A Covenant with Death (9 page)

Dietrich spent the last hour of the day on the crime itself: let them think about it overnight. Alfred testified, and Tolliver, who was officious and exact and contributed nothing, and Doctor Schilling. Dietrich played on Talbot's bruise; the doctor said that it had been “fairly fresh,” incurred certainly “within the half hour,” and Dietrich favored the jury with a faceful of hypocritical sorrow. The doctor went on to say that Talbot had been drunk, and in shock. The deceased had been strangled but was otherwise unharmed. Otherwise unharmed!

Parmelee could do little with these witnesses. Alfred and the doctor agreed that Talbot's babbling might have been meaningless, but Alfred managed to hint that it was important, would bear further thought, and seemed incriminating. Doctor Schilling admitted that the bruise was more than a scratch, but would not say that the victim could not have inflicted it. The rest of us believed what we wanted to, and what I saw at the time was Talbot drunk, seizing a woman, ignoring her frantic blow, and tearfully taking revenge on God knew what unnamed oppressors for God knew what unnamed oppressions. That is, I could see the act, but I could not see why; not even after Peter Justin testified.

Justin might have plunged us into chaos by declining to mention liquor. We all drank but were not required to incriminate ourselves, and the Fifth Amendment was still as valid as the Eighteenth. But he spoke freely, and I learned later that Dietrich, no enemy to schnapps, had promised him an informal, and highly illegal, immunity. Justin said phlegmatically that Talbot had drunk about half a bottle of bourbon in two hours. Straight, with chasers. Justin had turned him out at ten minutes of ten: Talbot was wobbling, and had picked a fight. Senseless, and with a total stranger, who had seen a dark and lovely woman in the streets earlier and was congratulating Justin on the local talent.

Talbot lurched toward the man and said, “Just keep your mouth
shut
, buddy.”

“Easy, Bryan,” Justin said. “He wasn't talking about Louise.”

“The hell he wasn't,” Talbot said. “They all do. Where you from, buddy? Dallas, maybe?”

The stranger, imperturbable, gave Talbot obscene instructions, and Talbot lunged but Justin had him by the back of the shirt and threw him out amiably.

Parmelee followed this testimony with barely suppressed excitement, which died abruptly when Justin went on to say that the stranger had sat drinking until midnight.

“Did Talbot mention his wife again?”

“Just as he was leaving.”

“What did he say?”

Justin looked at Talbot here, and the first gentle grimace tightened his features. “He said, ‘Damn that woman.
Damn
that woman,' and then he went on out.”

“And that was the last you saw of him that night?”

“It was.”

“Your witness.” And Dietrich sat down.

Parmelee cross-examined with skill. Delicately, establishing but not defaming his client's character, he allowed Justin to make it known that Talbot was an habitual drinker but not a drunkard, and that in his year of drinking he had committed no act of violence in Justin's presence. The spectators were disappointed, cheated; they had hoped for more.

But when Hochstadter adjourned at a quarter to five the courtroom emptied slowly, amid bombination: tomorrow the strangers would testify. Tomorrow there would be talk of death and fornication, of bitter laughter and bitter tears; of tragedy. Soledad City, our wholesome middle-class American town, would be lined up three deep for good seats.

5

And the next morning I had troubles of my own. It was another fine day, a bit too hot but not oppressive, and on my way to the office at eight-fifteen I admired the high-school girls who crossed my path: blooming, tan, those white teeth and clear eyes, and they seemed to smell of prickly pear and blue grama grass. They reminded me of Rafaela because I had watched her grow up, from an ignored infant to a lovely chiaroscuro little girl, and she too smelled of the grasses and pines, even later when she was a tomboy repairing baby birds or riding home with a hurt lamb across the saddle. We had examined the lamb together and Rafaela smiled shyly, as another girl might who had just finished sewing her very own gingham dress. Later Rafaela could do that too and once we sat for two hours while she hemmed and I read, and every few minutes she looked up, dark eyes in a lovely Old World face—wasted on me then—to smile that same shy smile. But these girls, in the streets of my town, were a different breed; they traveled in flocks. Most of them wore white middy blouses. The boys were in jeans and had their sleeves rolled up. In my day twenty years earlier—over sixty years ago now!—the authorities had experimented briefly, requiring linen jackets. Parents had repaired to the then Judge, a man named Crown, threatening to sue because their children did not own linen jackets and the public school system of the territory had no right to demand expenditures over the usual taxes. The territory had been edging its way into Supreme Court decisions and the legislature was tired of rebuffs, so Crown simply notified the Board of Education that a linen jacket, or anyway requiring one, was unconstitutional. The Board then laid out almost four hundred dollars for eighty linen jackets of various sizes that were given to the boys. So the parents threatened to sue for misuse of school funds. They quieted down when the Board promised not to buy any more, and as soon as the first batch wore out we went back to khaki and denim. Nowadays children have to buy their own neckties and pens and accident insurance and God knows what. One of my grandchildren was required to pony up a dollar for something called a class terrarium. A thousand square miles of desert, salt flats, cottonwood groves, farmland, pasture, and good solid diorite mountains within a day's ride, not to mention bats, rats, shrews, carrion beetles, and ant lions, but the class needed a terrarium. City Hall is
still
full of lizards, but the class needed a terrarium.

