'He must have done it,' said McCauley. 'For seventeen years I have believed . . .'
'And you may have been wrong for seventeen years,'' said Johnny grimly. 'But it's up to you, sir. I promised» Emily. It's yoii? decision.'
CHnton McCauley began to beat his hands softly on the desk and Johnny watched. Suspiciously.
'Vve thought of something,' said the chaplain, suddenly. 'And Sims here is qualified, . too. Why don'jt you ask him to check for you?'
'Check?' said McCauley.
'He's done work for Roderick Grimes. Couldn't he check the alibi?'
Johnny was listening with a sagging jawbone.
'Isn't it true,' said the chaplain, 'that you have always said the Bartee boy's alibi was worthless? Now, suppose you are wrong and suppose it does hold? Why then, we would know that the boy had not done it. And your daughter could go on being happy. Just as you and Miss Edith planned for her to be.'
Johnny gaped at the chaplain's kind, beaming, rugged face. He was appalled by the naivete of the whole conversation.
'Look,' he said. 'I'm not a detective. I'm not a police officer. I'm not qualified to check . . .'
'You say she loves him?' (Johnny looked at that white saintly face and it made him uneasy.) 'If I have been wrong,' said McCauley, 'I pray the Lord to let me know it now.'
Johnny was shocked. 'But Nan has to be told,' he said. 'You can't let her marry into that family, not knowing. Emily only wanted you to be the one to—to tell me to teU her.'
McCauley straightened his slight body. 'She mustn't be told,' he said, 'and her heart broken with this old evil business, and my sister's whole life thrown away. Not if there is anything else at all that we can do. Not if you can prove that I've been wrong.'
'I agree,' said the chaplain.
'Oh, you do?' said Johnny angrily. He rose. 'May I speak to you alone. Father Klein?'
'Surely.'
The chaplain led Johnny into a kind of anteroom.
'Look here^' said Johnny, 'unless something pretty fishy has been going on, / don't agree, at all. Maybe you know what I don't know. Is that man guilty? Does he know, right now, and none better, that Dick Bartee didn't kill his wiJFe? Because he did it himself, and all this seventeen years' innocence is just phony?'
'Sometimes,' the chaplain said calmly, 'a prisoner gets obsessed with a phony innocence, as I see you realize. I can only tell you that ever since I've been here McCauley has believed . . .'
'Believed,' said Johnny.
'Exactly. He believes that he did not do it. He has believed that the Bartee boy did.
'But what gets me is now he's willing to change his mind and believe that Bartee is innocent! Which I can't swallowl How can you swallow that? What kind of man is this? Why hasn't he been out on parole?'
'Things happen,' the chaplain said vaguely. 'Whenever the Board gets around to his case . . .'
'What things?'
'Oh, twice he was involved with an escape attempt. At least sympathetically—'
'I don't get it.'
'Not that he meant to escape. But that stops parole, you know. Things happen to—well, keep him here. You might say he has given up the world,' the chaplain went on gently.
'Then he's not normal,' snapped Johnny. 'He's nuts or something. And you can't believe a word he says.'
'It is hard to imagine,' the chaplain said slowly, 'what way a man can be changed in his soul if he has had to bear justice. Perhaps McCauley has made prison his home, confinement his cross. He assists me, you know.'
'He's become something like a monk?' said Johnny. 'That's what you are sa>dng?'
The chaplain nodded.
'What about Bartee? What do you think? Is he guilty?'
'I don't know,' the chaplain said, 'That's why I suggested that you try to find out.'
'What makes you think I can find out, after seventeen years? And tell me this, while you're at it. Wliy should / mix in this anyway?' Johnny felt wild.
'That I don't know either,' the chaplain said. 'I don't know why Miss Emily chose to send you, you see. If you could find out, of course, it would save this Httle girl heartbreak.' ^
Johnny looked into die chaplain's eyes and thought he was in a dream, a romantic dream of innocence and mercy.
'The police will haidly try,' the chaplain said gently. 'And there's no money to hire^ a detective. It would have to be a friend.'
'A woman got killed,' Johnny said harshly, himting for something logical and hard and reliably true. 'I suppose it wasn't suicide?'
'No.'
