by James Yaffe
Wolkowicz opened his mouth, but for a few moments no words came out. It wasn’t hard to imagine his thoughts. Who was a jury going to believe, this beefy cop who looked as if he had the IQ of a ten-year old, or this quiet confident little man of the cloth who spoke at Chamber of Commerce breakfasts?
The rabbi just stood there, smiling brightly, waiting for the inevitable.
“All right, all right,” Wolkowicz said, “let the record show that the suspect surrendered voluntarily to the authorities.” He turned to the cops next to him. “Put the cuffs on him. Read him his rights. Take him to headquarters.”
“And we’ll go with him,” Ann said.
“The hell you will,” Wolkowicz said. “Nobody travels in an official car when an arrest’s been made, except the prisoner and the arresting officers.”
“We’ll be right behind you then,” Ann said. “So we can talk to the prisoner just as soon as you’ve booked him.”
Roger was handcuffed now. I caught a glimpse of his white scared face as the cops hustled him off, away from the crowd. Wolkowicz hung back just a second, and spoke straight into Ann’s face. “This won’t do you any good in court,” he said. “Fugitive or no fugitive, we’ve got this bastard dead to rights.”
Then Wolkowicz went after the cops, and Ann turned to Rabbi Loewenstein. “We appreciate it, rabbi,” she said.
He gave a little shrug. “Seemed like the thing to do,” he said. “Well, I must be off now. Somebody has to get to that poor boy’s parents. I wouldn’t want them to hear about this on the television.” He sighed. “And maybe, with luck, I’ll be home tonight in time to see the last part of It’s a Wonderful Life. My family and I always watch it on Christmas Eve.”
* * *
When the new courthouse and jail were built a few years back—two handsome brownish-red buildings, attached by an underground passage, and looking so much alike from the outside that you couldn’t tell which one was for the lawyers and which one was for the crooks—a new police headquarters was supposed to be part of the package. But the city ran out of money, and so the police department had to make do with its old building across the street. It was squat, gray, and ugly, the plumbing was constantly breaking down, and there was no air conditioning. The chief of police never tired of expressing his annoyance about this, in newspaper interviews and on TV: “It’s undignified. The jailbirds have better living conditions than we do.”
It was nearly ten when Ann and I got to police headquarters. We had to cool our heels in the waiting room for half an hour, and then one of the uniformed flunkies told us that Roger wasn’t there. He had already been booked and sent across the street to occupy a cell. If we wanted more information, we had to get in touch with assistant district attorney Wolkowicz.
Ann called his office from police headquarters, and the night switchboard operator told her he had gone home. Swearing softly under her breath, Ann called Wolkowicz’s home. With some irritation, he told her he was trying to settle down with his family to look at It’s a Wonderful Life on TV. It had begun at nine, so he’d already missed half of it.
“And I wouldn’t want you to miss another heartwarming moment,” Ann said. “Just call the jail and tell them I’ll be there in two minutes and they should let me talk to my client.”
“Sure, why not?” I could hear Wolkowicz saying.
“And while I’ve got you,” Ann said, “we might discuss the question of bail.”
“The DA’s office is totally opposed to bail,” Wolkowicz said. “It’s a capital crime, and your client has already been a fugitive.”
“He gave himself up voluntarily, remember? So I hope you’re not going to try that fugitive line in front of a judge.”
“Nobody’ll be trying anything in front of a judge for a few days. Tomorrow’s Christmas, and Monday’s an official non-working day too. Most of the judges in town will be holed up in their homes or their mountain cabins, not answering their phones.”
“I can ring a phone pretty loud,” Ann said. “Meanwhile, you’ll call the jail, won’t you? Two minutes.”
In the jail building there’s a small, soundproof room where attorneys can talk to their incarcerated clients. It has a table, a few chairs, and an iron door with a barred window, outside of which sits a uniformed guard wearing a conspicuous gun. In another half-hour, Ann and I were sitting in this room with Roger Meyer.
His face was very white except for the dark blotches around his eyes. He looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. He was wearing the same jeans he had been wearing when he gave himself up—in fact, he had been wearing them on Thursday, when he disappeared—and he was in his stockinged feet. “They took away my shoes,” he said. “They said they were evidence.”
On account of the bloody shoeprints on the floor of Candy’s hallway, I thought. But naturally nobody had explained it to Roger. Once you cross to the wrong side of the bars, you discover you’re in a world that sees you as a lower species of animal life; your peace of mind no longer has to be considered. I had noticed this plenty of times when I was on the police force back in New York. It had never much bothered me then.
“How are my folks?” Roger asked. “Will they get to visit me here?”
“They’re doing as well as can be expected,” Ann said. “You’ve put them through a terrible two days.”
He lowered his head, like a little boy caught doing something naughty. For some reason, haggard and rumpled and sitting in this crummy room, he looked even younger than he had looked a few days ago. “I know that. I’m sorry. But I just couldn’t think of anything else to do. Will I get to see them?”
“We’ll fix it up,” Ann said. “Now I know you’re not feeling so great, but you have to forget about that, you have to get yourself together and answer my questions. Clear, complete answers—a lot may depend on it. Do you think you can do that?”