Anyway I reached my office at about eight-thirty and saw a stranger waiting outside the door. About my age, short and stocky, dark and hard, and as soon as he spoke I knew he was from back east, Illinois or Indiana maybe. “Good morning,” he said. “Are you Judge Lewis?”

“Good morning,” I said. “I am. Let me get this open and come on in.”

“My name is Gorman,” he said.

“How do you do. Had breakfast?”

“Oh, yes,” he breezed. “I start early.”

I grunted, never having considered early starts particularly virtuous and preceded him into the office. I waved him to a chair and sat down while my face took on magisterial lines. “Can I help you?”

“My identification,” he said, and slid his wallet toward me. Gorman, Francis X., Treasury Department. Special Investigator. Et cetera.

“A Federal man,” I said. “What is it? Trouble at the bank?”

“No sir. I'm what most people call a Prohibition agent.”

“Then I won't offer you a drink,” I said lightly. “Do you mean to tell me you're looking for violations in a little oasis like this?”

“The law's the law,” he said. “Everywhere.”

“Everywhere in this blessed republic,” I emended. “Not in civilized countries.”

“Well, of course.” He smiled as if I had made a joke. “And you're not far from the border.”

“Do you know what they say?”

He smiled again. “What do they say?”

I spoke wearily. “They say that people are drinking far more now than they did before Congress called their attention to liquor.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” he said, and he astonished me by mimicking, quite gently, my professorial tone. “Unfortunately, my obligation is to uphold the law, and not to lobby against it.”

So I smiled too. “All right. Have you come to me for information, or do you want me to sign a warrant?”

“Well, maybe both. I need at least one witness who's not an agent. I never used to; but they've got us tied up in so much litigation now that I couldn't make an arrest alone if I was drowning in the stuff.” He was wearing a blue gabardine suit, much frayed, and his shirt collar was dirty. He pulled out a package of Spuds and lit one without permission. Then he remembered me and offered the package; I declined silently. “I'm pretty sure the Territorial Hotel is serving liquor,” he said. “They told me no last night, but they have what they call a private reading room, and there was a lot of noise coming from it and it smelled like a saloon to me. I'd like you to come over there with me.”

“Right now?”

“If you don't mind.”

“They don't have to let us in, you know. And I think if they saw me, a judge, walk in with a stranger they might be very polite and very uncooperative. That is, if they really have the stuff.”

“How about a search warrant?”

“That's possible,” I said. “Ah. Just in time.” John was loping through the doorway. “Mr. Digby, Mr. Gorman.” They nodded. “Mr. Gorman is from the Treasury Department. A Prohibition agent. He and I are going to draw up a search warrant and go over to take a look at the Territorial. In about fifteen minutes. I may be some time, so I want you to get to court and occupy my seat for me. We've got a murder trial in progress,” I told Gorman. “First-degree. Haven't had one of those in this county since statehood.” I turned again to John. “And on the way drop off and tell Ettore the examination will be nondiscriminatory because admission to the bar is a right and not a privilege. In this or any state. Go along, now.”

“Right away,” John said. “Pleased to have met you, Mr. Gorman.” Gorman nodded pleasantly, and John skipped off.

“What is he, an Indian?”

“Zuñi,” I said. “A good clerk. Smart. Works hard.”

“I'll be damned. Got a lot of Mexicans around here, too.”

“That's right.” I was scribbling at the warrant.

“They much trouble?”

“They're all anarchists,” I explained. “Knife throwers.” I did not look up. “Wife beaters. They keep pigs. Sleep all day.”

“Must be rough,” he said.

“Yes.” I blotted the warrant “My mother's the worst of the lot. She smokes cigars. Not only that, but they're all Catholics.” I stood up. “Shall we go now?”

He was a lot redder than John. And I remember thinking of Cousin Ignacio then, possibly because it was preposterous that he and Gorman should inhabit the same planet.

