A Covenant with Death (2 page)

The three at the fence were silent for a time. We never knew if Donnelley had simply stood there, a neighbor and an elder, or if he had flashed covert glances at the lush stranger beside him; we never knew if he had resented or desired, denied or admitted the heat of temptation; if his hand, like Henry Dugan's, like the Colonel's, like Juano's, like so many men's, had received and rejected in one instant the heart's command to rise and touch. Shortly the Donnelleys drifted home; and after a few minutes more Louise Talbot too turned from the fence, the road, the town, and walked away, erect and lovely, proud and careless of her warm flesh, statuesque and voluptuous in the soft wash of late sunlight. She went into the house, and the road was empty and quiet.

Four hours later she was dead. She had talked and laughed, a lonely sentinel at the roadside, yearning perhaps for some unknowable adventure; four hours later the voice was stilled and the yearning finally appeased. We knew how. In time we knew who, but by then three of us were dead. And when the town knew who, it was satisfied, and turned away, and left me alone to ponder the last and best question: why?

And where was I when Louise Talbot died? At home, a mile from her, wondering whether to spend my life in Soledad City, not yet aware that I could never escape myself. Now, more than forty years later, I am still in Soledad City, in the same home, in the study that was my father's before me. Now my calendar warns me, shrieking 1964; now they call me Old Judge Lewis. In 1923 it was Young Judge Lewis, and a confused young judge at that. I had never met Louise Talbot formally, and had—or thought I had—a sufficiency of problems without her. I was a judge, at the embarrassing age of twenty-nine, because the Governor of our state had called my father friend, a word that meant much to both men; by a kind of nepotism once removed, there I was, one of two judges in our district of the state criminal court, and this account is of my first capital trial. It is also of myself and of Bryan Talbot and for that matter of Soledad City, because geography is more than points and lines, and civilization is more than concourse. Soledad City was the scene of the crime; it was also the scene of much life, funny and tragic, plain and fancy. And for those of us who troubled to look, the glow of that primitive and provincial life, a glow now pale, now brazen, now ruddy, illuminated the death of Louise Talbot.

Back east she might have been less noticed and not murdered. In Chicago, for example, where I had frozen to death and learned the law, floozies abounded. But a dozen years before, we had been still a territory, not yet a state, and law and order had got ranged on the side of long black dresses buttoned up to the chin, like Mrs. Moody's. The ladies inside those dresses were vigilantes of the soul, dedicated to a shrill, maniacal lynch law. They were mainly Protestant, and relied upon the support of elders and such; Bruce Donnelley, for one. The town, Soledad City, was about a third Mexican, and the relatively unembarrassed Latins (of whom I had the honor to be almost one), to whom the flesh and the senses were life itself and not enemies to be smote h-p and th-gh, stood for Sodom and Gomorrah to the ladies in black. Gringo Roman Catholics were suspect even when they bore names like O'Brien and Sienkiewicz; Sunday mornings people like Mrs. Moody would spy on them, reconnoitering for just one red skirt, just one rose behind the ear, just one deep neckline. We were a queer sort of town, part frontier, part plantation, part pleasure, part cruelty, part old Mexico, part clanking modernity, and, as noted, part murder. Some of the men had been Indian fighters, and some were back from Paris and Belleau Wood (where I too, shavetail, had cringed from shot and shell and not killed anybody, or not noticeably) and trying to get the roads improved for their Marmons and Stutzes, Reos and Mercers. A social stew, in short, and the heat kept it at a simmer; a foretaste of fire and brimstone. The righteous moved in pools of sticky resentment, concealing perspiration; the damned peeled off their shirts and sweated in the sight of their elect brethren. Nights, thank God, were merely warm; but perhaps three times a year the desert air flowed in on a south wind and clung to the streets like hot tar, and then there were fights and knifings and the tomcatting came out in the open and we all grew slower and surlier.

