A Covenant with Death (7 page)

He would have snorted again but without approval watching our fellow citizens scramble for places in the courtroom. The air was golden with the bright unquenchable gleam of prurience. Fishing trips were cancelled, shops unattended; the public squares—two benches in a patch of dust, most of them—were deserted, save the courthouse square, which had become a picnic ground: couples, old men, women with babies. Sandwiches and water bottles. White-throated swifts and white-bellied sparrows hopping and flashing from sycamore to sycamore. The people were quiet enough, and I do not mean to offer the impression that they were bloodthirsty, but nothing since the war had so stirred the town, and even the war consisted largely of band music at the depot. Tolliver, Alfred's young constable, had helped Talbot to the defendant's chair and had then gone outside to keep the courthouse steps clear. In the courtroom the lucky ones peered at Talbot, rustled newspapers, buzzed and whispered and fanned. I chatted briefly with Edgar Musgrave, whose topics ranged from Bonar Law's resignation a couple of days before to a judge in Houston who had granted two hundred and twelve divorces in two hundred and forty-five minutes. Edgar said it was easy because most of them were uncontested. One was interesting, granted to a woman who had been dragged out of her house in Goose Creek the previous January and flogged by five men in disguise. “Damned cowards,” Edgar said. “The Klan, I bet. Like those Chinese bandits. Know what they did last week?”

“No.”

“They held up a train and took three prisoners, and then threw them off a cliff as a warning, because they think the government's stalling on the ransom for those captives. Damned cowards. There was an earthquake in Quito. Lot of people killed. I didn't know Talbot wore a wrist watch.”

“Yes,” I said. “And a straw hat.”

“He could appeal if he had to,” Edgar said. “Can't get a fair trial in Soledad City if you wear a wrist watch and a straw hat. Smokes cigarettes too. Prejudiced jury. Damned cowards.”

“You're behind the times,” I said. “Wrist watches are all right now. Since the war. Hardly the place for those old turnips. And a lot of people smoke cigarettes. Anyway an appeal is mandatory if he's convicted.”

“Coffin nails,” he said. “You know the best story this week?”

“What?” The courtroom was almost full.

“Harding appointed a colored man to be collector of customs in New Orleans, and the Louisiana authorities wouldn't stand for it and made him quit. So Harding reappointed him. That's pretty good for the old boy, hey? And the best part of it is the man's name.” I waited. Edgar grinned. “Walter Cohen. Isn't that something?”

“I don't believe it.”

“God's truth,” he said. “Walter Cohen. Those Louisiana people have no poetry, that's all. If they throw him out again, let's give him a job here.”

“Or send them Geronimo,” I said, and Edgar whooped gleefully as Harvey Bump stood up.

Now this trial, and my account of it, need some gloss. A good trial is, as you know, consummate drama. It helps a drama if there is a triangle (Agamemnon, Achilles, Briseis) or if the crime is Everyman's secret dream (Oedipus) or if there is a radical involved, a free mind in Brownian motion against the walls of the tin box called society (Socrates). But only one trial in a thousand is even interesting, unless you care for arcana, the priesthood of lawyers performing before the hallowed symbols (flag, Bible, robes, water pitcher) and chanting ferociously in a dead language. Otherwise the usual trial is a contest in chicanery, but at least it is a contest, and chicanery is often less inconvenient than unchecked crime. And even the dullest trial pits man against man, mind (however shallow) against mind, and is therefore a diversion, not as exciting as a good cockfight but superior to whist. The presumption of innocence, politely maintained even in the face of absolutely Euclidian demonstration, makes the contest.

