Anatomy of a Murder (24 page)

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Authors: Robert Traver

BOOK: Anatomy of a Murder
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“Why, yes, Paul. I thought I'd told you that before. He also said Barney had been drinking hard lately and that it was too bad we had come to Thunder Bay when we had. Is—is that good?”
“Clients are clients and lawyers are lawyers—and never the twain shall meet,” I thought. “It might help,” I agreed. “Anything else?”
“Well, he brought Manny those cigarettes, as I say. He was real nice and thoughtful.”
I turned inquiringly toward the Lieutenant. “When he gave me the cigarettes,” the Lieutenant said, “he told me how sorry he was for my trouble and said that he wanted me to know that for his part the only thing he held against me was that when I shot Barney I broke a bottle of bonded white-vest bourbon rather than some cheap pilerun cooking whisky.”
“He used those terms?”
“Yes. He visited awhile and then he left. Said some friends would drive him back to Thunder Bay. Laura stayed over that night—we were trying to reach you all day. And she also had to go visit your—” he paused and smiled “—your favorite horse doctor.”
I restrained the impulse to leap and shout and go seek out Parnell and give him the word. “Have either of you seen him since?” I said. “The bartender, I mean?”
Laura shook her head. “I saw him once on the street in Thunder Bay—naturally I have not been back to the bar—and he paused briefly and inquired for Manny and hurried on his way. That's the last either of us have seen or heard of him.”
“Was there any more talk about Barney—when you met him on the street?”
“No. Just as I've told you.” Laura paused and reflected. “Now that you speak of it, it does seem he was sort of restrained and reticent. And in a hurry. About all he did was say hello, ask how Manny was —and he was gone.”
Again I saw the fine silky hand of Mary Pilant at work. What was the gimmick? What had happened? Here was a man who'd gone out of his way to be nice to the Manions, who'd called his dead boss a wolf—and then, by the time I'd talked to him, had grown shifty and evasive and had referred to Mrs. Manion as a “floozie” and an “easy lay.” What was the score? I shook my head.
I then told the Manions of the brush-off on the psychiatrist; that I had now written his own outfit; and that they must begin to learn to live with the grim prospect that we might not be able to get a psychiatrist in time for the trial. “It's only about two and a half weeks away. But I haven't given up yet. I'll pry a psychiatrist out of this Army of yours, Lieutenant, if I have to make a sign and go picket the Pentagon. ‘Army unfair to Lieutenant.'” I arose. “Right now I must leave you. Tomorrow is Saturday and I won't be down. Next week I must put on my black sateen sleevelets and hit the law books in earnest. I'll be in touch with you. Good-bye for now.” I turned away.
“Happy fishing this weekend, Paul,” Laura called after me. I turned and she and the Lieutenant stood smiling, arm in arm, a picture of wedded compatibility and connubial bliss. It was a pity, I thought, that the ubiquitous newspaper photographers were never around when they were really needed.
I went in the sun-blistered back door of the courthouse in search of Parnell and Maida. Gaining the tall main marble hallway I turned and climbed the wide marble stairs leading to the courtroom on the second floor, thinking I might find them in the adjoining law library. My steps rang hollowly along the deserted upper corridors, and it occurred to me that there were fewer places in the world lonelier and emptier than the precincts of a country courtroom between terms of court. For company I'd any day take a lone beaver dam at dusk … .
Making my way to the tangle of corridors in back of the courtroom I found the law library deserted and musty-smelling and hot as a Finnish
sauna
in the bottled summer heat. Packets of unopened and dusty law books and advance sheets and pocket-parts cluttered the tables and chairs. I left this oven and glanced into the jury conference room, where so many fates were decided, and found it empty except for the long table and the traditional twelve chairs.
The attorneys' conference room was as empty as a morgue except for a pegless cribbage board on a table. The door of the prosecuting attorney's office—my old one and Mitch's new one—stood open; the office was also empty except for the dusty desk and chairs. A fly about the size of a Russian Mig buzzed crazily up and down one of the sooty windowpanes, with its goal of Lake Superior gleaming far beyond. The court stenographer's office was empty; the heavy door to the judge's chambers was closed but unlocked and I entered. I walked through the dusty book-lined judge's office and down a short corridor and tried a heavy mahogany door. It breathed open and shut behind me and I found myself standing alone in the dim and empty courtroom.
 
