Five Smooth Stones (78 page)

"Almost?"

"Don't be coy. You. Perhaps losing you is the balance."

Sara reached across the table and pushed the check the waiter had left closer to Hunter's plate. "Pay it, sweetie, and let's go."

As they left the restaurant he looked down at her and said, "Shaken up?"

"A little. Hunter, give your mother my love and—and I think I'll go back to the hotel. Would she give me tea if I came by tomorrow afternoon?"

"Most assuredly. Pick you up about four?"

"Thanks, again."

***

She saw the street sign high holborn on a building and only then realized how far she had walked. A good brisk walk, she thought glumly, was supposed to clear a muddled mind. It had done nothing for hers. There had been the dizzying lift of spirit at Hunter's news, then a vortex of conflict within that dragged that spirit down into depths of indecision.

Just let it be enough that he's in England, she thought; just let that be enough. Her thoughts were close to prayers. Don't let me do what I've done before; don't let me hurt myself— and him—again. If it means going back to Europe, give me the strength to do it. David. David, forty miles away, an hour, two hours away. Just a little ride in a train through the countryside and then—David. Can I do it, can I go there, manage somehow just to see and not be seen? That will be enough, truly that will be enough before I go away again. David, David—she was halfway into the intersection at Southampton Row, not seeing the lights, stopping only at the blast of a horn, the sound of squealing brakes. She turned confusedly back to the curb, heedless of what the cabdriver had shouted, and waited now for the lights, trembling a little.

After she had crossed the intersection she hurried up Southampton Row to her hotel in Russell Square, thirsty now, and tired. She went directly into the big lounge, walked to a far corner, and sank into one of the big chairs, almost hidden by its hugeness, lonely all at once. She should have gone with Hunter to his mother's; it was better to be alone in sorrow, but not in this tumbling maelstrom of emotion. She ordered tea and toast from the lounge waiter absently. I'll let go, she told herself; I'll let go and not worry and not think about it until it happens, and then try to do what's right. And that will be to leave. Unless—unless—David—David—let me stay!

How could Hunter know that David was still in love with her? How could Hunter know? Hunter didn't know everything, not every damned thing there was to know. If David still cared anything at all about her, surely he would have been in touch with her. It would have been so very easy. The Knudsens, Tom Evans, Hunter, they all knew where to reach her. And there had been no word. Pride; perhaps it was pride. But she had been the aggrieved one, not David, he knew that. David—David—
Sometimes I'm frightened myself.... Of what, David?... Us. Sara.
And then, the day she had left—
But what about me?

What about you, David—oh, my darling, what about you? For more than a year she had been crying silently, yet so loud was the cry within that it seemed everyone must hear it, those she passed on the street and sat beside in buses and cinemas and rode with in elevators. What about you, David my love—is it all right with you? That's all I want to know—is it all right with you?

And now she knew the answer, and was no happier.

"Two and six, madam."

She looked up, startled, to see the lounge waiter standing beside her chair. Tea and toast were on the small table in front of her.

'Two and six? But I didn't order-—of course I did. I remember now." She fumbled in her purse for change, embarrassed, then decided that the waiter's opinion of her sanity didn't matter.

CHAPTER 50

Brad Willis leaned back in the seat of the car beside David, twisting his head from side to side, massaging the back of his neck in an effort to relax the taut muscles that had followed weeks of strain.

David glanced sideways at him, hands on wheel. "Office?"

"God, no! At this point I never want to see it again. The logical thing for us to do is get drunk."

David laughed. "You're the boss. Sounds like a hell of a good idea to me."

"You don't have a drinking problem in the home. Peg's been doing fine for longer than usual. I can hardly stagger in plastered."

"Could be a good idea if you were plastered enough. Where to, Chief? East Cambridge doesn't have much to offer—"

"How about a run down to the North Shore for dinner? We'll pick up Peg." As they pulled away from the curb, Brad said: "I always have to spend a little time apologizing to my assistant after a murder trial. How big a son of a bitch was I this time?"

"Medium-sized. Of course, it was my first and I don't have any basis for comparison."

