Killing Time Page 17

  The Detweiler case had every recommendation but one. It was certainly hopeless enough at first glance. The killer had not only confessed, but to a sensational newspaper for a large fee. The crime was gaudy and peculiarly outrageous to the layman: female victims, one a mother, and on Christmas Eve. Detweiler had been billed by the papers, pejoratively, as an artist; a jury’s unfavorable bias might be assumed. If the public could be said to have moods, its current one had been conditioned by other mass murders of the year; six victims of a berserk gunman in Oakland, California; four, including the suicide of the perpetrator, his entire family, in Battle Creek, Michigan; and the work of a killer-rapist in St. Louis. Detweiler’s achievement might be seen as the continuation of a trend, which if not stopped by the stern hand of justice might, etc., etc. And that he had not attacked his female victims sexually or committed theft might be to his disadvantage: Melrose could sometimes lead a jury into a curious sympathy for the perpetrator of a crime-for-gain: who among humankind felt no lust or cupidity?

  Furthermore, Melrose was hungry for battle. It had been a good fourteen months since the last trial which quickened his blood. Like a Don Juan who surfeited with easy conquests could feel desire only in the pursuit of very special prey—novice nuns, frigid princesses—he gained no sustenance from the routine diet. In the Guglielmo case, more than a year before, he had won an acquittal for the gang-hired hatchetman by exploiting an idiosyncrasy of the killer’s weapon, a shortened twelve-gauge shotgun with a quirk in its sear which permitted the arm to fire only when held at a downward angle from the horizontal. As only Melrose and the defendant knew, Guglielmo had first to knock his victim to the ground before discharging into him the double load.

  In court Melrose opened a fresh box of Super-X shells, chose two of the blunt red cylinders, and having passed them among the jurors for examination, dropped them into the breech.

  He presented the weapon to his assistant counsel. “The safety, Mr. Willingham, is not on.”

  Much of Melrose’s pleasure owed to his awareness that both the judge and the prosecutor would have been peculiarly gratified to see his head blown off. The jury of course were enthralled, except for Number Three, a sardonic-looking man in whose countenance Melrose had watched unsympathy grow throughout the trial.

  “Now, Mr. Willingham, would you please place the barrels at my chin.” His assistant took care to keep the breech ever lower than the muzzle while Melrose pressed against the twin openings of barrel.

  “Now, Mr. Willingham.” His voice was necessarily distorted. “Will you be so good as to squeeze the triggers.”

  The cynical juror stared aloft in disgust. He was very dear to Melrose at this moment.

  “Squeeze, Mr. Willingham, squee-ee-eeze.”

  The sear held, refused to release the hammers. Melrose called for greater force of finger, he was in a seizure of ecstasy, only the external symptoms of which were for display: at such a moment, only at such a moment, did he experience a maximum sense of life. The judge soon called an end to the demonstration; the prosecutor inveighed against the courtroom circus; the jury subsequently acquitted Guglielmo.

  Melrose waited for the discharge of the jury, so as to thank its members as was his custom, and his warmest reception came from Number Three, who in the world to which he was returning, that bleak world outside the courtroom, worked as an alteration tailor.

  “Mr. Melrose, it wasn’t easy. You had the other eleven more or less against you when we went Out. They took the shotgun thing as a trick, Mr. Melrose.”

  Melrose smiled within while showing aggrieved astonishment without: nothing gave him more gratification than a favorable verdict returned by a jury who knew it had been hoaxed.

  “One man, he knew guns, says you rigged it,” the tailor went on. “I say nobody can fix an exhibit. He says Melrose can get to anybody or thing. I says, if he had the judge in his pocket why did the judge never sustain an objection of his while always for the prosecution? I says why did the judge threaten him many times with contempt. He says to make it look good.”

  “You must be an eloquent man, Mr. Kleinsinger,” Melrose said. He was still pleasantly astounded in particular but not in general at the revelation that Kleinsinger, his supposed enemy, had been his actual friend. In a murder trial there were no absolute surprises, because there were no true precedents. A unique life had been lost, and another was at stake. Every soul involved was under the mortal pressure of the grand hazard. Melrose disapproved of capital punishment, but without it his profession would be but a game and humanity thereby devalued. He had never sought a license to practice in any jurisdiction in which execution was not the ultimate penalty.

  What Kleinsinger had done was to mask a marked bias in his favor. This juror’s tactic was not unknown to Melrose, but he had misjudged Kleinsinger’s appearance, which as seen from the defense table had not suggested sentimentality.

  Kleinsinger said: “No, I can’t take such credit. I held out for a point. I says your client was a hood and he might have shot the other one, but the prosecution never proved it in this courtroom beyond a reasonable doubt. Isn’t that the idea of justice? If the state wants to take a life, even of an evil person, they got to have a hundred per cent excuse. We are not talking of how God would do it.”

  “Do you believe in God, Mr. Kleinsinger?” Melrose asked.

  Kleinsinger replied proudly: “In fact I do not. I believe in being a Mensch.”

