by Peter Rabe
“Why?” the sheriff was suddenly roaring. “Why? Because you’re guilty?”
“You think so,” said Spinner.
The sheriff waved his arms without saying anything, as if groping for the right, convincing word. Then he let his breath out and sat for a moment.
“Jake,” he said. “I’m trying to tell you, Jake, nobody thinks — I don’t think you’re guilty, until there’s proof.”
Spinner looked at the sheriff for the first time. He did not think the old sheriff was a good actor, so he must have meant what he said. Spinner said nothing, though. He was afraid to think of this too much.
“Jake, you going to listen to me?”
After a moment Spinner nodded his head.
“Here’s what the prosecutor brought up,” said the sheriff, and he suddenly talked as eagerly as he had wanted to do from the start “He said you drove down that road, that plowed-up road out of town, because you didn’t know it had been torn up, you’d just come back into town and couldn’t have known that it wasn’t a road any more. You remember he said that?” Spinner had started to nod but the sheriff went on. “And then I remembered. You told me about that road being torn up when I had you in the station. You said Sloan, back in the bar, was telling you they just tore up the cutoff on the south end. You said that, trying to make us go out there and look for the killer. You remember?”
“Yes. I remember — ”
“You knew that road was no good long before Dixon got killed, so you wouldn’t have taken that road. You knew it wasn’t good long before because they had told you, back in the bar. I checked that they told you.”
“You checked?” said Spinner, and then he said it again. “You checked — ”
“Yes,” said the sheriff and he saw what it meant to Spinner, that it meant all this hadn’t been false talk of encouragement or a visit to just ease the guilt of the sheriff, or to thank the killer for a killing and tell him his death would be worth-while.
“You mean,” said Spinner but he was still afraid, “you mean what you said about thinking I might be innocent?”
“Yes, Jake, yes! Now listen, we got to follow the steps. First Dixon — why he got killed. You could have had reason, and that lawyer today showed how you could. But I also know about Dixon and the trouble he had with St. Louis. They could have done it, Jake. I’m not good enough to find out for sure, but I’ve looked as best as I could. St. Louis had reason and they could have done it. If they sent a killer it must have been all cased ahead of time, and taking the south end cutoff out to the highway makes sense. And coming into town for the killing, the man they sent wouldn’t know about the road being no good. Now the gun, with your prints — how come it had your prints?”
“I touched it. I threw it out of the car.”
“And the killer wore gloves.”
“Yes. He …”
“Now the shoe, Jake. Was that his shoe?”
“Yes. He lost — No, I took it off him. He’d busted his ankle. He …”
“So let’s say it was his. It was his,” the sheriff repeated. He had gotten out of his chair and was pacing back and forth. “It was his. Therefore — ” The sheriff frowned with the strain of finding the angle that might make the shoe the killer’s, for sure. But he couldn’t think. “How about it, Jake? You remember what happened to the other one, the mate of that shoe. One shoe left, maybe he threw it away, maybe left it somewhere or …”
“No,” said Spinner. “He never took that one off. He had a clubfoot”
“Oh — You say a clubfoot?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you know, man, how big that is? How big that can be? If the mate to that shoe is a clubfoot shoe, how could that shoe back there in court be one of yours? That can prove you didn’t kill Dixon, that would prove it no matter what the killer might say!”
Then came a silence, like a great hesitation.
“You don’t know where he is? Who he is?” said the sheriff.
Spinner looked at his hands, shrugged his shoulders.
“Anything at all, Jake?”
“I went with him,” said Spinner. “It’s too late to explain all of it — ”
“Perhaps you don’t need to say,” said the sheriff. “But the killer. Can’t you describe him? Can’t you try, now that you know that I’m trying to help you. Can’t you …”
“All right!” The old hopelessness inside Spinner made him shout “He is small and frail, as if he hadn’t grown up; he is stooped and lined, like a monkey, his mind is the only thing that’s alive about him, and that mind is like a machine! Is that a description? It’s better than height and weight and color of skin, but is that going to help with a ghost? And he’s got a clubfoot and he never does anything except for a dead cold reason from his live-machine brain! Is that going to help? You know what he’d do if he were here? He’d prove I did the killing. He’d prove it just because there would be no good reason why not! And his name? Loma, he said, is the name he’s using.”
Spinner stopped when the door opened behind him and his lawyer came in. Spinner stopped to catch his breath and to shake his head so it would distract him. He did not want to think about this, he had not thought that he would again, and then he sat down on his chair. The lawyer had asked the sheriff a question and the sheriff had started to answer. Fast and eagerly he went over all of it and Spinner sat in his chair, and after a while he just sat and looked at his hands. They felt swollen and useless. Spinner barely listened to the two men.
“You mean to tell me he knew that road was impassable?” The lawyer was loud with irritation. “And why haven’t I been told about this?”
“And why haven’t I been called to the stand before? I tried right in the beginning — ”
“ — and this entire second-person theory, why haven’t I received the support any normal defense — ”
They hacked at each other because they were frightened and it showed in their anger.
