Joe Hill (38 page)

Revenge, as the newspapers assumed? A deliberate murder—the quick step in the door, the shout, the shots, the getaway? Morrison had been a policeman, and had made enemies. Also, since leaving the force to open his grocery, he had twice stood off holdup men with a gun, wounding one of them in the second encounter last September. Revenge, quite possibly. And if revenge, and if Joe Hillstrom had really been involved, then Joe might be guilty of a double murder, premeditated, in cold blood.

Or robbery? Merlin Morrison had not seen who fired the first shot. He had fled, and turned running to see the taller robber fire the second shot into his father’s body, and as he stumbled into the stockroom in panic he had heard a fusillade. But who fired first, the robber or Arlin Morrison, who grabbed his father’s gun from the open icebox and died with it in his hand, one cartridge exploded?

For some time Lund stood looking through the window into the abandoned store, trying to make the pattern come clear, but failing. There was no pattern, only the shout and the shots and the two slumped bodies and the slam of the door as the murderers fled. He turned and looked down to the corner, the way they had run, and
he saw how they had looked in the dark to the women, neighbors, who had hurried to their doors and looked out. He saw the shorter man sprint from the shadow of the trees across the dim intersection and disappear in the murk down Eighth South, and after him he saw the taller man run stooping, his hands to his chest, and heard him call that he was shot.

Like a second-rate melodrama—except that real death had been died in the store, and except that Joe Hillstrom might have been the man who ran with his hands pressed against his chest. Lund tried to think how it would be to run hard, along slippery sidewalks and through slushy alleys, with a .38 bullet through the lung, and he tried to imagine what might have been in the mind of someone who had just killed a man and his son, but he could not get his mind around either. It seemed to him only that in the chest there would be a desperate burning, and in the mind a pounding of fear.

Everything in the quiet, closed-up scene of murder led him farther from what he was after. He could not get Joe Hillstrom into it; the tall thin-faced man who took Arlin Morrison’s bullet in the chest remained a stranger, the villain of a thriller.

Across the street a man came out of his driveway and stood in his shirtsleeves, watching Lund so that he swerved away from the window with guilty suddenness. The place was saturated with guilt. He did not want to stay around it. With his mind groping among contradictions, trying to fit the Joe Hillstrom he knew to the Joe Hillstrom who might have run from this corner five months ago coughing blood from a punctured lung, and repudiating the whole case the law made as preposterous, unbelievable, out of character, Lund started walking north toward his hotel.

The man who might have been Otto Applequist (and
that
part of the case was convincing enough, considering what Lund knew of Otto) was lost in the black alleys, separating from his wounded companion, abandoning him, making a clean getaway. The man who just possibly could have been Joe Hillstrom also disappeared in the alleys below Eighth South. He might have hidden away somewhere, he might have made the tracks and crawled into a boxcar and lived, or got away to die somewhere else.

But the real Joe Hillstrom appeared just before midnight on the porch of a Dr. McHugh in Murray, several miles from the scene
of the crime, and asked to be treated for a bullet wound in the chest. He was weak, but holding himself stiffly. When he took off his coat to expose the wound, an automatic fell from a shoulder holster. The doctor did not examine it to see whether it was loaded or empty; he dressed the wound and said nothing to Joe Hillstrom’s request that the whole affair be kept private. There was a woman involved, Joe said. There had been a quarrel over a woman. He was as much to blame as the other fellow, and he did not want to make any complaint against the man who had shot him. Neither did he want the woman to be dragged into any unpleasantness.

That was all that anybody really knew—the fact of his wound and the unwavering consistency of his story, or of his refusal to tell a story. The gun he threw away when a colleague of McHugh’s drove him home, and it was never found. In pain, weak from loss of blood, he whistled twice, sharply, on his fingers as they approached the house where he boarded, and then the doctor helped him in.

He was half dead of his wound three days later when McHugh told his story and the police came down to get him.

At three-fifteen Lund was at the door of the county jail. The door let him into a little vestibule with an office on the right and closed doors on the left and a grilled steel gate straight ahead. A man and a woman were waiting in the office. Behind the gate a fat policeman in an office chair looked him over with puffy yellow eyes.

“I’d like to see Joseph Hillstrom, if he’s back from court.”

The jailer’s eyes went over him in silence, and Lund stood them as he might have stood a crawling yellow-jacket. Living at the mission and working with sailors and hoboes and the drift that washed up and down Beacon Street had made him jumpy around police. If you were on the bottom you were at the mercy of every grafter and sadist and petty exerciser of power. But no matter how steadily he looked back into the jailer’s dead eyes, the
eyes did not change. A fat freckled hand shoved out a book like a hotel register, and Lund signed.

“Fifteen minutes,” the jailer said. “Couple ahead of you. Wait in there.”

He yawned, his yellowish eyeballs swam with sudden water, he looked past Lund as if he had already forgotten him.

As Lund sat down the woman on the next chair drew her knees together, holding her pocketbook on top of them primly. Her consciousness of him had in it a wan echo of coquettishness; her eyes fixed themselves in a businesslike way upon the opposite wall, strayed, touched him again, jumped back to the wall. Beside her on the other side a chinless little man smoked the fierce stump of a cigar. Behind the desk a deputy read a magazine. There was a noise of flies at the high windows.

Somewhere a bell rang, and after a couple of minutes a man came out of the door on the left. The man and woman in the office stood up uncertainly. From the chair in the hall the fat jailer said something, and the man and woman crossed the hall and closed the door behind them. The deputy turned a page, rolling half the magazine under in his left hand.

No more sure of what he would find, or of what he hoped to find, than he had been on the train in the morning, Lund sat on. The papers had given him details but no explanations; the visit to Eighth South and West Temple had done no more than upset him and accentuate his doubt. He was unable to visualize what Joe would look like: like himself, or like the bearded desperado of the morning paper? And what would they say to each other? No moral lectures, he said to himself. Above all, no moral lectures.

