by James Yaffe
“So that old drunk thinks he’s going to take a potshot at me, does he?” Marvin said. “Well, he’s got another think coming!”
I pointed out that there was very little chance of potshots, since there was absolutely no reason to believe Stubbins had a gun.
“You won’t be foolhardy though, will you, Marvin?” Ed said. “If any disturbance starts up in the crowd, I hope you’ll duck down fast.”
McBride laughed. “Duck! I never ducked out of a fight in my life! I’ll stand right up there and tell him to shoot at me! I’d just like to see him try it!”
Laughing again, he turned to Ann. “See what an upstanding, exemplary, honest type you’re defending these days, sweetie? ‘Homeless,’ everybody calls them. And we’re all supposed to cry our eyes out over them. ‘Gutless!’ that’s more like it, if you ask my opinion. When I was growing up, we pulled them in for vagrancy and threw them in the tank until they dried out. Now we send them to psychiatrists, and pray over them, and make speeches about them. In New York City—did you know?—they put them up in luxury hotels!”
Then, for a moment, McBride wasn’t smiling any more, and his voice got tighter. “God, if there’s anybody I really hate in this world, it’s these drunken old bums!”
He grunted, then he looked at his watch. “So I guess you haven’t dug him out of his hole yet, have you? What about the cops, Leland?”
“Pat Delaney is in charge, he’s here personally. He told me he’d let us know right away if they caught Stubbins.”
“Pat came down himself to keep the son of a bitch away from me? I feel honored. It never occurred to me Pat had so much affection for me he’d give up an evening to keep me in one piece.”
McBride laughed, then he looked at his watch again, and in practically the same motion he jumped to his feet. “Sorry, fellows, it’s game time, the team has to get out on the field. Come on, Ed, it’s five after eight, we don’t want to keep the fans waiting.” He squeezed his hands together, which somehow came through as a gesture of tremendous elation. “Suddenly I’m feeling terrific! I holed myself up for the whole afternoon yesterday, working on this masterpiece—believe me, it’s going to kill the people!”
And he swept past us, through the door, with Ed Brock bustling behind him as fast as his bulk could carry him. A few seconds later we heard the roar of the crowd.
* * *
My original idea was to describe that political rally in detail—the people cheering and heckling, the signs and pennants being waved, the TV cameras set up on all sides, the flashbulbs going off. Above all, McBride’s speech, full of inflated rhetoric, wild promises that nobody expected him to keep (least of all himself), scornful abuse heaped on “them”—it had a good chance of being one of his greatest performances, because he was on a real high that night. Every minute his face got redder, his gestures wider, his voice hoarser and more feverish. He was hotter than the crowd he was trying to heat up.
I’ve decided against this, though. Everybody knows what a political rally is like. It’s not much different in Mesa Grande from anywhere else in the country, except that here there tends to be a higher percentage of cowboy hats in the crowd. Not worn by cowboys, by the way. There are very few cowboys left in our section of the country. The hats are carried by all the fanciest haberdashery stores, and they aren’t cheap. Anyway, as Roger pointed out while we all stood and watched McBride, with Ed Brock and Grantley sitting behind him, “It looks like a B-picture version of Citizen Kane.”
McBride began with the barefoot farmboy and Great University stuff, then switched to leading the crowd in a chant of his own invention, “Hard on Crime, Soft on People.” Roger was watching in disgust, but also he couldn’t take his eyes away. When you’re young, it’s still possible to be fascinated by the lunacy; you’re seeing it for the first time.
As the McBride juggernaut rolled on, I looked around the crowd for Stubbins. I still didn’t see him, but the way people were squeezed together it wouldn’t have been hard to miss him.
And then, suddenly, he was there. He rose up from the center of the crowd. Like one of those old Esther Williams movies, one of those water ballets where the girls are swimming around in the form of a flower, and out of the middle of the flower Esther comes popping up. Not much resemblance between Harry Stubbins and Esther Williams though. With his scrawny arms and neck, his pasty complexion and his red eyes, he looked more like a ghost. In a torn flopping ragged overcoat, instead of a clean white sheet.
