All the king's men

by Роберт Пенн Уоррен

  The breath gave out, and for a long moment I thought there would not be any more. But some more came, and he said, "But–that–doesn't matter–either."

  I thanked him and shook his hand, which was like cold wax and left a chill in my palm, and went out and got into my rented car and drove back to the city, where I got a drink, not to celebrate but to take the ice out of my marrow, which not the weather but the old man had put there.

  I had found out that Mabel Carruthers had been broken, but had married a rich man from the West. Or rather what in Savannah they called "the West." Well, that was a joke. Not doubt the rich man from the West had married her for the money, too. There must have been some gay times as the truth emerged. I left Savannah the next day, but not before I had gone out to the cemetery to look at the Carruthers vault, where moss encroached upon the great name and the angel lacked one arm. But that didn't matter, for all the Carruthers were inside now.

  I had knocked and the sound had been very, very hollow. I sunk the crowbar in deeper. Judge Irwin had not paid off his mortgage in 1914 with his wife's money. What had he been doing in 1914 to get the money? He had been running a plantation, and he had been, under Governor Stanton, the state's Attorney General. Well, you don't clear $44,000 a season off a cotton plantation (it was that amount he had paid, for the $12,000 he had paid in 1910 had come from a mortgage on the house in the Landing, I discovered, which he cleared at the same time as the plantation). And his salary as Attorney General had been $3,400. You don't get rich being an Attorney General in a Southern state. At least, you aren't supposed to.

  But in March of 1915 the Judge had a good job, a very good job. He resigned as Attorney general to become counsel and vice-president for the American Electric Power Company, at a very good figure of $20,000 a year. There was no reason why they shouldn't have hire a lot of good lawyers for a lot less than $20,000 a year. But a job in 1915 doesn't pay off the bailiff in 1914. When I knocked, it still sounded hollow.

  So I took my one plunge in the stock market. One share of common stock of the American Electric Power Company, and it was cheap as dirt in the middle of the Depression. But it turned out to be a very expensive piece of paper. For a lot of people.

  It was a coupon-clipper now, and I wanted to know how they were going to take care of my investment. So I took advantage of the stockholder's right. I went down to look at the stock records of the American Electric Power Company. From the literal dust of time, I dug up certain facts: In May, 1914, Montague M. Irwin had sold five hundred shares of common stock, at par, to Wilbur Satterfield and Alex Cantor, who were, I was to discover later, officials of the company. That meant that Irwin had plenty in his pocket in late May to pay off the mortgages and have some change left over. But when had he got hold of the stock? That was easy. In March, 1914, the company had been reorganized and a big chunk of new stock issued. Irwin's stock was part of the new chunk. The boys had passed it to Irwin (or has he bought it?) and some of the other boys had bought it back. (Irwin must have kicked himself about selling it, for it began to climb shortly and kept on climbing for quite a spell. Had Messrs. Satterfield and Cantor taken Irwin? They were old hands, on the inside. But Irwin had had to sell, and quick. There was the mortgage.)

  Irwin had had the stock, and had sold it to Messrs. Satterfield and Cantor. So far, so good. But how had Irwin got the stock? Had they just given it to him out of the blue? Not likely. But why do people give you great big chunks of nice new stock issues with gold seals? The answer is simple: Because you are nice to them.

  The job, then, was to find out if Judge Irwin–then state's Attorney General–had been nice to the American Electric Power Company. And that meant a long dig. With exactly nothing in the bottom of the hole. For the entire period when Judge Irwin was Attorney General, the American Electric Power Company had been an exemplary citizen. It had looked every man in the eye and had asked no favors. There was nothing in the hole.

  Well, how had Judge Irwin spent his time as Attorney General?

  The usual odds and ends, it developed. But there had almost been a case. The suit to recover royalties from the Southern Belle Fuel Company, which had operated, under lease, the state coal lands. There had been some hullabaloo about it, a little stir in the Legislature, and some editorials, and some speechmaking, but it was only the ghost of a whisper now. It was probably the only person in the state who knew about it now.

  Unless Judge Irwin knew, and woke up in the night and lay in the dark.

  It was all about the interpretation of a royalty contract between the state and the company. It was a very ambiguous contract. Perhaps it had been designed to be that way. In any case, by one reading, the state stood to gain about $150,000 in back royalties and God knew how much before the end of the contract period. But it was a very ambiguous contract. It was so ambiguous that, just as the shooting was about to start, the Attorney General decided that there was no case. "We feel, however," he said in his public statement, "that it is most reprehensible that those responsible for this agreement should have been so lax in their protection of the public interest as to accept the figures of this contract by which the state has sold for a song one of her richest assets. But we also feel that, since the contract exists and is susceptible of only one reasonable interpretation, this state, which wished to encourage industry and enterprise within her borders, cannot do otherwise than bow to an arrangement which, though obviously unjust in its working, is binding in the law. And we must remember, even in circumstances such as this, that it is by law that justice herself lives."