The town had once been a minor accretion at the bend of a clear river; possibly the first settler was a ferryman. The town grew, and prospered, because of pasture to the northwest and mineral flats to the northeast Being a judge, and the sole heir of a local idol, I knew the town well, and had friends in high place and low. Up where the Colonel took his afternoon tea lived George Chillingworth, for example. George was about my age, and made rude jokes about his good family; he had sung, danced, made a speech in Spanish, and got roaring drunk at the wedding of Juano Menéndez's youngest daughter two years before. If I had a best friend it was George, but we were not really close. Through high school, yes, but he had gone east to Harvard and I to our state college, and we had quarreled about the war, he saying it was all for the money. That was a minor quarrel and we always had a good time together but we were both loners by nature. His own class, all those nice people, called him a socialist.

George owned the other half of Juano's laundry, which did all the commercial lavage for the town, including my own robes and the napery at the Territorial Hotel. Menéndez was my friend, too, and the most popular figure in Soledad City (accepted by even the nice people, and little he cared!). He loved children and was a sort of year-round Father Christmas, burdened eternally with gumdrops and jelly beans; he told funny stories in the lobby of the Territorial; and he stood drinks on any pretext—seven nights running to celebrate the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, and seven nights again at the passage of the Volstead Act, and even a few days after the murder, when President Harding's trip to Alaska was announced. “We have finally driven the son of a bitch out of the country,” he shouted. “Drinks all around.”

The Mexicans lived up in the northeast corner of town, and slightly to the south of them stood the abattoir, where meat was dressed for local consumption and some shipped fifty or a hundred miles to smaller towns. Beyond the slaughterhouse, in the true southeast corner and basking in the hot, moist attar of bos and ovis, lay the Negro quarter, and I had a friend there too, William Carter, but of course “friend” is the wrong word. We had competed in high school, both excellent in mathematics, each graded always within a point or two of the other and no hard feelings; and we were both good at basketball, forwards on the same team, intramural, as Bill was not permitted to play for the varsity. I had last seen him perhaps a year before. He had been summoned to jury duty; he was a registered Republican and his name was on the rolls. He was dismissed just before the noon recess, a peremptory challenge he said, and we met on the courthouse steps and we chatted and he went home. I wish I could say that I was a good fellow in those days and lived with truth and took Bill's sister to the church dance or something on that order. No. I didn't even know if he had a sister, and didn't care. When I read a month after the murder that a man in Detroit named Charles C. Brown, twenty-nine, my age and Bill's, had been sentenced to five-to-fifteen for stealing twelve cents and three hundred marks (the marks were worth .001-.275 of a cent), I assumed that Brown was colored and realized suddenly that Bill was no safer than he, but I did not trot off to look him up and have a drink.

The scene of the crime. My town. I have omitted the business center, the stores and municipal buildings, livery stables and later auto agencies, the hotels and restaurants and saloons (and ex-saloons), the telephone building and the cable office, the lumberyard and the depot, the barbershops and beauty parlors. I have omitted the electric company and the Chinese restaurant and the brokerage office, the banks and the dry cleaners, the town hall and the calaboose, the dingy Mescalero Museum and the movie houses. (I have not even told you what state we were part of, because it does not matter; think of a small and sunny state between New Mexico and Arizona.) Or the dozen churches and the dozen gas stations, or the former fancy house now occupied by the state's local representatives: National Guard (first floor; parlor; beer and music) and State Police (second floor; bedrooms) and Veterans' Adviser (attic; towels and sheets). I have omitted much more, mainly people, but some of them will be along soon.

That was the scene of the crime. It was a little society, complicated and unique, vibrating to overtones and undertones, and it was certainly no microcosm, no happily symbolic distillation of America the Beautiful. It was an unpleasant little town except to those of us who could deceive ourselves with amenities and conveniences. It suffered the climate of Timbuktu and probably enjoyed fewer books; even its boosters and service clubs tended to a sheepish reticence; it was in the process of superimposing a cheap, clanging, oily modernity upon a harsh and gritty past; and everyone in it, including young Judge Lewis, was vicious or inadequate or uncomprehending or indifferent in his own way. We did not even boast a green park.

