Mom Meets Her Maker

by James Yaffe

  Ann produced a beautiful duplicate of Francesca’s contemptuous shrug. “What else could I do? My duty is to get my client off. I’d be neglecting my duty if I didn’t do everything in my power to achieve that goal. Even if it means sending somebody else to the gas chamber in his place.”

  “But I didn’t do it!”

  Ann smiled gently. “I can’t imagine how that concerns me.”

  There was a long silence. I could see from the way Francesca’s eyes were scrunched up that she was thinking hard. The trick was to keep quiet and give her thoughts a chance to percolate and come boiling out.

  Finally they boiled. “I didn’t have anything to do with any killings,” she said. “And I didn’t know Victor had killed anybody. I may have had my suspicions, but there was nothing I could take to the police. I want that clearly understood.”

  “All right, that’s understood,” Ann said.

  “So I can’t help you by telling the police that I saw any murders being committed, or anything like that. All I can testify to is that I called Victor on Thursday and told him that Chuck was turning against us and Victor said he’d take care of him. I can testify that I gave Victor a bottle of white wine at lunch the day before Christmas, and I might be able to identify the bottle too. And I can testify about that real estate deal, and Victor being the one behind it—he would’ve got the biggest cut for himself, I’ll be happy to testify to that.”

  “You’re willing to say all this under oath?”

  “Oh that’ll be easy. I’ll take as many oaths as you please, I’m very good at oaths.”

  Ann looked at her a moment and said, “It doesn’t bother you a bit, does it?”

  “What doesn’t bother me, dear?”

  “Well, for openers, what you did to that old couple?”

  “What did I do to them, for Heaven’s sake? It was a simple business deal. They had something we wanted, we tried to buy it for the lowest possible price. That’s what makes our country strong and free.”

  Francesca laughed. “Chuck was bothered by that part of it, I have to admit. He worried about what this deal would do to his relationship with God. He finally had to square his conscience by telling himself the money was for his church, not for himself.

  “And Victor too. That’s really rather funny, when you come right down to it. Victor had to square his conscience too. He told himself that he couldn’t be discredited, he couldn’t lose his career, he had a right to get away with murder, because if anything happened to him the forces of injustice would triumph. They’re very much alike really, Chuck and Victor.

  “I’m luckier than either of them. I don’t believe in God, and I know there’s no such thing as justice. I can sleep soundly at night, without any pangs of conscience.” She gave her head a shake. “Now if I testify to all this, you’re sure it’ll get me off the hook for the murders?”

  “I’m not the district attorney,” Ann said. “But I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Suppose we drive over to George Wolkowicz’s house right now, and we can thrash the whole thing out.”

  Francesca looked at her for a moment, and then her cool crumpled all at once. A long sigh came out of her, like a death rattle. “It’s all so fucking ironic really. You know why I got into this deal in the first place? Because I’m an idealist. I’ve always been one. I’ve always made sure my friends were idealists too. That’s where I learned all I know about greed and materialism. Watching my dear high-minded liberal friends march against the Vietnam War and fight to save the whales and sign petitions for everybody to divest their holdings in South Africa—and in between they’re taking their long trips to Europe and trading in their old Maserati for a new Porsche and clipping the coupons from their investments. I got sick of it, can you understand that? I wanted some of the gravy for myself.”

  She broke off, took a few deep breaths, and then looked up at us again with one of her old sarcastic grins. “Little Francesca’s been screwed again, hasn’t she? I should’ve known it would turn out this way. Whenever I try to get out of this crummy hole—”

  She broke off with a quick bark of a laugh. Then she took out her mascara and started to repair her face.

  * * *

  I called George Wolkowicz’s house from the phone on Francesca’s desk. He wasn’t pleased to hear my voice, and even less pleased when I told him Ann and I wanted to come over right away to tell him about some new developments in the case.

  He couldn’t exactly turn us down, though, so he gave one of his unpleasant chuckles and said, “I’ve got some new developments for you too, counselor. Like the reports are back on those fingerprints from the murder gun. And the lab has compared the kid’s shoes with the shoeprints in Candy’s hallway. None of it looks too good for your client, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Well, we’re in for a terrific evening,” I said. “Exchanging good news with each other.”

  Ann and Francesca left a few minutes later in Ann’s car, and I followed them in mine. As I drove along, something odd began to stir in me. Deep down, like a vague tickle at first. A few minutes passed before I recognized what it was.

  I was feeling happy. Happy didn’t do it credit. Try elated, ecstatic, jubilant. I wanted to stick my head out the car window and give a yell to the world. It was Christmas. Only a few hours left of it, but Christmas it unquestionably was. And suddenly I was in favor of the whole thing.

  I didn’t give the yell though. Instead I turned on my car radio, and as if this was a movie with exactly the right music rising up exactly when you want it, about a million voices came blasting into my ears in the Hallelujah Chorus. Wonderful! Dear God, how wonderful! If You could create something like that—or to be accurate, if You could create the mind that could create something like that—You can’t really be all bad.

