The Reservoir (19 page)

Tommie waits for Mr. Evans to say something calming, but he just sits there beside Tommie looking over some notes. Crump, his son alongside him like a shadow, stands awaiting an answer. “I don’t know what reason she would have to lie,” Tommie says. He is struck by his own coolness, and he begins to consider the matter from Lillie’s point of view. Under what circumstances would she use his name to cover up her whereabouts? “Perhaps she wanted to throw Mrs. Dickinson off in some way,” Tommie says. “What more innocent name could she use than her cousin’s?”

Crump scrutinizes him. “So you were here in Richmond both times she was here, and you never laid eyes on her?”

“My business brings me here often, Mr. Crump.”

“I know that, Tommie.” Crump puffs out a lungful of smoke, rubs the back of his neck, and rolls his head side to side. He addresses Evans, “We’ll have to go with that then.” Now turning to Tommie, “Young man, did anybody ever tell you you can be infuriating?”

“Yes sir,” Tommie says, a faint smile on his lips.

“I like you, honestly. But everybody out there knows now that you’re no saint. If there’s anything you want to tell us about you and that girl, this is the time. Believe me, it can only help. We’ll work out a new battle plan.”

Tommie tries to clear away the doubts that have been gathering strength. Would it be advisable even now to throw the entire matter into Crump’s able hands and hope for mercy from the jury? Probably they’ve already made up their minds. Buried in all that testimony is a nugget of truth that the jury must have the rough shape of, even if they can’t get the exact dimensions. The question is, what truth are they on to? “No sir,” he says, “I don’t know any more about it than you do.”

During the afternoon session Tommie sits through testimony from two men employed in the nailworks on Belle Isle who claim to have seen him and a short, chunky woman with a red scarf. One of them says he heard the woman exclaim, “Oh, cousin Tommie!” Tommie has not been on Belle Isle in years, and Lillian has never called him cousin Tommie.

“You mean to tell the jury,” Evans says to one of the workers, “that you have never seen the prisoner since his arrest and yet you identify him as someone you saw fleetingly three months ago?”

“Yessir.”

“And how many strangers do you see on Belle Isle in the course of a week?”

“That depends, sir—sometimes a handful, sometimes maybe a dozen or two.”

“Are you sure you aren’t fitting your memory in with something you read in the paper?”

“I’m right sure.”

On a redirect, Aylett says, “Will you ever forget the features of the dead girl out at the almshouse?”

“No sir,” the worker says, shaking his head.

The star witness is saved for near the end of the prosecution’s case. The jeweler Herman Joel takes his place at the head of the courtroom. He’s a short man with a goatee and a heavy Polish accent, and he sometimes unintentionally makes the court laugh by mangling an English idiom. “And you sold a watch key to the prisoner?” Meredith asks.

Joel clears his throat and blinks his eyes. “Close up all day I look at jewelry. The faces not much. But, yes, I think the same man it is.”

“And is this the key?” Meredith shows him the gold key.

Here Joel takes out a pair of eyeglasses, tucks the stems methodically behind his ears, and examines the key.

Again he rapidly blinks his eyes, then says, “I believe it is a key on which I replace the barrel and selled, yes, to the gentleman.”

“How would you know for a fact if it was the key?”

“I take apart the key and see it is my work, or, no, it is not.”

“Judge,” Meredith says, “could Mr. Joel be permitted to open the key up and see if it’s his work?”

“I object to this proceeding,” Crump says. “We haven’t even identified it yet, and here you are wanting to destroy it.”

Hill rules that unless both sides agree, the key cannot be tampered with. When Crump’s turn comes, he asks Joel if he has any proof he sold the key to the prisoner.

Joel runs air across his vocal cords. “Records of my works and sales I keep in Bland’s store. But page is missing.”

“That’s convenient for you. You say the page for that day is gone?”

“Yes sir.”

“What happened to it?”

“I don’t know.” Joel blinks once.

“You come in here with a story before twelve bearded men, men of brains representing the commonwealth of Virginia, and you can’t back it up in any way whatsoever? Who did you first tell this story to?”

“I speak with detective. Now I think the less talk the better it is. I should speak with a cat tongue.” The audience titters.

“I should say so,” Crump fumes. “That’s all, Your Honor.”