“The mate to that shoe a clubfoot? You realize that could be tantamount, could have been if I had been apprised in time for adequate investigation — ”
“ — got to follow that up. And the Dixon angle. The gangland angle I been telling you — ”
It went on for a while and then the excitement died down. When it did there were a few facts at the lawyer’s disposal. There were new avenues for exploration — too late almost, too late for a motion — but a strong point for a retrial if that man could be found, or even the shoe.
Spinner stopped listening. He had heard the important thing. Too late. He looked at his hands, which seemed swollen and useless.
CHAPTER 27
The prosecutor had his summation prepared by one of his clerks who had nothing to do but to excerpt the unfinished points from the cross-examination. This method was not pure lack of interest on the part of the prosecutor, but he was busy preparing two other cases. Of course, the prosecutor delivered the summation himself. He was not tired now and he felt almost sorry not to have any opposition.
He said, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” and his smile was indulgent “There is a saying, mana lavat manam, meaning simply that one hand washes the other. You have borne with me, ladies and gentlemen, and you have shown perspicacity. In return I shall therefore be brief.” He paused, turned serious, and in a short while, from professional habit, became quite vehement “I have shown you motive, modus operandi, and the corpus delecti. We need no more; you need no more. I will not insult your intelligence.
“The defendant, as I have shown, has nurtured over the years the kind of animosity which in the weak often results in violence. Years of friction between the victim, Alvin Dixon, and this poor man, the defendant, years whose hate was first crowned with just punishment by incarceration — three years in jail which the defendant had used to nurture his hate — so that, upon his release, his unmitigated criminality found culmination and release in the murder of Alvin Dixon!
“You have seen the gun which killed the victim, you
have been shown that the gun bore the defendant’s prints, you have seen the shoe worn by the defendant, the same shoe which bore dirt from the place close to the victim’s home, the place where the killer stood to consummate his intent to murder!
“Ladies and gentlemen, I would add nothing more. Even in the face of defense’s valiant attempt to disperse this logic, to cloud the evidence by the spurious introduction of a possible second to the execution of the crime — even so, I will say no more. Because does it help the defense to claim that the shoe lost by the defendant belonged to someone else? Does it help the defense to invoke a ghost? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it might help and supply comfort in the same way that it might help to blame illness upon the evil eye! The ghost has not materialized as the myth has grown larger. But I refuse to insult your credulity by enlarging a myth. I return you to the facts of the crime, for which, in good conscience, you must return your verdict of guilty as charged!”
The prosecutor bowed, then sat down. It had been one of his shortest summations. He had not needed more.
When defense rose to walk to the jury box, the prosecutor did not even look up. He knew his jury and he knew what the quiet in the room meant, a settled silence which meant it was over. The prosecutor did not envy defense.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” said the attorney. The prosecutor thought that it did not sound very vital. Stubborn, perhaps, but without life. “I cannot make your heavy task any easier than it is. I cannot ease it for you, the way my colleague — ”
He had started with a negative, the prosecutor thought Not very good strategically. And he is hesitating —
The defense counsel had done even more, he had stopped. The silence in the room had grown heavy, but no longer with that sense of conclusion. It was heavy with waiting, with suspense made frightening by a low rush of whispers.
Two guards came down the aisle with a girl between them. The prosecutor could not remember her name, but she had been with the defendant She looked tense, rushed, and held her large purse tight in both arms. The prosecutor got up. He would have to join them. He walked to the group under the judge’s bench and even the whispers died in the room, like a wind leaving.
Spinner had not recognized Ann in the beginning. He had not looked up till she was up front, and all he had seen was the back of the girl and the group around her. Then she had turned to look at him.
Spinner sucked in his breath with his sudden, strong rush of feeling. It had come too fast for him to know what name or direction his feeling had. So he sat in his chair and clamped his hands to the seat with a strength that felt like a tremble inside. He did not want the feeling to grow. If they stopped whispering under the bench, if they stopped charging the air with their hisses and their fast, checked gestures — if the girl would go away —
Ann came toward him, her eyes large and anxious. She walked fast and there was strain in her face. When she talked the pressure made her voice hoarse.
“Jake — ” she said, close to his car. “Jake, dear — one moment longer. Hold on one moment longer, please — ” And she added then, “You need a miracle, Jake. Please, dear, I’m with you now — Look!”
Spinner thought all their faces looked alike. The tight, hustling bunch at the judge’s bench had turned to look at him, two eyes each, mouths silent and immobile now. They stepped apart.
There was a small table behind them. And on top was the black, lumped, massive-heeled shoe of a clubfoot.
• • •
When it was over and Spinner and Ann walked to the girl’s car, he was silent and still did not know what to feel.
“Jake,” she said, “aren’t you glad?”
He smiled at her, but only because she was looking at him.
They drove south, and Spinner saw the flat land getting rounder and the fields and trees slanting up against hillsides. It was a bright day, and early. They would still have daylight when they reached the farm.