“Murderer!” the ghost called out, in a hoarse cracking voice. “You’re a murderer!”
“Who’s that, who’s that?”
McBride, standing on the platform, clutching the microphone, swiveled his head around, trying to locate the source of the disturbance. His jaw shoved forward and his eyes bulging, he looked even more like an angry bulldog than usual.
“Trying to kill me!” Stubbins went on croaking at him. “Trying to send me to the gas chamber! Murderer, murderer!”
McBride’s head stopped swiveling as he got Stubbins into focus, and his eyes bulged even wider with shock.
Though I was seven or eight yards away, with a lot of the crowd in between, Stubbins’s voice, thick from alcohol, was still loud enough to carry to where I was standing. “What’re you doing up there? Sounding off up there—big crimefighter, are you? Everybody knows what you are! Drunkard, whoremonger, cheat!”
I started to push my way toward him. I could see Roger, off to my left, doing the same thing. And I could see some of the cops, on the edges of the crowd, trying to make their move too. One of them was Pat Delaney.
Stubbins shot out a skinny arm, stabbing a finger in McBride’s direction. “You’re me!” he cried. “We’re one and the same person! Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!”
I feel pretty sure that McBride didn’t understand a word of the French, but he must have caught the general idea, because he turned as red as Stubbins and made a little backward jump. This seemed to infuriate Stubbins. His croak turned into a shrill screech: “Don’t run away from me! Long-lost brother you tried to hide from the world! Should be up there with you—”
By this time Delaney and another cop, in uniform, had broken through and were getting closer to Stubbins. But they were a little too late. Suddenly Stubbins was moving forward, plunging through the crowd in the direction of the platform, shouting as he went, “Let them see us together! Let them see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself!”
“Stop him!” McBride’s voice was as loud and shrill as Stubbins’s. “Don’t let that nut up here! Where are the cops, for Christ sake?”
The crowd seemed to give way before Stubbins like water, and the next thing I knew he was scrambling up the platform, fantastically strong and agile considering what a wreck he was. And at the same time he was reaching into the pocket of his ragged overcoat, trying to pull something out.
“My God”—a piglike squeal from McBride—“he’s got a gun!” He started backing away from Stubbins, waving his hands in front of his face. “Don’t shoot! For Christ sake, don’t shoot!”
Stubbins’s hand came out of his pocket, but I couldn’t see any gun come out with it. “Judas!” he was shouting. “Want to crucify your brother, do you? Ought to get the going rate! Here’s your thirty pieces of silver!”
A splattering of small objects sprayed out of Stubbins’s hand and made clanging clattering sounds on the floor of the platform. Most of them were coins, also I saw some buttons and nails. As they hit the floor, Pat Delaney and the uniformed cop finally made it to the platform, jumped up, and grabbed Stubbins by the arms. The energy seemed to go out of him all at once, he went limp between them, hanging like a popped balloon. And McBride was standing still, blinking, looking as if he was hypnotized.
Then I heard Delaney’s voice. He had bent down to the floor, and now he was straightening up, holding something in his hand. “Hey, we been looking for this!” I heard him say. “It’s that ring—”
Getting closer, I saw what he had in his hand—a gold ring, with a large green stone in it. What else could it be except Edna Pulaski’s ring, the one that had been stolen from her effects when her body was taken to the morgue?
A wail broke out of Stubbins. “Somebody gave it to me—I was begging on the street yesterday, somebody put it in my cap—I swear it, I swear it!”
McBride gave himself a shake, blinked, came out of his hypnotic trance. His voice was a little shaky at first, but it gained strength as he went on: “Arrest him!” He waved at Pat Delaney. “Do your duty, Captain! Arrest that man—put him behind bars—”
Leland Grantley, his hand on McBride’s arm, spoke in a low urgent voice. “He’s free on bond, Marvin, you can’t really—”
“Son of a bitch, he’s violated his bond! Disorderly conduct—making threats of violence—possession of stolen property—suspicion of committing a second murder! For Christ sake, arrest him, take him away, get him out of here!”
