The Glass Village

“Oh, sure,” said Johnny. “If Kowalczyk didn’t kill her, someone else did. And since everybody’s whereabouts for the time of the murder is confirmed as having been elsewhere, that provisional somebody is an unknown. The only thing is, I’ve queried and requeried everyone in sight, with special attention to the kids, and nobody saw the slightest sign of one. There just wasn’t any stranger in Shinn Corners Saturday but Josef Kowalczyk.” Johnny shrugged. “Therefore Kowalczyk it’s got to be. It’s got to be Kowalczyk if only because — always excepting the man from Mars — there’s just no one else it could have been.”

The Judge looked at his watch. “Andy,” he said, “why do you believe Kowalczyk’s story?”

The old lawyer stirred. “You, of all people, Lewis!” he exclaimed. “How can you ask me a question like that? As a matter of fact, don’t you believe him? You know you do.”

“Well,” said the Judge uneasily.

“I’ve even,” murmured Johnny, “given myself a hayride in a daydream. You know — you start thinking things. Especially when you have my type of mind...”

“What things?” demanded the Judge.

“Well, I see some three dozen people in this daymare of mine, last inhabitants of a decrepit community called Shinn Corners, getting together in a secret hate session and conspiring to alibi one another so that the furriner’s guilt will be unassailable. Fact! That’s what I’ve been thinking. Why? Don’t ask me why. I suppose when you get right down to it, I don’t believe Kowalczyk’s guilty, either. Or, to put it more correctly, I don’t want Kowalczyk to be guilty. I still have enough romanticism left to get a smug bang out of seeing right triumph and evil get kicked in the prat. That’s my trouble, really... A conspiracy of thirty-five people, not excluding tender kiddies! Oh, and Pastor Sheare as well. Of such fanciful nastinesses is sentimentality made. All to avoid seeing my nose.

“Let’s face it, friends,” said Johnny, “we’re making passes at a non-existent animule. I’m sorry, Judge, but if that Gilbert and Sullivan jury you finagled me into were to take a vote right this minute, I’d have to vote our suffering Josef guilty.”

“Before you start with your witness, Mr. Adams,” said Judge Shinn, “Juror Number Three will please rise!”

“That’s you, Mert,” whispered Hube Hemus. “Get up.”

Merton Isbel got to his feet. He was haggard, but the wildness had gone out of his eyes and he looked like what he was, a sagging old man.

“Mert, you and I have known each other since we were boys hooking apples out of old man Urie’s orchard back beyond the Hollow,” said the Judge softly. “Have you ever known me to lie to you?”

Mert Isbel stared.

“So I tell you now: If you so much as lay one fingernail again on the defendant in this case, Mert, I will swear out a warrant for your arrest and personally see to it that you’re prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

The big old head slowly nodded.

“And what I have just told Merton Isbel,” said the Judge to the jury, “applies to every mother’s son and daughter in and out of this room who’s in any way involved in this case.” He rapped with Aunt Fanny’s darning egg so suddenly that Prue Plummer jumped. “Proceed with your witness, Mr. Adams!”

As Casavant was sworn in by Burney Hackett, and Ferriss Adams went to work eliciting from him his background and long association with Fanny Adams and her work, Johnny watched Josef Kowalczyk resentfully. The man both puzzled him and wrung his heart. He was either the world’s greatest actor or something was incredibly wrong. It grew increasingly hard to be cynical about him, and Johnny wanted above all to maintain his neutrality in a world of warring self-interests... Where before the Polish refugee had been frozen in terror, now he seemed frozen in peace. It was as if the clutch of Mert Isbel’s frenzied hands on his neck had been, in its dark taste of death, the fate he had dreaded from the beginning, the execution, the consummated dealing out of his punishment... as if he had been hanged, and the rope had snapped, and he was saved to face hanging all over again. No man could feel that fear twice. The knobby hands unconsciously — or consciously? — caressed the swollen throat. The welts, the pain, were — or were made to appear? — a reassurance.

Kowalczyk’s beard was quite heavy now. Put a gold ring on a stick over his head, Johnny thought, and get him into a nightgown, and he’d look like a medieval painting of Jesus Christ. Born to surfer for the redemption of mankind. But mankind was in this room, a bunch of ignorant idiots breathing hell’s fire down a scared killer’s neck. Unredeemed trash in a dirty old pawnshop. The lot of them.

Kowalczyk closed his eyes and his lips began moving soundlessly, as they did so often now. The sonofabitch was pretending to pray.

Johnny could have kicked him. Or himself.

He struggled to pay attention to Casavant.