Way back in 1905 the supervisors of Iron Cliffs County outdid themselves when they built the new county courthouse. Conceiving the structure as an undying monument to their statesmanship and proceeding on the theory that if one architectural scheme or motif could be impressive, a combination of styles would presumably dazzle all the more, they had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Few structures in the Peninsula presented a more startling pile of stone and slate and marble and mortar, vestiges of Roman, Norman and Gothic architecture vying mightily with each other for predominance,
with authentic nineteenth-century St. Louis Brewery perhaps winning by a nose.
The interior of the courthouse was as lined and overlaid with mahogany and marble as a heavily frosted chocolate cake. Whole quarries and forests must have been gouged and toppled in the sacrifice. The tall marble corridors were large enough to play football in—including the kicking of high punts—while much of the actual business of the courthouse was transacted in cubbyholes. The place was a monument to Thorstein Veblen's theory of “conspicuous waste.” At the dedication ceremonies (my mother Belle had told me) loggers and farmers and miners had driven in from all over the county, picnicking on the big lawn, listening to the speeches of the rural statesmen, uneasily beholding this remarkable reason for the sharp increase in the county's bonded indebtedness.
The whole vast structure was topped by a great oval dome, like a sort of inspired Byzantine architectural afterthought, as though a Turkish mosque had flown over during the night and inadvertently dropped a pup. This rounded dome was visible for miles around Iron Bay, and mariners far out on Lake Superior were said regularly to chart their courses by it. But it was also utilitarian, serving as the skylight of the courtroom (for once a nice thrifty note), and I stood gazing up thoughtfully at its stained-glass windows—stained by the pigeons, that is—wondering what happy accident had conspired to make this courtroom not only one of great dignity, but also the one place in the entire courthouse where one did not have to shout like a stevedore to be heard.
The judge's bench, a massive mahogany affair, stood like a lone judicial island on the end of the room nearest me, the mahogany-enclosed sheriff's chair and desk at its right nearer me, the witness stand on the left, and the clerk's railed cubicle running across the front, the ensemble looking faintly like a truncated battleship with suspended mahogany lifeboats. Glancing guiltily around I ascended to the judge's bench and sat myself gingerly in the tall leather swivel chair and tilted it—“Ah”—and nearly fell backwards. “
Oops
!” I glared around looking for someone to commit for contempt. The glowering oil portraits of three bearded deceased judges seemed to frown down even more fiercely from the wall …
The empty jury box loomed to my left; the two wide leather-topped counsel tables stood out in front, the People's (and plaintiff's) table to my left, the defense table to my right, with tall old-fashioned hourglass brass cuspidors standing like tethered watchdogs
at either corner. Immediately beyond the two tables stood the lawyers' chairs, running nearly across the width of the courtroom, then the mahogany rail with the gates at either end, and beyond that the double rows of uncomfortable square mahogany benches for the extra jurors and waiting litigants and witnesses and spectators and curious rubbernecks and sensation-seekers and all the rest. In just over two weeks they would all be there, craning and whispering and sighing and hiccupping and dozing and endlessly shuffling in and out. I lit a cigar and gazed sightlessly toward the rear of the deep chamber and cleared my throat, gutturally and pompously.
“Quiet back there,” I growled, “or I'll have to ask the bailiff to remove you! This is my final warning.”
Part of my words echoed hollowly back—“final warning … warning … ing … ing …” and I repeated the words, enchanted by the sepulchral effect. Had a psychiatrist seen me at that moment he would have sighed and clapped me in the booby hatch. Were all of us secretly a little crazy? I slid from the judge's chair and leapt down off the bench and hurriedly left the courtroom to continue my search for Parnell and Maida. Enough of this summer fantasy … . I finally found them in the steel-floored filing vault of the probate court, downstairs, Parnell holding a recorded paper under his glasses and dictating stealthily to Maida.
“
Jiggers
!” I hissed from the doorway.
Parnell started and looked over his steel-rimmed spectacles. “Give us five more minutes and we'll have it,” he said, almost in a whisper. “Now beat it before someone comes and discovers us. We're not ready for that.”
“Excuse it, please,” I said, and I shrugged and went out and paid rather ponderous court to the lovely Etta, the probate registrar, a maiden lady who possessed more warmth and charm at sixty than most women manage to acquire in a lifetime. Had she been a little younger or I a little older I would certainly have considered making a play for her … .
“Oh, Polly,” Etta blushed, “you say the silliest things, really you do … .”
Parnell plodded out of the vault with his battered briefcase, Maida following him like a faithful gun-bearer, the two brushing past me and out into the main corridor.
“‘Parting is such sweet sorrow,'” I told Etta, and left her blushing prettily, overtaking Parnell and Maida near the far end of the long marble corridor. “What's the pitch?” I demanded. “I took a
bath last week and I regularly anoint myself with Aladdin Salve—from the large economy jar. What'd you discover in there? Oil or a batch of Confederate twenties?”
“Oil,” Parnell said curtly, out of the side of his mouth, like a bookie confiding a tip on the fifth at Pimlico. “Wait till we're alone, damn it. This stuff is hot.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, meekly clamping my cigar in my mouth and following them dutifully out to the car, like little Rover with his faithful flashlight.
 
