So I looked across at Judge Irwin, and liked him suddenly in a way I hadn’t liked him in years, his old shoulders were so straight and the dog-toothed smile so true. But I knew I had to know.
So, as he studied me–for my face must have been something then to invite a reading–I met his gaze.
“I said there wasn’t much,” I said. “But there is something.”
“Out with it,” he said.
“Judge,” I began, “you know who I work for.”
“I know, Jack,” he said, “but let’s just sit here and forget it. I can’t say I approve of Stark, but I’m not like most of our friends down the Row. I can respect a man, and he’s a man. I was almost for him at one time. He was breaking the windowpanes out and letting in a little fresh air. But–” he shook his head sadly, and smiled–”I began to worry about him knocking down the house, too. And some of his methods. So–” He didn’t finish the sentence, but gave his shoulders the slightest shrug.
“So,” I finished it for him, “you threw in with MacMurfee.”
“Jack,” he said, “politics is always a matter of choices, and a man doesn’t set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You’ve made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.”
“Yes, but–”
“Jack, I’m not criticizing you,” he said. “I trust you. Time will show which of us is wrong. And meanwhile, Jack, let’s don’t let it come between. If I lost my temper that night, I apologize. From my heart. It has cost me some pain.
“You say you don’t like Stark’s methods,” I said. “Well, I’ll tell you something about MacMurfee’s methods. Listen, here is what MacMurfee is up to–” And I lurched and ground on like a runaway streetcar charging downhill and the brakes busted. I told him what MacMurfee was up to.
He sat and took it.
Then I asked him, “Is that pretty?”
“No,” he said, and shook his head.
“It is not pretty,” I said. “And you can stop it.”
“Me?” he demanded.
“MacMurfee will listen to you. He’s got to listen to you, for you are one of the few friends he’s got left, and he knows the Boss’s breath is hot on his neck. If he really had anything of more than nuisance value, he would go on and try to bust the Boss and not haggle. But he knows he hasn’t got anything. And I’ll tell you that if it comes to a pinch the Boss will fight in the courts. This Sibyl Frey is a homemade tart, and we can damned well prove it. We’ll have an entire football squad in there, plus a track team, and all the truckers who run Highway 69 past her pappy’s house. If you talk MacMurfee into sense, there might be some chance of saving his shirt when the time comes. But mind you, I can’t promise a thing. Not now.”
There was nothing but shadow and silence and the faint odor like old cheese for a spell, while what I had just said all went through the hopper inside that handsome old head. Then he shook the head slowly. “No,” he said.
“Look here,” I said, “there’ll be something in it for Sibyl, the tart. We can take care of that side of it, unless she’s got ideas of grandeur. She’ll have to sign a little statement, of course. And I won’t conceal from you that our side will have a few affidavits from her other boy-friends salted away just in case she ever gets gay again. If you think Sibyl isn’t getting a square deal, I can reassure you on that point.”
“It isn’t that,” he said.
“Judge,” I said, and caught the tone of pleading in my own voice, “what the hell is it?”
“It’s MacMurfee’s affair. He may be making a mistake. I think he is. But it is his affair. It is the sort of thing I am not mixing in.”
“Judge,” I begged, “you think it over. Take a little time to think it over.”
He shook his head.
I got up. “I’ve got to run,” I said. “You think it over. I’ll be back tomorrow and we can talk about it then. Give me your answer then.”
He put the yellow agates on me and shook his head again. “Come to see me tomorrow, Jack. Tomorrow and every other day. But I’m giving you my answer now.”
“I’m asking you, Judge, as a favor to me. Wait till tomorrow to make up your mind.”
“You talk like I didn’t know my own mind, Jack. That’s about the only thing I’ve learned out of my three score and ten. That I know when I know my own mind. But you come back tomorrow, anyway. And we won’t talk politics.” He made a sudden gesture as though sweeping off the top of a table with his arm. “Damn politics anyway!” he exclaimed humorously.
I looked at him, and even with the wry, humorous expression on his face and the arm flung out at the end of its gesture, knew that this was it. It wasn’t the dabble of the foot in the water, or even the steady deep pull of the undertow or the peripheral drag of the whirlpool. It was the heady race and plunge of the vortex. I ought to have known it would be this way.
Looking at him, I said, almost whispering, “I asked you, Judge. I near begged you, Judge.”
A mild question came on his face.
“I tried,” I said. “I begged you.”
“What?” he demanded.
“Did you ever hear,” I asked, my voice still not much more than a whisper, “of a man named Littlepaugh?”
“Littlepaugh?” he queried, and his brow wrinkled in an effort of memory.
“Mortimer L. Littlepaugh,” I said, “don’t you remember?”
The flesh of the forehead drew more positively together to make the deep vertical mark like a cranky exclamation point between the heavy, rust-colored eyebrows. “No,” he said, and shook his head, “I don’t remember.”
And he didn’t. I was sure he didn’t. He didn’t even remember Mortimer L. Littlepaugh.
