The Judgment

by William J. Coughlin

  So I was wrong. She didn’t need a marriage counselor, after all. She needed a lawyer.

  I went over to Benny’s Diner, just managing to beat the noon crowd by a few minutes. As I gobbled a cheeseburger, I read quickly through the pertinent parts of the two Detroit papers, relieved to find nothing in them on Mark Conroy. The Port Huron paper could wait. I had to have something to help me pass the rest of the afternoon. When I finished there, I kept my word and delivered the Kelman filing to the Kerry County clerk’s office in the basement of the courthouse. Gladys Monk, the lady in charge, said we’d know about our court date in a week’s time, or not much longer, but that they were already running well into next year. Too bad about that. Clare Kelman would have to remain married a little longer than she might like.

  Back at my office, I spent a good part of the afternoon working on the Higginses’ insurance claim. The way I read their policy, there was five thousand dollars coming to them on their son’s death. I drafted a letter to that effect for Frank to sign, as well as a cover letter from me as their attorney to give support to their claim. Then I spent some time staring out at the St. Clair River, counting the ore boats and freighters and thinking about the Conroy matter. The Victim Report could wait.

  About four o’clock the office phones went dead.

  Or who knows when it was exactly? There had been no calls for over an hour before that, which was fairly unusual, but it wasn’t until four, when Mrs. Fenton tried to phone out in order to let Frank and Betty Higgins know the insurance letter was coming, that she found the line dead. No dial tone, no white noise to let us know we were still plugged into the local exchange, nothing at all. Strange.

  Mrs. Fenton asked me to try my phone. Same thing. The trouble was out there someplace.

  “No wind, no thunderstorm, no lines down,” I said.

  “I wonder what’s wrong.”

  “Why don’t you go over to that insurance office downstairs and see if they’ve got the same problem?”

  I looked out the big window, down on the street, and saw a Michigan Bell van parked nearby, which was more or less reassuring. Right on the job.

  When Mrs. Fenton returned, she was waving her hands dramatically, slamming the door behind her.

  “It’s a madhouse in there,” she said.

  “The insurance office?” Whenever I peered inside, they all looked like mummies at their desks—no visible movement at all.

  “There’s a crew from Michigan Bell just tearing the place apart. They say there was an irregular outage all through this grid area, something to do with the snow last night. Can you imagine? They’re not quite sure why, so they say all this is partly diagnostic. Such a noisy bunch, really. They’ve just taken over downstairs.”

  Irregular outage? Grid area? Diagnostic? I could tell she’d picked up a few new words. They didn’t quite fit well in her vocabulary yet, but she used then gamely.

  “Well, maybe I’d better—”

  I never got a chance to finish that sentence. I was interrupted by three hard knocks on the door. Before Mrs. Fenton could fly over to get it, it popped open, and in walked a big Michigan Bell hardhat, complete with tool belt and a dangling receiver.

  “You folks having trouble with your telephones?” Then he spotted Mrs. Fenton. “Oh, yeah, you were downstairs, right? Said yours had gone out completely. How many lines you get in here?”

  “Just one.”

  “Frank! Joe! Come on in here. This one’s out, too.”

  Frank and Joe tramped in, one of them carrying a length of telephone wire and the other a box of equipment.

  “How many telephones?”

  “Two,” said Mrs. Fenton, growing more flustered with each question. “The other one’s in Mr. Sloan’s office.”

  He gave me a glance, no more, and a quick shrug. “Joe, go in there and try it.”

  Joe went into my office, while the nameless boss went over to the phone on Mrs. Fenton’s desk, picked it up, and listened for a moment.

  “You get anything, Joe?” he shouted.

  “Not a damned thing,” Joe shouted back.

  “Better take it apart.” He turned to Frank. “Toss the wire out, okay?”

  Frank went over to the window and began tugging away.

  “Lady, how does this open, anyway?”

  “Not that way. Here, let me show you.” She bustled over to demonstrate how it was done.