  Melrose thanked him and, without irony and though he had already lost interest in the tailor, who had not proved as subtle as he first supposed, said: “God bless you.”

  In trials as in sex, the more glorious the moment, the more deathlike the succeeding quiescence. If only Detweiler were not a psychopath.

  But the newspaper publisher, when Melrose returned his call, said of that there could be no doubt, and was cheerfully positive on this matter owing to his vulgar misapprehension Melrose would find it attractive.

  “I’m sorry,” Melrose replied: “I cannot take the case.”

  The publisher said: “This means a great deal to me personally.”

  “Why?”

  “I gave my word to him that I would get you.”

  “I don’t accept that as placing me under an obligation,” Melrose said. “Your arrogance aside, I am on general principles disinclined to place any great value on the ‘word’ of the press.”

  “All right,” the publisher said in a jollying tone. “I’ll play along with you and your reputation for giving a hard time to respectable elements.” He raised the offered fee.

  “No,” said Melrose.

  “Look, Melrose, I don’t want to be gross, but you are getting to be known by the public in recent years as almost exclusively a hoodlums’ lawyer. I personally don’t like to see this happen. You are a man of extraordinary talents—”

  “I merely practice my profession, sir. I am not a moralist.”

  “But here’s my point,” said the publisher. “This boy is crazy as a bedbug, yet that in itself won’t save him. We just can’t take a chance on some inferior defense lawyer. Crews had blood in his eye and is no idiot whatever else you can say about him. He wants the next gubernatorial nomination. He may be approaching desperation: I don’t have to tell you that his last term as D.A. has not been distinguished. He will be out to fry this boy. Now, I have spent an afternoon with Detweiler. At first he was merely a story to me. I had never before sat in a room with a murderer—”

  “I know,” Melrose broke in, “and you discovered to your surprise that he was human. Again and again over the years your trashy papers have editorially called for vengeance against the so-called enemies of society, and this is the first one you have ever laid eyes on.”

  “Now you are being moralistic,” said the publisher. “I think I have you there. And uninformed, as well. Some of those editorials have been written by former police reporters who have seen as many criminals as you.”

  “But not in the same way,” Melrose said
soberly. Nevertheless, the man had scored a point off him.

  “Detweiler is not an enemy of society. He is sick.”

  “You are qualified to make that diagnosis?”

  “I am not on the stand, Mr. Melrose,” the publisher said waspishly. “I know something about men. I know Detweiler is mad.” He paused. “He has no malice in him.”

  Melrose was suddenly embarrassed. He found he could not explain his prejudice against maniacs without revealing more of himself than he could afford to do. Surely one of the reasons for which a man becomes an attorney at law is to evade the law as applied to himself, to be an officer of the court of life and not a defendant, to speak always for others, the state or the accused, and never oneself; and yet so to celebrate the self. Else the Law was unbearable.

  In self-protection, then, Melrose felt compelled to take the case. But he could not let this pretentious ass think he had been won over by the argument. Until he accepted Detweiler as client, Melrose would not care whether the killer lived or died, sane or crazy.

  So what he did was to demand a fee precisely twice as large as that which he had been offered. The publisher agreed, but whether Melrose had deceived him could not be determined at this time. Powerful men, Melrose knew, could often be manipulated more easily than janitors, but they were more skilled in concealment.

  It had been a defeat for Melrose nevertheless. Finally it was he who had been manipulated by his own vanity. His clients were all the same to him; whether innocent men or rogues, he shared with them a community of interest. Their motives had been rational. If killers, they had murdered for a reason: money or hatred or jealousy. If wrongfully accused, they had yet been arrested in a situation or condition which suggested to rational men—the police and the district attorney—that they had committed the crime for rational motives. There were rules to the ensuing battle, and Melrose’s joy was to exploit the possibilities within the discipline, as a poet uses the constricting form of the sonnet. That he was often misidentified as a maverick or even an anarchist testified rather to the quality of his enemies than his own.

  But a madman was something other, a resident of a different universe of discourse, with no neighbors, feeling no affinity even with other maniacs; by his very existence derisive of Melrose’s art, wit, life. And that Detweiler was psychotic, Melrose had been certain from his first perusal of the newspaper stories, he who was famous for objecting to any qualitative description of a client’s manner by a nonprofessional witness.

  Q. Please describe the defendant as you saw him on the morning of the twenty-ninth.

  A. He seemed nervous.

  MR. MELROSE. Objection, Witness is not a psychiatrist.

  If the witness were an alienist Melrose went at him as a ferret at a rabbit: Had not all psychoanalysts themselves been psychoanalyzed? This question reminded jurors of the folk wisdom, immanent in most allegedly normal men, which held that he who trafficked in derangement was himself perhaps deranged—and served to distract them from a similar suspicion that a criminal lawyer was touched with crime…. Were there not many different schools of thought in psychiatry? Was the witness a member of such a school? If he was, Melrose managed to suggest organizational rigidity and bias; if not, his subsequent questions tended to reflect on the possible irresponsibility of the free-lance, the eclectic, the practitioner who could not make up his mind. Of course the prosecutor objected all along the line, which served, whether or not he was sustained, in fixing the matter ever more firmly in the jurors’ minds.