Cousin Ignacio was a polished primitive, with a beard and dirty nails, and a black cigar, dead or alive, in his mouth; and in the library of his house was a billiard table probably a hundred years old. Ignacio weighed some two hundred pounds, most of it sideways, and he bowled through the lanes, gardens, and fields of his busy estate like an officious cannon-ball. He possessed a fine private library, maybe four hundred serious volumes and nothing after 1850, the second Calderón, and Ignacio had not read a book since running away from the Brothers in 1880 or so. Reading was a woman's occupation chez Montemayor and Rafaela had read all those books by the time she was eighteen, including a few not written for young ladies. My mother brought her books in English. Julia and Marta had also been great readers before they married. Ramón had never read more than the financial pages in his life; he lived in Mexico City and made money, appearing at Christmastime with bolts of cloth and boots and mysterious novelties like toothbrushes and hair tonic. He had a wife and children and they were always welcome but otherwise no one paid them much attention, or to Ramón either, who could support just so much pastoral simplicity and always made plausible excuses after three or four days.

Ignacio and Rafaela lived alone except for thirty or forty friends, companions, employees, stockholders—who knew what they were?—who ran the farm. Ignacio cared for his manor, his wine and cigars, his anticlericalism, his horses, and his family, in approximately that order. He liked women too but they were a condition, an environment, and not a category. He was dark brown with a thick head of black hair and the eyes of an eighteen-year-old, black and snapping, and I imagine he had tumbled every woman on his estate and his tenants, who called him Don Ignacio but also called him a blockhead and a mule when he was wrong, did not object, or did not object strongly, or did not seem to object. Who could object to rain or thunder, and what good would it do? Objections glanced off him anyway; he was a good man but mindless and his eruptions of lust or anger were blind, unthinking, and not too frequent. He hardly ever spoke except to manage his farm or to be polite. The obligatory courtesies at my arrival and departure emerged in the form of laryngeal grunts and gurgles accompanied by nods, smiles, flutterings of the hands, offers of red wine and black cigars. I always drank his wine and smoked his cigars; his life on the farm was truly a life and not a collection of disjointed aspects and activities, and the wine and cigars were integral. The wine, from his own grapes and probably his own bare feet, was dark red and quite harsh even after years in the bottle, so he kept most of it in casks and he and his friends drank it up every year. He had been told that it tasted much like Corsican wine but neither he nor I had ever drunk Corsican wine. We drank plenty of Ignacio's, though. When dinner was over and we were alone at table he usually opened another bottle, and when it was half gone and we were either drowning in the juices of the maduro or choking to death in its smoke Ignacio would croak something like “Nnn. Ggg. Quieres?” and jerk his head toward the library, which meant, “Would you care for a game of billiards?” After the game he would nod in pleasure, shake my hand, and trundle off to bed; he was up with the sun. Then Rafaela would join me in the library and blow out the candles. I don't believe Ignacio ever knew, or would have cared.

Rafaela was a boy by day, on horseback many hours, visiting friends, watching stock, tending hurt lambs and such. Not a classic tomboy; she had never hunted or fished or bothered with adventures. But she wore trousers and shaps. She was of average height and build but extremely graceful, and would return to the house in late afternoon to change; for dinner, and for the evening, she was a lady. A very beautiful lady, and the cool efficiency with which she rode or set a splint or quieted a baby was never inflicted upon me. Only that occasional sense of my own inferiority. When I left for the war she was a child and when I got back she was still a child, but only because she was just seventeen and an old friend and I was fresh from the ripeness of Paris, and when I was twenty-five ripeness was all. I was polite and cheerful for a couple of years, visiting three or four times with my parents and then with my mother. Ignacio was heartbroken when my father died. My father's Spanish was only fair but to Ignacio words were a superfluity; he and my father rode together, worked together, and spent hours hunting. When there was nothing to hunt they shot at targets and drank wine and careened home in roaring good spirits. I was a disappointment to Ignacio because I did not replace my father. I slept a lot in a hammock and read the old books and one day I noticed a stunning black-haired black-eyed dinner companion in her early twenties staring carnivorously at me. It was Rafaela. That made me more than ever a homebody. She was wearing a long dress that evening, dark green brocade, with a pale green shawl; and she warmed me with eyes that were no longer wall-eyes but had become what the Italians called gli occhi di venere, the eyes of—well, what? Venery, lust, lechery, passion; but in Italian it was a compliment. We went riding next day and fetched up in an elfin grot, and I shut her wild, wild eyes with kisses more than four, and ravished her; or would have, in Fielding's glorious words, had she not by a timely compliance prevented me. After which she snubbed me for several hours so that I arrived in the dining room morose and confused, trying to be natural but nervously fearful that I had violated every possible rule of human behavior, from incest to simple social regulations like not pinching the chief's daughter in his own tent But between soup and chicken she laughed in delicious mischief and I knew she had been playing some woman's game. When I was sure it was all right I grew jealous and wondered who had preceded me, but I never asked her. I told myself that I had no claim on her. What I meant, and eventually discovered, was that I did not want her to assume a claim on me.