Crump sits down in a huff. At the break, Crump and Evans confer about this as if Tommie doesn’t exist. Then Evans turns to Tommie. “This could be what tilts the jury, Tommie. It’s little things like this. Suppose we let him open it and he claims it’s his work, then at least we’ve taken the mystery out of it. We can always point out that one jeweler’s work is similar to another’s, and, anyway, just because it looks like his work that doesn’t mean it’s the same key he repaired for you.”

“He didn’t repair a key for me. He recognizes me because he repaired a watch for me. He took his time getting it back to me and I got upset with him, and that’s why he’s so happy to come in here now and perjure himself. It’s good publicity.”

“I’m sure all that’s true, but what about letting him open it up? The jury has a picture of you crawling through the fence and snagging your watch key. We need to change that picture.”

Tommie thinks about it for a moment. “What do you think, Mr. Crump?”

Crump rubs his beard, becoming the contemplative jurist he does not show in front of the court. “I don’t know, son. Mr. Evans could be right. On the other hand, Joel’s hardly going to back down now, even if the file marks and whatnot he finds inside that key aren’t what he expects.”

Both wait for Tommie’s decision. “I think for now we don’t let them open it,” he says. “Maybe they’ll forget about it once they’ve heard our defense.”

Crump and Evans exchange looks. “Maybe,” Evans says. “But the prosecution will remind them.”

Richardson and Birney take their turns on the stand, recounting the details of the arrest, Richardson from time to time glancing at Tommie as though trying to square in his mind the young man he met in Little Plymouth with the murderer the prosecution has pieced together. The hours Richardson and his men have spent tracking down leads, interviewing people who have some connection or other with the case, and then sorting through all this evidence, have accumulated to where he hardly knows his home anymore. He has attended some of the trial, when he could find the time, because people keep asking him his opinion about Tommie’s aunt, his brother, his parents, Lillie’s home life, and all kinds of things the newspapers have gotten onto. He doesn’t have answers for most of them, nor can he quite fathom what it is people are after. Do they just want to be entertained by the downfall of a fellow human being? Do they feel pity for Cluverius? Or is there some deep-seated anger at a fellow who gets too big for his britches and comes here to visit an unspeakable act upon a girl—who could have been one of their own daughters—and is so lacking in honor and decency that he tries to hide it, taking what he wants like a carpetbagger and then running off?

Richardson answers the questions both sides put to him, but only one question really bothers him and it comes from Aylett: “In addition to the torn note, what made you decide to arrest the prisoner?”

“The testimony of the victim’s father,” Richardson says, and as soon as he does he sees weeks of work by scores of people adding up to nothing but a weak chain leading from the American Hotel to the reservoir. He still thinks he arrested the right man—there is a mountain of proof. Yet none of it is solid. The only truth, as he has long known, is what you can get people to believe.

And then, after ten days and seventy-seven witnesses, the torture is nearly over. The commonwealth says it has one more witness.

Howard Madison has been noticeably absent for most of the trial of his daughter’s accused killer. He takes his time walking to the witness box as though he’s ten years older than he really is. Willie studies him, wondering if he hasn’t primed himself with a drink or two. His hair is slicked back and he’s wearing a wrinkled black bow tie and a gray Confederate jacket with brass buttons and the number of his unit stitched to the shoulder.

Aylett tells him he knows how difficult it must be to have to come here and discuss the murder of his daughter, and that he doesn’t have many questions. He then asks if Madison’s daughter and the prisoner were romantically involved. Madison replies that Fannie Lillian told him she was in love with her cousin Tommie and that he had promised to marry her. Willie stares hard at Madison, almost daring him to look his way. He has not laid eyes on the man since their encounter at the Tayloe place, and now he’s sure that Madison is lying—and enjoying himself in the process.

On his cross, Evans asks Madison, “When exactly was it that she told you this?”

Madison screws up his brow, shakes his head. “It was ’long about July.”

“Early July? Late July? When exactly?”

“I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

“It makes a great deal of difference, Mr. Madison. The timing is crucial, as is your memory of it.”

“I think it was early July.”

“And where exactly were you at that time?”

“At my place. We were out in the barn. I was mending an axle on my hay tedder, and she come in and says, ‘Pa, I need to tell you something,’ like it was real important.”

