Fling and Other Stories
Page 20
You have a charming house, with so many intriguing objets d’art on piano, coffee table, dining-room sideboard etc. that might tempt an intruder. I must therefore inform you that I was astonished to find your front door unlocked, and I would urge you to be more careful in the future.
Sincerely yours,
Samson Honniger
P.S. Thank you for the dog.
“Was anything missing,” Joel asked, “aside from Timothy?”
“Isn’t that enough? To steal a dog?”
“Timothy doesn’t seem to be any worse off for the experience. Do you really feel a need to go to trial?”
“He sure as hell is worse off. He won’t eat. I think the bastard poisoned him.”
* * *
—
Samson Honniger was rearrested, and this time the judge set bail at one thousand dollars and warned Avered that if he gave the accused a single dollar of credit he would bar him from further business in the Fifth Circuit Court. In order to scare up money for the bond, Mr. Honniger took Joel with him, first to his house and then to Fanter’s Pawn Shop, downtown, where tickets on just three tiny items from one of Mr. Honniger’s parlor tables netted him enough for his bail.
“Johnny Fanter has a wonderful eye for value,” Mr. Honniger said as they left the pawnshop.
“He seemed to know you quite well,” Joel said.
“He’s a good judge of character,” Mr. Honniger said. “He trusts me.”
* * *
—
Seated as usual in the jury box, one morning about a fortnight before the day set for Mr. Honniger’s trial, Joel was astonished to see Mr. Honniger’s name on the arrest list again. And there it said again in so many words: “…theft of dog.”
Judge Whinman’s eyebrows did a little dance when he saw Samson Honniger come smiling up the aisle again on Nelly Netto’s arm. “Same dog, different dog?” the judge asked.
“Your Honor, sir,” Mr. Honniger said, “I was out all evening, and when I came home very late, Timothy was sleeping on my front porch.”
“You claim you never went owner’s house?”
“I’ll wager, sir, that if you took the trouble to inspect the owner’s home, you’d find a front-door screen broken out—something of the sort. Timothy wanted to be with me.”
There was a slight ripple of conversation and laughter from the area of the court-watchers’ folding chairs.
At this moment the case of the stolen dog seemed to have reached the outer edge of Judge Whinman’s juridical patience. “Quiet!” he roared, suddenly so upset that he broke out with several distinct prepositions. “If you want to talk, I’ll put you in the cellblock for the morning. If you don’t believe me, try me. This facility is bad enough without the conduct on top of it.” Then he turned to the clerk and said in more normal tones, “When this person stand trial?”
As Alexander Cherevoy started riffling through papers, Joel said from the jury box, “On the thirteenth, Your Honor.”
“That you, Avered? You get full amount bail last time?”
“Yes, sir. Every cent.”
“Remove him.”
* * *
—
During voir dire of jurors on the morning of the trial, Winthrop Clacks, the public defender assigned to Mr. Honniger, shook his head and muttered to Joel, “I wouldn’t have half of these characters to try my dog.”
This remark touched a nerve in Joel, because it seemed to him that what was really to be tested in this trial was the soul of Timothy, the Labrador retriever.
The very first thing that morning, after having asked what was coming up in this session, Judge Whinman had said, “I want the dog here.” This had caused a conference between Clerk Cherevoy and Bailiff Esposito, out in the middle of the floor—a chat that gave to those two their usual function of setting the day’s tone. There was an air of heavy doubt about their murmuring. An animal witness? Was the Fifth Circuit Court in danger of becoming a circus? Had the Honorable Eustace Whinman mislaid, as these two evidently had long feared he might, his marbles? Bailiff Esposito went off to make some phone calls. He was gone some time. On his return, he reported to the clerk. The clerk shook his head, with the slow stretching movement back and forth of one in whom incredulity causes severe neck pain.
Then Alexander Cherevoy said in a loud voice, “Your Honor, it will be necessary for you to make a call to the City Animal Officer.”
The judge naturally wanted to know why.
“The dog is in the pound. It bit its master last night.”
And so, Joel thought, hearing the official scorn of the clerk’s voice pronouncing those words, yes, the soul of an allegedly criminal animal would be put in the balance this time. Was such a soul entitled, in this temple of justice, to affinities—and to violent antipathies? To feelings so vivid and seductive and corrosive as to seduce human beings into indecent acts—felony, litigious revenge, and, yes, the carrying out of a cruel and unusual punishment, the arbitrary sentencing of a beast, without trial, to incarceration in a pound? Would the Final Judge make choices of value among the species of the living? Could dogs be among His elect—and His damned? Could a creature capable of wagging its entire body as a signal of peaceful intention have been born with the curse of original sin?
The jury was chosen with uncommon speed; neither attorney used any peremptory challenges. By about eleven-thirty the panel had been sworn, and the complainant entered the room wearing a world-class scowl and with white bandages wrapped bulkily around his right hand. He was accompanied by an attorney from Winthrop, Thrull & Panstrom. The pair stood at the table in front of the bench, and the clerk called out, “Alford versus Honniger.”
As the prosecutor stepped forward to elucidate the charge to the jury, Judge Whinman growled, “Make it short sweet.”