  “Al! Al!” It was Frank yelling down at another member of the crew through the open window. “Here, catch this.”

  He threw a length of telephone wire out the window.

  “Joe, how ya doin’ in there?”

  “I don’t know. Can’t tell yet.”

  These guys were driving me crazy. I turned to the guy in charge. “Look, how long is this going to take?”

  “No idea, mister.” He was attaching the other end of the line Frank had brought over to Mrs. Fenton’s receiver. “See, this is the diagnostic part. We still don’t have a good fix on what really went wrong. Can you beat that? But we’re putting them back on line. Just takes a while is all.”

  I grabbed my topcoat and asked Mrs. Fenton to hold the fort and lock up when she left. She seemed none too pleased about it, but she nodded and let me go without an argument. Occasions like this defined the distance between employee and employer.

  I practically ran out of there and down the stairs. I caught a glimpse of Al running the line he’d caught back to the Michigan Bell van. Then I jumped into my car and drove to the library. I decided I could look up that material on Delbert Evans as well as Mrs. Fenton could. Maybe the Evans family was crazier than they seemed.

  The reference librarian was helpful. She knew the year and was’ pretty certain of the season, if not the month. The Port Huron paper was on microfilm. A careful scanning brought me to the facts of the case. They were more or less as Mrs. Fenton had summarized them.

  Annie Louise Evans, age seven, had been absent for over a week from school when the truant officer went to the Evans home to make inquiries. He was told abruptly by Delbert Evans that she had died from “a cold.” Thinking this highly unlikely and quite irregular, he reported it to the Kerry County Police. Evans was visited by an officer, none other than Dominic Benda, who asked to see the death certificate. When it turned out that no doctor had been in attendance either before or after the girl’s death and that she was buried in the backyard, Benda did the sensible thing and brought Delbert Evans in for questioning.

  The story ran off and on for more than a month. The body was exhumed. The autopsy, which was held in Port Huron, proved the cause of death was pneumonia. There was a good deal of public indignation expressed. But Delbert Evans simply insisted he knew how to take care of his own. He was sorry Annie Louise died, but those things happened. They had done what they could for her. What Mrs. Evans had to say on the matter was never mentioned. It rated an editorial in the Times-Herald on criminal child neglect, and in the end that was the charge against Mr. and Mrs. Evans, both of them. They were brought to trial a month later and represented by a Hub City lawyer named Krantz, whom I’d never met. Delbert Evans must have shown more regret in court than he’d shown earlier, and Mrs. Evans was said to have cried copious tears. In any case, though they were found guilty, they were put on probation for two years and placed under the supervision of a social worker. The fact that they had a son, Samuel, played a part both in the granting of probation and in the decision to have a social worker keep close tabs on them.

  It was an ugly story, something that might have been common a hundred years ago but today seemed primitive, if not downright eerie. Could it have anything to do with those little bodies in the snow? If anything, old man Evans had shown nothing but indifference throughout all three tragedies, and Mrs. Evans seemed nothing more than a cipher and a sidekick to her appalling husband. But could he have washed their clothing and groomed them? Would she have done it for him? Certainly they appeared to have known how to clothe and bury their own dead daughter
right in their backyard, didn’t they?

  I spun the microfilm back to the first report on Annie Louise Evans’s burial, noting the newspaper’s date and calculating the probable date of her death. What I came up with was more or less the same month and date that Lee Higgins, the first victim, was found a few days ago.

  Maybe it was just a coincidence, but if it was, it was still unnerving. There was no question that Delbert Evans was a loose cannon on the deck, capable of unleashing tremendous rage, an unstable man furious at the world. Maybe he wouldn’t give a good goddamn about bathing and grooming the little children and then wrapping them in plastic, but surely Mrs. Evans was his accomplice in all things and would do whatever he ordered her to do.

  I wondered if Bud Billings had noticed the coincidence and if it had been he who questioned Evans about his daughter’s death and had worked the case from first to last. I wondered if maybe he was thinking the same thing I was thinking. Maybe Bud and I should have a talk.