“Go on, what were her exact words?”

“She said, ‘Pa, me and Tommie are gettin’ married. He’s promised me.’ I said, ‘What’s the rush?’ and she said, ‘We just have to.’ Those were her exact words, ‘We just have to.’ And then she went off up to the house.”

“Mr. Madison, is there anyone else, your wife, for instance, to whom she might have said the same thing?”

“She might’ve.”

“And yet you’re the only one who has come forward with this unsupportable hearsay. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Meredith says.

“I don’t mind,” Madison says. “No, I don’t think it’s strange atall. Mrs. Madison is a quiet woman who minds her own business. I had to speak out, though.”

“And yet,” Evans says, “she didn’t marry him. In fact, she went off to Bath to teach. And there was never another mention of her marrying Mr. Cluverius?”

“Not as I know of, no sir.” The tension has gone from Madison’s face. Before he steps down he takes a moment to glance over at Tommie and Willie. Willie catches the look, sees the smirk ripple across Madison’s features like a breath of wind on the water.

• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN •

T
HE DEFENSE BEGINS
.

Tyler Bagby swears to the good character of Thomas Cluverius and says that on the night of January 5 Tommie had dinner with him and his wife. Martin Harrison is a well-spoken young lawyer who says he talked with the prisoner at Schoen’s on March 13, and Bernard Henley saw him at the Dime Museum later that day. Crump tries to plant a subliminal idea. “So you saw him at the intermission of the evening performance—how did he seem to you?” Henley says they only waved across the lobby, but that Tommie seemed fine. “And he was alone?” Yes, he was alone.

Meredith spots the trick and on cross-examination clarifies: “When you say evening performance you mean you saw him at the
afternoon
performance, is that not correct?” Henley says that it is. “So you never saw him that night after five o’clock?”

“No sir, I did not.”

A handful of friends come forward to say what an outstanding citizen Tommie is, how they’ve never known him to have anything but a sterling character. The Aylett brothers have, of course, not attended the trial, their father sitting on the side of the prosecution, but Randall Croxton stands up and avers that no matter what anybody says, Tommie is “a true-blue friend who couldn’t think a harmful thought if he tried.” At this, Tommie begins to tear up and has to fight to stop the flow. The prosecution doesn’t bother much with these witnesses. They have no evidence, and the jury knows they’re standing by their friend and kinsman.

The next day Jane Tunstall takes the stand for the defense. She wears a black dress and veil, but the heat is such that after a while she takes the veil off. Her eyes are grief-worn, but she tries to smile. Crump asks her about Tommie’s watch keys. She says that the one with the amethyst had been her husband’s and that she gave it to Tommie when he went off to college. Then Crump wants to know about the nature of the trouble Lillian had with her parents.

“I didn’t understand it exactly,” Jane says. “They thought she was out of control someway, so I let her come live with me. They didn’t have the money to send her to private school and I did, so I didn’t see anything wrong in that. But they seemed to resent me after that. I sent a dress to her one time, when she went home for a holiday, and they sent it back.”

Crump then has Jane identify a letter written to her by Lillian shortly before she moved out of her parents’ house. He reads aloud, “ ‘It is my prayer tonight that the sun of tomorrow may shine on me a corpse. O if suicide were not a sin, how soon the lingering spark of my life would vanish.’ I realize she was very young when she wrote that, but she appeared to be capable of high-strung emotions. Would you agree with that?”

Jane looks torn for the first time. “I loved my grandniece very much.” She dabs her eyes. “But, yes, she could be very flighty, and, as you say, high-strung.”

On cross-examination Aylett asks, “Didn’t you think, ma’am, you might be spoiling Lillian? Making her unfit to be happy in her own home?”

“No,” Jane says, quietly, fanning herself. She smiles, batting her eyelashes at Aylett. “She was just as unhappy there before she came to me as after.”

“But by educating her at your own expense,” Aylett persists, “weren’t you giving her high aspirations and enabling her to move in a different circle from what she had been born and raised in?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“And so weren’t you teaching her to be disobedient to her own flesh and blood?”

“No sir, I was not. I’m her own flesh and blood.”

“How many children do you have?”