  And He answered me. He acknowledged my compliment. Because at that moment something landed on the windshield of my car. A snowflake! And another one followed it, and another one. And looking out the side, I could see that the snow was coming down. Slowly, not so thickly, but it was definitely snow. We were going to have a white Christmas after all! All right, semi-white. Which is better than nothing, right?

  That’s the secret of dealing with God, I decided. Very seldom does he give you what you want. But a lot of the time what he gives you is better than nothing. Settle for better than nothing, and life can be a reasonably enjoyable experience.

  In front of me I saw a car with this bumper sticker: “Honk If You Hate People Who Honk If They Love Jesus.”

  I honked joyously, feeling like Ebenezer Scrooge in the last chapter. In the words of our esteemed Mayor Willard A. Butterfield, God bless us, every one.

  After Christmas

  At the end of a story, I always want to read a chapter where the author winds everything up. You find out what happens to all the people, you get the answers to all the unanswered questions. So this is what I’m going to do now, as briefly as possible.

  First of all, there’s Christmas. Whatever you may think about it, it’s always over eventually. It reaches its climax in a great big New Year’s Eve bash, and from January first it’s strictly recovering from the hangover.

  Here in Mesa Grande—in most towns like ours, I suppose—the hangover took the form of debris on the street. The giant Christmas tree got hauled away pretty fast, but it took much longer for the pine needles to disappear. Well through the end of January, you could still find yourself crunching a cluster of them underfoot, you could still see them mixed up with the garbage that clogged the drainage holes at the curbs. The remnants of Christmas posters, paper frost, glass bells, and so forth could be seen in store windows or flapping from the sides of buildings; Santa Clauses with half their faces torn off took their good time about disappearing from sight.

  The churches, from the first days of January, started advertising a whole new line in sermons; “the spirit of the New Year” replaced “the spirit of Christmas” as a hot topic for our local clergy. The restaurants got rid of their menus
with sleighbells decorating the margins, and started featuring special Presidential Birthday dinners.

  And January also brought us a lot of snow. Heavy but intermittent, bitter cold days alternating with days that were so mild you could go out in a light coat. That’s how it usually happens out here. The local saying is, “If you don’t like the weather, be patient for an hour or two; it’ll change.”

  Victor Kincaid was in California the day after Christmas, when the Mesa Grande district attorney’s office requested the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to arrest him and hold him for extradition. Immediately he launched a series of legal obstruction tactics, fighting the extradition, questioning the legality of the grand jury, petitioning for a change of venue, casting doubts on the integrity and impartiality of the judge, and issuing sizzling statements to interviewers that he was being framed by the establishment on account of his political opinions. Nevertheless he was held in our city jail without bail, his trial was scheduled for early February, and Francesca Fleming was summoned to be one of the leading witnesses against him.

  Then, practically on the eve of the trial, he surprised everybody by going to the district attorney with the offer of a plea bargain. The result was that he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the death of the Reverend Chuck Candy and received a sentence of fifteen years, with eligibility for parole in five. The death of Luke Abernathy, late Prophet of the Cult of the Egg, wasn’t mentioned either in the courtroom or the media.

  Because there was no trial, Francesca didn’t have her day in the witness box. But she’d already made her deal with the district attorney, and there was nothing he could do but stick to it. She pleaded guilty to charges of harrassment and commercial fraud in connection with her attempt to get hold of the Meyers’ property, she was sentenced to a year and a half in prison, and the sentence was suspended on condition she went into psychological therapy.

  The day this sentence was announced, Francesca invited all her friends and acquaintances to a celebration dinner at her restaurant. A hundred people showed up, including most of the stars of the artistic, musical, theatrical, and left-wing political world of Mesa Grande. The Reverend Eugene Grant Morgan was there, representing the ACLU, which had been prepared to take up the cudgels for Francesca’s civil rights in the event that the judge had decided to send her to jail. He left the party early, however, before one of Francesca’s friends made a little speech praising her as a heroine who had fortunately escaped martyrdom at the hands of the forces of oppression who controlled this fascistic town.

  The Republican-American described this party in a scathing editorial the next morning: unsigned, but everybody recognized Arthur T. Hatfield’s style. To give one sample that will convey the flavor of the whole, the first sentence began: “Not since the most degenerate and disgusting orgies of imperial Rome.…”

  The Church of the Effulgent Apostles of Christ announced at the end of March that it was closing its doors and filing for bankruptcy. Attendance had fallen off sharply right after Christmas, but the death blow was the discovery, when auditors were brought in as a routine aftermath of Candy’s death, that the capital surplus which the church was supposed to have in the bank was nonexistent and in fact there were fifty thousand dollars worth of debts. Mrs. Candy broke down and admitted that her late husband had been raiding the surplus for years, not for his own personal gain—this was obvious from the modest way he lived: no gold-plated foreign limousines or Shangri-la palaces, like certain other more highly-publicized evangelists—but to pay the mortgage on the building and to meet the monthly payroll, heating bills, phone bills, and costs of the video tapes in the lobby.

  Shortly after the closing of the church, Gabriel Candy got a job selling real estate with Dwayne McKee’s firm. If he was like most of the real estate salesmen in town, he worked strictly on commission.