Parnell had put on the rush act, he explained, because the lawyer for the estate was expected momentarily in probate court and the old man didn't want to be discovered “raiding” the Barney Quill file. “I'm not ready for him yet,” he added cryptically.
He and Maida were radiant; they had dug out the probate records in the new file:
Estate of Barney Quill, Deceased
. The estate had been started the Monday following the shooting, the day I got in the case. Mary Pilant had filed the petition for probate of the will, listing, as required by law, a daughter, Bernadine Quill, age sixteen, as the sole heir at law, with residence at Three Willows, Wisconsin. The will left everything to Mary Pilant, and was dated—as the bartender had said—about three weeks before the shooting. The next important paper had been an appearance and notice of will contest filed by a Green Bay lawyer on behalf of a Janice Quill, individually and as guardian of the daughter, Bernadine, attacking the will on just about all the classic grounds a will can be attacked on, including undue influence and lack of testamentary capacity on the part of Barney Quill due to his excessive drinking and alcoholism.
“Janice Quill?” I said. “That would be the child's mother—and Barney's divorced wife.”
“Correct,” Parnell said dryly, “except that the lady does not concede to be the
divorced
wife; she has filed a notice and a flock of supporting affidavits claiming that the Wisconsin divorce between her and Barney was void because she had never been served with process or received adequate notice of Barney's divorce action against her.”
“More Technicolor,” I said. “What's her angle?” I went on. “Surely after all these years the dame must have known she was divorced. Why in hell should she be trying to undivorce herself now?”
“Money,” Parnell answered, hunching his shoulders and rubbing his dry palms together. “Just the same old dreary love story—money, money, money … . As a fine broth of a former Irish mayor of Chicago once told the graduating school children: ‘Boys and girls,' he said, ‘remember when you go out into the world that
money
won't buy happiness,
money
won't buy respect,
money
won't buy honor. Confederate money, that is.'” Parnell shook his head. “Don't you see, Paul?—if this woman can dump this old divorce
and
the will, she will come in for her wife's share of Barney's property, the daughter getting the other share. If she can dump the divorce alone, even if the will is sustained, she'll come in for her statutory widow's third and certain other loot, come hell or high water, even if the daughter is left out in the cold. It's as neat as bar whisky. And her Wisconsin lawyer's no slouch either—I checked him already in Mar-tindale's.”
“Yes,” I said, “but how can she expect to come into a Michigan probate court and attempt to make a collateral attack on a foreign decree of divorce? That's
verboten,
isn't it, under the ‘full faith and credit' clause of the Constitution?”
“Generally, Polly,” Parnell conceded. “But she also alleges that she is initiating action down there to set aside the Wisconsin divorce. Furthermore, if she claims to be Barney's wife, it seems to me that it might be up to Mary Pilant to disprove it.”
“Yes, Parn. Now it looks like we've not only got Lieutenant Manion's murder case to defend but Barney Quill's will and divorce as well.”
Parnell smiled. “How do you mean, boy?” he said. “What's that to us?”
“Because this will contest and divorce business are plainly affecting our man's chances to win this case. That's why Mary Pilant and the rest of the Thunder Bay Inn crowd have clammed up so. Can't you see? It's to protect the goddam will, not primarily to hurt us. If they can protect their precious will, Mary Pilant will still get roughly two thirds of the swag, come what may, even if the former wife dumps the divorce—and the charming Pilant will get everything if she can sustain both the will and the divorce. So that's why they can't allow Barney to be a boozer and a rounder who was so addled and crazed by drink that he couldn't draw a will and would do this thing to Laura Manion.”
“That's just what I figured, too,” Parnell said, smiling dryly. “But I scarcely expected a mere criminal lawyer to see the point.”
“That's why the bartender suddenly clammed up with the Manions,” I ran on, ignoring the shaft. “That's why he's now willing to make a bag out of Laura. That's why Mary Pilant is willing to let our man possibly hang rather than let us get at the truth. It's a fine kettle of fish—and I mean bass, damn it, not trout.”
“But what do we care about all this?” Maida said. “How can all this possibly affect our Lieutenant?”
“Because, my dear,” I said, “this rape—if I may use such an inelegant word in your sheltered presence—is the golden key to our defense. Anything that sheds any doubt on that brutal fact hurts our case.”
“I still don't get it.”
“Look, one of the biggest areas of possible doubt in this whole case is that a sober man in his right mind would do what Barney did. To the extent that these lovely people—whatever their motives —successfully picture Barney as a sober, God-fearing, un-pistol-packing Boy Scout, and try to pull down Laura Manion in the process, to that extent they cast doubt on our story—at the same time building up sympathy for the late departed. This sword has several edges, don't you see? What's more, it happens not to be the truth.”
“I see,” Maida said, frowning. “I think I'll go tear that Mary Pilant's hair.”

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