A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“She was dead when I let myself in,” he said, “and the radio was playing Nobody’s Sweetheart Now. I remember that. That’s all I remember. I lost my head I guess. I beat it down the emergency staircase and slipped out while the doorman was out front getting a cab for someone. I got into one myself around the corner and drove around and around in a daze. Then I made for the train—”

“You’ll get your lawyer, Jackie,” I promised him.

My brother-in-law in Trenton turned me down flat. I had the diamond engagement-ring Jackie had given me five years before, though. And my wedding-ring was platinum. That went, too. I got Westman for him. You spell his name with dollar marks.

“I like the case,” he said. “I don’t like the looks of it much, but that’s why I like it. Hold on tight.”

I liked the looks of it even less than he did — after all, Jackie was my husband, not his — but I held on tight.

The trial opened in the middle of a freak heat wave that had got its dates mixed. At 90 in the shade, with a perspiring jury ready to convict the Angel Gabriel if they could only get out of there and into a shower bath and a cranky judge who hated his own mother, he didn’t have a chance.

It was a mess all the way through. The State’s proposition was that she’d agreed to beat it to Montreal with him; then when she changed her mind at the last minute for some unknown reason, he’d killed her in a fit of jealous rage. The gun was her own, but it had been found at the bottom of the elevator shafts — and she’d died instantly with a hole between her eyes. Soundproof walls, no shot heard. The doorman had seen him go up at 8:30; he was the last person he’d seen go up there; he’d known him by sight for months. And about everybody else in New York seemed to chip in their say-so after that — the State had them stepping up and stepping down all day long.

“Do something,” I kept saying to Westman, “do something!”

Westman drew nothing but blanks. The night doorman, who’d come on duty at six, was obviously greased — or so he said. Then when he went out after the day doorman, who might have been able to mention any callers she’d had earlier in the day, that gentleman had chucked his job two days after the murder and gone home to Ireland or somewhere without leaving any forwarding address. He dug up a former colored maid of hers who would have been a walking card-index of the men in Pascal’s life, and just as he had her nicely subpoenaed and all, she got mysteriously knocked down by a speeding car at 135th and Lenox and had a fine funeral. All wet, all wet.

I sat through it day after day, in the last row behind a pair of smoked glasses. The jury came in on the 21st with their shirts sticking to their backs and stubble on their jaws and found him guilty.

I keeled over and a court attendant carried me outside, but no one noticed because people had been passing out from the heat the whole time the trial lasted.

It was nice and cool when he came up for sentence, but it was too late to do any good by that time. Jackie got the chair.

“So my husband goes up in sparks for something he never did!” I said to Westman.

“Ten million people think he did, one little lady thinks he didn’t. You can’t buck the State of New York.”

“No, but I can give it a run for its money. What do you need for a stay of execution?”

“New evidence — something I haven’t got.”

“No? Watch me. How long have we got?”

“Week of November Eighth. Six weeks to us, a lifetime to him.” At the door I turned back. “The five centuries, I suppose, was to pay for the current they’re going to use on him.”

He threw up his hands. “You can have the retainer back. I feel worse about it than you do.”

I took it because I needed it. I’d been living in a seven-dollar-a-week furnished room and eating corn flakes, since I’d retained him. Now here was the job — to separate the one right person from the 6,999,999 wrong ones — or whatever the population of New York was at the last census — and hang the killing of Bernice Pascal on him so that it would stick and give my Jackie an out.

Six weeks to do it in. Forty-two days. A thousand hours. And here was the equipment: five hundred dollars, a face like an angel and a heart like a rock. The odds? A thousand to one against me was putting it mild. Who could stand up and cheer about anything so one-sided?

I just sat there holding my head in my hands and wondering what my next move was. Not a suspicion, not a hunch, not a ghost of an idea. It was going to be tough going all right. I couldn’t figure it out and the minutes were already ticking away, minutes that ticked once and never came back again.

They let me say goodbye to Jackie next day before they took him upstate. He was cuff-linked, so we didn’t have much privacy. We didn’t say much.

“Look at me. What do you see?”

“You’ve got a funny kind of light in your eyes,” he said.

“It’s going to bring you back alive,” I said, “so never mind the goodbyes.”

When I got back to the room there was a cop there. “Oh-oh,” I thought, “now what?”