by James Yaffe
“And either way,” McBride put in, “there was no reason for us to let you know about Pulaski. Like Leland just said, he isn’t relevant.”
“Maybe the unknown visitor wasn’t the murderer,” Ann said, “but is afraid to come forward on account of the publicity.”
“So Pulaski came in and killed her after that visitor left?” McBride laughed. “You’re putting an awful lot of people into that room at midnight on a cold rainy night! Come on, Ann, admit it, we’ve got good reason for thinking that Pulaski is in the clear. For Christ sake, you know I wouldn’t hold out on you. I’ve got a legal obligation to keep the defense informed at all times of every pertinent fact that comes into my possession. I take that obligation very seriously. That’s the way I operate. Have I ever operated any other way?”
The question was so fantastic as to make both of us speechless for a moment. A dozen times since I’ve been on the job we’ve caught McBride out trying to suppress evidence that was favorable to our clients. Every time it’s happened we’ve let him know about it, and every time he’s been forced to give one of his sheepish grins and apologize. So what the hell could he mean by asking that question? Was he making some kind of cynical joke? Or—and this is the possibility that boggles the mind!—did he really believe in his own protestation of innocence? Could a man be such a natural-born liar that he gets to believing his own lies?
A stupid question, I realized. This is practically the definition of a politician.
“Of course you couldn’t do anything underhanded, Marvin,” Ann said. “It’s just because I know you couldn’t that I fully expect you to tell me everything you’ve learned this morning from the coroner’s autopsy and from your various lab reports. There’s no chance you’d even think of leaving out any of that information—is there?”
McBride grunted. “You got that stuff for them, Leland?”
“Absolutely.” Grantley flipped open his notebook and read from it. “‘Time of death, as determined by the contents of the stomach, etcetera—somewhere between ten-thirty and one A.M.’ So you see Stubbins could well have killed her before he passed out on her floor.
“Report from the fingerprint people. The room was loaded with prints, of course. Plenty of Edna’s, her mother’s, the girls who worked for her, plenty of your client’s. And about two dozen unidentified prints, some comparatively new, some pretty faded and probably unidentifiable. Customers of hers from the recent past, no doubt. We’ll try them out on the FBI fingerprint bank, but most of them, I’d guess, won’t have any record.”
“How about Ron Pulaski?” I asked. “Any of his prints in her room?”
“I thought of that,” Grantley said, “so I had Pulaski’s prints taken when he came to my office yesterday. Results negative. No prints of his showed up in her room.
“Now for the test results from the lab. Let me see—yes, well, at first glance this item might appear to confirm one part of your client’s story. The coffee cup had traces in it of a common drug, known as a beta blocker. It’s the Pulaski woman’s heart medicine, she was taking one pill at every meal for angina pectoris. It’s supposed to regularize the heartbeat, but one of its most common side effects is to cause drowsiness, fainting, in large enough doses unconsciousness. Stubbins had enough of the stuff in him to make up three or four doses. More than enough to knock him out.”
“Well, there you are,” Ann said.
“I’m truly sorry, Ann, but if you think about it for a moment, it really strengthens our case, not yours. You were asking yesterday why Stubbins didn’t get out of her house right away after he killed her, why he fell asleep in her room and stayed there until the next morning when the old lady found him? Well, this lab report answers that question, doesn’t it? Edna Pulaski was preparing to take her heart medicine when Stubbins broke in. She’d put the pills in her coffee, but she hadn’t drunk it yet. After the murder, Stubbins swallowed down that coffee—needing something to steady his nerves, I imagine—and the drug knocked him out. He was just unlucky.”
So the report on Edna Pulaski’s medicine definitely wasn’t good news for our client, I thought. Chalk up another to Mom.
“If Edna Pulaski was planning to take her medicine in that coffee,” Ann said, “how come she put in three times her usual dose?”
McBride spoke up. “Happens all the time, doesn’t it? People get confused, they forget how many pills they’ve taken, done it plenty of times myself.”
“What about the murder weapon, the cloth that was used to strangle her? You said you found some fibers around her bruises?”
“They were cotton,” said Grantley, “but the lab can’t determine the color or what kind of object they came from.”
“You compared those fibers to the rope Stubbins was wearing around his waist?”
Grantley cleared his throat slightly. “They didn’t come from that rope, as a matter of fact. Of course, that’s not at all inconsistent with our contention that he used some other weapon and threw it out the window.”
“Did the Pulaski woman have any kind of record?” I said. “Did you ever arrest her? She was breaking the law, wasn’t she?”
“It isn’t easy, nailing these prossies,” said McBride. “You need witnesses, and the johns—their clients—don’t usually want to come forward. Actually, the Pulaski woman did come to our notice once. Six or seven months ago the cops arrested her, one of those roundups they make every so often. They brought her in on a vice charge, and she was questioned by some of my lower-echelon people, and then I talked to her myself for a few minutes. But her lawyer got her out on bail, and the charge had to be dropped on account of the witness changed his mind and refused to testify. When I heard about this murder yesterday, I didn’t remember the name. It was only when I got to looking over my records this morning that I recognized who she was.”
