When they finally threw us out of Pommeroy’s, and after we had considered the possibility of buying the Bishop brandy in the Cock Tavern, and even beer in the Devereux, I let my instinct, like an aged horse, carry me on to the Underground and home to Gloucester Road, and there discovered the rissoles, like some traces of a vanished civilization, fossilized in the oven. She Who Must Be Obeyed was already in bed. feigning sleep. When I climbed in beside her, she opened a hostile eye.
“You’re drunk, Rumpole!” she said. “What on earth have you been doing?”
“I’ve been having a legal discussion,” I told her, “on the subject of the admissibility of certain evidence. Vital, from my client’s point of view. And, just for a change, Hilda, I think I’ve won.”
“Well, you’d better try and get some sleep.” And she added with a sort of satisfaction, “I’m sure you’ll be feeling quite terrible in the morning.”
As with all the grimmer predictions of She Who Must Be Obeyed, this one turned out to be true. I sat in the Court the next day with the wig feeling like a lead weight on the brain and the stiff collar sawing the neck like a blunt execution. My mouth tasted of matured birdcage and from a long way off I heard Wrigglesworth say to Bridget O’Dowd, who stood looking particularly saintly and virginal in the witness box, “About a week before this, did you see the defendant, Edward Timson, on your staircase flourishing any sort of weapon?”
It is no exaggeration to say that I felt deeply shocked and considerably betrayed. After his promise to me, Wrigglesworth had turned his back on the spirit of the great Christmas festival. He came not to bring peace but a sword.
I clambered with some difficulty to my feet. After my forensic efforts of the evening before, I was scarcely in the mood for a legal argument. Mr. Justice Vosper looked up in surprise and greeted me in his usual chilly fashion.
“Yes, Mr. Rumpole. Do you object to this evidence?”
Of course I object, I wanted to say. It’s inhuman, unnecessary, unmerciful, and likely to lead to my losing another case. Also, it’s clearly contrary to a solemn and binding contract entered into after a number of glasses of the Bishop’s putative port. All I seemed to manage was a strangled, “Yes.”
“I suppose Mr. Wrigglesworth would say—” Vosper, J., was, as ever, anxious to supply any argument that might not yet have occurred to the prosecution “—that it is evidence of ‘system.‘ “
“System?” I heard my voice faintly and from a long way off. “It may be, I suppose. But the Court has a discretion to omit evidence which may be irrelevant and purely prejudicial.”
“I feel sure Mr. Wrigglesworth has considered the matter most carefully and that he would not lead this evidence unless he considered it entirely relevant.”
I looked at the Mad Monk on the seat beside me. He was smiling at me with a mixture of hearty cheerfulness and supreme pity, as though I were sinking rapidly and he had come to administer extreme unction. I made a few ill-chosen remarks to the Court, but I was in no condition, that morning, to enter into a complicated legal argument on the admissibility of evidence.
It wasn’t long before Bridget O’Dowd had told a deeply disapproving jury all about Eddie “Turpin” Timson’s sword. “A man.” the judge said later in his summing up about young Edward, “clearly prepared to attack with cold steel whenever it suited him.”
When the trial was over, I called in for refreshment at my favorite watering hole and there, to my surprise, was my opponent Wrigglesworth, sharing an expensive-looking bottle with Detective Inspector Wainwright. the officer in charge of the case. I stood at the bar, absorbing a consoling glass of Pommeroy’s ordinary, when the D. I. came up to the bar for cigarettes. He gave me a friendly and maddeningly sympathetic smile.
“Sorry about that, sir. Still, win a few, lose a few. Isn’t that it?”
“In my case lately, it’s been win a few, lose a lot!”
“You couldn’t have this one, sir. You see, Mr. Wrigglesworth had promised it to me.”
“He had
“Well, I’m retiring, as you know. And Mr. Wrigglesworth promised me faithfully that my last case would be a win. He promised me that, in a manner of speaking, as a Christmas present. Great man is our Mr. Wrigglesworth, sir, for the spirit of Christmas.”
I looked across at the Mad Monk and a terrible suspicion entered my head. What was all that about a present for the Bishop? I searched my memory and I could find no trace of our having, in fact, bought wine for any sort of cleric. And was Wrigglesworth as inexperienced as he would have had me believe in the art of selecting claret?
As I watched him pour and sniff a glass from his superior bottle and hold it critically to the light, a horrible suspicion crossed my mind. Had the whole evening’s events been nothing but a deception, a sinister attempt to nobble Rumpole, to present him with such a stupendous hangover that he would stumble in his legal argument? Was it all in aid of D. I. Wainwright’s Christmas present?
I looked at Wrigglesworth, and it would be no exaggeration to say the mind boggled. He was, of course, perfectly right about me. I just didn’t recognize evil when I saw it.
DEAD ON CHRISTMAS STREET – John D. MacDonald
The police in the first prowl car on the scene got out a tarpaulin. A traffic policeman threw it over the body and herded the crowd back. They moved uneasily in the gray slush. Some of them looked up from time to time.
In the newspaper picture the window would be marked with a bold X. A dotted line would descend from the X to the spot where the covered body now lay. Some of the spectators, laden with tinsel-and evergreen-decorated packages, turned away, suppressing a nameless guilt.
But the curious stayed on. Across the street, in the window of a department store, a vast mechanical Santa rocked back and forth, slapping a mechanical hand against a padded thigh, roaring forever, “Whaw haw ho ho ho. Whaw haw ho ho ho.” The slapping hand had worn the red plush from the padded thigh.
The ambulance arrived, with a brisk intern to make out the DOA. Sawdust was shoveled onto the sidewalk, then pushed off into the sewer drain. Wet snow fell into the city. And there was nothing else to see. The corner Santa, a leathery man with a pinched, blue nose, began to ring his hand bell again.
Daniel Fowler, one of the young Assistant District Attorneys, was at his desk when the call came through from Lieutenant Shinn of the Detective Squad. “Dan? This is Gil. You heard about the Garrity girl yet?”
For a moment the name meant nothing, and then suddenly he remembered: Loreen Garrity was the witness in the Sheridan City Loan Company case. She had made positive identification of two of the three kids who had tried to pull that holdup, and the case was on the calendar for February. Provided the kids didn’t confess before it came up, Dan was going to prosecute. He had the Garrity girl’s statement, and her promise to appear.
“What about her, Gil?” he asked.
“She took a high dive out of her office window—about an hour ago. Seventeen stories, and right into the Christmas rush. How come she didn’t land on somebody, we’ll never know. Connie Wyant is handling it. He remembered she figured in the loan-company deal, and he told me. Look, Dan. She was a big girl, and she tried hard not to go out that window. She was shoved. That’s how come Connie has it. Nice Christmas present for him.”
“Nice Christmas present for the lads who pushed over the loan company, too,” Dan said grimly. “Without her there’s no case. Tell Connie that. It ought to give him the right line.”
Dan Fowler set aside the brief he was working on and walked down the hall. The District Attorney’s secretary was at her desk. “Boss busy. Jane?”
She was a small girl with wide, gray eyes, a mass of dark hair, a soft mouth. She raised one eyebrow and looked at him speculatively. “I could be bribed, you know.”
He looked around with exaggerated caution, went around her desk on tiptoe, bent and kissed her upraised lips. He smiled down at her. “People are beginning to talk,” he whispered, not getting it as light as he meant it to be.
She tilted her head to one side, frowned, and said, “What is it, Dan?”
He sat on the corner of her desk and took her hands in his. and he told her about the big. dark-haired, swaggering woman who had gone out the window. He knew Jane would want to know. He had regretted bringing
