If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

tasseled loafers, but since the client in question was au naturel and leering at him from the edge of the pool, Bill felt that the honors of formality rested with him. At his elbow hovered Miri Malone, in a black swimsuit and sunglasses.

They had taken an early flight to Florida and proceeded to the marine mammals park in a rented Plymouth. Bill had been apprehensive about a possible trespassing violation, but Miri assured him that the owners did not object to visitation, since she was a former employee. “I go back all the time to see the gang,” she explained.

He wondered how they would react to the notion that she might soon be using illegal maneuvers to kidnap one of the gang, but since Miri was his client, he abandoned that train of thought. Maybe it’s a far, far better thing we do, he reasoned, and followed her through the gate to the large saltwater pool.

“Bill MacPherson, I’d like you to meet Porky Delphinidae,” Miri was saying.

Nearby, a nervous young man, wearing a wet bathing suit and a Sea Park towel, consulted his watch. “This isn’t going to take long, is it, you guys? Porky is on in half an hour.”

“I doubt if we’ll get too caught up in the conversation,” Bill told him solemnly. He still couldn’t believe that he was doing this at all. “I have a thing for you to sign here, Mr. Edmonds, certifying that you are a disinterested party in these proceedings, and that you understand what the dolphin is saying.”

“Porky wants Rich to be best man,” said Miri, stroking the dolphin’s head.

Whereas, Porky will be best what? thought Bill wildly, still trying to figure out how to proceed. Perhaps he should have brought a tape recorder. “Look, before we go any further here, I need to know how the owners of this marine park feel about-er-Porky’s personal life. I mean, what if you win the lawsuit, and they refuse to part with him?”

Miri Malone smiled sweetly. “If they refuse, they will have the public-relations nightmare of the decade. I will go on every talk show on the planet, telling how the cruel dolphin-slavers are keeping true lovers apart.”

“She would, too,” Rich assured him. “She’s quite a woman.”

Bill looked at the pair of them appraisingly. “Hmm,” he said. “Miri, what about you and Rich here-”

“I told you how I feel about primate males!” said Miri.

“Whereas those are my mates of choice,” said Rich, grinning. “Besides, I couldn’t cut in on a pal, could I, Porky, old buddy?”

Porky favored them with his maniacal smile, and bobbed in agreement.

“So you’d better talk to this guy about getting engaged,” said Rich. “Because I’m not available. And you’d better hurry, because in twenty minutes it will be show time, and then we’re outta here.”

“Right,” said Bill, consulting his notes and turning to the male half of the couple he had come to think of as the starboard-crossed lovers.

“Er-how do you do, Porky?” he said to the dolphin, who was still leering at him with an expression of antic cheerfulness.

“Give me a kiss, Porky,” said Miri Malone, puckering her lips and making smacking noises at Porky. Obligingly, the dolphin touched her lips with its own.

“Don’t lead the witness, Miri,” said Bill. “Lots of guys will kiss you, but it doesn’t mean they’re willing to get engaged. Does Porky kiss just anybody?” he asked.

Miri smiled. “Want to give it a try?”

“Can’t kiss clients,” said Bill, shaking his head. He turned back to Rich Edmonds. “He’d kiss just anybody, wouldn’t he? You, for instance?”

“Well, Porky’s a pretty friendly guy,” Rich agreed. “But he’s certainly more affectionate toward Miri than toward anybody else. He-how can I phrase this?-put the moves on her a few times in the pool. That’s only to be expected, of course. You can ask him yourself, you know. He understands human speech pretty well.”

Bill knelt down beside the dolphin. “Porky,” he said, resisting the urge to speak loudly. Where were its ears? “Miri says that you would like to leave the ocean park here, and go to live with her. Is that what you want?”

Porky whooped, and bobbed his head.

Bill looked to the dolphin’s trainer for a translation. “I’d say that was a yes,” he said.

“Watch this, and see what you think.” Rich went to a bucket near the tiers of seats and took out a fish. “Want a snack, Porky?”