2

Bryan Talbot telephoned the police at 10:34 on the night of May third. His voice was wild; he was sobbing. He had just returned, so he said, from Peter Justin's Bar and Billiard Parlor, where the town's politics took shape, and had found his wife dead, in a bathrobe, bruises on her throat; she was lying in the hallway between the living room and the master bedroom. He called Alfred Harmsworth, our chief of police. Alfred called Doctor Schilling, whom no one ever referred to as Doc, and ran to the Talbots' house, towing a rookie named Tolliver who threw up when he saw the corpse. “That woman,” Tolliver said to me next day. His eyes went momentarily blank with horror. Alfred was in his forties, and had been a captain of infantry in France; he had seen it all, legs and heads lying loose, barbed wire festooned with American intestines, but this was worse. “Probably I never laid eyes on a finer figure,” he said. “I had to examine her; and I knew why Tolliver got sick. My stomach turned, and the world was kind of fuzzy for half an hour. She looked fine, except for the bruises on her throat. Beautiful. Long legs and that little waist and everything else exactly what a man would specify if he could get a woman from Sears, Roebuck; but she was dead. I would have paid twenty dollars for her in a bathrobe the night before, but now she was nothing. Wood, or marble maybe. Was that all it was, Ben? That she was dead? Was that what made her ugly and me sick?”

“I imagine there was more to it than that,” I said. I knew about the Viennese revolution, so I pontificated for Alfred. “You wanted that woman, like everybody else in town—no, no,” (he had tried to protest) “I don't mean that you'd have done anything about it even when she was alive, anyway not while anybody was watching, but way down deep all men want all women. Nothing much to do about it and nothing to be ashamed of. And whatever kind your own group decides is jazziest, you want that kind most. And there she was, all laid out on her back for you—but she wasn't even a human being any more. She belonged to nature and not to you. And all the taboos we don't even know we worry about hit you at one time, and below the belt. Spooks and the wrath of God. Evil spirits. Devils that would shrivel your equipment if you so much as let the thought of her cross your mind.”

Alfred was nodding. “I felt that way, sure enough. I've watched Doctor Schilling handle all sorts of bodies, and this was the first time I wondered how he could stand it. But I'm the chief, so I couldn't get sick like Tolliver. Tolliver's only nineteen. If that was the first naked woman he ever saw he may be ruined for life.”

“If that was the first naked woman he ever saw, times have changed,” I said.

“Yeah. Anyway I had Talbot to worry about. And when I got over the willies I remembered that somebody must have killed the woman.”

Talbot sat on a couch, pale as death himself, tears running quick and silent down his bruised face. Alfred noticed the bruise immediately, along the left cheek and temple, the skin barely broken and only a drop of drying blood. Talbot stank of whiskey. Every little while he ran the back of his hand across his upper lip and snuffled. Once he moaned. Doctor Schilling said Mrs. Talbot had been dead for only twenty minutes or half an hour, and then he covered her up and went to Talbot. “Lie down here,” he said, and Talbot broke out sobbing—long, strangled, airless sobs. He might have been thinking that if he'd stayed home it wouldn't have happened; he might not have been thinking at all. Alfred was sweating now, and losing touch. The night was still and hot and the hallway was bright with lamplight; a painting of a waterfall hung six inches from his nose, and every indentation of the frame, every contour of the drawing, every change in color was sharp, glaring, painful; he turned away but it was the same in the living room: chairs, tables, knickknacks staring out at him like bright monsters in a nightmare. Then Tolliver stumbled back in and Alfred was all right again. He blinked a couple of times and ran a hand through his sandy hair and took a deep breath.

Doctor Schilling had cleaned Talbot's bruise and given him an injection. Alfred would have preferred Talbot awake and babbling but no one ever argued with Doctor Schilling. Talbot began to quiet down, and Alfred caught him before he drifted off: “When did you find her, Talbot?”

Talbot answered slowly. “Just before I called.” A pause. “I tried to bring her to.” A pause. “Thought she'd fallen.” A pause. His eyes were closing. “Then I couldn't … find a heartbeat. Thought she was—oh, God!”

“What'd you do after you called?”

“Rubbed her wrists. Water … put water on her forehead.” His eyes were shut and his breathing was quiet.

Alfred couldn't do much more then, but he tried a last jolt, hoping for a flash of truth from the drugged mind: “Who did it, Talbot?”