A Covenant with Death (8 page)

Well, Dietrich had a good jury: not crusty old cattle barons or domineering male heroes, but the butcher the baker the candlestick maker, spongy men of the middle class who, taking their wives in adultery, would be more likely to sulk than to shoot. Parmelee would get nowhere with the unwritten law; but I suspected that Parmelee did not intend to bring it up.

Hochstadter recessed until two o'clock and I went home to lunch, avoiding the Colonel. I had chicken salad and beer, and resumed the morning's events for my mother. She was somber, for her, but requested details; her Wednesday night mahjongg group, she said, would want to know everything. And she was writing to Ignacio, who missed me.

By which she meant Rafaela.

Cousin Ignacio was Ignacio Montemayor, and he was a distant cousin who owned property in the state of Sonora about a hundred and fifty miles southwest of us on an unambitious river. He had a married son, Ramón, and two married daughters, Julia and Marta, and an unmarried daughter, Rafaela. His first wife had died fifteen years before and his second wife, an Indian, about five years before. He had not married a third time. His correspondence with my mother was European: respectful, formal, newsy letters in an elegance of phrase and hand that died with the nineteenth century. We visited perhaps twice a year before the war and then more often; after my father died, my mother took comfort from the bosom of the family, though it was a skinny family and a bony bosom, only Ignacio and Rafaela left to tend the estate. We always hired a car and left early, allowing six hours for travel and minor repairs. We entered Arizona and roared from Douglas to Bisbee to Nogales. At Nogales we rested because we could get a drink just by crossing the street. Nogales must have been the most cheerful of Prohibition towns: half in the land of the free, dry, and half in sodden Mexico. From Nogales we aimed straight at the Rio Conceptión and then followed the river to Ignacio's, bouncing along a track that put me in mind of Central Asian trade routes. A caravan, camels and yurts and pointed turbans, would not have surprised me there. By the time we reached Ignacio's we were encased in dust, half blind, and stiff in the joints. Two hours later we were clean and refreshed, pumping a powerful red wine into ourselves and chatting in barbarous Spanish, all but Ignacio, who was phatic: he communicated in elemental bursts of sound reinforced by the jiggling, bobbing, or oscillation of hands, shoulders, feet, hips, and head. He was just too lazy to bother with consonants.

The Montemayors were far more important to me than I knew; and when I think back I can remember almost nothing of what was said. I remember the land, the vine-covered slopes and the field of maize, the groves along the river, the higher slopes where Ignacio and my father had hunted desert rams, the gardens near the house and the formal fishpond, and the homes of Ignacio's tenants, or fellow farmers, or dependents—the relationship was never clear. I remember a town some fifteen miles down the river, with an alcalde and a guard post, and neither the mayor nor the soldiers really sure to whom they owed allegiance; and a priest who was quite sure, which outraged Ignacio, who hated priests. It was an adobe town with a beautiful stone church that lacked a bell. The bell had been carried off for smelting years before in a local Jacquerie. I remember the cantina there, beaded curtains, dark inside, many flies, but cool, and tequila slowly invading the eyes and brain so that the walls and bottles and bartender shifted from dark green to purple and preposterously to dark yellow and the day outside the door was bright red through the hanging beads and even the voices took on tints, murmured browns and grays and a clanging orange and the dirty pink of a shrill laugh.

I remember Rafaela only dimly in those early days. She was eight years younger than I and slightly wall-eyed; wide-set eyes, almost black and diverging slightly. Rafaela loved all living things and sulked when the men hunted. We paid little attention to her, a girl; but now and then her grave composure was disquieting even to adults. I condescended to her for many years because she made me feel like a child. Her voice was dignified, its tone level; she spoke slowly and firmly, and she never lied.

All that too was my life; how much of it, Bryan Talbot may have taught me.