Porky whooped again, bobbing his head vigorously. Bill thought the reactions were identical, but in proper legal fashion he remained skeptical. Perhaps the dolphin reacted that way toward any string of phrases addressed to him, regardless of their meaning. He leaned forward and said in a hearty tone: “Porky, would you like to end up in a can of tuna?”

Several minutes later, when Bill had gone through a stack of towels and was now reasonably dry again, he looked up at Miri Malone with salt-reddened eyes and shrugged. “All right, let’s assume for argument’s sake that he does understand what people say to him. How do we know that he understands the concept of marriage? And, by the way, there’s very little chance we’ll get any of this past a sober judge. But just supposing. How do we know he understands what you’re asking?”

Miri thought about it. “The conditions are spelled out in a conventional marriage ceremony, aren’t they? You could go point by point and ask him.”

“Sure, why not?” said Bill, dumping a small puddle out of his tasseled loafer. “Dolphin law. It could be a whole new area of specialization. We have to give him the benefit of the doubt, don’t we?” Solemnly he turned toward the pool. “Do you, Porky, take this woman to have and to hold? In sickness and in health?”

Elizabeth MacPherson sat on the rug in her living room surrounded by a stack of old books and dog-eared photocopies on loan from Everett Yancey. Bill was off in Florida on a daft case for one of their mother’s friends. She had finished dinner; now she planned to spend most of the evening listening to classical guitar on the stereo while she read material on the Lucy Todhunter case. She was only about a quarter of the way through the documents after an hour of reading, and making notes of comments that seemed relevant to the case, but already she had a much clearer image of the Todhunters, having seen them characterized by friends, servants, and physicians.

From what she learned, Elizabeth did not regret missing the chance to meet them herself. In fact, she thought she had met versions of them several times in couples of her parents’ acquaintance. Philip Todhunter was the hearty, crass fellow, whom everyone suspected of having a terrible temper, although no one had ever seen it. Lucy was the smiling slender belle, with the Miss Georgia good looks, the brand-name vocabulary, and the decorator-magazine decor. As a couple, they would socialize with people important to the husband’s business interests, or the “right” people from the neighborhood or the country club, but no one would know them very well, because their conversation was confined to trivial pleasantries. Perhaps it was all they were capable of. Such people made Elizabeth feel five pounds heavier, and colt-awkward, because try as she might, she could not think of anything to say to them. She was glad that the Todhunters had been dead for more than a century, thus relieving her of the task of interviewing them in person.

Elizabeth turned to the transcript of Lucy Todhunter’s trial, but she found that the court record added little to the summary provided by Everett Yancey in his history of the case. Next she turned to a photocopy of a lengthy newspaper interview with Richard Norville. Since the case had been a cause celebre in Danville, considerable coverage had been given to the trial, to the background of the unhappy couple, and to interviews with the principal witnesses. A pen-and-ink sketch of Norville, captioned WARTIME COMRADE: FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH, accompanied the article.

According to Richard Norville, his friend the major was something of a dandy, meticulous about his clothes and his possessions, but he was not a man of robust health. Philip Todhunter had suffered from neuralgia and stomach complaints during the war, and he was accustomed to dosing himself with patent medicines, in hopes of relieving his discomfort. Norville maintained, though, that despite his health problems, the major had been a good officer and, later in civilian life, a hardworking businessman.

“He was a hypochondriac and a carpetbagger,” Elizabeth remarked aloud. “I expect he was tiresome, but I wonder why anyone would want to poison him? Especially, why Lucy? If wives poisoned spouses just for being tiresome, entire continents would have to be used as prisons.” She added, “No offense, Cameron!” in case any angelic presences were passing through the room.

The journal of Dr. Richard Humphreys went into greater detail about the medical tribulations of the Todhunters. According to Humphreys’s narrative, Philip Todhunter was a cornerstone of his medical practice, forever calling in the physician to treat his headaches, his sleeplessness, and his aching joints. Humphreys noted that his patient was