But in its undercurrents Bryan Talbot's trial was not so much a diversion as a community bloodletting. Parmelee could not have foreseen how sharply the town would react. For the space of three or four days all the normal hostilities of an American town were translated into the language of Bryan Talbot's alleged crime. And those hostilities were not merely the platitudinous frictions of a mongrel population; they were, suddenly and astonishingly, open passion. Or so it seemed to me. An outsider might have seen the gloating and gossiping and horrified repugnance as the normal reactions of placid burghers to a crime that repelled and attracted them equally. But watching the watchers I sensed more. A deep pleasure, for example, among the Mexicans because this monster was a gringo and a Protestant, and the Mexicans had lived through generations here knowing that to Talbot's kind a Mexican was not simply a Mexican but the embodiment of Latin lust, consort to the Whore of Babylon; Catholicism itself was somehow like a fat woman flirting with the Devil. And among the Negroes because clearly there was no way to blame this enormity on a black man, and we all knew—but no one dared say—that we kept Negroes where they were and how they were not because they were evil but because we were and it was easier to ignore that by inventing a reservoir of exotic and enigmatic ruffians. And among the “best people” because they could conveniently and righteously disown Talbot, hate him and fear him openly without feeling at all immoral or unChristian; to them he was like a naked baby in a front yard, a red shirt at a funeral, burlesque, a colored Congressman from Chicago, or a boy and a girl in the back seat of a Locomobile. Solidarity had come to the town, and Bryan Talbot was the common enemy, and everyone had a reason to be happy. Bryan Talbot had sinned against God and broken ancient laws, and for a few days everyone else in Soledad City felt virtuous.

Normally jurors are reluctant to serve. The variety of their excuses, the imagination and industry lavished on them, would do credit to a surrealist. The veniremen are all indispensable at their offices, plants, stores, or farms. Their wives are sick and they have many children. They have weak bladders and are unable to sit still for more than an hour. They have strong opinions on the crime at issue and would be unable to render an unemotional verdict. A business deal six months in the making is to be consummated this week. Their religion does not permit them to assist the state in punishing evildoers. They are friends of one or another lawyer, plaintiff, or defendant. They are subject to headaches that warp their judgment. They are recovering from typhoid. Their mare is about to foal or their prize black-and-tan to throw a litter. They are on a special diet for rheumatism. They become hysterical when locked in a room. They have boils and cannot abide wooden benches.

Normally. Not this time. Never since have I seen so many able-bodied Americans oppressed by a surplus of leisure and asking only to devote their hours to the state. The venire facias had been answered by thirty of the most eager public servants this side of William Jennings Bryan, who had just been elected a commissioner by the Presbytery of Southeastern Florida.

The first two veniremen were accepted without a murmur, upright citizens named Sawyer (an engineer at the waterworks) and Meldrum (a butcher).

Dietrich had no questions.

Nor had Parmelee. Not even about capital punishment.

Hochstadter almost let his eyebrows rise. There was a gentle buzz in the audience; Hochstadter rapped once, and the next candidate was introduced. His name was Diego Gutiérrez.

Dietrich had no questions.

Nor had Parmelee. Not even about capital punishment.

Hochstadter looked thoughtful.

In twenty minutes six veniremen had been accepted. The seventh was a Mrs. Arthur Dodd.

Dietrich had no objections, but Parmelee challenged for cause.

Hochstadter nodded; he seemed relieved. “Please state the cause.”

“The victim of the crime was a woman; accused is a man.”

“And you feel that a woman might be swayed by her emotions.”

“That is correct.”

“The lady may be excused,” Hochstadter said. Mrs. Dodd looked as if she would weep. “I'm sorry, madam. I believe counsel's point is well taken. May I ask”—he turned to Parmelee—“that you state your grounds more fully in the future.”

Parmelee bowed. “Of course, Your Honor.”

And that, incredibly, was that. Parmelee challenged another woman, who was dismissed; and the jury was complete, with two alternates, in less than an hour. Parmelee had challenged no man. He was sure. He was staking everything on one roll. He worried me.