Brad grunted, stretched his legs, and sighed. "You did a good job, brat. I've got to learn to turn more of the trial work over."

"Thank God you didn't."

"Anyhow, we won." He sounded anything but victorious. "Yes, indeed, we won. Another damned soul spending a lifetime of nights looking at striped moons. I wonder it life—just life, just breathing and existing—is that important. But I'm damned if I'll hold still for cold-blooded, social murder in the name of punishment."

"Do you always have these letdowns?"

"Always. But don't let me pass this one on to you."

David, tired but not admitting it to the emotionally exhausted man beside him, drove slower than usual over the route he had traveled only a few years before with Bill Culbertson on that first visit to the Willis house, and as he drove his mind strayed back over the trial they had just completed.

There had never been any hope of acquittal for twenty-one-year-old Pete Martinez, the client they had just left at the Middlesex County Jail, awaiting transfer to State's prison. Their only hope had been a recommendation for life imprisonment instead of death, and that hope could only be realized by revealing to a jury the environmental pressures of his childhood and youth: poverty, slums, a bestial, drunken father who had once thrown him across a room after a brutal beating for bed-wetting. The resultant broken arm had been bungled in the setting by a neighborhood doctor and the too tight cast had left him with a semiparalyzed, stunted arm. The father had disappeared, and been followed by a procession of successors who were little better. The stay of these successors had slowly decreased from months to weeks and, finally, to hours.

Pete had been arrested less than two miles from the place where he and two companions had held up a gas station. The attendant had been shot and later died, and a witness, just coming out of the men's room of the station, identified Pete Martinez as the man who fired the gun when the attendant made a break for the telephone. The identification was more positive than that given by most eyewitnesses because of Pete's misshapen arm; the witness had mentioned it even before the police began detailed questioning.

David gave a little shiver now, remembering his interview with Pete's mother as soon as they received the case, unable to erase from his mind the smells and filth of the fiat in which she lived. If she felt sorrow and concern over her son's plight, they were well hidden under a blanketing fog of self-pity. Brad had told David their only hope of a fee lay in her possession of some diamonds given to her during a drunken weekend by a merchant seaman whose tenure as a successor to her husband had lasted almost a year. She had clung to them tenaciously, refusing to sell them, pawning them when the need arose, but always managing to redeem them. Her son told Brad, "She'll see me burn before she'll sell 'em."

"No, she won't, Pete," Brad said quietly. "In the first place, you won't burn, and in the second place, she'll sell them. I'll take care of that. She owes you your defense."

For the purposes of that first, fact-finding interview David was instructed not to mention fee or the means of raising it Yet it had obviously been on her mind. Toward the end of the interview she had broken down and cried, the weeping mean, shallow as dirty water running in a gutter, calling attention to her poverty. "You don't know how it is," she whined. "You don't know." She looked him over with swimming eyes. "You've had it good. Even if you are a nigger you've had it good—"

And then in a final obscene gesture of maudlin self-sacrifice she had offered her untidy, sated body, and when David ended the interview in stuttering haste and hurried down the stairs she screamed after him, "You black son of a bitch!"

When he described the incident to Brad he found disgust had added new life to his vocabulary. "I know I sound like a damned self-righteous phony, but I can't help it. I keep thinking of that guy—Pete. If he goes to the chair it won't be the jury that sent him there. With all the evil he's had going for him, how the hell could he come out much different?"

"Than being a killer? People do. He didn't. Anyhow, you had a good chance to see how the other half lives."

"Yeah. And how about the ofay bastards all over the country screaming about our low moral standards?"

"When she gets on the stand—"

"On the stand! You going to put that slut on the stand?"

"Yes. Yes, indeed. I look forward to it."

"They'll tear her apart on cross-examination."

"They won't cross-examine if they've got any sense."