“Well,” I questioned, “do you remember the American Electric Power Company?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I? I was their counsel for ten years.” There wasn’t a flicker.
“Do you remember how you got the job?”
“Lt me see–” he began, and I knew that he didn’t for the moment remember, that he was in truth reaching back into the past, trying to remember. Then, straightening himself, he said, “Yes, of course, I remember. It was through a Mr. Satterfield.”
But there had been the flicker. The barb had found meat, and I knew it.
I waited a long minute, looking at him, and he looked straight back at me, very straight in his chair.
“Judge,” I asked softly, “you won’t change your mind? About MacMurfee?”
“I told you,” he said.
Then I could hear his breathing, and I wanted more than anything to know what was in his head, why he was sitting there straight and looking at me, while the barb bled into him.
I stepped to the chair which I had occupied and lean down to pick up the manila envelope on the floor beside it. Then I moved to his chair, and laid the envelope on his lap.
He looked at the envelope, without touching it. Then he looked up at me, a hard straight look out of the yellow agates, with no question in them. Then, without saying a word, he opened the envelope and read the papers there. The light was bad, but he did not lean forward. He held the papers, one by one, up to his face. He read them very deliberately. Then he laid the last, deliberately, on his lap.
“Littlepaugh,” he said musingly, and waited. “You know,” he said marveling, “you know, I didn’t remember his name. I swear, I didn’t even remember his name.”
He waited again.
“Don’t you think it remarkable,” he asked, “that I didn’t even remember his name?”
“Maybe so,” I said.
“You know,” he said, still marveling, “for weeks–for months sometimes–I don’t even remember any of–” he touched the papers lightly with his strong right forefinger–”of this.”
He waited, drawn into himself.
Then he said, “You know, sometimes–for a long time at a stretch–it’s like it hadn’t happened. Not to me. Maybe
to somebody else, but not to me. Then I remember, and when I first remember I say, No, it could not have happened to me.”
Then he looked up at me, straight in the eye. “But it did,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “it did.”
“Yes,” he nodded, “but it is difficult for me to believe.”
“It is for me, too,” I said.
“Thanks for that much, Jack,” he said, and smiled crookedly.
“I guess you know the next move,” I said.
“I guess so. Your employer is trying to put pressure on me. To blackmail me.”
“_Pressure__ is a prettier word,” I averred.
“I don’t care much about pretty words any more. You live with words a long time. Then all at once you are old, and there are the things and the words don’t matter any more.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Suit yourself,” I replied, “but you get the idea.”
“Don’t you know–your employer ought to know, since he claims to be a lawyer, that this stuff,” he tapped the papers again with the forefinger, “wouldn’t stick? Not for one minute. In a court of law. Why, it happened almost twenty-five years ago. And you wouldn’t get any testimony, anyway. Except from this Littlepaugh woman. Which would be worthless. Everybody is dead.”
“Except you, Judge,” I said.
“It wouldn’t stick in court.”
“But you don’t live in a court. You aren’t dead, and you live in the world and people think you are a certain kind of man. You aren’t the kind of man who could bear for them to think different, Judge.”
“They couldn’t think it!” he burst out, leaning forward. “By God, they haven’t any right to think it. I’ve done right, I’ve done my duty, I’ve–”
I took my gaze from his face and directed it to the papers on his lap. He saw me do that, and looked down, too. The words stopped, and his fingers touched the papers, tentatively as though to verify their reality. Quite slowly, he raised his eyes back to me. “You’re right,” he said. “I did this, too.”
“Yes,” I said, “you did.”
“Does Stark know it?”
I tried to make out what was behind that question, but I couldn’t read him.
“No, he doesn’t,” I replied. “I told him I wouldn’t tell him till I’d seen you. I had to be sure, you see, Judge.”
“You have a tender sensibility,” he said. For a blackmailer.”
“We won’t start calling names. All I’ll say is that you’re trying to protect a blackmailer.”
“No, Jack,” he said quietly, “I’m not trying to protect MacMurfee. Maybe–” he hesitated–”I’m trying to protect myself.”
“You know how to do it, then. And I’ll never tell Stark.”
“Maybe you’ll never tell him, anyway.”
He said that even more quietly, and for the instant I though he might be ready to reach for a weapon–the desk was near him–or ready to spring at me. He might be old but he would still be a customer.
He must have guessed the thought, for he shook his head, smiled, and said, “No, don’t worry. You needn’t be afraid.”
“Look here–” I began angrily.
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” he said. Then, reflectively, added, “But I could stop you.”
“By stopping MacMurfee,” I said.
“A lot easier than that.”
“How?”
“A lot easier than that,” he repeated.
“How?”
“I could just–” he began, “I could just say to you–I could just tell you something–” He stopped, the suddenly rose to his feet, spilling the papers off his knees. “But I won’t,” he said cheerfully, and smiled directly at me.
“Won’t tell me what?”
“Forget it,” he said, still smiling, and waved his hand in a gay dismissal of the subject.