I saw Delaney heave a sigh, then Stubbins was hustled away, and Ann and Roger and I followed. We saw him being put into a squad car, with Delaney sitting next to him, and Ann had just time to assure him we’d meet him shortly at the jail. “Don’t say anything to anybody till we get there!” she called out to him as the squad car pulled away.
Behind us we heard the voice of McBride. All his confidence was back, and his voice, as he harangued the crowd, couldn’t have been more full of triumph. “Yes, Goddammit, I am a fighter against crime! I’m proud that people call me that! I’m the best damn crimefighter who’s ever held office in this fair city—which the good people of Mesa Grande know is the gospel truth, which is why they’ve returned me to office four times in a row already! And they’ll be returning me a fifth time, so I’m giving fair warning here and now to the bums, the thieves, the druggies, the killers—you don’t stand a chance in this town! That’s my pledge to the people of Mesa Grande—vote McBride in, kick the vermin out!”
I could hear the crowd going wild with delight. Because they believed he was a knight in shining armor, or because he was putting on a great show? It didn’t matter, he’d get their votes anyway. And a lot of other votes too, I thought, seeing that on the outskirts of the crowd the TV cameras were grinding away.
These days the difference between entertainment and politics is getting harder and harder to notice.
* * *
We were at the jail till after ten that night. We stood by while Stubbins got booked, with Grantley and Pat Delaney in attendance.
After the booking, we talked to Stubbins for a while, though it wasn’t easy. The drunkenness had gone out of him, but what was left was pure exhaustion. When we asked him questions, it took him a long time to answer them, and then the most he was able to squeeze out were monosyllables.
All we really found out from him was that he didn’t have any idea who had given him Edna Pulaski’s ring. When people dropped things in his hat, he never bothered to lift his head and see who they were. “You don’t want to do that,” he said. “You could find yourself looking them in the eye.”
SIXTEEN
Just before I left the jail building, close to ten-thirty, I gave Mom a call. I knew she’d still be up, waiting to hear from me, because she’d been anxious about my mission to Manitou Park. Also she undoubtedly wanted to hear everything about these latest developments.
Mom told me she’d been watching the television news reports about McBride’s rally. “But the cameras weren’t close enough I could see what was happening up on the stage. Some kind of fight, wasn’t it? And this crazy old man—this was your client?”
I filled her in on all the details, everything that had happened at McBride’s rally. There was a long pause after I finished, and then she said, “It’s interesting, isn’t it?”
I knew that flat noncommital tone of voice very well. “What does that mean, Mom? You tickled your brains, you’ve found your last little piece, you’re ready to clear up the case?”
“It means I couldn’t get to sleep yet. If you aren’t too tired, why don’t you come over here, I’ll give you a cup coffee, and we’ll talk a little.”
“That definitely means you’ve got the answer, doesn’t it?”
“In half an hour I’ll see you,” Mom said. “Do you think you could invite Roger? If he isn’t too tired either.”
In exactly half an hour, at a little after eleven, Mom opened the door for us. She had coffee and schnecken all laid out on her kitchen table, following her usual principle that our stomachs have to be full before she can start filling our brains.
Tonight I was too curious to stick by the rules. “Never mind the coffee,” I said. “Tell us what’s up. Our tongues are hanging out from the suspense.”
“Put them back in, they could bump into something.” Mom went ahead and poured coffee. Then she returned to her chair, took a couple of sips, leaned forward, and told us who the murderer was and how she knew.
Obviously she was right.
“But the problem is,” she went on, “you couldn’t prove this yet. First you have to clear away the lies, you have to make the liars start telling the truth. Does your boss, Ann Swenson, still have that snapshot Doris Dryden gave her—the picture of McBride lying in the Pulaski woman’s bed?”