  I read that in the old _Times-Chronicle__ of February 26, 1914, which was dated a couple of weeks before the foreclosure proceedings were instituted against the Irwin plantation. And about three weeks before the final reorganization of the American Electric and the issue of the new stock. The relationship was a relationship in time.

  But is any relationship a relationship in time and only in time? I eat a persimmon and the teeth of a tinker in Tibet are put on edge. The flower-in-the-crannied-wall theory. We have to accept it because so often our teeth are on edge from persimmons we didn't eat. So I plucked the flower out of its cranny and discovered an astonishing botanical fact. I discovered that its delicate little root, with many loops and kinks, ran all the way to New York City, where it tapped the lush dung heap called the Madison Corporation. The flower in the cranny was the Southern Belle Fuel Company. So I plucked another little flower called the American Electric Power Company, and discovered that its delicate little root tapped the same dung heap.

  I was not prepared to say that I knew what God and men are, but I was getting ready to make a shrewd guess about a particular man. But just a guess.

  It was just a guess for a long time. For I had reached the stage in my problem where there was nothing to do but pray. That stage always comes. You do all you can, and you pray till you can't pray, and then you go to sleep and hope to see it all in the dream, by grace. "Kubla Khan," the benzine ring, Caedmon's song–they all came in the dream.

  It came to me. Just as I fell asleep one night. It was only a name. A funny name. _Mortimer L. Littlepaugh__. The name drifted around inside my head, and I thought how funny it was and went to sleep. But when I woke up in the morning, my first thought was: _Mortimer L. Littlepaugh__. Then walking down the street that day, I bought a newspaper and as I looked at it I saw the name _Mortimer L. Littlepaugh__. Only it was not in the newspaper I had just bought. It was on a yellow, crumbling, old-cheese-smelling sheet, which I saw, suddenly, in my mind's eye. _Mortimer L. Littlepaugh's Death Accident, Coroner's Jury Decides__. That was it. Then, wavering slowly up, like a chunk of waterlogged wood stirred loose from the depth, the phrase came: _Counsel for the American Electric Power Company. __That was it.

  I went back to the files, and found the story. Mortimer had fallen out of a hotel window, or rather, off the little iron-railed balcony outside the window. He had fallen from the fifth floor, and that was the end of Mortimer. At the inquest her si
ster, who lived with him, said he had recently been in ill health and had complained of fits of dizziness. There had been some theory of suicide, for Mortimer's affairs were in a tangled condition, it developed, and the railing was high for an accidental fall. And there was a little mystery about a letter a bellhop swore Mortimer had given him the evening before his death, with a four-bit tip and instructions to go out and mail it immediately. The bellhop swore it had been addressed to Miss Littlepaugh. Miss Littlepaugh swore that she had received no letter. Well, Mortimer had been dizzy.

  He had also been a lawyer for the American Electric. He had, I learned, been let out not long before Irwin came in. It did not sound too promising, but one more dead end wouldn't matter. There had been plenty of dead ends in the six or eight months I had been on the job.

  But this was not a dead end. There was Miss Lily Mae Littlepaugh, whom, after five weeks, I tracked down to a dark, foul, fox-smelling lair in a rooming house on the edge of the slums, in Memphis. She was a gaunt old woman, wearing black spotted and stained with old food, almost past the pretense of gentility, blinking slowly at me from weak red eyes set in the age-crusted face, sitting there in the near-dark room, exuding her old-fox smell, which mixed with the smell of oriental incense and candle wax. There were holy pictures on the walls on every spare space, and in one corner of the room, on a little table, a sort of shrine, with a curtain of faded wine-colored velvet hanging above it, and inside not a Madonna or crucifix as you would expect from the other pictures, but a big image made of felt and mounted on a board which I at first took to be a sunflower pincushion swollen to an impractical size, but then realized was an image of the sun and its rays, The Life-Giver. And in that room. Before it, on the table, a candle burned fatly as though fed not merely from wax but from the substance of the greasy air.

  In the middle of the room was a table with a wine-colored velvet cover, and on the table a dish of poisonously colored hard candies, a glass of water, and a couple of long narrow horns or trumpets apparently made of pewter. I sat well back from the table. On the other side, Miss Littlepaugh studied me from the red eyes, then said, in a voice surprisingly strong, "Shall we begin?"

  She continued to study me, then said, half as though to herself. "If Mrs. Dalzell sent you, I reckon–"

  "She sent me." She had sent me. It had cost me twenty-five dollars.

  "I reckon it's all right."

  "It's all right," I said.

  She got up and went to the candle on the little table, watching me all the while as tough, in the last flicker of the light before she blew it out, I might turn out to be distinctly not all right. Then she blew out the candle and made her way back to the chair.

  After that, there were wheezings and moaning for a bit, the chink of metal which I took to be from one of the trumpets, some conversation, not very enlightening or edifying, from Princess Spotted Deer, who was Miss Littlepaugh's control, and some even more unenlightening remarks, given in a husky guttural, from somebody on the Other Side who claimed to be named Jimmy and to have been a friend of my youth. Meanwhile, the radiator against the wall at my back thumped and churned, and I inhaled the pitch darkness and sweated. Jimmy was saying that I was going to take a trip.

