The D. A. gave her a considerate smile that silently said he disliked putting a lady of her position through a nonsensical routine. “Do you have any opinions already formed regarding this case, Mrs. Clevenger?”
“None.”
“Do you know the defendant, Max Taylor?”
She looked down her nose at the D. A. “Hardly.”
“Of course. But this is all necessary, Mrs. Clevenger.”
“I quite understand. Get on with it, young man. ”
“I think we need go no further,” the D. A. said. He turned toward the judge. “Your Honor, we find the juror acceptable.”
The judge nodded. “Counsel for the defense may question the juror.”
Cyril Abbott shuffled a few steps toward the Bench. He stood with that country bumpkin slump and scratched his gray tangle. “Your Honor, I guess the District Attorney has asked the important questions. I don’t see any grounds for disqualification of the juror. The Defense accepts her.”
I stared at Abbott’s slouching back for a moment. Then I sagged in my chair and let a hard-held breath break from my lungs.
As Abbott turned to face me. I’m sure he controlled an urge to wink. For a second I was almost sorry I’d lied to him, hadn’t given him the whole fifteen grand.
I don’t know what Mrs. Clevenger was before she married old man Clevenger, when she made that trip to a dazzling vacation land in a tropical clime. I don’t know what Len Doty had on her when he came looming out of her past. It must have been plenty to cause her to spend a young fortune seeking out a trustworthy name—my name—and making the arrangements to get rid of him.
I’d never know that part of it, and I didn’t care. I did know that there was only one thing she could do now, if she didn’t want me singing my head off.
I knew how great it was going to be, getting back to the city and telling the boys how I’d been tried with my own client on the jury.
LIFE SENTENCE
Originally published in Manhunt, April 1960.
In my official capacity I’ve escorted many men to state prison, each handcuffed to me during the train ride. Several of them have been murderers. This one was in that macabre category, and the thing that interested me was that I couldn’t imagine him killing anybody.
As a matter of fact, his was the goriest murder of all. He had taken a heavy meat knife and chopped his wife so thoroughly that she was buried like a mass of hamburger.
His name was Hervie Taylor. He looked as if he should be on his way to keep books in an electric appliance store. This was precisely the job he’d had. If you’d noticed him at all against that background you’d have felt instinctively that he would never go far. He was an excellent bookkeeper. This, coupled with his natural colorless attributes, kept him in his dim corner writing his careful rows of figures while the world went its laughing, crying, loving, brawling, lustrous way.
He was a considerate little man, doing his best to keep from being an inconvenient appendage attached to me by steel. Some of them can’t help worrying their hand against the handcuff. Others want water. A few try to bury our hands in the seat to hide the cuff. Last one I took up before Hervie Taylor had to go to the bathroom every five miles or so.
Hervie sat beside me watching the scenery stream past, beautiful farming country of low. Rolling hills and green meadows, white houses and red barns. In this, he was different from the others. There are several stock reactions. Hatred for the beauty of the countryside. Bitterness. Nostalgia. Inner torture, if the man being taken away had a masochistic streak. Even hope, in a few.
Hervie Taylor simply sat and looked at the scenery.
He was a man of fifty, small-boned and not given to excess flesh. He had brown hair that he wore neatly parted. The hair had faded a little, but there was no gray in it. His eyes were dark brown, keen and intelligent. You’d never guess his age—or his crime—simply by looking at him. There was still the suggestion of boyishness in his face. A lively eagerness in his eyes that the monotony and cares of the years had not altogether extinguished.
He was of course going up for life. Perhaps he was thinking about it, now that each click of the wheels carried him that much closer.
“Do they have good food?” he asked.
“Simple, but substantial,” I said.
“Not a lot of sticky, sickening stuff or creamed mess on toast, I guess.”
“You guess right,” I said.
“It was the only mess Jassie knew how to cook, wanted to cook, or cared to eat,” he announced.
Jassie was—had been his wife. You’ve seen couples like them, a little guy with a woman who had spread, flabbed, and grown to three times his size. There’d been a lot of Jassie to chop up.
“I lived with Jassie thirty years,” he said idly.
“That’s quite a time.”
“Jassie never should have strung it out,” he said. “She changed. Or perhaps I did. Or maybe it simply took me a long time to get to know her.”
He must have loved her once, I thought.
As if suspecting the thought, he said, “She was a cute kid when we got married. Only having a husband made her feel secure, I guess. She had a man. She didn’t need to fix up any longer. She let herself go to seed in a hurry.”
“Some women are like that.” Mentally, I
