by James Yaffe
Human beings are built so they have to make choices, said my little voice—and by this time, believe me, I wasn’t having any doubts about whose voice that was.
So I thought about it hard for a while, for all the world as if there actually was something to think about it. I weighed ruthless efficiency against easygoing sleaze, and then my hand pulled down the lever. McBride’s lever, God help me.
What the hell came over me anyway? Deep down in my subconscious, was I sorry to see him go, was I afraid his departure would leave a void in my life, did I find his brand of bullshit more enjoyable than hers?
So much for my image of myself as a rational human being!
* * *
Just before noon on election day, McBride suddenly appeared at the public defender’s office.
His official reason for dropping in was to thank Ann and Roger and me again for the “invaluable assistance” we had given him in apprehending Edna Pulaski’s killer. Once he had unloaded himself of this formula, he was able to get down to what he really had on his mind.
McBride had come to offer jobs to all three of us. “I’ll be needing a new assistant DA,” he said. “As, of course, you know. My number-one assistant. Lots of responsibility. You’ll go to court for all the big cases, Ann, the ones I don’t have time for myself. At an appropriate salary, you understand. And just between us, it’s a lot more than you’re making as public defender. With a decent office too. A view out on the courthouse square. Your desk will be twice as big. Your own personal secretary. And if you want it to be the old biddy that’s out there in your reception room now, that’ll be fine with me.
“And what I want you for, Dave, is to be my chief investigator. A big raise in salary for you too, and you won’t have to operate out of this hole-in-the-wall any more. You’ll have a real staff under you, four or five trained detectives. And you too, kid—what’s your name, Ralph? Robert? whatever—Dave can bring you right along with him if he likes. And he can decide how much you get paid. Within the city guidelines. So how about it, Dave? You used to be a real cop, isn’t that so? Won’t it do wonders for your conscience if you start working on the right side of the law again?”
None of us said anything at first, and then Ann put the question that was on all our minds. “What happens to the public defender’s office?”
McBride gave a shrug. “The city’ll appoint somebody else, I suppose. What’s the difference? It’s never going to be more than a penny-ante operation. One of the things I’ll be doing, after I’m elected, is submitting next year’s budget to the City Council. And what I told you a while ago, I don’t happen to have changed my mind—I’ll be asking them to make drastic cuts in the line items for the public defender’s office. No raises for anybody, no more assistant investigators, lower operating budget. But why should I go into all those dry financial details with you? None of you is going to even be here by that time. You’ll be part of my team on the second floor, in the decent section of this building. You’ll be playing up there in the Super Bowl, instead of down in the cellar.”
While he was chuckling at his own sense of humor, Ann and Roger and I looked at each other. Then, one by one, we each told McBride that we didn’t think we were interested in his offer. “I’m happy down here in my cellar,” Ann said. “It’s humble, I admit, but from time to time we play a pretty nice game.”
A few seconds later McBride went stamping out. He didn’t look very pleased. I told myself I should have voted against the little jerk after all.
* * *
I spent election night with Mom, watching the returns on her TV. Roger came to her house too, bringing a date along with him. It was the first time he’d been willing to do that in six months, not since that unfortunate business that soured him on women forever. None of us had thought at the time that forever would turn out to be this long; we couldn’t be happier at this indication that the kid was sweetening up again.
The girl’s name was Beth, and she was a student at the School of Veterinary Medicine, a branch of the state university, located in the state capital about seventy miles from Mesa Grande. It was very encouraging that she should be willing to make that hour-and-a-half drive, on a weekday night, for Roger’s sake.
From the moment she stepped through the door Mom hovered over her with innocent little questions, all of them with a hidden meaning. She asked the girl about her family (hidden meaning: what did her father do for a living, did they happen to be Jewish?); about her friends (hidden meaning: were any of them unmarried men?); about her career plans (hidden meaning: were they likely to stand in the way of marriage?). At the same time, Mom plied her with cake, fruit, pieces of candy, cups of coffee, glasses of the special Election Night punch she had made. “With just a little sniff from alcohol in it. It wouldn’t hurt a baby.”
Beth took all this without strain, answering Mom’s questions good-humoredly, never showing any wear and tear on her patience. And best of all, from time to time she would dart a look at Roger and her eyes would glow with pleasure. I hoped the stupid kid knew how lucky he was.
The polls close at six o’clock in Mesa Grande, and sometimes it takes a long time to count the votes. We have the usual modern up-to-date machines, but human beings have to open them up in back, read the gadgets inside them, and make records of what they say. Since all this is done by little old ladies with trembling fingers and failing memories, it wasn’t till seven-thirty that the first figures started coming in.
It was pretty clear from the start that McBride was winning by a landslide. It was barely eight-thirty when the TV station took us to Doris Dryden’s campaign headquarters, a ballroom in the Marriott-Chinook, so we could see her concession speech. This ballroom looked like some scene out of a sci-fi movie, after the atom bomb has fallen and only a handful of human beings are left in the world.
