“You understand me, I think. What Ken meant was that you had not gotten Harry fairly or honestly or on the basis of real evidence. The idea is Harry was framed, that the evidence was manufactured against him. And that the union didn’t put up much money and when that lawyer, Farragut, could not immediately disprove the evidence, he simply gave up. Is that true?”
The steadiness of her gaze had attracted him before. Now it disconcerted him. He looked away, feeling again the familiar stab of alarm.
“Wait a minute. I have no idea what they are saying on the docks. But if you think your brother was framed—” to say it was an effort—“you’re crazy. Holy God, the evidence against him—”
“I read the papers.”
“Then you know—”
“I know Ken was present once when Farragut visited Harry in jail. He says Harry told Farragut that one of the cops blew some dust on his jacket to make the case stronger. I don’t understand that, exactly. But did you do it, Mr. Ryan?”
That marshaled Ryan’s wits. He looked amused. “Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know what to believe!” she cried. The oven man looked up from the Italian newspaper he was reading.
“Well, it’s ridiculous on the face of it,” said Ryan. “The evidence against your brother was overwhelming, as you know if you followed the case.”
“I know.” She sounded uncertain. “And I wouldn’t believe it if Harry said it.” Her raised voice was near hysteria. “But I believe Ken! And don’t think I have many illusions about the police, either. We haven’t had a very easy time of it from them—between Harry and my father, when he was alive.”
And your brother and father didn’t make things very easy for the cops.
Instead, “That’s how it goes,” he said softly. “Some people go wrong. I saw it happen to kids I grew up with—kids from decent homes and all that. It’s nothing for you to be ashamed of.”
“I’m not ashamed. I can’t help what my father was, or what he helped my older brother to become.
“But I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to believe. Did you ever hear a bigger cliché?” Her smile was unnaturally bright; her voice cracked. “Listen!” In the intensity of her gesturing she struck her coffee cup and spilled some across the table. “Listen. I lost my job today. I was fired. That’s why I’ve got two weeks’ pay in my pocket—from the Fortunatus Club. You know it? It’s very exclusive. I was their librarian. When Harry was arrested they found out for the first time who I was. And they were very nice. They said, after all he wasn’t guilty until proven—nobody’s guilty until proven. You know? AH that. But he was proven. So today Mr. Murchison came around and very nicely told me I would have to leave. He said, ‘We feel terrible about this, Rosemary.’ And he did. But how many librarian’s jobs do you think there are in the city, Mr. Ryan?”
She got to her feet. Her voice was shrill. Ken Derby opened vacant eyes. His sister gestured toward him.
“And you know what, Mr. Ryan? I believe Harry is innocent. By God, I do! I believe what Ken said is the truth and that you framed Harry. You know why I believe it? Because I’ve talked to you, and seen your face. You’re a liar, Mister Ryan. You’re a cheap liar—”
Suddenly she began to cry, and she continued talking and crying, disregarding her tears and the saliva that thickened her voice. “That’s justice, what you are! No truth, or honesty. Justice is what you make people believe. Sure, Harry was no good. But to send him to prison you had to make yourself worse. You had to lie and cheat in the name of decency. That’s how the law is upheld! Oh, dear Jesus, I hate—”
She threw herself at him, sobbing, beating down on his chest with her fists, kicking, crying…
“Hey for Pete’s sake,” said the oven man, alarmed.
Ryan caught her arms. “Call a cab,” he said.
The oven man rushed to the front door and unlocked it. The girl was weeping uncontrollably. Ryan waited, holding her thin shoulders and feeling them shake, knowing this would take time.
Ken Derby got up on unsteady legs. “What’s now?” he said. “Whatsa matter, Rosie?”
Then brakes squealed outside. Ryan led the girl. “Come on,” he flung over his shoulder.
He put them both in the cab, got the address from Derby and repeated it to the driver as he handed him a dollar. “See that your sister gets home all right,” he said.