During the next weeks, and especially during the trial, Brad was scarcely recognizable except in physical features. The speech slowed; the deep voice developed a cutting edge; the green eyes became shallow and expressionless. In the courtroom his deference to his opponents and the black-robed judge was different from the easy, sincere deference of Brad Willis appearing in a civil case or one in which a man's life was not the stake. It was an alert deference that made no effort to conceal a distrust of every man, even the man that sat on the bench above him. David, who liked things defined, tried to find a word for this attitude, and finally settled on "protective." He was like a lean and hungry mother cat, wary of all living creatures, vicious or slyly ingratiating as it suited her purpose, reflexes sharpened and made quicker by responsibility. Outside trial hours he showed unsheathed and unexpected claws, and David developed a catlike quickness of his own in dodging them.

Dora was both sympathetic and amused. "Never mind," she said soothingly one afternoon when he all but staggered into the office at the end of a trial day. "Remember the old saying, 'Even this shall pass away.'"

"How about swapping a cliche for a cup of coffee? Like now."

During the long hours waiting for the jury to come in, David was silently hoping there would never be another murder trial. It had been a year and a half, more or less, since he had first seen his own name on an office door. During that time only one capital case had come to the office, and that had been Mike Shea's, and Mike had unashamedly sought Brad's counsel. There was an undercurrent of excitement and tension in the office during the life of the case, and David had been secretly envious of the junior who assisted Mike. A "reasonable doubt" that had been strongly established brought an acquittal. Now David wondered why he had ever been envious of anyone who actively engaged in the rough-and-tumble, yet subtle and devious, tactics of a murder trial. He flinched from the sight and sound of a District Attorney who, acting on behalf of the "people," demanded of a jury the right of the State to take a man's life. The first time he had ever been in a fight Gramp had practically had to force him to go out and tackle the neighborhood bully; he didn't think he liked fighting any better today.

And in a murder trial you got yourself involved in ways that clouded your judgment. You found yourself thinking of a killer as a "good kid." At least, in this case that had just wound up, the guy had killed from fear, stupidly, not from hate. And that, damn it, was no grounds for tolerance, yet— after an hour in that sordid flat with the woman who had borne and reared Pete Martinez—it was no grounds for bitter condemnation either. He found himself wondering if he would ever—could ever—fight as hard to save from death a southern leader of a lynch mob, or a man such as the one Gramp told him had killed Gram's nephew, in cold blood, during a rape scare. "Going out and get me a nigger," the man had said, and blasted Gram's nephew's brains out with a shotgun just outside Mandeville. "Boy hadn't done a thing," Gramp had said. "Wasn't even walkin' on the sidewalk on the wrong side of the street." Could he ever base an advocacy for such a man on the evil influences of early environment, early pressures, the fact that he had been taught to hate, the intangibles on which Brad was basing his plea for mercy for a young killer named Pete Martinez?

The case went to the jury in midafternoon, and not until midmorning of the next day were he and Brad summoned to the courtroom from their uneasy coffee-drinking in the Cambridge Street restaurant. Brad's face was impassive as the foreman read the verdict, but David could feel himself grinning like a fool. Afterward Brad insisted upon going across the street to the jail to visit his client before he was transported to State's prison.

Pete, the specter of the electric chair no longer haunting him, seemed far easier and more relaxed than his attorneys. He thanked David, who said, "I didn't do much. There's the guy who really worked—"

"You worked like a son of a bitch." Pete's face flushed. "At first I didn't want no—" He stopped, embarrassed.

"Forget it, Pete. I'm used to that. As long as you don't feel that way now."

"Hell, no. Maybe you got something going for you instead of against you. Anyhow, thanks."

David caught the "Beat it!" signal in Brad's eyes, and walked down to the front office to wait. A trusty, mopping up the hallway, looked at David with a sort of curious contempt as he passed. David knew the man must be aware that the Negro he looked down on was one member of a team of two whose efforts had just saved a white man from death. Even up here, thought David, there are the likes of you, who'd spit on the hands that gave one of your people life—if the hands were black.

He talked for a moment with the sheriff while he waited. "That's a good lawyer you're working for, young fellow," said the sheriff. "Never misses coming over to see a client he's defended after the trial, even if he knows he's done all he can for him."