The Transcendental Murder

Attorney's office was an effort to help him. But Charley had merely looked at her with red eyes, and said, 'Oh, sure.' Mary had bitten her lip and said nothing. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps after all her motives were not as clear as all that.

Jimmy Flower brought out a chair for Charley and started calking. Charley listened to the facts about his fingerprints on the letters, and then confessed right away. 'Sure,' he said, 'I wrote them. But let me tell you how it happened.' He turned to Homer. 'You know what a great practical joker my father was? A real joker. You saw him that night going after poor old Edith with that paper napkin. Well, it occurred to me (back in February I guess it was), after a particularly nasty trick he had played on me, that one way of getting back at him was to try it myself. Let him slip on his own banana peel. I thought it over for some time before I finally came up with this. The thing that made me think of it was an exam I had in one of those crazy schools I went to. They didn't really have exams, just something they called CTPs, Creative Thinking Projects. The course was a sort of Renaissance History Seminar, or something. You were supposed to write an imaginary letter from Savonarola to Pope Alexander VI. Well, I had a wonderful time. I had Savonarola threatening to hire Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine and drop burning coals on the Vatican. Got a very good paragraph on my PCP. That is, my Personal Critical Profile. In other words, my report card.

'But anyway, the point is, it gave me this idea of writing letters from one Transcendentalist to another, making them ridiculous but sort of superficially convincing. I did a whole lot of reading, and I even copied the handwriting, when I could find the originals. There's a glass case there in the library with samples of writing by Emerson and Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott.'

Homer shook his head. 'I've got to hand it to you, Charley. You did a magnificent job. Works of art, all of them. What did you do for paper and ink?'

'It was just good bond paper in various weights and sizes. And brown India ink. I left the paper in the barn a while to get weathered. Any even slightly scientific examination would show that it wasn't old paper.'

'What did you do with them when they were finished?'

'Well, that took a bit of thought. I finally wrote another letter. This one was supposed to have been written by a sweet little old lady in western Massachusetts by the name of Miss Maria Fuller Alcott Emerson...'

'Maria Fuller Alcott Em ...Say, that's the mysterious lady in your father's will! Okay, go ahead, what was she for?'

'She was supposed to be a genteel old lady in reduced circumstances, descended on both sides from Concord greats. She flattered my father up and down, going on about how much she had heard about his integrity and honor and all that bilgewater, and how her grandfather had known his grandfather, and how ashamed she was to be selling the souls of her great ancestors, so she didn't want her name mentioned, but her poverty had reduced her to this extremity. So would my father publish these letters under his own name and divide the royalties with her, that was all she asked, some fraction of the royalties, and would he please memorize her address and burn this? Well, of course, Dad fell for it. He wrote her this big pompous magnanimous letter, agreeing to the whole thing, and then she sent him the letters.'

'He really wrote a letter to some fictitious lady?'

'Oh, I have an old buddy out there in Springfield. He's a postman. He agreed to send and receive letters for her. I guess he's kept his mouth shut.'

'Well,' said Homer. 'It all worked just the way you hoped.' Charley flushed.

'Not quite,' he said. 'Of course I was delighted when I heard he had read them to the Alcott Association and that they had laughed at them. I thought that would be the end of it. I'd had my revenge. But I didn't dream he'd go on taking them seriously after that.'

'Didn't that put you on the spot then?'

'What do you mean?'

'Your father did go on believing in them. That meant that there would eventually be a good deal of notoriety and investigation and damage to literary reputations, and it probably meant that the letters might be traced back to you. How would you have explained to the press, for example, your responsibility for such spectacular forgeries?'

Charley was silent.

'And your father. What would have been his reaction to the discovery that his own son had made a fool of him before the world? Had you thought that through?'

Charley still said nothing. He looked down at the red backs of his hands, which were clutching his knees.

'Isn't is possible,' said Homer, 'that you feared your father's anger because you thought he might cut you out of his will? You hated him anyway. Isn't it possible that you decided there was only one thing to do, to kill him? You arranged a rendezvous with him, again by letter, posing as a literary agent or a collector, or something. You also made arrangements to be sure that your brother would have no alibi for the time of the rendezvous. Then you killed your father...'

'What arrangements?' said Charley. 'How could I know Philip was going to leave the Rod and Gun Club and go out for a walk?'

'We don't have the whole story on that yet,' said Homer. 'But his slip with the cannon firing that morning was just the break you needed, wasn't it? You counted on the double confession you assumed he would make, on his opportunity to commit the crime and on his unlucky mistake of the morning to so confuse the police that they wouldn't dare to arrest either of you, afraid of condemning an innocent party—the very same ruse you had practiced throughout your life to escape punishment at the hands of your parents. Your Sam Prescott outfit and your false 'confession' were all part of the trick. Isn't that so, Charley?'

'No, no,' said Charley, 'that's not so. That just isn't true. It is true that I was unhappy about the letters when my father insisted on going ahead with them. But I didn't think any reputable publisher would take them seriously. Then, I thought, he would drop the whole thing.'

Homer made a church of his fingers, and opened and closed the front door that was his large thumbs. He shifted his ground. 'I didn't know your sister Edith was a horsewoman, Charley,' he said. 'She denied it when we asked her, way back in April.'

Charley was startled. 'Why, yes. Yes, she is. It's one of the few things she's any good at.'

'She rides your horse, Dolly?'

'Sure. It's the only one we've got. She likes to go out mostly at night. It's kind of hard on Dolly, but, heck, it's one of the few pleasures the poor girl has. Say, look, you don't think Edith...'

'No, as a matter of fact, we don't,' said Homer. He clap shut his church doors like the snapping of a trap.

'I mean, she's just not strong-minded enough...' Charley stopped abruptly, and looked at Jimmy Flower. 'Are you going to arrest me now?'

Jimmy looked at Homer. Homer's little eyes blinked. He rubbed his hair up the wrong way on the back of his head and leaned back in his chair. 'No, Charley, you can go on home.'

The door closed behind Charley. 'What do you think?' said Jimmy Flower.

'Well, with Teddy still missing, what can we do? Besides, it doesn't really hold water yet.' Homer looked gloomy. 'Do you suppose Charley and Teddy were really in it together, and afterwards Charley murdered Teddy to shut him up?'

'In that case,' said Jimmy, 'where's the corpus delicti?'

'That's just it. Where is Teddy?'

'Well, I'll tell you what I think, Teddy or no Teddy,' said Chief Flower. 'I'm sick and tired of us being so clever. Here was somebody wearing Charley's own bunny-suit, seen practically at the moment of firing the fatal shot. Charley had the opportunity, he had the motive, stronger than ever now, with these letters to hush up, and he was witnessed by a real live witness. Why do we have to think up all these ifs, ands and buts? I'll tell you something else—all it would take to convince me is one more scrap of evidence against Charley—just one more little scrap.'

*41*

What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. —Henry Thoreau