He watched the cab pull away, then went back inside and paid the bill. It was only after he had done that and stood outside again, breathing deeply and seeing the little restaurant’s lights blink out, that he really felt what she had said to him.
CHAPTER 18
The Homecoming
As she herself occasionally said, Agnes Ryan had never looked at another man after her husband was killed—and at very few before she met him. She had been a plump little Dresden doll of a girl with the Irish gift of merriment and a fierce streak of possessiveness that was dramatic in one so otherwise kind and docile. When she lost her husband, Mrs. Ryan turned her long-lashed eyes inward on herself and her memories, on her family and her God. She devoted herself to bringing up Eleanor and O’Neill, to working at the church and to making ends meet on a slain policeman’s pension and insurance, with occasional help from her brother who had an insurance agency in Worcester. At fifty-five she was a prematurely white-haired little woman with china blue eyes, patience and good cheer. She prayed regularly and lived in the serene faith that her man was watching her from heaven where ultimately they would be reunited forever.
When Ryan let himself in with his key, she was sitting in the living room before a radio turned low, listening to the eleven o’clock news and sewing the hem on a new dress of Eleanor’s. After sewing each section she pulled the basting threads out with tiny stubby fingers.
Ryan bent over and kissed her, “Hi, ma,” and she caught the reek of whisky and heavy food. It reminded her of his father. Her son reminded her of his father in many ways, although he was shorter and slighter and—it seemed to her these days—quieter and less aggressive. “You’re late,” she said.
“Yeah. Something came up.”
She would not ask what it was although she looked searchingly at his bloodshot eyes and haggard cheeks.
“Some people were here.”
“I saw them.”
“They came twice.”
“They would. It’s not important.”
“You’ve eaten?”
“I—I had a bite.”
“Let me fix you a sandwich. We had a nice meat loaf.”
He really didn’t want it but he knew she wanted to fix it. And what difference did it make in a world that had fallen apart?
“Well, maybe a thin one.”
While she bustled in the kitchen he leaned back in his father’s chair and closed his eyes, and despair flooded in like the sea through a dissolving dike. He did not know where to turn next and he was oppressed with the urgency of doing something now—yet what could he do? He thought of the time when he was thirteen and they had hit a baseball through the plate-glass window of Mr. Brodt’s butcher shop. Once again he had that hopeless feeling of having done something enormous and frightful, beyond repair or recall. What could he do—what was there to do?
Go to Lieutenant Bauer and tell him that the real murderer of Mrs. Connors had been permitted to escape clean and unpursued? Ruin Jablonski’s retirement-in-honor—even forgetting Jablonski’s threat? Blast his own hopes and chances that were now so bright? And yet…
Everything in Ryan’s nature, everything instilled in him as a boy about honor and fair play, his staunch belief in the ultimate supremacy of right, all that he had come to admire and respect as he grew into a man, stood inexorably over and against what he had done. And he had done it, he told himself brutally. There was no use blaming Jablonski or Derby or anyone else. They had had a part in it, sure. But he had
let himself drift into what was now—as Jablonski had so bluntly told him—an impossible situation. There was nothing he could do. There was no way out. Ryan’s closed eyes tightened spasmodically.
“Here, Neill,” said a voice and he opened them to see his mother standing over him with a plate and a glass of milk. She was looking at him worriedly. “Is everything all right?”
Ryan munched the sandwich. “It’s great.”
She picked up the dress and resumed work. After a moment she said, “That’s not what I meant. I meant—is everything all right with you?”
Ryan knew what she meant. He went on eating the sandwich, looking at his mother’s white head bent over the dress, tiny fingers busy with little stitches, and all that he had felt about her as a boy surged into his mind. Suddenly he had to say it.
“Ma.”
“Yes?” She went on working, because she knew something was coming.
“Everything’s all right—it’s fine. I’m just tired. But…something I been thinking of asking you.”
“It’s about that girl, isn’t it? That red-haired dancer?” She forced herself to smile at him. “She looked pretty in the paper, Neill. I’d like to meet her.” Her head bent again over her sewing.