Ann said, “Can’t you believe it, Jake?”
He shook his head, not knowing how to say what he felt. “Why,” he said. “Why? Why did he do it?”
Ann reached into her pocket and gave a small white paper to Spinner.
“He sent you this,” she said. “With the shoe.”
Ann hardly knew Loma but she knew what it said on the note and that Spinner would understand it.
It was very short: To Jake Spinner. For no good reason. Loma.
THE END
If you liked Agreement to Kill check out:
The Box
Chapter 1
This is a pink and gray town which sits very small on the North edge of Africa. The coast is bone white and the sirocco comes through any time it wants to blow through. The town is dry with heat and sand.
The sirocco changes its character later, once it has crossed the Mediterranean, so that in Sicily, for example, the wind is much slower, much more moist and depressing. But over Okar it is still a very sharp wind. It does not blow all the time but it is always expected, fierce with heat and very gritty. The sand bites and the heat bites, and on one side the desert stops the town and on the other the sea shines like metal.
None of this harshness has made the inhabitants fierce. Some things you don’t fight. There are the Arabs there and there are the French. Once, briefly, there were the Germans, the Italians and the English, and a few of these remained. The people move slowly or quietly, sometimes moving only their eyes. This looks like a cautious, subdued way of living, and it is. Anything else would be waste.
There were not so long ago five in Okar who moved differently, perhaps because they forgot where they were, or maybe they could not help what happened; none of them is there any more. They were Remal, the mayor, who also did other things, and Bea, who did nothing much because she was waiting, and Whitfield, who was done waiting for anything, and Turk, who was so greedy he couldn’t possibly have made it. And Quinn, of course. Put simply, he came and went. But that’s leaving out almost everything….
• • •
“You got me out of my bath, you know,” said the clerk.
“Mister Whitfield,” said the captain, “this is your pier.”
“Because of this bleedin’ box you got me out of my bath.”
“Mister Whitfield. I’m tied up at your company’s pier, and in order to lower the box I need your permission.”
“If Okar isn’t the destination, why lower your box? And during siesta,” the clerk sighed.
“I’m sorry I interrupted your sleep.”
“I take a bath during siesta,” said the clerk. He did not seem angry or irritated, but he was interested in making his point. It reminded him of the bath and he smiled at the captain, or rather, he smiled just past his left ear.
The captain thought that the clerk did look very clean — Englishman-clean — and he thought that he smelled of gin. Take an Englishman and give him a job where the sun is very hot and he soon begins to smell of gin. Perhaps this one, for siesta, bathes in gin.
The captain squinted up at his ship which showed big and black against the sun, much bigger than the tramper actually was, because the pier was so low.
“The winch man dropped a crate on the box down in the hold,” said the captain, “and something cracked.”
“I can understand that,” said the clerk because he felt he should say something.
He looked at the captain and how the man sweated. How he sweats. Why doesn’t he shave off that beard? Siesta time and I must worry about his cracked box. Such a beard in this heat. Perhaps a Viking complex or something.
“So the crew in the hold,” said the captain, “two of the crew down there, they went and took a look and next they came out running and screaming. Uh — about something bad,” said the captain and looked the length of the empty pier.
The empty pier was white in the sun and much easier to look at for the moment than anything else, such as the clerk, for example, and his patient face. And why doesn’t he sweat — ?
“E
h?” said the clerk.
“And they described a smell. A bad smell.”
The captain looked back at the clerk and went rasp, rasp in his throat, a sound to go with the beard.
“Now, you understand, don’t you, Whitfield, I can’t have something like that down there in my hold.”
“You’re Swedish,” said the clerk.
This sounds like nonsense, thought the captain, all of this, including Whitfield’s unconnected remark, because of the heat. Otherwise, everything would make sense. He made his throat rumble again, out through the beard, and thought a Swedish curse.
“Is your crew Swedish, too?” asked the clerk.
“Those two from the hold, they are Congolese.”
“And they described a strange smell. And perhaps a strange glow? You know, something wavering with a glow in the dark, eh?”
“Goddamn this heat,” said the captain. “Don’t talk nonsense, Whitfield.”
“I?”
“Whitfield…”
“Captain. You know how ghost-ridden they are, those Congolese. Very superstitious, actually.”
“Whitfield,” said the captain. “I understand you want to get back to sleep. I understand…”
“I take a bath during siesta.”
“I also understand about that, Whitfield, and that this is an annoyance to you, to come out here and sweat on the pier.”
“I’m not sweating,” said the clerk. His blond hair was dry, his light skin was dry, and the gin smile on his face made him look like an elderly boy. “However,” he said, “I wish you would take your box to destination. It would save us so much paperwork.” Then he thought of something else. “And I’m sure the smell doesn’t reach topside and nobody lives in the hold anyway.”
The captain looked way up at the sky, though the brightness up there hurt his eyes. Then he jerked his face at the clerk and started yelling with both eyes closed.
“I must look at the box and repair the box! I can’t repair on deck because of the freight lashed down there! All I request…”