The prosecutor in that month was Romeo Orp, who hated everything soft in the American system of justice that might ease the levies on the lawless—loathed bail, loathed probation, loathed continuations, loathed paroles, loathed public defenders and lenient judges. Joel had often thought that a man so riddled with hatreds would harbor a bleeding ulcer; no such thing. Prosecutor Orp was always in the pink of good cheer. He belabored the accused with the natural grace of an athlete playing—and confident of winning—a contact sport. He was, this morning, indeed brief, because his contempt for a person who could steal a dog was so great as to make the case appear to him proven by the mere act of describing it in three sentences.
Mr. Clacks, the public defender, wasted no words, either. His motive for brevity was indifference, for he, as the saying went, could care less. He said, “Man says he didn’t steal the dog, the dog just followed him home.”
“All right,” Judge Whinman said. “I want the defendant stand right over here. Face the jury box. Now, the complainant down there other end, other side the bailiff’s desk, far as you can get. Face the jury. You ready?…Esposito, let’s have the dog. Leave him loose. Don’t use no leash.”
The bailiff disappeared through the lockup door, which clanged shut behind him. Soon the door opened again, and out came Timothy. Joel, seated in the onlooker’s section now that the jury box was occupied, could see that the black dog was in no hurry to settle a case at law. It sniffed its way to the jury box, then toward the bench, looked up piercingly for a moment into the judge’s eyes—just as Samson Honniger had done on that first day, Joel recalled—and, without a flicker of concern or respect, put his nose down again and ranged around the room savoring the spoor of countless lost souls. It seemed to Joel that Timothy knew he was in charge, and that he wanted to spend a few minutes devoting his keenest sense to a study of human folly. Joel suddenly remembered, from way back in elementary school, the goose pimples he’d got when a friend had pointed out to him that “God” was just “dog” backward. There was an awesome hush in the courtroom.
Then the spell b
roke. Lifting his head high, Timothy took one sharp look around and made for Samson Honniger. During this trip his tail described circles of ecstasy. He sat straight in front of the defendant, his tail now sweeping back and forth on the floor and kicking up a little cloud of dust.
There was a flurry of conversation in the jury box. Then the foreman arose and said, “Your Honor, could we try that again? Could we have the two men over on this side of the room, facing away from us, and try again?”
“What for?” the judge said.
“We only had a rear view of the dog when it went over there. We want to see it front on when it decides.”
So Bailiff Esposito took Timothy to the lockup, Alford and Honniger moved to the other side of the room and turned around, and the dog was let in again. Joel thought for a moment that in view of Timothy’s power, in these circumstances, to make a shrewd comment on ambiguities in human justice of sorts he had experienced all his life, the dog might this time go and sit with his tail thrashing in front of his master. But he did not. He went around sniffing again, as if he had never been in the place before, and then, once again, danced over to Samson Honniger and sat facing him.
“You satisfied?” the judge asked the jurors.
The foreman stood and said, “Yes, sir, Your Honor. We’ve seen enough.”
The judge asked the bailiff to lead the twelve to the jury room. They deliberated for exactly four minutes and sent word out that they had arrived at a verdict. When they had filed back into the jury box, the clerk shouted: “Does the jury find the defendant guilty as charged, or not guilty?”
The foreman said, “Guilty.”
The judge said, “How come guilty? The damn dog chose the defendant.”
“Yes, sir,” the foreman said. “But. The eyes were the thing. We didn’t like the way the man and the dog looked at each other. One of the jurors used the word ‘mischief,’ something between those two. But the rest of us thought it was worse than that, Your Honor, that the man is not just a thief—we could see that plain as a deuce of spades, you better search his house—but more than that, there’s a lot of dog in him, there really is, underneath all those clean clothes and that smiling. One of our jurors said that you had to lay it on the line and say he’s a son of a bitch. But the dog’s eyes were the limit, sir. It clinched it, when we reversed things. That dog is a troublemaker. I’m not telling Your Honor any news when I say it takes a crook to know a crook. We didn’t like what went on between those two. They’re both guilty—theft, confidence game, alienation of affection, desertion, assault, you name it, sir.”
Judge Whinman turned to the complainant. “Whatsyourname,” he said. “Alford. Want the dog back?”
Mr. Alford held up his bandaged hand. “You think I’m crazy?”
“All right,” the judge said. “I sentence you—whatsyourname—Honniger, take care the damn dog until it dies or you die, whichever is sooner.”
Joel then saw a look of utter dismay spread on Samson Honniger’s face. A few minutes later, Joel peeled off nine one-hundred-dollar bills and three tens—bail minus fee—and laid them on the free man’s palm. Then he said, “Timothy won’t like your going out late at night, Mr. Honniger.”
Mr. Honniger, aplomb fully restored, shot his lower jaw out toward the dog for a moment, mimicking the Alford underbite. Timothy growled but also wagged his tail. “Thank you for trusting me, Mr. Avered,” Mr. Honniger said, and he left the courtroom through the public door, snapping the thumb and third finger of his left hand to bring Timothy to heel.
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