“Oh. Gee Gee? No. I wasn’t thinking of her. I’d like you to meet her, though. The next Monday night I’m home, I’ll ask her up.” He put down the empty, milk-clouded glass.
“Good. And so, what then?”
“Oh, nothing much. It’s just this—this guy Derby that we sent up. Jablonski and me.” He didn’t know what he was going to say. He just had to talk to someone—someone he could trust.
“Oh. Well, he surely shouldn’t bother you, Neill.”
“Well, he does. Suppose—ma, suppose I told you that today I learned something that makes it look as if Derby wasn’t guilty after all?”
For the first time she looked fully at him.
“O’Neill Ryan,” she said. “Have you lost your mind? Of course he’s guilty. By the Holy Mother do you think I didn’t read every word of it in the papers, and my own boy in it?”
“Sure. But…”
Carefully she pulled out the basting stitches. “This is the first man you’ve ever helped send to the electric chair, isn’t it, Neill?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“I mind the time your father was home on the night a stickup artist was to die in Sing Sing. He’d helped send him there and the man had almost killed the two officers who had arrested him. Yet your father could not stand it, and as it got close to midnight he went out and over to Martin’s speakeasy and had some drinks. He told me about it later. And do you know what he did then? The drinks didn’t help either, and he left there and began walking and he walked all the way down to St. Pat’s and he went in and spent the night on his knees—praying for the man he had helped to electrocute.” Her voice suddenly caught and Ryan knew his mother inwardly was crying.
“You’re like him, Neill,” she went on. “And you worry like him, even over people like this Derby. But you needn’t, believe me. For if ever there was justice served to one of them thieving scum—”
“But—” He couldn’t let it go on. “But, ma—suppose Derby wasn’t guilty!”
“Wasn’t guilty! Wasn’t guilty of what, in heaven’s name?”
“Well—suppose he didn’t kill the old woman?”
She switched off the radio’s indistinct murmur. “Well,” she said, “didn’t he kill her?”
Ryan was silent. Could he tell her?
No.
“I didn’t say that. I just said, suppose he didn’t. And I found it out now. What could I do?”
“O’Neill Ryan, if that’s the sort of thing that’s bothering you, you had better get to bed and get a good night’s rest.” Petulantly she resumed her sewing. “You’re just the kind to lean over backwards about things like that, you certainly are. But let me tell you this. Even if that Derby had not killed the old woman, he has done so many other evil things, and well you know it, that the electric chair is no more than he deserves. Think of your father, boy, and what they did to him. That man Derby is that kind—if he hasn’t killed some decent, brave officer it is only because he hasn’t had the sneaking chance to. Why, Neill, of course he’s guilty.”
It was getting beyond his control. “But, ma,” he cried out, “supposing—suppose I have to go to the department and tell them that—that we’ve got to set Derby free?”
He was on his feet. He had not been aware of getting up.
Wonder filled her face. “Tell them he must be set free,” she repeated. “Have you had too many drinks, son? God in heaven, you’re—you’re having a nervous fit, I think. Neill! How can you say such a thing—how can you? A crook like Derby? Think of what you stand for, and what your father stood for.” She waved to the large framed photograph on the table and Sergeant O’Neill Ryan in uniform stared at his son with expressionless, retouched eyes. “He felt bad about the man he sent up too, Neill. But it didn’t swerve him from his duty. He didn’t flinch—he prayed for strength. And he got it. He knew when it was time to force himself to be—to be steel.”
“But a man’s life—”
“And what was your father’s life?” she asked. She was being steel too; the blue eyes were night-dark. “What’s the matter with you—you’re not that new at the business. Don’t you have the courage to put a—something like Derby where he belongs? A decent citizen must be treated with respect until he’s proved guilty, anyone knows that. But a crook like Derby—what’s come over you?”
The front door opened. Eleanor came in laughing, pink cheeked, followed by her date. “Hi, ma. Hi, Neill. Come on in, Jerry.”