He wet his lips. “Okay. I’ll do my best. I’ll sort of pretend that it’s only a movie—I’m this character in a movie who’s falsely accused of a crime. And there’s really nothing to worry about, because everybody knows he’ll be cleared by the end of the picture. Like Paul Muni in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.”
I remembered that movie. What I didn’t point out to him was that Paul Muni never does get cleared.
“Are you falsely accused?” Ann said, with no change in her flat matter-of-fact tone of voice. “You didn’t kill the Reverend Chuck Candy?”
“No! I swear I didn’t!”
“You know what the District Attorney’s case is?”
“They told me a little when they arrested me. Somebody saw me go into that house.”
“Did you go into that house?”
“No, I never—” He lowered his eyes again. “All right, I did. But I didn’t kill him! I never even touched him! He was dead when I—”
“Start from the beginning,” Ann cut in. “What made you go into his house in the first place?”
“He called me on the phone. He asked me to come over there.”
“You’re saying Candy himself invited you over?”
“I guess it sounds crazy, but it’s true. I was at my parents’ house, around four-thirty or so. I got this phone call. Didn’t they tell you I got a phone call? It was Mr. Candy. He said he was sorry for everything he’d been doing. For the way he’d been treating my parents, and pulling that gun on me, and lying about it to the police. He asked me could I come over so he could apologize and then he’d call the police and fix things up about the charges against me.”
“Did he say why he had this sudden change of heart?”
“He said it was Christmas-time, and people are supposed to show kindness and good will at Christmas-time. Oh, and he told me not to tell my parents or anybody where I was going, because he wanted to be sure first that everything was all settled about the trial.”
“And that’s what you meant by that remark you made to your parents—‘If Christians can do it at this time of year, Jews ought to be able to do it too’?”
“I guess I did say something like that.”
“So you left your parents’ house and went down the street to Candy’s house,” Ann said. “Then what?”
“I rang the doorbell a few times. He didn’t answer the door. But then I noticed it wasn’t shut all the way, it was open a few inches. I figured he’d left the door open for me, so I went in. I stood in the hall for a couple of seconds—the same hall where I had my trouble with him before—and I called out his name. When he didn’t answer, I went down the hall to this archway that opened into the living room—anyway, I guess it was the living room. I went through this archway, and I saw the Christmas tree, all decorated with lights and that silver stuff. And there were packages under it, and then I saw—”
He stopped, pressed his lips together, then made himself talk again. “At first I thought it was another package under the Christmas tree. A pretty big package. And then I realized it was him—well, a person, I didn’t know who right away—he was lying there, with his legs bunched up and his arms sticking out. I thought maybe there was something I could do for him, so I kneeled down by him, and that’s when I knew who it was, and I knew he was dead.”
“How did you know?” Ann said. “Did you feel his pulse? Put your ear up against his heart?”
“No, I could never have— I just knew. It’s the way his head was sort of twisted and all that blood coming out of him. And the gun was there too—”
“Where? Close to the body?”
“No, it was halfway across the room. On the carpet, I saw it there.”
“You didn’t go up to it, did you? Pick it up or anything?”
“No. I just saw it, and then I stood up. And then I started thinking. I was supposed to go on trial for trying to shoot him. With that gun. So wouldn’t it look as if I busted into his house and tried it again, and this time I succeeded? Then I saw this picture of Jesus over the fireplace, and it reminded me I’m a Jew—which, to tell you the truth, isn’t something I think about very often—so nobody in this town was going to believe my story. So I ran out of the house!”
“Did you shut the front door behind you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Where did you go after that?”
“Down the street. To my parents’ house. I didn’t go in. My car was parked in front, so I got in it and took off.”
“When Candy called you on the phone, how did you know it was him?”
“He told me who it was.”
Ann leaned forward a little. “But how could you be sure it wasn’t someone else using his name? How many times have you ever heard his voice?”
“Well, only once actually. When I went to talk to him about what he was doing to my parents—and he pulled that gun on me.”
“At which time, you weren’t listening carefully because you were excited and he wasn’t talking clearly because he was excited too. So how did his voice sound to you over the phone? Did he seem to be talking naturally and easily, the way people talk in ordinary conversation?”
“Now that you mention it, his voice was pretty low, almost a whisper. Like he was under a strain, forcing himself. I thought that was because it wasn’t easy for him, apologizing and admitting he was wrong and all.”
“Did you see that message he wrote on the carpet before he died, those words in red crayon?”
“I read about that in the paper. But I didn’t see anything written on the carpet. I just didn’t notice it, I guess. I must’ve been too scared and in shock and all. I’ve never actually seen a dead body before. All I could look at was his head, and all that blood.”
A look of skepticism appeared on Ann’s face. “If he’d scrawled only a word or two, you might have overlooked it. But he wrote four words. ‘Gold, frankincense, and myrrh.’ They took up a lot of space. Don’t you think it’s strange you didn’t see them there?”
“I don’t know why I didn’t. I just didn’t, that’s all I can say. Why would I lie about it?”
Ann made the little clicking noise that she makes with her tongue whenever she’s skeptical or suspicious about something. “After you drove away from your parents’ house, where did you go? Where have you been these last two days?”
