski as they went down the stairs. “You know what I think? I think you’re darned lucky, Neill.”

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” said Ryan bitterly. “I think this guy’s going to be convicted.”

  “Wait and see, Neill, wait and see,” said Jablonski. “That’s all I ask.”

  * * * *

  But when court resumed next day it was not Farragut but his bespectacled young assistant, McCormick, who took over the defense of Harry Derby. Farragut, it was announced, had suffered a heart attack the previous evening and must rest for at least two months. Courtroom veterans smiled. This was Farragut’s surrender. It was his boast that no Farragut client had ever been executed in his thirty years of practice, and he knew he could not save Derby. So instead he had had a heart attack, and now it was a McCormick client that would go to the chair.

  Three days later after an almost pathetically weak defense the case went to the ju
ry, which deliberated forty-five minutes and then returned a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree without recommendation of mercy. That made a death sentence mandatory.

  CHAPTER 15

  The Phone Call

  Ryan had the day tour on the day Derby was sentenced so he could not get downtown to hear it, even if he’d wanted to. But he read about it after work, standing at a bar bustling with the hurly-burly of day’s end. He had ordered a whisky before he opened the pink sports final, and he drank it straight. The paper did not devote much space to the Derby story, but Ryan was able to reconstruct it in his mind’s eye as he sipped the chaser.

  There was the loosening of the handcuffs, the leading of the tall, thin man around in front of the judge, the dry recital of the facts and reading of probation reports. “I therefore direct that you, Harry Derby, be transported to the slate prison of New York at Ossining and there be executed in accordance with the laws of the State and at the discretion of the warden some time during the week of February 23. And may God have mercy on your soul.” Then he would have been cuffed again and led away, the lean, sinewy back still surly with defiance. But desperately frightened inside.

  Ryan ordered and drank another whisky. Then he stuffed the paper into his overcoat, went out and walked down Lexington Avenue.

  When he reached Grand Central Station he went in and found a large telephone headquarters containing booths and operators to get long-distance numbers. He called Jablonski at his home. When he answered, Jablonski asked how Ryan was with great heartiness.

  “You see tonight’s papers yet?”

  “No. I been home with a cold all day, Neill. Anything I should have seen?”

  Ryan took a breath. “Our boy got the chair.”

  “You mean Derby?”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Well,” gently, “what do you think we do, Neill?”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Desperation tore his throat. “If we don’t do something, the guy burns.”

  From the other end came a long, fully rounded silence. “Well,” said Jablonski, “don’t you really think he ought to?”

  Ryan began to have the helpless, nightmare feeling of being pursued and menaced and not being able to run.

  But he said, “God damn it,” steadily, “it’s not for us to decide that. This is a—” he started to say “human life” and knew how weak that would sound. “This is a guy’s life. Even if he is the kind who—”

  “Now wait a minute, Neill.”

  “Wait, hell! We agreed to wait until the trial was over because maybe he’d never be convicted. Okay. We waited. Now he’s convicted. And sentenced. And he didn’t kill that old woman.”

  “Where you calling from?” Jablonski’s voice had grown cold.

  “Grand Central.”

  “Pay phone?”

  “Sure.”

  But he realized he must be talking loud. The operator outside who had put the call through was looking in at him.

  Jablonski said, “Listen, Neill. Take it easy and don’t start yelling your head off. You know what I told you when you first got in an uproar about this, and I’m going to tell it to you again for your own good. And mine. You got a great future in the department, kid. You’re going to go a long way. I wish I was in your shoes. I mean it.”

  Ryan knew he did.

  “I told you before the trial to keep your mouth shut because I knew this slob might get off and you would only wreck everything if you opened up. And if he didn’t get off and got sent up, why that’d be all right too, because it would be too late for anyone to do anything. And Neill, that’s just how it is.”

  “Just how is it?”

  “Derby’s convicted—he’s put away. And Farragut’s licked—he wouldn’t touch the case now for fifty G’s. Derby is going to the chair and that’s where he belongs. You’re sitting pretty. So am I. And why not—? Don’t you think cops are entitled to a break occasionally?”

  Ryan did not answer.

  “So maybe he didn’t kill that old lady, like you claim,” Jablonski went on. “Although I sure as hell doubt it. But anyway—he was one of the guys in the Moriarity murder in ’fifty-one. You know that.”

  “I don’t know it.”

  “Maybe it was before your time.”

  “Was he ever convicted?”

  “Of course not. He was brought in but we never had enough to hold him on. Then there was another killing, an old man named Trimble.”

  “Was he tried for that?”

  “No. Derby was never tried for—”

  “Was he arrested?”