Then he got to his feet, rubbing his hands together. “So we’re all busy people, better break this off, pleasant as it is to talk to you both. Everything all straightened out between us, sweetie?” he said, coming around the desk to Ann. “Just a little misunderstanding, right? No offense meant, no offense taken.”
He took her by the shoulders and gave her a big loud kiss on the cheek. She tried to hide her reaction, but I heard her gag a little, and saw her eyes roll up, the way your eyes do when you’re disgusted. No doubt about it this time—whatever had put McBride on the wagon Saturday night, he was definitely off it again.
EIGHT
When Ann and I got back to the office, toward eleven-thirty, Mabel Gibson greeted me with the news that my mother had been trying to get me for the last hour. I went into my room, shut the door, and dialed Mom’s number.
“It just came to me,” Mom said. “All of sudden into my head it popped. What was bothering me last night.”
“You told me nothing was bothering you.”
“Naturally. Did I want you worrying? You’re a good boy, you always believe what I tell you. So I’ll meet you at lunch, you’ll hear something positively amazing.”
“About the Pulaski murder?”
“What other murders have you got? Bring Roger with you too—someplace near your office.”
“We could meet downstairs in the courthouse cafeteria.”
“No, this wouldn’t be good. Too many big ears belonging to lawyers. You know the little Chinese place two blocks away from you? What’s it called—it’s something like New York City?”
“New Wok City, is that the place you mean?”
“Exactly. I knew it was a name I had good feelings about. Could you and Roger be there in ten minutes maybe, fifteen top? Otherwise we’ll have to wait for a table.”
“I guess we could manage that, Mom. Give me some hint what—”
But she hung up the phone. So I went out to the waiting room to look for Roger, and found him making long-distance calls through our switchboard.
“Are you hungry enough to eat an early lunch?” I said. Unnecessary question. At Roger’s age you’re always hungry
enough, even if you just finished a five-course meal.
We walked the two blocks to the New Wok City. It was bitter cold out, and my nose and ears were red and stinging by the time we got inside. The place was small and bare—only a few paper lanterns and some dragon drawings on the walls to give it a more or less Chinese atmosphere. (Actually it had been an Italian place until six months ago, and a Hungarian place six months before that, and it still had the same waiters.) Mom was already seated at one of the tables. Tapping on the cloth with her spoon, looking as if she could hardly contain herself.
She did though. Her sense of drama was stronger than her impatience. She told us to order our food, and she waited for her tea, and she took a few sips of it. Then she asked us to tell her in detail exactly what both of us had been doing this morning.
First Roger described the results of the long-distance calls he had been making. “The American Association of University Professors,” he said, “are very friendly, obliging people. They dug up Harry Stubbins—or at least, there was a Harry Stubbins who was a dues-paying member until five years ago. Then he dropped out of sight completely. He was an associate professor of English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and they’ve given me the name of his department chairman. He’s out for lunch just now, I’ve left a message for him at his office. Also, I managed to talk to three or four of the guys who were bowling with Ron Pulaski on Saturday night. So far they confirm his story, but I’ve got a lot more to go.”
Then it was my turn to give a play-by-play account of my morning. As soon as I was finished Mom asked me sharply when I was planning to put that question to Ron Pulaski—whether he’d heard the news of Edna’s death on radio or television. I suppressed my annoyance as best I could, and answered stiffly that I just hadn’t had the time yet but I would get around to it shortly.
Finally Mom came out with what was on her mind. “All along I had the feeling there’s something about this murder that was right in front of my eyes only I wasn’t seeing it. Until this morning early I suddenly saw it.”
“So what was it, Mom?”
“Two facts you picked up in the last two days. Two different facts, but now you should put them together, you should look at them side by side, you’ll see there’s one thing only they could mean. First fact: Talking to people at this Pulaski’s house, you found out what I asked you to, that she didn’t like drinking. She wouldn’t let her massage girls do any of it. She wouldn’t stand for it in her customers even. A customer comes to her, he’s got liquor on his breath, she kicks him right out of the bed.
“Second fact: What I pointed out to you yesterday, and you agreed I was right. At the dinner Saturday night District Attorney McBride didn’t do any drinking. Not a drop of alcohol he took, not even a sip wine or beer. Only water.
“So isn’t it possible, this first fact is the explanation for the second fact?
“Why wasn’t McBride drinking last night? Because he had after dinner a date with Edna Pulaski, and he didn’t want on his breath the smell of liquor, so she wouldn’t kick him out of bed.”
It was a little hard for me to catch my breath after this. “You’re saying that Marvin McBride and Edna Pulaski—”
“A little bit of old-fashioned hanky panky, like there’s been between men and women for a million years already. Why should it come to you like such a shock?”
But Roger and I were still in the grip of that shock, so Mom sat back and went on talking. “Almost I could feel sympathy with this McBride. At that dinner he’s a man who’s being pulled in two opposite directions, like a tug of war. In one direction is that delicious wine, everybody around him is drinking it, it’s practically begging him to drink it too. In the other direction is this delicious woman, waiting for him in her apartment, lying on the bed with her clothes off. Which direction is going to pull him harder? It’s a simple case of Uncle Moe all over again, only with Moe it was eating not drinking.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Who was Uncle Moe?”