Juano Menéndez owned—flaunted—a Stanley Steamer, and at twenty minutes of two he barged into the courthouse square on his burnished throne. The automobile itself was almost silent, emitting a gentle ffft-ffft-ffft, but was usually followed by a pack of yelping hounds; apparently the Steamer gave off a hiss, or a whistle, beyond the range of the human ear but irresistible to dogs. This day Juano came to a stop almost surrounded by small children, and with cheerful resignation he dismounted, plucked a large sack from the seat, and poured an inch of chestnuts onto the boiler. The children, all shapes and colors, watched in silence and greedy awe. The automobile hissed delicately, an outsize samovar. I stood beside Juano and contemplated the pagan, hungry eyes of tomorrow's leaders, the white teeth, the torn shirts and the varied pigments, the bare feet, the scabby knees, the grimy wrists and elbows, the loving effulgence of sunlight on young hair. The day was bright, hot; the square lay in a peaceful bath of tropical balm, Juano was stocky, black hair turning white, his skin dark and leathery; he was health itself, and well-muscled health, and even in lazy repose he emanated strength. “This looks bad,” he said. “What a bad thing.”

“If it's all true,” I said.

“Mmm. I hope it's not. But what else? What a bad thing. Will they hang him?”

“If he's found guilty he has to hang. It's the law.”

“A bad law,” he said. “Maybe not. She has no brother to do it, and her father is an old and weak man. I saw him.”

“You think private revenge is better than the law?”

He considered. “I don't know. When the law does it, everybody shares. The law does it for you and me. But you and me, we don't really care about that woman. We weren't really hurt that she died.”

“Yes we were. Because it could have been us. Anybody. For different reasons. She died for all of us.”

“Well now,” he said, “for all of us? You make her sound like the Christ.” He plunged into the thicket of children and extinguished the fire. “All right,” he called. “First, one for everybody. Then you can fight for the rest.” The dogs had drifted off. “You know who is most nervous?” he asked me.

“Who?”

“Willie Waite.”

“My God. I never even thought of him.”

“He was drunk again last night. Which is not unusual, but he looked bad.”

I sighed. “He gets paid for it, but I don't suppose that makes much difference.”

“A pension. Until now it was a pension. More than a dollar a day for doing nothing. But you're right. The money doesn't help.”

Willie Waite was about forty-five, with a slattern for a wife and two unhealthy little children. He had been a ranch hand, salt digger, prospector, guide, dishwasher, handy man, hostler, and even, in days long gone, towel boy at Consuelo's, an establishment of blessed memory of which I will have more to say. He was a man of no accomplishment, no character, no eccentricity; he was just Willie Waite; and he was also the official, state-appointed, one-and-only hangman of Soledad County. The hangman has never been in demand socially, and the old custom of hiding him behind a black mask was a good one. With the mask he was anonymous and therefore surrogate for us all; without it he had his own identity and absolved the rest of us. With it he could do his day's work and go home and tell his friends he'd been fishing; without it he had no friends. It was, come to think of it, not much different with soldiers, or anyway enlisted men; we paid them to do our killing and then locked up our daughters when they came to town. They were crude and not civilized like the rest of us and did not have a home with a garden. I had not seen Willie Waite for months. He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and, some said, the junior kleagle or whatever in our county.

“Let's go in,” Juano said.

“It's full,” I said. “Have you got a seat?”

“A cousin,” he said. “He was there this morning. This afternoon I take the seat and he goes back to work. Luis Nava. You know him. The bean merchant. He runs the cockfights.”

“I know him,” I said. “I think he is my cousin too in a complicated way.”

Juano clapped me on the back. “Let's go, cousin.”

Dietrich spent an hour or so establishing Louise Talbot's presence—and the probable absence of anyone else—at the house on the evening of the murder. (It was here that Mrs. Orville Moody contributed her observations, and the Colonel, and Henry Dugan.) He was working chronologically with his witnesses, establishing the time and place and mood before he even established the crime. Helen Donnelley took the stand late that afternoon and I saw for the first time that she was attractive, almost beautiful; overlooked and ignored by us rakish masculine chaffers because she was, after all, in her forties, because she had, after all, two children, because her husband was, after all, an elder; and beauty, to us local studs, was under thirty and virginal, like Charlie Chaplin's blessed damozels. Mrs. Donnelley suffered another disadvantage: if a man thought of her at all it was as Louise Talbot's next-door neighbor. She was a tall woman with a sturdy, uncompromising figure; her hair was dark brown and her eyes were gray, and her nose was straight and fine. The thought touched me that Rosemary would be not very different in twenty years: an inch or two more here and there, and with those inches a softer warmth and a deeper heart. I liked Helen Donnelley. She spoke directly and without obvious emotion. Yes, she had chatted with Louise Talbot, from about five-thirty to about six. She had then greeted Bruce, who also spoke briefly to Mrs. Talbot. No one else had joined them. She had seen Colonel Oates stop by earlier. Louise Talbot had been placid and friendly.