I stood there irresolutely for a moment. Things were not making sense. He was not supposed to be standing there, brisk and confident and cheerful, with the incriminating papers at his feet. But he was.
I stooped to pick up the papers, and he watched me from his height.
“Judge,” I said, “I’ll be back tomorrow. You think it over, and make up your mind tomorrow.”
“Why, it’s made up.”
“You’ll–”
“No, Jack.”
I went to the hall door. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said.
“Sure, sure. You come back. But my mind is made up.”
I walked down the hall without saying good-bye. I had my hand lifted to the front door when I heard his voice calling my name. I turned and took a few steps toward him. He had come out into the hall. “I just wanted to tell you,” he said, “that I did learn something new from those interesting documents. I learned that my old friend Governor Stanton impaired his honor to protect me. I do not know whether to be more glad or sorry, at the fact. At the knowledge of his attachment or the knowledge of the pain it cost him. He had never told me. That was the pitch of his generosity. Wasn’t it? Not ever telling me.”
I mumbled something to the effect that I supposed it was.
“I just wanted you to know about the Governor. That his failing was a defect of his virtue. The virtue of affection for a friend.”
I didn’t mumble anything to that.
“I just wanted you to know that about the Governor,” he said.
“All right,” I said, and went to the front door, feeling his yellow gaze and calm smile upon me, and out into the blaze of light.
It was still hotter than hell’s hinges as I walked up the Row toward home. I debated a swim or getting into my car and heading back to town to tell the Boss that Judge Irwin wouldn’t budge. Then I decided that I might wait over another day. I might wait on just the chance that the Judge would change his mind. But I wouldn’t swim till later. It was too hot even to swim now. I would take a shower when I got in and lie down till it had cooled off enough for a swim.
I took my shower and lay down on my bed and went to sleep.
I came out of the sleep and popped straight up in the bed. I was wide awake. The sound that had awakened me was still ringing in my ears. I knew that it had been a scream. Then it came again. A bright, beautiful, silvery soprano scream.
I bounced off the bed and started for the door, realized that I was buck-naked, grabbed a robe, and ran out. There was a noise down the hall from my mother’s room, a sound like moaning. The door was open and I ran in.
She was sitting on the edge of her bed, wearing a negligee, clutching the white bedside telephone in her hand, staring at me with wide, wild eyes, and moaning in a spaced, automatic fashion. I went toward her. She dropped the telephone to the floor with a clatter, and pointed her finger at me and cried out, “You did it, you did, you killed him!”
“What?” I demanded, “what?”
“You killed him!”
“Killed who?”
“You killed him!” She began to laugh hysterically.
I was holding her by the shoulders now, shaking her, trying to make her stop laughing, but she kept clawing and pushing at me. She stopped laughing an instant to gasp for breath, and in that interval I heard the dry, clicking signal the telephone was making to call attention to the fact it was not on its rack. Then her laughter drowned out the sound.
“Shut up, shut up!” I commanded, and she suddenly stared at me as though just discovering my presence.
Then, not loud now but with intensity, she said, “You killed him, you killed him.”
“Killed who?” I demanded, shaking her.
“Your father,” she said, “your father and oh! you killed him.”
That was how I found out. At the moment the finding out simply numbed me. When a heavy-caliber slug hits you, you may spin around but you don’t feel a thing. Not at first. Anyway, I was busy. My mother was in bad shape. By this time there were a couple of black faces at the door, the cook and the maid, and I was damning them to get Dr. Bland and stop gawking. Then I rak
ed the clicking telephone up off the floor so they could use the one downstairs, and let my mother go long enough to slam the door to keep those all-seeing, all-knowing eyes off what was happening.
My mother was talking between her moans and laughing. She was saying how she had loved him and how he was the only person she had ever loved and how I had killed him and had killed my own father and a lot of stuff like that. She was still carrying on when Dr. Bland arrived and gave her the hypodermic. Across her form on the bed, from which the moans and the mutterings were now subsiding, he turned his gray, gray-bearded owlish face and said, “Jack, I’m sending a nurse up here. A very trustworthy woman. Nobody else is to come in here. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I told him, for I understood, and understood that he had understood perfectly well what my mother’s wild talking had meant.
“You stay here till the nurse arrives,” he said, “and don’t let anybody in. And the nurse isn’t supposed to let anybody in until I get back to see if your mother is normal. Not anybody.”
I nodded, and followed him to the door of the room.
After he had said his good-bye, I detained him a moment. “Doctor,” I asked, “what about the Judge? I didn’t get it straight from my mother. Was it a stroke?”
“No,” he said, and inspected my face.
“Well, what was it?”
“He shot himself this afternoon,” he replied, still inspecting my face. But then he added quite matter-of-factly, “It was undoubtedly a question of health. His health was failing. A very active man–a sportsman–very often–” he was even more dry and detached in his tone–”very often such a man doesn’t want to face the last years of limited activity. Yes, I am sure that that was the reason.”
I didn’t answer.
“Good day, sir,” the doctor said, and took his eyes off me and started down the hall.