policeman who was the dead man’s partner — I guess you’d call him that — ordered them to keep away.
After a while more police came and they took the dead man’s body and drove me to the station where I was locked up.
From the very beginning I didn’t take to that young lawyer they assigned to me. There wasn’t anything exactly that I could put my finger on. I just felt uneasy with him. His last name was Stanton. He had a first name of course, but he didn’t tell me what it was; he said he wanted me to call him Bat like all his friends did.
He was always smiling and reassuring me when there wasn’t anything to smile or be reassured about, and he ought to have known it all along instead of filling me with false hope.
All I could think was that I was thankful Mama and Papa and Mr.
Williams were dead and that my shame wouldn’t bring shame on them.
“It’s going to be all right,” the lawyer kept saying right up to the end, and then he claimed to be indignant when I was found guilty of resisting arrest and of manslaughter and theft or robbery — there was the biggest hullabaloo as to whether I was guilty of theft or robbery. Not that I was guilty of either, at least in this particular instance, but no one would believe me.
You would have thought it was the lawyer being sentenced instead of me, the way he carried on. He called it a terrible miscarriage of justice and said we might as well be back in the eighteenth century when they hanged children.
Well, that was an exaggeration, if ever there was one; nobody was being hanged and nobody was a child. That policeman had died and I had had a part in it. Maybe I had pushed him. I couldn’t be sure. In my heart I really hadn’t meant him any harm. I was just scared. But he was dead all the same. And as far as stealing went, I hadn’t stolen the box but I had stolen other things more than once.
And then it happened. It was a miracle. All my life I’d dreamed of a nice room of my own, a comfortable place to stay. And that’s exactly what I got.
The room was on the small side but it had everything I needed in it, even a wash basin with hot and cold running water, and the walls were freshly painted, and they let me choose whether I wanted a wing chair with a chintz slipcover or a modern Danish armchair.
I even got to decide what color bedspread I preferred. The window looked out on a beautiful lawn edged with shrubbery, and the matron said I’d be allowed to go to the greenhouse and select some pot plants to keep in my room. The next day I picked out a white glox-inia and some russet chrysanthemums.
I didn’t mind the bars at the windows at all. Why, this day and age some of the finest mansions have barred windows to keep burglars out.
The meals — I simply couldn’t believe there was such delicious food in the world. The woman who supervised their preparation had embezzled the funds of one of the largest catering companies in the state after working herself up from assistant cook to treasurer.
The other inmates were very friendly and most of them had led the most interesting lives. Some of the ladies occasionally used words that you usually see written only on fences or printed on sidewalks before the cement dries, but when they were scolded they apologized.
Every now and then somebody would get angry with someone and there would be a little scratching or hair pulling, but it never got too bad. There was a choir — I can’t sing but I love music — and they gave a concert every Tuesday morning at chapel, and Thursday night was movie night. There wasn’t any admission charge. All you did was go in and sit down anywhere you pleased.
We all had a special job and I was assigned to the infirmary. The doctor and nurse both complimented me. The doctor said that I should have gone into professional nursing, that I gave confidence to the patients and helped them get well. I don’t know about that but I’ve had years of practice with sick people and I like to help anybody who feels bad.
I was so happy that sometimes I couldn’t sleep at night. I’d get up and click on the light and look at the furniture and the walls. It was hard to believe I had such a pleasant place to stay. I’d remember supper that night, how I’d gone back to the steam table for a second helping of asparagus with lemon and herb sauce, and I compared my plenty with those terrible times when I had slunk into supermarkets and nibbled overripe fruit and raw vegetables to ease my hunger.
Then one day here came that lawyer, not even at regular visiting hours, bouncing around congratulating me that my appeal had been upheld, or whatever the term was, and that I was as free as a bird to leave right that minute.
He told the matron she could send my belongings later and he dragged me out front where TV cameras and newspaper reporters were waiting.
As soon as the cameras began whirring and the photographers began to aim, the lawyer kissed me on the cheek and pinned a flower on me. He made a speech saying that a terrible miscarriage of justice had been rectified. He had located people who testified that Mrs.
Crowe had given me the box — she had told the gardener and the cleaning woman. They hadn’t wanted to testify because they didn’t want to get mixed up with the police, but the lawyer had persuaded them in the cause of justice and humanity to come forward and make statements.
The lawyer had also looked into the personnel record of the dead policeman and had learned that he had been judged emotionally unfit for his job, and the psychiatrist had warned the Chief of Police that something awful might happen either to the man himself or to a suspect unless he was relieved of his duties.
All the time the lawyer was talking into the microphones he had latched onto me like I was a three-year-old that might run away, and I just stood and stared. Then when he had finished his speech about me the reporters told him that like his grandfather and his uncle he was sure to end up as governor but at a much earlier age.
At that the lawyer gave a big grin in front of the camera and waved good-bye and pushed me into his car.
I was terrified. The nice place I’d found to stay in wasn’t mine any longer. My old nightmare was back — wondering how I could manage to eat and how much stealing I’d have to do to live from one day to the next.
The cameras and reporters had followed us.
A photographer asked me to turn down the car window beside me, and I overheard two men way in the back of the crowd talking.
My ears are sharp. Papa always said I could hear thunder three states away. Above the congratulations and bubbly talk around me I heard one of those men in back say, “This is a bit too much, don’t you think? Our Bat is showing himself the champion of the Senior Citizen now. He’s already copped the teenyboppers and the under thirties using methods that ought to have disbarred him. He should have made the gardener and cleaning woman testify at the beginning, and from the first he should have checked into the policeman’s history. There ought never to have been a case at all, much less a conviction. But Bat wouldn’t have got any publicity that way. He had to do it in his own devious, spectacular fashion.” The other man just kept nodding and saying after every sentence, “You’re damned right.”
Then we drove off and I didn’t dare look behind me because I was so heartbroken over what I was leaving.
The lawyer took me to his office. He said he hoped I wouldn’t mind a little excitement for the next few days. He had mapped out some public appearances for me. The next morning I was to be on an early television show. There was nothing to be worried about.
He would be right beside me to help me just as he had helped me throughout my trouble. All that I had to say on the TV program was that I owed my freedom to him.
I guess I looked startled or bewildered because he hurried on to say that I hadn’t been able to pay him a fee but that now I was able to pay him back — not in money but in letting the public know about how he was the champion of the underdog.
I said I had been told that the court furnished lawyers free of charge to people who couldn’t pay, and he said that was right, but his point was that I could repay him now by telling people all that he had done for me. Then he said the main thing was to talk over our next appearance on TV. He wanted to coach me in what I was going to say, but first he would go into his partner’s office and tell him to take all the incoming calls and handle the rest of his appointments.
When the door closed after him I thought that he was right. I did owe my freedom to him. He was to blame for it. The smart alec. The upstart. Who asked him to butt in and snatch me out of my pretty room and the work I
