Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests (12 page)

We never knew exactly what was wrong with my father, just that it was some kind of wasting illness that made him more gaunt
with each passing month. He’d consulted a doctor, who could find no cause, and that was not an era when people got “second
opinions.”

If anything could have made my father’s situation worse, it was that the body was identified, three days after its discovery,
as that of Margaret Hilgendorf, a girl whose older sister was once a classmate of mine. When my mother heard the news, she
tsk
ed over the length of time it had taken the family—who were German immigrants—to report the girl missing. Their reluctance
to trouble the police only reinforced her opinion that there was something sheeplike and unquestioning in the German character.

My impression of the family didn’t fit my mother’s stereotype at all. Mrs. Hilgendorf was a broom-wielding Brunhilde of a
woman who made me think of bears, not sheep, and she stood no nonsense at all from any of her three daughters. I’d stopped
at their house after school two or three times back when Gretchen was in my class, and Gretchen had immediately ushered me
out of her mother’s presence to a recess under the basement stairs that she’d turned into an Aladdin’s cave. We were playing
there one day when Mrs. Hilgendorf came clattering down the steps above us in pursuit of four-year-old Margaret, who ran into
the narrow space behind the water heater to evade her. Mrs. Hilgendorf had given up that day, content to shout a threat at
the little girl and retreat back upstairs with her broom. But the incident had frightened me, mostly because of the sheer
size of the woman.

When Margaret’s body was identified, the pressure on my father intensified. The family lived right in our neighborhood, and
that seemed to provide a nail for Rags’s coffin, since our street was near the end of his Tuesday round and the place where
he parked his cart to take his late lunch at the soda shop. The Hilgendorf house was a block down the street that intersected
with ours to the west, but this was still the outskirts of the city, and there was a large open field that ran from where
the horse and cart were parked along the backyards of the houses on the Hilgendorfs’ street. Most of the backyards had been
privatized by fences or bushes, but the Hilgendorfs’ had been left wide open and could be seen from where the horse was tied.
The district attorney’s theory was that Rags had spotted the pretty child playing in her yard and used the cover of the bushes
and fences that backed the other yards to travel the few hundred feet to kidnap her.

What Rags’s motive was, no one could say. There was speculation that it was something “indecent,” and perhaps something involving
torture, for Margaret’s body was covered with third-degree burns all along one side. When the coroner’s report came back saying
she had not been sexually assaulted, Daddy breathed a big sigh of relief. But there were still the burns, and the talk continued
that Rags was a “pervert” who tortured children. A pervert my daddy was defending.

My father’s case was weak, and the dimmer the junkman’s prospects looked, the more my father insisted on our referring to
him with respect. We weren’t allowed to say “Rags” anymore. Now it was Mr. Keresztnévz.

Mr. Keresztnévz’s defense, as Daddy presented it, was that he hadn’t the nerve to kidnap or kill a girl and then coolly partake
of his lunch at the nearby shop. Several witnesses put him at the soda shop for at least a half hour, and others testified
to seeing him leave the shop, collect his cart, and proceed up our street in the opposite direction from the Hilgendorfs’.
The only time Mr. Keresztnévz’s movements were unaccounted for was the time
before
he sat calmly sipping his soda and eating his sandwich.

Another point in Mr. Keresztnévz’s favor was that the autopsy showed no evidence of Margaret having been bound or gagged;
and it established that she’d been burned while still alive, which suggested to my father that she’d been killed
before
ever being put in Mr. Keresztnévz’s cart, in some private place where a gag was unnecessary. He told us over dinner one night
what he thought had happened: that Margaret had wandered away from home, stumbled into a vagrant’s camp, and burned herself
accidentally on a barrel fire. A hobo would be frightened by a burned little girl’s screams and might have panicked and killed
her while attempting to shut her up.