“Nowhere in particular. I’ve just been wandering around.”
“Where did you sleep? What did you do about eating?”
“I—I got a room in a motel. I brought food in from a 7-Eleven.”
“What motel? What 7-Eleven? Let’s have names and locations.”
“I don’t see why it matters.”
“Because the people there must’ve seen you. They might’ve noticed your manner, how you behaved, whether you acted like somebody with a murder on his conscience.”
“I just don’t remember where those places were. I was feeling so scared and mixed up—”
His voice trailed off. Don’t you ever play poker, kid, I was thinking. Somebody could get rich off you.
“I’m your attorney,” Ann said. “Everything you say to me is strictly confidential. It would be illegal for me to tell the police about it even if I wanted to. You won’t get anybody into trouble, believe me.”
“There is nobody for me to get into trouble,” Roger said, but his eyes were all over the place.
I decided it was time for me to put my oar in. “What’s the point of beating around the bush?” I said. “We know where you went. You’ve been hiding out for the last two days with Rabbi Loewenstein.”
Roger’s eyes widened. Ann flashed me an astonished look. It isn’t every day I can produce such a spectacular reaction, and I admit it gave me a certain pleasure. I could understand what Mom feels.
“It’s pretty obvious actually,” I said. “What was the rabbi doing downtown tonight? He said he always stays home with his family on Christmas Eve and looks at It’s a Wonderful Life. Which began at nine o’clock on TV. He wasn’t going to deprive himself of that treat just to watch the mayor switch on some lights and say that Christmas comes but once a year. So he was downtown because he expected something special to happen, something he had a personal interest in, and he wanted to be sure it turned out all right.”
Roger was on the point of tears. “He’s not going to get in any trouble for this, is he? Can you guarantee—”
“Not from us he won’t,” Ann said. “That much I can guarantee. If the DA finds out from somebody else, though—”
“You went straight to the rabbi,” I said, “after you found Candy’s body?”
“Yes, I did. He was the only person I could think of. He’d been so nice to my parents and me while I was waiting for the trial.” He reddened suddenly. “I mean, you two were nice to us too—but I didn’t think—I mean, you being representatives of the law and all—”
“Did you go to the rabbi’s house?” Ann said.
“No, I didn’t want to drag his family into it. I went to the synagogue. I didn’t know if he’d be there or not, but I thought I could wait for him if he wasn’t, and if anybody saw me there, they’d think I was praying. But the rabbi was in his study, and luckily there was nobody else around.”
“And where did he hide you out?” I asked.
“There’s a little room in the basement. They use it as a storeroom, mostly for stuff they only need on special occasions—the shofar for the High Holidays, and the fancy Torah, stuff like that. He told me I could sleep in there, and he’d keep the door locked so the janitor wouldn’t barge in on me. And he brought me my meals himself. Mostly sandwiches and cookies. It was like Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Frederick March—that old movie, where Hardwicke is the bishop and March is this escaped convict—”
A look of alarm came into Roger’s eyes. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea! The first thing he said to me, after I told him what had happened, he said I should give myself up to the police. He said the same thing every time he saw me in the last couple of days. That’s why I finally called you, because the rabbi talked me into it, he made me see that the longer I hid ou
t, the worse it would be for me. You’re sure he won’t get into any—”
Ann gave him her promise all over again, and we couldn’t think of any other questions for him, so the interview came to an end. The uniformed guard led Roger out, and from the look on the kid’s face he thought he was going straight from that room to the gas chamber.
Ann and I went up to the main reception room of the jail, and found Roger’s parents sitting there. Rabbi Loewenstein was with them.
The Meyers rushed up to us, throwing questions at us, asking if Roger was all right, and could they see him, and was there any chance of his being released on bail? Ann answered all their questions as clearly and patiently as she could, then she went to the desk and asked the officer on duty there to arrange for Roger’s parents to see him right away. Before the officer could say no—it’s the nature of bureaucrats to say no, even when they have no idea what you want—Ann said, “assistant district attorney George Wolkowicz says it’s all right. So let these people see the boy, or do you want me to call Wolkowicz right now and tell him you’re responsible for disturbing him on Christmas Eve?”
The officer agreed to let the Meyers talk to Roger.
All through this fuss, the rabbi had been standing at the side with a polite look on his face. As soon as I could, I edged up to him and spoke in a low voice. “I’m afraid you’re going to miss It’s a Wonderful Life, rabbi.”
He shrugged. “I know how it comes out.”
“That’s the movie about this young fellow who’s in trouble, isn’t it?” I said. “But luckily he’s got a guardian angel who looks after him and keeps him out of trouble?”
“That’s the story.”
“Strictly a fairy tale, wouldn’t you agree? In the real world, what can a guardian angel do for somebody? Except maybe give him sandwiches and cookies and a little bit of moral support?”
The rabbi didn’t say a word. He went on smiling softly.
* * *
It was after eleven-thirty when I got out of the jail building. Ann was exhausted and headed straight home. I had a strong inclination to do likewise, but something was nagging at me; it had been kicking around in the back of my mind for hours. Something that had happened tonight.