  Like a lot of men, I don’t buy roses often, probably not often enough, so when I showed up at Sue’s door, freshly, showered and shaved, and thrust the bouquet at her, she seemed quite overcome.

  She made a big production of it, leading me into her kitchen, selecting the right-sized vase, filling it, cutting the bottoms of the stems, instructing me as she went in what ought to be done and why.

  “Now,” she said, “where’ll we put them?”

  She led me into her living room, or actually the part of it that served as a dining area. The dozen roses in their vase were a little too big for the small dining room table, since we had to eat on it, too, so she chose a place on her bookcase.

  “They’ll get some light here,” she said, “and open up all the way.” Then she threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug, burying her head in my chest. “Oh, Charley, thanks. They’re just what I needed.”

  Supplied with my usual Diet Coke, I stood in the kitchen doorway and talked about some of the events of the day. Some of them: I steered clear of my session with Judge Brown and my encounter with Delbert Evans at Kerry County Police Headquarters. I’d let her bring up the Evans business when and if she wanted to.

  For somebody named Gillis, Sue makes pretty good spaghetti. As she stirred the sauce and dropped the pasta into boiling water, I got around to telling her how our phones had gone dead and how the crew from Michigan Bell tore things apart. Keeping things light, I made a real routine of it. In my drinking days, I was known as a pretty good barroom storyteller, and I thought I was doing a good job of it this time, mimicking Joe and Frank and the boss, throwing my arms around to demonstrate the chaos they created. But I noticed about halfway through that she got a kind of funny look on her face. She was frowning but curious, nodding for me to continue. I ended the story kind of lamely, put off my pace by her response. She said nothing, just busied herself with her cooking, dipping a fork into the boiling water to pull up a ribbon of spaghetti to give it the chew test.

  Then she threw me another puzzled look. “You say the phones just went out all of a sudden?”

  “We didn’t notice until around four, but Mrs. Fenton pointed out that we hadn’t gotten any calls for at least an hour.”

  “And these guys were right on the spot to fix it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And they couldn’t tell you what had gone wrong?”

  “No, the guy in charge kept saying all this activity was ‘diagnostic’”

  “And you left before they were through?”

  “Yeah, they more or less drove me out of there.”

  “Charley, I wouldn’t tell you this except that I’m absolutely sure it wasn’t us, but I’d say those guys, put a wiretap on your phone.”

  “Oh, come on, Sue, they were from Michigan Bell. I saw their van. They had it on their hardhats. Michigan Bell wouldn’t do that.”

  She shrugged, tried the spaghetti again, and pulled the pot off the stove. She headed for the sink with it, and dumped the whole of its contents into a strainer. Then she looked me in the eye. “Did you ask to see their ID?” She shrugged. “That could’ve been faked, too.”

  “But they’d been downstairs at the insurance office. They fixed their phones. You’re not saying they put a wiretap on them, too?”

  “No, they wouldn’t have any reason to do that, would they? But whatever was done to your phone would’ve been done to the nearest office to yours just to make the whole scam seem real. Think about it, Charley. Have you got a case that might interest somebody else that much?”

  “I might have.”

  “You know, for a hotshot lawyer, in some ways you’re pretty naive, you know that?”

  “It’s always a pleasure to be complimented.”

  “Now get out of here, and sit down at the table. I’ll be serving everything in two minutes flat.”

  Maybe it was three. Not a moment longer, though. She came at me with salad and spaghetti, a plate in each hand, banged them down before me, and then she set a glass and filled it with a red liquid from a decanter that looked suspiciously like light Chianti.

  “You can drink it,” she said, “and so can I.”

  “What is it?”

  “Cranberry juice. Try it. I think it sort of tastes like wine.”

  Whether it did or whether it didn’t, the dinner was a grand success. As she herself sat down, she apologized for the modesty of the meal. “Been asleep all day,” she said. “I had to hustle this up from what I had on hand.” I assured her she was a great little hustler, and she gave me one of her raised-eyebrow looks.