Two boys rummaging in the rag cart for metal pipe with which to make smoke bombs had found Margaret’s body at dusk, about
two hours after Mr. Keresztnévz parked for the day, in a shed not a half mile from our house. That was plenty of time for
someone other than Mr. Keresztnévz to have put the body in the cart and disappeared without leaving a trace. So went Daddy’s
argument. But he knew very well that under pressure of cross-examination, some of those witnesses who accounted for the ragman’s
whereabouts during the crucial afternoon would break down and say maybe they weren’t so sure what time it had been after all.
And besides, Mr. Keresztnévz was always going to be Rags to the people on that jury—a hunched little man with unfathomable,
deeply hooded eyes who wore a dirty coat. What my father needed was someone who could testify unequivocally that no body had
been in Rags’s cart when he left it in its parking place that night.

It was wishing for the impossible.

But then the impossible happened… .

It was September, a week before the trial was to begin. I’d run out to meet my father as usual, but he stepped down from the
streetcar deep in conversation with a pretty woman in a red feathered hat. I got a welcoming pat on the back, but they were
too busy talking about some book they’d both read to bother with introductions. We were late getting home because my father
insisted on walking by a much longer route that was on the woman’s way. We’d only just come in and sat down together with
the comics when a heavy hand thumped on the door.

That time of the evening, it could only be one person. The oldest Hilgendorf girl, Adelaide, delivered coffee cakes and strudels
for her mother’s at-home bakery business. We had a standing order for Tuesdays, but now that Daddy was representing Mr. Keresztnévz
my mother was embarrassed to answer Adelaide’s knock.

“Will you get it, please, Sadie?” she called out. For once I understood how my mother felt. I tried to avoid Gretchen at school
for exactly the same reason. If only the Hilgendorfs would just refuse to deliver to us anymore. But they remained as faithful
as the rising sun. The only time Adelaide had ever missed a delivery was the Tuesday Margaret disappeared.

The knock sounded again as I slid off the couch, grabbed some change from a dish near the front door, and swung the door open
with my hand out ready to pay Adelaide.

But it wasn’t Adelaide. It was a rough-looking man with a couple of days’ growth of beard, wearing a tattered vest over a
dirty work shirt.

The murder fresh on my mind, I shouted “Daddy!” with such alarm that both my parents hurried to the door.

Mama didn’t know what to make of the unexpected visitor, but my father seemed to recognize him and invited him to come sit
on the back porch, a glassed-in space that had the advantage of being away from my mother’s ears and mine.

I think my mother and I both assumed the man’s business had something to do with Rags, because none of my father’s normal
acquaintances dressed so shabbily or had such an air of furtiveness. When the man was gone, though, Daddy stubbornly refused
to say what it had been about.

He didn’t open up until the next night, when he came home with resolution and worry and hopefulness all mixed on his face
and told us he had a witness who would prove that the dead girl was put on the cart after Mr. Keresztnévz finished his rounds.
The man worked for Mr. Keresztnévz occasionally, helping him sort the things he collected and deliver them to whoever was
willing to pay. The afternoon of the murder he and Mr. Keresztnévz had been sifting through the cart looking for cotton clothing,
having been offered ten cents a laundry-basketful by a local printer who would use them in press cleaning. They’d poked through
the whole bed of the cart, pulling out shabby garments that could be torn up to make that ten cents, and it was impossible,
the witness claimed, that a body could have remained unobserved.

A problem with this testimony was that Rags had not said anything about sorting through the cart with his sometime employee
when he was interviewed by the police. If he had, it would certainly have been known to my father. The only possible explanation,
if this witness was telling the truth, was that Rags failed fully to understand the nature of his situation. And truly he
hadn’t
seemed quite right in the head since his arrest; clearly terrified, he’d mostly rocked back and forth and moaned, instead
of helping Daddy figure out how to save his life.

The last-minute emergence of a witness for the defense was a big break, even if there were holes in the story just waiting
for the prosecution to rip open. For the first time, a ray of doubt about Rags’s guilt started to shimmer in my mother’s eyes.
She was so absorbed in this new turn of events that we were on dessert before she imparted
her
big news. Someone had stolen her grocery money, which was kept in a coffee can on a high shelf near the door to the back porch.
Our doors were usually left unlocked, and my mother was convinced that a hobo had come inside while she was out and found
the money.