Dietrich paused then, and nodded, and asked suddenly, “Have you ever seen Bryan Talbot drunk?”

Mrs. Donnelley hesitated, and spoke slowly: “I have seen him when he had been drinking. I don't know about these things, and I can't say whether he was drunk.”

“Very good,” Dietrich said. “How did he behave? Was he pugnacious, friendly, sullen?”

“Objection,” Parmelee said. “Calls for a conclusion.”

“Sustained,” Hochstadter said.

“Did he ever pick a quarrel when he had been drinking?”

“No.”

“Laugh excessively, become boisterous?”

“No.”

“Fall down?”

“No.”

“Talk gibberish?”

“No.”

“I want to phrase this next question carefully.” Dietrich smiled. “To your way of thinking, did Bryan Talbot behave in a noticeably different manner when he had been drinking?”

Parmelee did not object.

Again Mrs. Donnelley was careful. “I would say, yes. His—well, his emotions were
more so.
”

“That is, heightened.”

“Yes. He hardly ever showed affection, in public I mean, when he was sober, but one day when he'd been drinking he went over to Louise and gave her a big kiss right on the mouth, and hugged her. She had to break loose from him because he was squeezing her. And that same day he started to make a speech against the Democrats, and he got terribly angry.”

“But he knew what he was saying, and he was coherent.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Donnelley,” and Dietrich turned to Parmelee and said, “Your witness.”

And Parmelee never even mentioned liquor. I frowned; but I thought I understood. Parmelee would not plead drunken impulse, but he would not deny intoxication either; he believed that Talbot was innocent, drink or no drink, and he believed that he could prove it. So he spent his time establishing two points: that the Talbots had never quarreled noticeably, and that they had been good neighbors. Which points, to Mrs. Donnelley's knowledge, were true; so Parmelee thanked her and sat down.

Dietrich hurried forward. “Mrs. Donnelley: do you say that in the time you were the Talbots' neighbors you never heard a whisper of complaint, never a hint of quarrel, from your friend Louise Talbot?”

“That's right.”

“But you know married life: isn't it fair to assume that there were at least minor disputes, coolnesses, differences of opinion?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“And you never heard the slightest breath of any of that from the Talbots?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Donnelley.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Donnelley,” Hochstadter said. “You may step down now.”

“Bruce Donnelley,” Dietrich called, and the elder took his wife's place on the stand. He walked like a bear: strong, solid, with heavy, even steps. The reliable, phlegmatic American: he seemed unblinking. He also seemed slow-witted, not volatile.

He confirmed what his wife had said.

“And you did not see her go into the house?”

“No.”

“Then you saw no one else with her?”

“No. Of course not. I only saw her for half a minute.”

“And never again?”

Bruce shook his head heavily. “Never.”

“Thank you. That's all.”

Then Parmelee stepped forward and repeated with Bruce the line he had taken with Mrs. Donnelley. Bruce maintained firmly that no whisper of trouble had escaped the Talbot household. Dietrich also repeated himself, and sat down smiling. It was a rare enough moment: each attorney had scored a point, and each felt his own victory to be the more important. Parmelee had shown that the Talbots were outwardly happy; Dietrich had tried to show that their façade was utterly impenetrable and therefore that anything at all might have been roiling the household.

This was quite unappetizing to the spectators. Dietrich was, in his fussy, overcareful way, trying to anticipate the defense's contention that some unknown party had spoken with Louise Talbot, that somewhere in Soledad City there had been a man with reason to return, with lacerated emotions, with a continuing and passionate interest; and he had tried to define Talbot as an erratic, but not unbalanced, drunk. Within limits, he had succeeded; but only within limits. Louise Talbot's private life remained private, and Bryan remained a figure of woozy doubt Still, the jury was left with an impression that Louise Talbot was home alone most of the time, and that her life in Soledad City was quiet and full of Bryan. And she had done no entertaining on the day of her death.