You had to give Doris credit. She couldn’t have looked cooler and more elegant, as she stood up in front of those weary blotchy-faced college types, the ones who hadn’t already gone home in disgust, and announced she was conceding the election. A few ritual cries of “No, no!” came from the group—even with the best will in the world, you couldn’t call it a crowd—but they were halfhearted and didn’t last long enough for Doris to acknowledge them.
After she said the words that are expected on such occasions—how she was deeply grateful to the people who had worked for her, how they had all put up the best fight they could, how she didn’t consider her campaign to be a failure but a true success because they had brought the issues before the public—a TV reporter stuck a microphone in her face. “What’s your future in politics going to be, Mrs. Dryden? Are you going to run against Marvin McBride three years from now?”
“Is McBride going to run again three years from now? I seem to have missed that announcement.”
The reporter looked flustered. “Well, I mean, if he does.”
“‘If’ is one of the biggest words in the language. I’ll tell you my short-term plans though. Right now I intend to go home and sleep as long as I possibly can. I feel like I haven’t slept for about a year. And tomorrow morning, assuming I manage to wake up that soon, I intend to go down to my office and get back to work. I’m a practicing attorney, as you know. I’ve got partners, clients who depend on me. Cases have been piling up on my desk. Some of them, no doubt, will bring me into court opposite my recent opponent Mr. McBride.”
And then, after a pause, she couldn’t keep herself from adding, “We’ll see how well he does in front of those juries.”
The TV station took us back to the main studio, and a few minutes later switched us to McBride’s headquarters in the Richelieu, where he was ready to claim his victory.
We saw the great man in front of a hundred screaming applauding fans, waving his arms over his head, lifting himself up on his toes. Behind him stood Ed Brock, larger than life and beaming. McBride began his victory speech by saying how incredibly humble it made him feel that he, a poor barefoot farm boy, should be elec
ted for an unprecedented fifth term to the august office of district attorney. He expressed his thanks to the people who had worked on his campaign, how proud he was that they had fought cleanly and fairly and stuck to the issues. He reassured those who had voted for him, and those who had not, that he would continue to run a strong district attorney’s office and hold the line against the criminal element wherever it reared its ugly head.
He paused, then he said, “Now I want to tell you one of the first matters I’m going to attend to when I start my new term of office.
“Ann Swenson and her terrific staff in the public defender’s office gave me a big assist in clearing up the tragic murder case that came along in the last week of the campaign. I developed a new respect for their ability, competence, and dedication. So I want them—and all the people of Mesa Grande—to know that I intend to fight, with all the vigor at my command, to strengthen that office by asking our City Council to approve a ten percent across-the-board increase in the public defender’s budget. That doesn’t come close to what they deserve, but I hope it’ll allow them to maintain an even higher level of service to the public than they’ve been maintaining through the years. A strong public defender’s office, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the bulwarks of democracy.”
A little later McBride came to a stop, his fan club exploded, and Mom turned off the TV.
My God, I found myself thinking, the impossible has happened. There actually turns out to be a spark of honesty and gratitude inside that little dynamo of phoniness? Could politicians possibly be as complicated and unpredictable as other human beings?
You can bet I didn’t say any of that out loud to Mom.
I expected Roger to be more vocal though. Dryden had been his candidate, his knight in shining armor, his hope for a better tomorrow. Now that she had gone down to defeat, I steeled myself for one of his idealistic laments about the ignorance of the poor misguided voters.
He didn’t say a word, and then I realized that he hadn’t unloosed a single lament all night, even as the news about his candidate got direr and direr. The reason was obvious, now that I thought of it. He had been too busy watching Beth, making sure her glass was refilled, pushing himself close to her on the sofa. One of the best things love can do for a young fellow, I decided, is to take his mind off politics.
* * *
Later in the evening Roger and Beth left to go dancing. Mom and I, sitting next to each other on the sofa, had a last glass of punch together.
“So how are you feeling about the election, Mom?” I asked. “You voted for Dryden, I guess?”
After a pause Mom said, “I’d like to tell you something, Davey. Maybe it’ll be to you a surprise. The fact is, I voted for McBride he should be the district attorney.”
I couldn’t say anything for a moment. Then I put on the shocked tone of voice that I knew she was expecting from me. “For God’s sake, why? You know as well as I do, looking at him in the most generous light, he’s stupid, incompetent, a liar. You’re always telling me how important it is to make a choice. You haven’t come around to believing it doesn’t matter who wins?”
“No, no, this I could never believe. I made a choice. I thought about it a long time. The reason why I voted for him was Rabbi Schlossberg.”
“I don’t follow. Who’s Rabbi—”
“He was the rabbi twenty years ago at my synagogue in the Bronx. Nobody was satisfied with him. He didn’t have any ideas, he never did anything, he never accomplished anything, he only sat around. So we had a vote and we fired him, and we hired Rabbi Pearlstein instead. He did things. Such an accomplisher he was! In six months everybody in the congregation hated him, twenty families walked out, the head of the religious school had a nervous breakdown, the cantor who had a voice like Richard Tucker quit his job and Pearlstein replaced him with a cantor who had a voice like an old car that’s having trouble starting on a cold morning. And on top of all this, the treasury was all of a sudden ten thousand dollars in the red. This is why I voted for McBride. Because twenty years ago I made a big mistake and I wouldn’t make it again. This much I owed to Rabbi Schlossberg.