  Melrose was no less zealous in the protection and enhancement of psychiatric testimony for the defense. He kept available at least two professionals who would fearlessly state that theirs was an exact science, reliable as physics: one with a German accent, another as American-looking as a highway patrolman.

  A sane man, greatly exercised because of drink, passion, anger, might strangle a woman. As means of murder went, strangulation was really one of the kinder forms: the victim soon became unconscious for want of air. In taste it was more palatable than a man’s discharging a firearm into the flesh of another human being or drawing a blade across a throat. It was intimate, an extension of an embrace; human, not mechanized or chemical.

  But to strangle two women in succession, neither for love nor money, was for Melrose conclusive evidence of madness. He did not in such a personal judgment think legally. He who lived to practice his trade never confused it with life, and thus remained its master and not a servant. What he believed privately of Detweiler would have no influence on the representation he would make in public, in court, according to the Law which neither he nor Detweiler had made.

  Therefore he should now not be disturbed. He despised such clients as Guglielmo, the killer-for-hire, stupid and brutish, and yet with a clear conscience freed them to murder again. But it was clean work, a man’s job, a fair contest between himself and the prosecution. With a psycho, however, whatever the outcome, no one triumphed, all were somehow dirtied except the defendant, whose peculiarity was that he could not be touched by other human beings, not even by the man who had saved his life.

  Melrose recognized that he was jealous of Detweiler.

  He packed his suitcase and drove the rented car from Fort Lauderdale to Miami Airport, at one point, near Dania, crushing a host of the land crabs who suicidally frequent the highway after dark. He disliked the sound, but knew no other route. He was something of a gastronome, but according to the natives these crustaceans were inedible, unlike their marine cousins, the famous Floridian stone crabs of which he was fond. Melrose stood five feet nine and a half inches and weighed 196 pounds. At forty-nine he was a bachelor. Over the years his sexual tastes had grown so special that he was hardly ever nowadays gratified, and had all but forsaken the quest for women who were elegant but not so much so as to lack sympathy, were aware of his career but never asked about it, were bright of body but melancholy of spirit and in their early thirties without having been married and yet not noticeably neurotic about their situation, above all not bitter.

  Melrose had actually never met a woman who filled the bill in every particular and was also tall and wan-complexioned, his physical requirements. And while in earlier days he might find a certain amusement with those who missed perfection by as much as half, from forty-five on he tended to accept his lonely lot. He could not imagine not living alone. When he had had love affairs he never spent the night with the girl, always climbed out of bed to go, or to drive her, home. This distaste to share his private life extended also to friends. He had been invited to Lauderdale by a prosperous old Army buddy and wife, who lived in luxurious vulgarity on one of the canals. But Melrose would not stay in the guest room though it had its own bath.

  “Who is he hiding in that beach apartment he rented?” the wife asked her husband.

  “He just has to have his own place,” replied Melrose’s erstwhile comrade-in-arms. “He would never sit on anybody else’s bunk. I can still remember that. Or borrow money. But I guess he likes us or he wouldn’t come at all?”

  “I suppose he’ll eat here once or twice anyway,” the wife said stubbornly. “I’ll find those Frenchy recipes for the cook, which he seemed to like last time, and you better check your wine cellar and have the right years.” Despite her air of annoyance on the subject of Melrose, she was partial to him. He was the only male friend of her husband’s who commented on her clothes. And if she expressed opinions, he listened and did not pick out little flaws in her logic, smiled in the right places, in others waited for elucidations with shrewd eyes. His reputation for barracuda tactics in the courtroom saved him, for her, from being hypocritical; he could cut her to ribbons if he wished, but was too gallant.

  Still, there was something wrong with him, of which she was always reminded after Melrose had left and the nervousness she felt in his presence had been replaced by despondency. He had been visiting them for years, and yet she felt he did not know her at all.

  Melrose was fond of these people, who were li
ke a family to him, too fond to call them from the airport. He would instead write when he got home. He had his sentimental side.

  For some hours after Detweiler announced his firm intention not to speak further in the absence of his lawyer, they continued to question him anyway. He supposed they could not be blamed for this persistence though it was foolhardy to try to get him to break his word. But policemen work with so many criminals that they find it difficult to understand the motives of a man of honor who happens to run afoul of the law. He listened with alternative indignation and amusement, both concealed, to questions based on an assumption that, because Mrs. Starr and Billie were women, something dirty was involved in his killing them. Betty could testify he was no sex fiend.

  Betty. But Betty was an angel. He could not bring her into this wordly business of cops and courts and lawyers, this man’s affair. He would instead, now that he looked forward to imprisonment for a certain period—because he knew trials were not quick to start and subsequent executions not immediate—he would resume his work on Realization, jail being the perfect laboratory for such an endeavor. Odd that this had not occurred to him before, but one sometimes searches endlessly for what lies at hand. If he Realized Mrs. Starr and Billie, and the boarder as well, they could certify that he definitely had done nothing filthy to the women.