“Your papa’s uncle, your great-uncle. He was the rich one, and you couldn’t get around it, he was a man that enjoyed his food. Thick juicy steaks, with so much gravy on them the meat looked like it was drowning. Chocolate eclairs, the type you stick your fork in them and the cream squirts all over the table. All his life Moe eats and eats. The doctors tell him he wouldn’t do his health any good with so much food, but Moe goes on eating. And getting fat!
“And the other thing I should tell you from Moe, he loves his wife, your great-aunt Millie. They got married when they were both young kiddies. Moe wasn’t older than twenty, he didn’t weigh more than a hundred eighty-five. And Millie was younger even, and she never weighed more than a hundred ten. And they’re married forty years, and Moe is swelling up bigger every day, and one day Millie says to him, ‘Moe, you got to lose some weight!’
“And Moe says, ‘Why? Are you listening to those doctors? They told me I’d be dead in five years I didn’t stop eating, and that was thirty years ago, and most of them are dead.’
“And Millie says, ‘It isn’t the doctors. It’s when you climb up on top of me, Moe. You’re too heavy already. You sink down on me, it’s like the whole ceiling is coming down, I can’t breathe, I feel like every bone in my body is breaking. I’m telling you, Moe, you lose a few pounds, like maybe fifty or a hundred, or else you don’t climb on top of me no more!’
“So maybe you can imagine it, what a blow this was for Moe. He hoped there was some easy way out. Like Millie should climb on top of him. But this didn’t work neither. He was too round, his stomach stuck up too high, she felt like she was climbing on top of a wave in the ocean, and she kept sliding off before either one of them could do anything. So finally Moe knew what he was up against. It was do without the thick steaks or do without Millie. One or the other.
“Such a terrible decision to make. Back and forth he went, fighting it out inside himself. For weeks he wasn’t getting any sleep, there was bags under his eyes, everybody felt sorry for him what he was going through.”
“How did everybody find out?” I said.
“Millie told them, naturally. It wasn’t easy by her either. She needed sympathy. A woman can’t keep her troubles in a bottle inside herself, like a man can do. So the whole family gave a big sigh from relief when Moe finally made his decision. And this—the point I’m getting at—is exactly what your McBride went through last night at the dinner. A bottle wine or a good time in the bed with Edna Pulaski? He decided on the bed.”
Finally I was getting over the shock Mom had given me. “The evidence seems a little thin to me,” I said. “Maybe McBride is having an affair with someone, that wouldn’t surprise me a bit. And maybe that’s why he wasn’t drinking Saturday night. But the fact that Edna Pulaski didn’t like men who drank could be nothing but a simple coincidence.”
“Naturally. So let’s throw in a third fact. What happens right after the murder is discovered? What amazing thing happens, like a miracle, you said it yourself, Davey? McBride suddenly gets up early in the morning—a Sunday morning yet—and breaks the habits from his lifetime by going to work. He announces he’s taking charge personally of this murder case. So why?”
“Because Doris Dryden shamed him into it. She challenged him, at Saturday night’s dinner, to take over the first murder case that came along, and he accepted the challenge. When a murder case did come along, he had no choice, he had to put up a show. Once the election is over, he’ll drop this case and let Grantley handle it.”
“If this is true, isn’t the show he’s putting up a little bit too realistic so far? He was down in his office by nine o’clock Sunday morning. This early he didn’t have to be. He could wait till noon before he made his announcement. And this morning too, also at nine o’clock, he’s in court personally to argue against the bail. He was drinking last night—Ann Swenson smelled it on his breath—but he still got up and went to court. To me this don’t sound like being ashamed he
shouldn’t accept a challenge. To me this sounds like he really wants to handle this case. He don’t want to let go any part of it. He wants to keep his eyes on every development, every clue, every new piece information. And again I’m asking why.”
“Because he’s personally involved in it somehow!” Roger suddenly spoke up. “And he’s afraid some embarrassing facts might come out!”
“What else?” said Mom, with a nod of satisfaction. She curled some noodles around her chopsticks, shoved them into her mouth, and washed them down with a swig of tea. Then she went on, “So let me throw at you fact number four. We all saw McBride on the television last night, talking to the reporters. You remember one of the things he said to them? He said what a terrible room Edna Pulaski got killed in—‘with the neon sign, with the Chinese letters on it, flashing on and off through the windows.’ Those were the words he used, more or less. But when did McBride ever get a chance to see that room? He didn’t go down to look at it on Sunday morning, like his assistant Grantley did. And even if Grantley described it to him, he couldn’t describe any neon sign with Chinese letters flashing on and off through the windows. Because in broad daylight the sign was turned off, there wasn’t any flashing. In other words, is it crazy to imagine that McBride does know that room—because he’s been having an affair with the woman that lived in it?
“And if you add to this that McBride admits he actually met this Edna Pulaski—six or seven months ago, when she was arrested.”
“But he talked to her for only a few minutes—”