“All right, I know what you’re thinking. Some choice, you’re thinking. It would’ve been just as good I did it your way—shut my eyes and pushed down the first name I happened to touch.”
In justice to myself, I have to say that I felt at this moment a definite pang of guilt. Not so painful, though, that it was accompanied by the slightest temptation to blurt out the embarrassing truth about my own voting behavior. Confession may be good for the soul, but certain feats of moral strength you just can’t ask a mere human being to perform.
* * *
One more incident that’s connected to this case, and then I’m finished:
The morning after the election, I parked my car in the courthouse parking lot and was walking to the front entrance when I became aware of a figure sidling up to me on the sidewalk. “Lovely day, isn’t it?” the figure said in its usual hoarse croak. “Slight chill in the air, but that’s the season. I’m all in favor of the seasons.”
“How are you, Harry?” I said, slowing up a little, because he was still just a bundle of rags and bones who couldn’t keep up with other people. “What’re you doing around here? This isn’t your usual place of business.”
“Now it is,” Stubbins said. “Changed my place of business. Working the courthouse steps and environs from now on. Much better class of clientele than what I used to get. Changed my place of residence too. That alley on Arizona Avenue—hideous unsanitary slum!” Stubbins made a face, as if he were smelling something rotten. “Just moved into a cozy little spot—pleasant secluded cul-de-sac behind the courthouse, lovely view of the back of the jail.”
“Any particular reason for all these changes in your life?”
“Matter of convenience.” He gave me a grin, a flash of yellow teeth with a couple of gaps in them. “What I feel is, it’s reassuring—very reassuring, in case of emergency—being located so near my attorney.”
EPILOGUE
Excerpt from Mom’s Diary
Dear Diary,
I’m feeling foolish already, and I only wrote two words in you.
When I was a girl I never kept any diary.… So tell me please, what am I doing with one now? At my age, after seventy-five years keeping such foolishness out of my life? The answer is, since I moved to this little town … in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains—where my son is investigating murders and other crimes for the public defender—I’m giving him more help with his cases than I used to do back in New York even.…
And it sometimes happens there are deductions I’m making about these cases, ideas coming into my head, that I can’t tell him about, it would be dangerous or embarrassing he should know them. But I have to get them off my chest, no? Everybody has things they have to talk about to somebody. So that’s you, dear diary, you’re the one I’ll be doing my talking to.
Like now, when I know something I never want Davey to know about these murders that all the politicians got mixed up in.…
Actually it took me the last three months to catch on to the truth. Being fair to myself, I have to say that I had a certain feeling about this all along. Something else was there, something nobody was seeing. Even while I was making my brilliant deductions, this itch was inside me, it wouldn’t leave me alone. But for three months I didn’t do anything about it. I pretended to myself that I wasn’t itching. Until finally, a couple days ago, I decided I had to scratch. I was watching the five o’clock news on television, giving the jury’s verdict in Leland Grantley’s trial. Grantley was indicted three days after the election, and for a month now he was standing trial. Like he promised the voters, District Attorney McBride personally took charge of the prosecution.
He botched it so bad that the judge wouldn’t even let the charge be first-degree murder. He reduced it to manslaughter—for both murders yet!—and even when the jury found Grantley guilty they recommended a light sentence. (The judg
e took the recommendation and sent him to prison for five to ten years, which means, for some reason I don’t understand, he’ll be out in three.) Some of the people from the jury were interviewed on the television, and what they said was, McBride never convinced them that the idea for killing Edna Pulaski didn’t come to Grantley on the sperm of the moment, when he saw Harry Stubbins passed out from drinking her coffee.
I turned off the television right then and there.
The coffee, I said to myself. My God, the pills in that coffee! All this time, up till this moment, I was taking it for granted, like everybody else did, that Edna Pulaski put the pills in the coffee herself. She was taking her nightly heart medicine, and she lost track and put in too many.
What a schlemiel I was! How could I believe it, even for a few minutes, that this explanation made sense?
Now, all of a sudden, I could see what was wrong. Edna Pulaski could maybe forget how many pills she put in her coffee, but could she forget she put any pills in it? Could she give the cup to Harry Stubbins, knowing all the time her heart medicine was in it? And she didn’t get two different cups mixed up with each other either, because in the pot was only enough coffee for one cup.
Another peculiar thing. She told Stubbins she poured the coffee for him out of the pot. All right, Edna Pulaski would maybe put her heart pills in her coffee cup—but in the pot? This woman brews up her medicine in a pot? Excuse me, but positively not.
I could see the answer now, it couldn’t be clearer. Anybody takes a look at what actually happened, and they’ll see the answer too.
Edna Pulaski goes into the kitchen to pour out coffee for her and Stubbins. In the pot she finds enough coffee for only one cup, so she lets him be the one to drink it. But what if Stubbins didn’t happen to be there that night? Who could doubt that Edna Pulaski, sooner or later, is going to drink that cup coffee herself?