  “No—I’m trying to tell you! We always had a hunch—”

  “For God’s sake, Jabby, you can’t sentence a guy to death just because you suspect something.”

  “I ain’t just suspecting, Neill. I know darned well—”

  “You know nothing. And furthermore you lied and stalled before and you’re doing it now. What the hell kind of cop were you, anyway?”

  The other end of the line went silent. The words echoed, and Ryan knew that he had finally hit Jablonski where it hurt.

  When he spoke it was with the cold deliberation of mortal anger. “I’ll tell you what kind of cop,” said Jablonski. “I’m an ex-cop now. But I put in my time, twenty-eight years of it. And I learned a few things in my time. And one was that when you get one of them—a guy like Derby—in a spot where you can give it to him, then by God you give it to him. And you sure as hell don’t wreck your whole life and your partner’s life by trying to give the son of a bitch a break. I’m loyal to the department, that’s the kind of cop I am. And I got my own little place out here, and I and Sarah are getting along fine and I want it to go on.” There was a pause. “I don’t want that changed. You shouldn’t either.”

  Again there was a pause. “But if you try to do anything about it, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. You go ahead and tell your story—and I’ll swear to God you are lying. You come in with your fingerprint from the drugstore heist or whatever it was and I’ll say that you came to me a while back with a plan to get Derby off, for a payoff. And that you said something about planting or switching a fingerprint. That’ll put you and Derby on the same side of the fence, standing against the whole damn department. I wouldn’t want that, Neill, and I wouldn’t want to do it. But if you force me to I will. You want it?”

  Ryan looked out the booth’s glass door. The girl was not watching him now. She wrote something on a little pad and then thrust the pencil into her thick coil of dark hair.

  “And another thing, Neill. You swore under oath that Derby didn’t have the big bill on him. Now if you come in with a different story, who’s going to believe you? Once you’ve admitted you’re a liar, you never carry much weight again, you know. It’s like an expert witness who gets knocked down in court.”

  Ryan’s hand began moving the telephone instrument from his ear toward the prong that should receive it. He continued looking at that glossy coil of hair. Now she was writing something else.

  Somewhere in the telephone booth a tiny metallic voice said, “Well, what do you say? Neill?… Neill?”

  Ryan kicked at the door. “Go to hell,” he said. The telephone girl looked up. He had taken a step out of the booth before he remembered that he was still holding the phone. He latched it into place.

  In the wide, murmurous corridor outside he almost ran into a hurrying young couple. The man carried a big valise, the girl a lighter one. “Let me take it, honey,” the man said. “Come on. Give it to me.”

  “You can’t carry them both,” she protested. But she relinquished the bag.

  “Of course I can,” he laughed. “They balance.” As he took the bag his eye caught Ryan’s. Something in Ryan’s face made him look again.

  “It’s all yours,” Ryan told him. “All yours. Carry it.”

&n
bsp; They looked at him, then hurried on. Ryan walked out toward Forty-second Street.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Long Way Home

  He walked fast, through homing commuters and shouting newsboys, slipping past traffic-halted ranks at the curbs to dodge narrowly between taxi bumpers and keep going. At Madison, forgetting he was crossing a two-way street, he would have been run down had a cab driver not seen him walking against the light. The cab squealed to a halt and Ryan looked up; the driver laid his arms over the wheel and rubbed his face in them in an elaborate gesture of patience.

  Another time Ryan would have grinned apologetically; now he hurried on, only belatedly aware. He was gripped by a compulsion to get some place in a hurry, to move and keep moving without thinking. He had no real goal. Getting home was as good an excuse as any, so when he came to Fifth Avenue he turned north and walked fast past the glossy, lighted windows of the big stores and the little shops. He wanted to walk, not think.

  When he had crossed Fifty-seventh Street and was swinging up the avenue’s wide sidewalk, that was almost like broad, scented velvet under the lights of the apartment entrances and canopies, the silent trees and mystery of Central Park on the other side, he did not bear east toward home as he should have done. After a time he remembered Eleanor’s request for picking up the Ibsen book at the Columbia library and he seized the excuse to continue walking, fast and anonymous, through the night’s cold air, and think only of his errand, knowing his absence would cause no alarm at home, and above all determined not to think about what he could not help thinking about.

  He was standing in line in the familiarly stuffy library when something poked his back. A thin, chicken-necked man with the gleam of discovery in his eye was looking at him, tapping finger still extended. “Aren’t you O’Neill Ryan?”

  “That’s right.” It sounded surly. Then Ryan recognized the thin man. It was the hair that was deceptive.

  “Professor Montagne!” He had not been nearly so bald when he taught Ryan Greek philosophy eight years ago.