And yet there were questions he must ask, things he felt he must know.

After a long time the bell rang again. Though he had found the waiting tedious, marked only by the swish of the deputy’s pages, it seemed now that the fifteen minutes allowed visitors would not be enough even for a greeting. As he stood up and looked to the jailer for a sign, the left-hand door opened and the couple came out. The woman was crying, her eyes puffy. She held her handkerchief against her mouth, and in passing looked for a moment full at Lund with an expression of brave suffering. Her tears were for
herself and for spectators; she savored herself as sufferer. “You see?” her upturned eyes said. Her husband went with his arm across her shoulders, his weak little pucker of mouth clenched on the dead stump of cigar.

Oh Lord, Lund thought, and wondered why self-consciousness made even real anguish look like a pose, and went through the door at the jailer’s nod feeling furtive and brittle. Inside a chair was pulled close to a barred wicket like a ticket window in the wall. A policeman leaning against the far wall nodded him to the chair. After a few seconds there was a scraping beyond the wicket.

His first emotion was relief that the face did not look like the face in the paper, and the instantaneous explanation came to him: that picture had been taken while Joe was still sick from his wound. Now, though his face looked pale and so sharp that the slight bulge of his teeth showed under the drawn mouth, he was clean-shaven and his hair was cut so short that he looked like a boy. His eyes were wide and surprised; Lund thought they were pleased.

“Well, holy smoke! What are you doing in this burg?”

“I was on my way east,” Lund said. “I read about your trial in the paper I got in Ogden. It was the first I knew.”

His face a little in shadow, his eyebrows lifted quizzically, Joe watched him. Their position was a little like that of priest and penitent in a confessional, though which was priest and which penitent, which hoped for comfort from the other, was a question. Joe tapped the steel screen between them and smiled. “It’d be nice to shake hands, but they don’t seem to approve of that here.”

He laughed, but Lund did not laugh. The screen was too unavoidable a reminder that Joe was cut off where friendship and good will could do little for him. Because he could think of nothing to say, he filled his pipe, and when it was full he offered it to Joe. Joe shook his head.

“Still a good Christian,” Lund said.

“All the virtues.”

Frowning at the suck and blaze, Lund got the pipe going and waved out the match. He was full of balked rebellion at having to sit here and talk through bars, with a guard listening twenty feet away and Joe’s face so shadowed that he could not see it clearly. He wanted to study Joe’s face, and he wanted the long interrupted
unhurried talk they had had in San Pedro. But he would have no better chance than this.

“Joe, what can I do?”

“Nothing to do.”

“I’ve still got that money of yours.”

Beyond the wicket he saw the slow white smile. “You’d better use that to save souls.”

“I guess they’ll have to stay unsaved,” Lund said. “I’m out of the mission.”

“Out? Why?”

“You’re entitled to your laugh,” Lund said ruefully. “Political shift of power in the synod. Evangelicals went out, fundamentalists came in. I was a little too latitudinarian for them.”

There was a pause while they eyed each other. Joe’s face twisted with disgust. “My God, what a bunch of bolt-heads. You ran the only respectable mission on the coast.”

“Not enough Augsburg Confession,” Lund said. “Not enough Apostles’ Creed. They want a nice tight denominational mission, and they knew I wasn’t the one to run it.” But it warmed him to hear Joe’s praise. It was praise he valued.

“What are you going to do?”

“Back to the farm.”

“In Minnesota?”

“Yes.”

“No more soul-saving at all?”

“There doesn’t seem to be much place for a latitudinarian Christian,” Lund said.

“You ought to get into the union battle,” Joe said speculatively. “You’re educated, you can talk. Get yourself whipped up a little more and you’d make a soapboxer.”

The thought made them both laugh. “I told you,” Lund said. “No soul-saving. Not even for the heaven-on-earth.”

Their laughter ebbed and left them with the necessity of finding a new tack. At least five of their few minutes had passed.

“I do have that money, though,” Lund said. “You’ll need it for your defense.”

“My defense!” Joe spat the words out so bitterly that Lund leaned, frowning, to see him better.

“Isn’t the
IWW
defending you?”

“I told them to lay off.”

“But the papers said …”

“They go right on wasting money,” Joe said. “They’re crazy. The union shouldn’t bleed its treasury defending me. One man isn’t worth it.”

Lund straightened a little. “Now you’re talking nonsense.”

“No,” Joe said. “I’m not talking nonsense.”

His hard stare was difficult to face; his mouth was set like a stubborn boy’s. Lund looked down at the warm bowl of the pipe in his hand, looked up again to see Joe’s mouth move as if tasting something. Rather than force a clash, he let the talk edge away.

“How does it look, really?”

“You’ve seen the papers.”

“Anything critical happen in court today?”

Joe shrugged.

“What I can’t understand,” Lund said, “is why you don’t prove where you were that night, and settle this quick.”

With the crossed shadows of the wires on it, Joe’s face was changeable and hard to read, but now his eyes were dark, his mouth harshly pinched, the long scar white along jaw and neck.

“Why should I prove an alibi? I’m innocent till they prove I’m guilty, that’s what the law books say. If there’s any proving to be done, let them do it.”

“But if it means saving your life!”

“You sound like my lawyers,” Joe said. “I don’t have to prove anything. That’s the
D.A.
’s job.”

“What if they ever catch Otto? Can he clear you?”

“If they catch Otto he’ll be right where I am, charged with the same thing,” Joe said. “He was smart to take it on the lam. But even if they caught him his testimony wouldn’t be worth any more in that court than mine would be. I’m guilty as hell right from the start. They’re all set to stand me against the wall.”