“I’ve told you before to lock the doors, Alice… . Let’s all try to be more careful,” my father said, putting a reassuring
hand on hers.

____

T
HE DAY BEFORE
the
State of Illinois v. Keresztnévz
went to the jury, a letter addressed to my father arrived with our morning mail. On light blue stationery, marked
Personal and confidential,
it sat on the kitchen table, where my mother and I hovered over it like bees every time we passed.

Daddy came home that night well past dinnertime, as he had throughout the trial, but early enough that I was still up doing
homework. Mama and I exchanged a look when we saw that he was as surprised as we’d been by the letter. He took it out to the
porch to open it, though, causing suspicion to cloud my mother’s face. Then he came back into the house, put the blue envelope
in his breast pocket, grabbed his coat, and said he had to go back to his office.

He must have come home sometime in the early morning to wash up and change his clothes, but neither of us heard him. It was
his day to sum up for Mr. Keresztnévz, and then the junk collector’s fate would be in others’ hands.

Mama woke me up that morning slamming doors. I assumed she was upset over the unexplained letter on what was clearly a woman’s
stationery. But whatever jealous thoughts might have been eating at her, she was determined to be at the courthouse for the
summation. I begged her to let me take off school and come with her.

It was the first and only time I ever saw my father in a courtroom. Rags had someone there too. In the row behind the table
where the accused sat, there huddled a tiny woman with a babushka on her head and a toddler clutched to her breast. “Mr. Keresztnévz’s
wife,” Mama whispered as the court was being called to order.

I shrank inside my thin dress as the prosecution lawyer got up and had his say. I’d never been able to stand up to vindictiveness,
and I didn’t expect that my father would be able to either. But I learned something that day. When it was his turn to speak,
some fire rose up in the man I’d known only as a gentle father. He commanded the room in a way the prosecuting attorney had
not, for all the harsh accusations he’d flung about. And it wasn’t my father’s words that moved his listeners either; it was
the faith in Mr. Keresztnévz that resonated in his voice. When he’d finished, Mama and I looked at each other and the thought
passed silently between us:
That jury’s got to let Rags go.

There was nothing for it now but to wait for the verdict. My father gave Mr. Keresztnévz an encouraging pat on the back and
made his way to the back of the courtroom, radiating gratitude at the sight of us. My mother affected a stern look at first,
punishment, I suppose, for his mysterious behavior over the letter. But by the time we reached the streetcar, they’d linked
arms and offered me a hand. My mother was proud of her husband, and of me. I think jealousy made her see that.

We’d just reached the house, and I was about to suggest we all go out to dinner, when my mother took a good look at my father’s
haggard face and stopped in her tracks.

“Dear God, Matthew,” she said, putting a hand on his forehead, “we need to get you to bed.”

She bundled him up with a hot-water bottle and extra blankets and sat with him through the night. By morning I could hear
the rasp of his breathing all the way down the hall. A doctor was called, with the effect of frightening rather than comforting
me, because money for a house call wouldn’t be spent except in the worst case.

About the time the doctor pulled up in his Essex, a messenger came to the house to say that the jury was back. My father managed
to raise himself up and get out of bed. Compassion outweighing his disapproval, the doctor drove us to the courthouse and
waited with us while the verdict was read.

After the calling to order of the court, the judge’s questions to the jury, and the unbearable moments of silence while the
judge read what was written on the paper handed from the jury foreman to the clerk to him, the words—“not guilty”—rushed through
me like a tonic. The pressure was off. Daddy would recover now, and our life would go back to normal.

But it wasn’t to be. When my father turned from the defendant’s table, he was a spent man. And this time when he was laid
down on his sickbed, he wouldn’t ever get up again. We sat with him for two days while he tossed uncomfortably—murmuring,
in his waking hours, that he had to get to his office, that there was something he had to do.