“That’s not very nice of people.”
“No. It isn’t.”
“Just because other people make bum marriages…”
“What criterion do we have, but other people’s marriages?”
“I think our getting married makes sense.”
“So do I.”
“We can support each other.”
“Right. Today I tried to help you get out of Cecilia’s jodhpurs.”
“Build toward a family, a way of life.”
“As long as I keep accepting one miserable assignment at the newspaper after another.”
“Companionship. Grow old together, seeing things from somewhat the same perspective, having the same memories, protecting each other.”
“Correct,” said Fletch. “You know anybody who’s doing it?”
“Doesn’t mean we can’t.”
“No. It doesn’t.”
“I definitely think we should get married,” Barbara said.
“I do, too,” Fletch agreed. “Definitely.”
“Just think of marriage the way you think of everything else,” Barbara said. “Playing through to truth. Only in marriage, you’re playing through to a truth of you, and me, and us.”
The telephone rang.
Startled, Barbara looked at it. “Who could that be?”
“I asked Alston to call. He may have some things to tell me about Donald Habeck.”
“Habeck.” Barbara carried her plate to the sink. “You’re crazy.”
“Yeah.” Fletch stood up to answer the phone. “Factor that in, too.”
“Hate to admit it, ol’ buddy,” Alston said. “But you just might be right”
“Of course I am.” Fletch settled into a Morris chair by the phone. “About what?”
“As best I could, without my fingers getting caught in the files, I’ve been able to dig up a few things for you: Habeck’s latest big case; his current big case; and—this is where you may be right—what old client of his just got out of the pen with, maybe, an irrepressible urge to send a bullet through Habeek’s skull.”
“There is one?”
“First, his last and current big cases. Doubtlessly you have comprehensive newspaper files on both.”
“Yes. I got them this afternoon.”
“So you know the current big case concerns the chairman of the State House Ways and Means Committee being charged with a kickback scheme. Bribery.”
“Yeah.”
“He’s charged specifically with having accepted fifty-three thousand, five hundred dollars from an architectural firm contracted to design a new wing on the State Penitentiary at Wilton.”
“Hope the state senator had them design a nice cell with a southern view for himself.”
“Doubt he’ll ever see it, if he did. The maneuvers here are too sophisticated for me to understand. I don’t mean legal maneuvers, I mean political maneuvers. Habeck has filed all kinds of motions and petitions I don’t understand. He’s doing the most amazing fox-trot through the courts with this case. I don’t understand why the courts put up with this kind of wriggling.”
“Habeck was just trying to let the case get to be old news as far as the public is concerned, wasn’t he? After a while the public, and the courts, too, I suppose, lose their anger over a case like this. We become tired of reading about it. Indifferent to what happens. Right?”
“Right. It would help if you journalistic types blew the whistle on this kind of maneuvering once in a while. Reported in depth the history of such a case. Demand that the courts make final disposition of it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you’d be interested in Habeck’s personal notations on the records of this case?”
“You bet.”
“The first notation says,
“Ah. The idea being that Judge Swank owes something from the deep, dark, shadowy past to Senator Schoenbaum.”
“One assumes so. Some indebtedness safely hidden. You boys would never be able to find it.”
“Or, Senator Schoenbaum holds something in the blackmail line over the aforesaid Judge Swank.”
“Judges may deliberate like self-righteous prigs, but they must live as pragmatists.”
“I’ll write that down.”
“A second note on the file in Habeck’s own writing might also interest you. It reads,
“Until he gets the case in front of Judge Swank.”
“And that’s when he really jerks the court around.”
“Meanwhile, Senator Schoenbaum is vacationing in Hawaii.”
“Yes. Poor jerk thinks he’s going to come out of this a rich and free man.”
“Well, he’s half right.”
“I don’t see Schoenbaum as anybody who wants to ventilate Habeck’s head.”
“No.”
“The other cases Habeck is pleading, and there are more than twenty, are all being worked up by underlings, poor beavers like me. Several cases of embezzlement, two vehicular homicides, a half-dozen cases of insurance fraud, as many as ten cases of parental kidnappings—you know, when a member of a divorced couple loses the custody battle and arranges to have his own kid kidnapped?”
“That many?”
“It’s a big business. If I ever decide to leave Habeck, Harrison and Haller, I might decide to go into it. I’d feel more useful.”
“Gives one pause to think.”
“Plus one rather funny case about a milkman.”
“I met a witty milkman once.”
“This one is real witty. Listen. First, he rented a sable coat for his wife, for a month, on credit.”
“Loving husband.”
“Then he walked his sable-adorned wife into a Rolls-Royce showroom, and leased a Rolls-Royce for a month, on credit.”
“Liked good cars, too.”
“With his wife in the sable coat, both of them in the Rolls-Royce, he was able to rent a small mansion in Palm Springs.”
“Why shouldn’t a milkman live well?”
“With the coat, the Rolls, and the house, he then went, to a local bank, and wangled a five-hundred- thousand-dollar cash loan.”
“Wow.”
“And gave up his job as a milkman.”
“Yeah. Why should he need to work with all he’s got?”
“He returned the coat, the car, and canceled the lease on the house. And skipped to Nebraska.”
“You can buy a lot of cows in Nebraska for five hundred thousand dollars.”
“Even the bank didn’t care, for three years, because the guy kept paying them interest out of the principal he had borrowed.”