Ryan rubbed his hand over his face and nodded to Jerry. “I got your book,” he said, and went into his room.
He undressed slowly. Was he having some kind of nervous fit? Was he crazy? After all, what was Derby to him—or to the world? Nothing. Less than nothing. As Jablonski had said, Derby himself knew where he had been at the time of the Connors murder. If he didn’t want to say, why should O’Neill Ryan interfere?
But it wasn’t that, and he knew it wasn’t that. Maybe Derby was better off to the world dead than alive. Maybe he deserved extinction, like some deadly reptile. But something else was involved here. It was the basic acceptance of right and order toward which mankind had been moving for aeons, the faith in a well-ordered society that had led Ryan, and his father before him, to make themselves society’s instruments for preserving what was good and decent. Ryan could not put it clearly into words, but he felt it.
That was what was being violated. That was what had given Rosemary Derby’s face its desolate look. If Harry Derby were executed Ryan knew he could never tolerate himself again, nor pleasurably accept praise or kindness from others, or even accept their company. Then what must he do?
Suddenly he flung himself out of the bed and sliding to his knees beside it tried to pray. But he could not; what was there to say? That he was sorry for having made a mistake? That he would not do it again? That had made it right when he was a child. That had made everything right then.
Suddenly, from deep inside himself he started to cry, silently, face pillowed against the sheeted mattress, his tears wetting it, shoulders twisting and belly wracked spasmodically with sobs. For a long time he wept, not trying to halt it, sensing that this was something that had to be gotten over with.
Then he dried his face with a clean handkerchief and groping for it his hands grazed the pistol and holster on the bureau. That was another easy way out, he told himself contemptuously. But a thought struck like a bullet from the gun. If he were to be killed in the days to come, Harry Derby would go to the chair as surely as if Ryan himself had sentenced him.
There was one thing he could do. In the student’s desk he had used as an undergraduate he found paper and pen. He wrote:
In event of my unexpected death I want it to be known that when Ed Jablonski and I arrested Harry Derby we applied some dust made from a part of the lamp at the Connors murder to his jacket. Subsequently I learned that at the time of the murder Derby was holding up a drugstore on East Thirty-first Street, as a fingerprint obtained there and now in the file on the case will show. I swear before God this is all true.
He signed his name and shield number, put the letter in an envelope and addressed it to the judge who had tried Derby. Then he put the envelope in the little tin box in which he kept his insurance policy and his few other papers of importance.
He lay down again on the bed. He felt cold and exhausted and yet calm. He had the sense of something being about to happen, of his being about to go away, like on his last night at home before going to Uncle Frank’s summer camp near Worcester as a kid. He was passing some kind of turning point. A new time was coming in.
He began to breathe normally, and as he did he began to think logically about the real killer of Mrs. Connors. That was still a way out, of sorts: if he could get the real killer then they would have both him and Derby. It had fleetingly crossed his mind before, but he had dismissed it as impractical. Now he faced it squarely and fully.
That would take some of the curse off as far as the department was concerned. And even Jablonski might be saved, he thought in this spell of new clarity, for there was always Farragut’s explanation that the telltale dust had been transferred by accident during the fight.
He thought of the truculent, snarling man for whom he was considering undertaking this alone, without the usual help of the department, and he smiled bitterly. Still, it was an honest, satisfying bitterness, born of growing certainty of the direction he would take. Thinking on it, after a time he fell asleep.
He slept well.
PART THREE: THE BLOW-OFF
CHAPTER 19
The Things That Really Happen
He and Lambert had agreed to begin afternoon tours next day to spell another team, one of whose members had a daughter who was getting married. But Ryan dropped into the station house at twelve-thirty when he knew Bauer would be at lunch, telephoned downtown, and without explaining his purpose quietly set in motion the identification machinery that would give him the names and records of all known criminals in the metropolitan area who had two vital characteristics: a physical resemblance to Harry Derby and a working method of robbing women as Mrs. Connors had been robbed.
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