  In April, Chuck Candy’s widow went back to New Mexico. Rumor had it that she moved in with her unmarried sister on the ranch where she was born.

  Cutting back to December—the day the charges were officially dropped against Roger Meyer his parents had a modest luncheon celebration. Ann and I were invited, along with the rabbi, another elderly couple from the synagogue, and two or three young people who were Roger’s friends. After the meal, Roger took me aside and asked me if I’d given any consideration to what he had discussed with me a few days ago. About his becoming my apprentice, or intern, or gofer, or whatever I wanted to call it, after his graduation from Yale in June.

  “I feel I can be even more helpful to you,” he said, “now that I’ve seen the other side. I mean, I’ve actually been in jail, I know what it feels like, I know the living conditions in there, and don’t you think it’s important for us to empathize with the people we’re trying to help? It’s like Joel McCrea in Sullivan’s Travels, where he’s this movie director who wants to make a movie about the poor and the bums and all, but he doesn’t really know what their lives are like until he gets locked up in this chain gang—”

  I told him again that I’d certainly take his offer into consideration, but I didn’t think there was much chance of getting the money from the City Council. Privately I was thinking that it might not be a bad idea to have somebody to take some of the drudgery, the routine legwork, the filling out of forms off my back. The kid was bright, and he was definitely motivated.

  If I’d ever had a son, I thought, he might be about Roger’s age.

  I talked to Ann about it after we left the Meyers’ house, and her reaction was what I expected. “If you want somebody, Dave, you should have somebody. The problem is, how are we going to squeeze his salary out of the powers-that-be? And you know DA McBride’ll be fighting us all the way.”

  But the solution to this problem dropped in our lap—the way the plums of life occasionally do—without any particular effort on our part. A few days later The Republican-American ran an editorial in which—if you can believe it—the public defender’s office was praised for the good work it did in bringing the murderer of the Reverend Chuck Candy to justice. We could not be commended too much for the service we had done to the community by exposing the true nature of the radical left in its never-ending conspiracy to subvert America’s cherished religious traditions—

  Ann’s first reaction to this editorial was to pull at her hair, like some Old Testament prophet bewailing the sins of his people. The next step would be sackcloth and ashes. It was almost too much for her, the idea that the hard work of her office should be used by these lunatics to push their crazy political philosophy. But after awhile she calmed down and decided we might as well pay the lunatics back in kind. Since they were using us for their purposes, why shouldn’t we use them for ours? By this means some good could come out of the evil.

  So she asked for an appointment with Arthur T. Hatfield and put it to the old scoundrel that the public defender’s office, which he was so kind as to praise in his recent editorial, needed an increased budget if it was to go on operating effectively. Specifically, we needed money for an investigative assistant to take some of the burden off our overworked and undermanned investigatory staff (me). Would the newspaper be willing to put its weight and influence behind our effort to persuade the City Council to increase our budget so we could hire this extra person?

  Hatfield implied he was willing. In Ann’s opinion, which she expressed to me when she got back from her meeting, Hatfield was feeling a little guilty about the attempt he had made to railroad an innocent man into the gas chamber. He wanted to do something to erase that error from his conscience. “He has a conscience,” Ann said. “You wouldn’t think it from looking at him or reading his paper. But somewhere, deep inside there, hidden under those layers of steel plate, it’s alive and occasionally fluttering.”

  The very next day The Republican-American’s editorial came out with the suggestion that it would benefit the crime-stopping capacities of the city if the public defender’s investigatory staff were expanded. And the day after that, Ann mad
e a formal proposal to the budget committee of the City Council. It took another month or so for the allocation of funds to go through, but during that time not a word of protest was heard from District Attorney Marvin McBride. Elected officials—even those like McBride who operate most of the time in a pleasant alcoholic haze—will seldom go out of their way to antagonize the only newspaper in town.

  I had dinner with Mom the night of that City Council meeting. She was delighted with the news. “What a wonderful thing you’re doing for his mother and father!” she said. “They suffered enough already, it’s about time they got a little pleasure from life.”

  I tried to convince her that giving pleasure to Roger’s mother and father had absolutely nothing to do with my decision, but she didn’t seem to hear what I was saying.

  And at that moment, for some reason, a question which had been kicking around in the back of my head since Christmas decided to come to the front. What was there in the Nutcracker Ballet which had given Mom her clue to the solution of the murder?

  I asked her about it now.

  She frowned and shook her head. “What was it, what was it?” she said. “It must’ve been something, but to tell you the truth, it’s slipped out of my mind completely.”

  I felt a twinge of suspicion. Nothing ever slips out of Mom’s mind. And when she begins a statement with “To tell you the truth,” this usually means she’s about to tell me a lie. But I couldn’t see how it mattered, so I felt no urge to push Mom any further.

  And just then my phone rang, and I forgot all about the Nutcracker Ballet and the Candy murder because I heard the voice of this woman I had met the other day at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon. She was the editor of the Woman’s Page in The Republican-American, but from a few oblique remarks she dropped it had become clear that she had the same opinion as me about the paper and its policies. So I had asked her out for dinner this coming Saturday, and she was calling me back to say she had cleared her calender and she could make it.