Emil Dietrich's opening statement was a model. So far the town had nourished itself on rumor alone, and the spectators awaited confirmation of Talbot's depravity; Dietrich did not disappoint them. There were men leaning forward, avid, bright-eyed; there were women who refused to look at Talbot or even at Dietrich except sidelong but who emanated prim attention. “The means, in this case,” Dietrich said, “was a pair of human hands. That Bryan Talbot had the opportunity is obvious; indeed that
only
Bryan Talbot had the opportunity seems equally obvious. It is the moral obligation of the state, however, to demonstrate a motive; and because—we admit this—there were no eyewitnesses, it is the state's obligation to prove to you beyond question that the motive was of such emotional force that it could, and did, impel the defendant to the most extreme and irrevocable of human actions: murder.” And so on, for a minute or two, after which he digressed: “You must understand what first-degree murder is. Judge Hochstadter will instruct you further on that, later; for now I will say that first-degree murder is deliberate homicide by a human being who is sane within the legal definition and who has premeditated the act. That is, who has thought about it beforehand. There's one tricky point here. He doesn't have to have thought about it for months, or weeks, or days, or even hours. If the idea comes to him and he thinks about it for as much as five seconds, the murder is premeditated; the law assumes that
any
time for thought is sufficient time for a man to think twice, not only about killing but about the
wrongness
of killing. About the consequences.

“Now I will tell you more exactly what the state will prove. The state will prove that in 1919 Bryan Talbot contracted a social disease.” He paused; utter silence. “That he communicated that disease to his wife Louise.” Another pause. “That as a result she was obliged to undergo surgery, more precisely an operation called a hysterectomy, as a natural result of which she was barred forever from bearing children.” I thought his pause here was not for effect; it was as though even he, after the days of preparation, was not ready to absorb such facts. But he may have been wishing that he had some women on the jury. “That as a further and later consequence, in her resentment of her husband she took at least one lover, with a strong probability that it was more than one; and that her husband's motive for killing her was a violent resentment of her promiscuity coupled with a deadly sense of his own guilt in the tragic course of her life.”

He was on dangerous ground, and knew it, and shifted immediately. “I suppose you are now thinking of certain ‘unwritten laws,' by which traditionally a man discovering his wife in adultery is considered to be justified in taking violent action. Although the state believes that written laws are more important than unwritten, the state nevertheless acknowledges the strong emotions that may possess a man at such a time. But”—and here he gazed at each juror briefly—“the state will prove that it was not a sudden, instinctive reaction to one incident that motivated the accused. We will prove that Louise Talbot's infidelities had occurred over a period of two years and more; that her husband knew about them and therefore condoned them; and that it was no single instance that drove him to murder—that, indeed, his wife had not been away from him for many weeks before the murder. The state will prove that this husband, who acquiesced in his wife's infidelities for a long time, coldly and deliberately murdered her with absolutely no immediate provocation, out of his accumulated resentment of a situation which he himself, more than any other human being, had brought about. It was willful and premeditated murder.”

He was silent for a few moments, and then drew a long breath. When he resumed his voice was more official. “The state's case, as you will see, does not rest on any firsthand, eyewitness evidence of the murder. It consists largely of what is called circumstantial evidence. Now: there is a superstition, a wrong belief, a misapprehension, very commonly held about circumstantial evidence. People who do not know the law will tell you that you cannot convict on circumstantial evidence. That is very simply not true. This kind of evidence—that is, evidence that sets the time, place, method; evidence that
excludes
other possibilities; evidence that is a net, in which it is obvious that the accused is caught, rather than a searchlight pointing directly at him—has been, in more than half the serious criminal cases in which I have been involved, the evidence on which the prosecution based its case. It is not too much to say that without circumstantial evidence courts of law would be paralyzed, and justice would be utterly impossible. The judge will, I am sure, have more to say to you about this later on.”

Dietrich flattered the jury adroitly. His voice was just barely emotional; he was not leading them on a crusade, but was admitting them as thinking men to the processes, the intimacies, of the law. He was making citizens of them, and the solemnity of their faces proved his success. He went on, discussing the murder itself. He did not point out that the death sentence was mandatory upon conviction; Parmelee would play upon that in his closing statement, in the classic effort to remind men that they were not God and that even a legal execution would leave blood on their hands. Dietrich finished in a low key, reminding the jury that we had not been a state for long but were no longer a territory, and that the existence of law, and of respect for it, was one great difference between barbarism and civilization. The law, and not the visceral preferences of the population: I thought of Gibbon and the wry smile with which he must have written “But patience is not the attribute of zeal; nor can the arts of a court be adapted to the freedom and violence of popular enthusiasm.” He meant another kind of court, but he spoke true.