  She told me that because of the body out on Beulah Road, she’d missed the Higgins funeral. Maybe it was just as well. But then we just goofed around verbally, discussing personalities and situations. I told her one of the few Mark Evola stories she hadn’t heard from me. She countered with the latest on Dominic Benda: He was using some of his retirement money to buy his old patrol car from the county because he said he was more comfortable in it than he was in his living room. Stuff like that. We knew we were skirting around the real issues, but that was all right. There’d be time for that later. Meanwhile, the spaghetti was fine. The meatballs may have tasted a bit more Swedish than Calabrese, the salad dressing may have come out of a Paul Newman bottle, and the cranberry juice—well, maybe only a little like wine—but the total effect was just right.

  I think Sue’s confidence had been restored by our exchange in the kitchen. Although I wasn’t quite prepared to admit she was right about my visitors from Michigan Bell, she had made a good case, and she knew it. And she had shaken me up in the process. Score one for her.

  What with dessert—ice cream from the freezer—and my after-dinner cigar, it was after nine before we got to the dishes and general washing up around the kitchen. I always take part. It was part of the bargain between us.

  Somehow it wasn’t long afterward that we found our way to her bed. And Dr. Charley Sloan performed another miracle of sexual healing. Miracle? That may be an exaggeration. Let’s call it a successful operation. The important thing is that it got her talking afterward about the things that had moved her to invite me over in the first place. We lay together, the covers up around us, my arm around her, and we talked.

  She admitted that they were probably right to send her home, that she was too emotionally involved in this case, and maybe too much in her work every day.

  “I feel all this pressure to succeed,” she said. “I got a late start, Charley. I feel like I have to show them.”

  “Them?”

  “All right, the men. They’re who I work with. I admit there’s a definite gender thing involved here.”

  We talked about that a little, nothing new there. Our attitudes were as much generational as anything else. A number of years separated us, important years, important experiences.

  I, in turn, admitted that I was wrong to have taken on Sam Evans as a client. I explained to her how his father had more or less trapped me into it. Then I told her about the
scene with him when his son was released.

  “He’s a terrible man,” she said. “Four years ago he let his little girl die, no doctor or anything. Then he just buried her like some dead animal or something.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that afterward. I looked up the newspaper accounts.” I hesitated, then asked, “Tell me something, was Bud Billings involved in that case?”

  “From first to last.”

  “He got a conviction on criminal neglect.”

  “Should have been manslaughter, from what I hear,” she said. “Anyway, Evans got off on probation.”

  “They got off. Mrs. Evans was charged, too.”

  “She’s so much under his thumb, though.”

  We were quiet for a little while.

  “Charley?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You were so right about what you said on the telephone. You know, about it being inevitable that sometime or other we’d be in a situation like this Evans thing. It’ll probably happen again.”

  “Probably.”

  “When it does, let’s be careful. We’ve got a lot to protect here, don’t you think?”

  In answer, I gathered her up and kissed her as tenderly as I knew how.

  “Want to stay the night? I’d like you to.”

  “I’ve got to get out pretty early. I’ve got an eight o’clock meeting tomorrow.”

  “I’ll set the alarm if you want.”

  “I never need an alarm clock.”

  “Well, if you’re as sure as all that, then there’s no problem, is there?”

  “None that I can see.”

  “Maybe just one.”

  “What’s that?”

  “All that sleep I got today. I need something to tire me out a little, to put me to sleep.”

  She giggled. Sue Gillis does not often giggle.

  “A little exercise?”

  “That might do it.”

  She giggled again, and without really consulting on the matter, we came up on the idea of exercising together. We had a great time. I was proud of myself.

  It had the desired effect on Sue, too. The last I saw of her she was curled up in a ball beside me, breathing deeply, in the last stages of wakefulness. She did manage to mumble one more thing.