“None that have lived.”

“By taking Lillie in weren’t you able to strike at her parents over her shoulders?”

Jane cannot stifle a little laugh. “No, I don’t believe I was.”

“Does that furnish an amusing idea to your mind?”

“No, but it sounds funny.” When she has finished, she takes her place behind Tommie; she doesn’t touch him, but sits there watching her own hands, wondering what happened under her own roof that she might have been the cause of. It is too impossible to imagine, so she closes her eyes and sees her husband, sitting in a carriage waiting for her, his hand outstretched to help her up.

Tommie’s brother comes to see him that evening at supper-time. He fills up the cell doorway with his broad shoulders and wide-brimmed straw hat, and Tommie feels a twinge of resentment at his brother’s health and freedom. No matter what happens, however careworn his face is now, he’ll go on and raise a family and live a full life.

Willie takes off his hat and comes in. “Are you eating enough, Tommie?” he asks.

“Yes, fine.” The truth is, he feels weaker than he ever has in his life. The lack of exercise and sunlight, the strain of the trial, are beginning to take a toll. He wakes up nights, his heart banging in his ears, his eyes sand-filled sockets searching the darkness for what woke him—a dream? a terrified outburst down the hall?—and then he lies awake for hours, afraid to go back to sleep.

“I want you to think about something,” Willie says, sitting down. “You know I was awfully keen on Lillian. I’d like to—I want to take your place, Tommie. You have the bright future; I’m just a laborer, always will be.”

Tommie shakes his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That could have been my child she was carrying.”

Tommie eyes him sharply, waiting.

“I mean it may have been. How do you know it wasn’t? She wrote me asking for some help back in February.”

“I don’t believe you. You weren’t intimate with her. Not like that.” And yet he’s not sure, and it seems that this rope his brother is throwing him may be real enough to grasp.

“She did write me,” Willie insists. “She asked for money. She said she was in trouble. She didn’t say what kind, but she said she wanted to see me.”

“Did she mention me?”

“Not a word.”

But Tommie can tell by the way he tongues his lower lip and shakes his head that his brother is, at least in part, lying. “I still have the letter,” Willie says. “It’s proof I was involved—I can bring it to you. I can give it to Colonel Aylett and make a confession. There’d be nothing you could do about it.”

“I’d say you were lying. I’d confess myself.”

“Would you?”

They look at each other. The guard at the end of the hall coughs; somewhere nearby a spoon scrapes against a metal bowl. Tommie glances at Forney’s
Anecdotes of Public Men
in his stack of books, and an old image of himself addressing the general assembly flickers in his brain. “I honestly don’t know what I’d do,” he says.

“I’ve thought about it,” Willie says. “I could take my chances. I’d be out in ten years, at the most. My whole life ahead of me. I could survive in here. I don’t know if you can.”

“Ten years,” Tommie says. “Is that what you think I’ll get?”

“I think you’ll walk out of here. But why risk it?”

“You can’t save me, Willie. There’s nothing you can do anymore, except what you’ve been doing.”

“It’s not too late for me to get up there. I want to do it.”

“No,” Tommie says, but he won’t look at his brother, because Willie will see that he desperately wants to say yes.

“But it’s not right. You didn’t do this. She killed herself. God knows it, and he won’t let you be punished for it. I know he won’t, Tommie. I’m going to confess.”

Tommie puts a hand on his arm. “No, you’re not. You wouldn’t get away with it. You can’t prove you were in Richmond. You’d just look like a liar, like you’re trying to cover up my tracks.”

Willie considers a minute, then nods. “All right, then. Are you sure there’s nothing you want? Do you have enough blankets?”

“It’s not cold anymore. A little more light would help, but they won’t let you bring a lantern in.”

Now Willie leans in and whispers, “I could help you get out of here. It wouldn’t be that hard—nobody expects you to run. I’ve studied the walls, and there’s a place over in the southwest corner where the barbed wire sags. You can’t tell from inside the yard. You’d have to figure out when the guard is watching. The bars in here are practically rusted out at the top. We’d pick a dark night in the rain. I’d throw a rope over at your signal and a piece of saddle leather so you won’t cut yourself. We’d go down by the creek, and get you on a freight train.”

Tommie smiles. “You have it all figured out.”