“I think she does.”
“Good, good. So here’s my suggestion what you should do. First thing tomorrow morning…”
SEVENTEEN
As soon as I got to the office Thursday morning, I filled Ann in on everything Mom had told me the night before.
At first Ann was as skeptical as I had been, but I could see her turning into a true believer as each logical brick was added to the house Mom had built. Ann also agreed that we didn’t have quite enough yet to bring our theory in front of a jury. So I outlined the strategy that Mom had suggested, and Ann agreed to follow it.
The big moment had to wait until early evening, after working hours, because otherwise our key player wouldn’t be free. But we were able to spend the rest of Thursday morning setting everything up. We had to make sure that the room we wanted would be available; then we had to do a little fast talking to Captain Pat Delaney of the Homicide Squad; finally we had to issue our invitation, in such a way that the guest of honor wouldn’t turn us down.
As anticipated, he put up a lot of resistance at first. The fact is, Marvin McBride likes to go home at six o’clock and get started on the evening’s serious drinking. “An informal discussion!” He hooted at Ann through the phone. “What the hell does that mean? What’s to discuss? We’ve got your client exactly where we want him!”
“There are a few aspects of this case that we’d like to put before you, Marvin. We’d like to get your input on them, knock around some ideas with you, maybe come up with some mutually agreeable approach—”
“We’ll do our approaching in front of a jury!”
“But you never can tell what a friendly frank talk might lead to. Maybe even a plea bargain.”
“Who needs a plea bargain? I told you what I feel about this lazy good-for-nothing old lush. He’s not going to wriggle out of this, he’s not going to get away with some nice easy vacation for a few years. The bastard’s getting the gas!”
“You’re a hard man, Marvin. Let me just try out one more argument on you that might soften your heart. If this case goes to trial in front of a jury, I can’t guarantee I won’t be forced to bring in certain evidence—about certain intimate relationships that the murder victim had with certain public figures, for instance—”
“You better not try it! Didn’t we warn you already—”
“And I’m taking the warning very seriously. That’s why I’m suggesting we have this nice easygoing, informal talk session. The public defender’s office will put its cards on the table, and get your reactions to them, and maybe the whole matter can be settled quickly, without any unpleasant publicity.”
There was a long silence. Then McBride spoke, in a somewhat less striden
t voice. “You’re saying you might be interested in pleading your client guilty?”
“Well, that’s certainly a possibility.”
“He doesn’t get the gas, he saves his neck, but he goes away for life. I’m not settling for anything less than—”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Marvin. Let’s see what develops after we have our talk.”
A few more moments of silence, during which I could imagine McBride puffing furiously at his cigar. Then he said, “All right, I guess it won’t hurt to talk. Come up to my office at six.”
“Sorry, but we can’t have this meeting in your office.”
“Why the hell not? I’ve got a lot more space here than you’ve got.”
“Don’t I know it.” Ann’s laugh had a little edge to it. “But the fact is, Mr. Stubbins has to be present at this meeting too. And he doesn’t feel comfortable in your office. It scares him. In the event that we do reach some sort of plea-bargaining stage, he’ll be a lot more likely to cooperate if he isn’t in a state of panic.”
“All right, we’ll meet in your office.”
“No, actually we can’t do that either. As you’ve correctly pointed out, we don’t have nearly enough room here. Suppose we meet in the interrogation room, down in the basement of this building.”
“That hole! I don’t see why—”
“Think of it as neutral ground, all right? See you at six, Marvin. Try not to be late.”
“I’m bringing Ed Brock with me.”
“Why not? As I’ve said, it’s going to be completely informal. Ed may have a lot to contribute. And oh yes, I’d appreciate it if you called the jail and gave orders for our client to be delivered there too.”
Ann hung up the phone, wearing a satisfied grin.
We had known perfectly well that McBride would insist on being propped up by Ed. How could the dummy do his talking without his ventriloquist?