She started down the steps, already busy with the problem of getting back to her hotel, pushing away two little horrors that were beginning to thrust at her like glass slivers. These were booted feet—she was close enough to see that now—so where had the heel-click on the path come from? (A tree branch, cracking in the cold.) Women surprised by attack usually screamed, or squealed, but what she had heard had not been the beginning of either. (Susan was grim, perhaps even half-prepared.)
But the covering on the head bent at an impossible angle toward the shoulder was not a scarf; it was the drawn-tight hood of a man’s parka. Willis! shrieked Celia soundlessly in the lightning-shot blackness of her brain, but a terrible telescoping process of knowledge had begun. She would not realize until later that she had guilt-created an avenger out of her past where none existed actively as such, that she had in effect fled where no one pursued, but she knew even before a shocking white light poured down on her there on the ice, with a haunted-looking woman in gray and a Priory employe behind it, that she had killed Jules Wain.
She did shriek aloud then, and they took her away and presently took Jules Wain away too, disclosing the tear-gas gun on which his body had fallen.
It was drawn from a tight-lipped Adelaide Wain that she had indeed let her late brother-in-law’s discharged secretary, David Farrell, know the time and place of the wedding when he telephoned to ask, but that she had no idea that he would send this information, together with the newspaper clipping, to Jules’s pathologically jealous ex-wife—hadn’t even known, she insisted, that Farrell was still in touch with the woman ten years after the divorce. The former Teresa da Cunha was in and out of mental institutions during that period; ironically, the Wain level of society had chosen to interpret Jules’s explanation of instability—the truth—as a cloak for alcoholism.
Early on that prewedding evening, in spite of the changes brought about by years and illness, Adelaide had recognized the woman in the lobby and, knowing her to be fully capable of violence, told Jules. He in turn tried to reach Celia at her hotel to warn her not to go out and to let no one in—and there Adelaide Wain’s knowledge of events ended.
It was where the jury’s troubles began. Celia said calmly that late that afternoon she had received an anonymous letter so disgusting that she had burned it at once but, upon reflection, decided to go to The Priory and consult Jules about it. Once there, she had begun to feel that it was foolish to cast this cloud over their wedding, and had taken a walk outside to think it over.
“In fourteen-degree weather?”
“I was warmly dressed, and I have always enjoyed walking.”
“With a tear-gas gun.”
“Certainly. My fiance had bought it for me after an incident near my home and insisted upon my carrying it.”
Then came the recital of the man looming up in the dark, indescribably menacing on the heels of the anonymous letter, and Celia’s own instinct of self-defense. “I was terrified when he fell. I had no idea that there were steps there. I went down to see if he were badly injured, if there was something I could do before I went for help, and then, . . . and then —”
(Then she realized that Jules had occupied the wing chair, belated in his recognition of her scarfed, ski-suited back view because she was the last person he expected to see at The Priory that evening, and gone out after her and even called to her . . . He had ordered a taxi, it was revealed later—to go to Celia’s hotel?—and was presumably waiting for it well out of sight of his unpredictable ex-wife.)
Was it conceivable, the jury had to ask themselves, that a woman would wilfully kill her wealthy fiance for no discernible reason on the very eve of their wedding? There were countless recorded cases of tragic error: farmers waking up in the night to take rifles and shoot their own sons, wives surprised out of sleep dispatching their husbands.
Celia went free.
Having as it did the magic elements of money, social status, and fashionable setting, the trial was widely reported. It unearthed Mrs. Cannon, and then Mrs. Stryker, and a reluctant Mrs. Stevenson; there was even a newspaper photograph of the Bridgeport tenement, although all this was ruled out as having no bearing. On a sweltering New Jersey afternoon in late June, a thirsty man in a bar remarked, “Ask me, she got away with murder. Good thing it wasn’t a poisoning case.”
With this lure cast out, he waited until his drinking companion bought him another beer. “Remember that Lambert who was a character witness, said she’d never hurt a fly? William, Willis, something like that. Set up the Lambert Lounge over on Twelfth Street, kind of a tacky place, you know what I mean, a little rough sometimes, but the food isn’t bad. I don’t know if he married her or what, but she works there as a waitress . . .”