“What about it?”

“Well, it hasn’t come to that yet, but it’ll give me something to think about at night.”

Willie goes and looks up and down the corridor. “Listen, Tommie, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he says. “It’s about Mr. Madison.” Tommie looks alarmed, and Willie wonders if his brother already knows. “He threatened to get up in that box and say you and Lillie were involved if I didn’t pay him two hundred dollars. I can’t prove that he said it, but he did. I want to get up there and tell the jury.”

“They’ll think you’re lying to protect me.”

“So what if they do? Isn’t that better than letting him get away with a real lie?” Willie looks at his brother, trying to pry out what might be hidden there.

“He wanted money?” Tommie says. He gets up and grips the bars on his gate. He turns and squats, facing Willie. “He’s crazy, Willie. He’s liable to do anything.”

“I know it. He was mean to Lillie, and now here he is trying to extract money for her sake.” Again, Willie regards his brother, trying to figure if he wants to say something else. “What do you mean, he’s liable to do anything?”

“I don’t know. Just don’t give him any money.”

“The only thing he’ll get from me is a fist in the face if he ever speaks to me again on this earth.”

“Willie, if I don’t get out of here … well, there’s some things you should know. I don’t want to tell you everything now, but there’s some important things you should know.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Not everything is as I’ve told it. There’s some missing pieces that I can’t talk about. You’re the only one I’ll tell, but not yet.”

“What are you waiting for, Tommie? If there’s something that can save you, what could you possibly be waiting for?”

“I can’t say that either. The jury doesn’t want to hear things. Nobody wants to hear certain things, because nobody can believe certain things even if they hear them. There’s strange things that happen in the world sometimes, I’ve come to understand that, and they don’t fit in with the rest of our lives. These things, they’re like a burl in a tree, Willie—they don’t belong there. They get in somehow and the tree has to work around it. Or else die.”

“Burls won’t hurt anything. Some people think they’re pretty. Mighty hard to work with though.”

“Okay, Willie, but my point is that not everybody thinks they’re pretty.”

Willie rises from the little fanback chair. “You get some sleep. Things are going to turn around, I can feel it in my marrow.”

In the morning Willie takes his turn. Tommie can hardly bear to look, and for the second time in as many days he feels his eyes welling. He has never been prouder of his brother, sitting there in the witness chair looking so confident and friendly—the man Tommie has always looked up to, and, as he once told Lillie, would trust with his life. He answers Evans’s questions in an unhesitating, forthright, clear voice. No, it was not strange that Tommie went out the night he was arrested wearing his brother’s hat—there was no effort to conceal anything. No, he never wore a mustache. Tommie traveled to Richmond March 12 on business pertaining to a land suit in a bankruptcy court, representing Mr. Bray. He often went to Richmond for such matters.

“Tell the jury,” Mr. Evans says, “whether Miss Madison was able to swim.”

“She couldn’t swim to save herself,” Willie says. “She fell in the river when we were out boating and I had to jump in and rescue her.”

“So if she had thrown herself into the reservoir she couldn’t have changed her mind and gotten out?”

“I don’t see how.”

Evans shows him a gold watch key similar to the one found at the reservoir. It’s an inch-long gold cylinder, but the top is inset with a hexagonal amethyst. “Do you recognize this key?” Evans asks.

“It’s my brother’s,” he says.

“Did you bring this to your brother after his arrest?”

“Yes I did.”

“Why did you do that?”

“He sent word he needed it, to clear his name.”

“And where did you get it?”

“From his desk at home where he left it. It didn’t work well, so he was using his steel keys.”

“I see.” Now he shows him the reservoir key. “Have you ever seen this key before?”

Willie studies it. “No, sir, not before it was shown in this courtroom.”

Aylett then gets up and says, “Your Honor, it might be instructive to the jury to see how well this new key fits on the prisoner’s watch.” Hill nods his assent, and the clerk brings out Tommie’s pocket watch. Aylett offers to let the defense try it.

“This is your show,” Crump says.

Aylett inserts the key and attempts to wind the watch. “Well, it’s not turning anything, it’s just spinning.” He shows the judge as if asking for help.

“Our witness just explained it was worn out,” Crump says. “Of course it doesn’t work.”