wrong. This wasn’t a deal off a stacked deck in a bust-out joint. This was a big one. One little snag somewhere along the way would blow the works to hell and back.
The telephone rang at ten minutes of ten like a small bomb and the noise shattered the comparative silence of the apartment. I reached over, switched off the radio. I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear. Her voice was music.
“It worked,” she said.
“What happened?”
“It worked like a charm. The cops just left and they took Murray along with them. I didn’t hear much of it. They asked him if he knew anybody named Milani. He said he didn’t. They asked again and he said that Milani was some insurance salesman but he had never met the man.”
“And?”
“And they zipped him up and took him to jail,” she said. “I have to hang up now. He wanted me to call his lawyer, but I decided to call you first.”
I didn’t say anything. I felt numb now. The scheme had worked so far, it was going nicely, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
“Darling?” A soft chuckle. “You’re a wizard, darling. You really are.”
12
From there on, it was everybody’s ball game. The whole town was busy for the next ten days. Murray found himself the best criminal lawyer in town, a man named Nester who handled most of the important cases in the area. He had two sets of clients—rich men in trouble, and hoods. Murray was a rich man, and he was sure as hell in trouble.
He hired Nester. Murray also hired the local agency of a national detective outfit. He drove the lawyer and the detectives out of their minds. According to what I learned through Joyce, both Nester and the detectives took it for granted that Murray was guilty. All Nester did was try to persuade Murray to level so a way could be found to break the case. Murray kept on shouting that it was all crazy, that some bastard was framing him. And the more the detectives dug around, the guiltier Murray appeared.
The district attorney was digging around, too. It was a colorful case—wealthy killer, shocked and pretty young wife, and enough elements of mystery to give the theory-builders a kick or two. The newspapers gave it a big play, one daily screaming for Murray’s head, and the other staying more on the solemn side.
It was the sort of case that a politically ambitious district attorney would be well advised to win. This public prosecutor was ambitious as hell.
Every joker had a different notion. Somebody suggested that Milani hadn’t been killed, that he was wounded and was biding his time in a gangland hideout, ready to wreak revenge on Murray as soon as he was released. Other geniuses insisted that Rogers hadn’t done the job himself at all, that he had hired professionals and that Milani was in the river wearing a cement overcoat. The music went round and round, and I sat back and tried not to listen.
The grand jury was to meet on Thursday, ten days after the arrest had been made. I was out with Barb Lambert Wednesday night. We had dinner and then went over to her place for records and conversation, and I was in a mood. She misread it as concern for a close friend. She asked me what would happen to Murray Rogers.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Will he—”
“Go to the electric chair?” I said.
She shuddered.
“No,” I said. “There’s not much chance of that. The prosecution has a good case, but the evidence is all circumstantial. It’s probably enough to send him to prison, but not enough to—to hang him. Or electrocute him.”
“But how can they call it murder? Don’t they need a corpus delicti?”
“They’ve got that.”
“You mean Milani’s body was found?”
“You don’t need a body for corpus delicti. All corpus delicti means is evidence that a particular crime was committed. And there’s plenty of that, body or no body.”
There was enough for the grand jury to return an indictment, at any rate. I was in the courtroom for the hearing, along with Joyce and a few of Murray’s other friends. The prosecution’s case sounded even more damning in a courtroom with a judge and jury and batteries of lawyers on either side.
If Murray had actually been guilty, he might have been in a position to make a better case for himself. By telling how Milani had been blackmailing him and bleeding him white, Murray could have built up a lot of sympathy, and by a little legal footwork he could have had the charge reduced all the way down to manslaughter, with a possible bid for temporary insanity or self-defense, the two traditional refuges for the accused having committed murder with extenuating circumstances.
But Murray couldn’t take any refuges even if he had wanted to. He couldn’t tell them what Milani had been blackmailing him for. Murray couldn’t locate the corpse. He could only stammer and scream about a frameup.
And nobody was listening.
The outcome was never really in doubt. The jury indicted Murray Rogers for murder in the first degree. The offense is not a bailable one. I sat there and watched the guards take him away, shoulders slumped and face drawn and eyes vacant. He passed a few feet from me and didn’t seem to see me at all. It was just as well. I couldn’t have met his eyes.
Friday night.
I sat in my bedroom alone and did card tricks in front of a mirror. My hands weren’t too nimble because I was tight. The bottle of Cutty Sark was on the dresser. Every now and then I took a swig and the whiskey went right down without my tasting it at all.
During the days I had been a machine. I had made the motions at the office, and the motions when I took prospects out to lunch or met them at their homes. Nothing had seemed to reach me. Once I had spent an hour with a prospect, had talked at length about everything under the sun, and had wound up selling him a nice bundle. And when I had left him and returned to the office to type out some forms, I hadn’t been able to remember his name. Everything had been automatic, mechanical, and nothing had made any impression at all.
The nights had been a little different. The nights had been solo ventures for the most part, with Barb on hand now and then, more often than I wanted her and less often than she would have preferred it. It had been funny because I was clear now. Joyce had let me off the hook, and I could court Barb and marry her if I wanted to. But things had changed since Murray’s arrest. Something very significant had taken place, and Barb’s version of what had happened did not mesh with mine because she did not know what I had done.
And I couldn’t tell her.
Which had made a difference. The little middle-class nook that had seemed so desirable included a wife with whom you could discuss everything—excluding your semi-annual infidelities, at least. And the more bits and pieces there were that I could not possibly tell Barb about, the less I could imagine myself spending the rest of my life with her.
So we had cooled off a little. I had never shared her bed after that one night. She hadn’t asked why. She may have written it off as mood, or she may have decided that I was an intensely moral person. Whatever, I had been spending most of the nights alone—after Murray’s arrest and indictment.
But the nights had been rarely spent sober. I had become blind drunk only once. That had been on the night after the indictment had been returned, and that night I had wound up getting tossed out of a wino hangout on Skid Row and crawling in the gutter while my insides had spilled out. Most of the time I just put a heavy edge on and sat around thinking. Maybe I was drinking to keep from dreaming, because without a good skinful I had some dreams that woke me up sweating and panting.
The hell with it.
It was Friday night, and I was doing card tricks poorly in front of a mirror, and I was about half in the bag, and the phone rang. I put down the cards and answered.