  I leaned forward in the dark and said, "Ask for Mortimer. I want to ask Mortimer a question."

  One of the trumpets chinked softly again, and the Princess made a remark I didn't catch.

  "It's Mortimer L. I want," I said.

  There was some huskiness in the trumpet, very indistinct.

  "He is trying to come through," Miss Littlepaugh's voice said, "but the vibrations are bad."

  "I want to ask him a question," I said. "Get Mortimer. You know, Mortimer L. The L. is for Lonzo."

  The vibrations were still bad.

  "I want to ask him about the suicide."

  The vibrations must have been very bad, for there wasn't a sound now.

  "Get Mortimer," I said. "I want to ask him about the insurance. I want to ask him about the last letter he wrote."

  The vibrations must have been terrific, for a trumpet banged on the table and bounced off to the floor, and there was a racket and rustling across the table, and when the electric light came suddenly on, there was Miss Littlepaugh standing by the door with her hand on the switch, staring at me out of the red eyes, while her breath hissed quite audible over old teeth.

  "You lied," she said, "you lied to me!"

  "No, I didn't lie to you," I said. "My name is jack Burden, and Mrs. Dalzell sent me."

  "She's a fool," she hissed, "a fool to send you–you–"

  "She thought I was all right. And she wasn't a fool to want twenty-five dollars."

  I took out my wallet, removed some bills, and held them in my hand. "I may not be all right," I said, "but this stuff always is."

  "What do you want?" she demanded, her eyes snatching from my face to the green sheaf and back to my face.

  "What I said," I said. "I want to talk to Mortimer Lonzo Littlepaugh. If you can get him on the wire."

  "What do you want from him?"

  "What I said I wanted. I want to ask him about the suicide."

  "It was an accident," she said dully.

  I detached a bill and held it up. "See that," I said. "That is one hundred bucks." I laid it on the table, at the end toward her. "Look at it good," I said. "It is yours. Pick it up."

  She looked fearfully at the bill.

  I held up two more bills. "Two more," I said, "just like it. Three hundred dollars. If you could put me in touch with Mortimer, the money would be yours."

  "The vibrations," she murmured, "sometimes the vibrations–"

  "Yeah," I said, "the vibrations. But a hundred buck will do a lot for the vibrations. Pick up that bill. It is yours."

  "No," she said quickly and huskily, "no."

  I took one of the two bills in my hand and laid it on top of the other one on the table.

  "Pick it up," I said, "and to hell with the vibrations. Don't you like money? Don't you need money? When did you get a square meal? Pick it up and start talking."

  "No," she whispered, cringing back against the wall, with a hand now on the doorknob as though she might flee, staring at the money. The she stared at me, thrusting her head out suddenly, saying, "I know–I know you–you're trying to trick me–you're from the insurance company!"

  "Wrong number," I said. "But I know about Mortimer's insurance policy. Suicide clause. That's why you–"

  "He–" she hissed, and her gaunt face gathered itself into a contortion which might have been grief, or rage, or despair, you couldn't tell for sure–"he borrowed on his insurance–nearly all–and didn't tell me–he–"

  "So you lied for almost nothing," I said. "You collected the insurance, all right, but there wasn't much left to collect."

  "No," she said, "there wasn't. He left me–that way–he didn't tell me–he left me with nothing–and this–this–" She looked about the room, the broken furniture, the foulness, and seemed to shudder and shrink from it as tough she had just entered and perceived it. "This–" she said, "this."

  "Three hundred would help," I said, and nodded toward the two bills on the velvet.

  "This–this–" she said, "he left me–he was a coward–oh, it was easy for him–easy–all he had to do was–"

  "Was to jump," I finished.

  That quieted her. She looked at me heavily for a long moment, then said, "He didn't jump."

  "My dear Miss Littlepaugh," I said in the tone usually described as "not unkindly,"

  "Why don't you admit it? Your brother has been dead a long time and it will do him no harm. The insurance company has forgotten about the business. Nobody would blame you for lying–you had to live. And–"

  "It wasn't the money," she said. "It was the disgrace. I wanted him buried from the church. I wanted–" She stopped suddenly.

  "Ah," I said, and glanced at the holy pictures around the wall.

  "I was a believer then," she said, paused, corrected
herself, "I believe now in God, but it is different."

  "Yes, yes," I said soothingly, and looked at the one trumpet left on the table. "And, of course, it is stupid to think of it as a disgrace. When your brother did it–"

  "It was an accident," she said.

  "Now, Miss Littlepaugh, you just admitted the fact a second ago."

  "It was an accident," she repeated, drawing back into herself.

  "No," I said, "he did it, but it was not his fault. He was driven to it." I watched her face. "He had given years to that company, then they threw him out. To make room for a man who had done a wicked thing. Who drove your brother to his death. Isn't that true?" I got up, and took a step toward her. "Isn't that true?"

  She looked at me steadily, then broke. "He did! He drove him to it, he killed him, he was hired because it was a bribe–my brother knew that–he told them he knew it–but they threw him out–they said he couldn't prove it, and threw him out–"