Murder Most Merry (11 page)

“I mean exactly that.” I was glad that he seemed, at last, to be following my drift.

“And you think I might give this case to someone, like a Christmas present?”

“If you care to put it that way, yes.”

“I do not care to put it in
exactly
that way.” He turned his pale-blue eyes on me with what I thought was genuine sympathy. “But I shall try and do the case of R.
v
. Timson in the way most appropriate to the greatest feast of the Christian year. It is a time, I quite agree, for the giving of presents.”

When they finally threw us out of Pommeroy’s, and after we had considered the possibility of buying the Bishop brandy in the Cock Tavern, and even beer in the Devereux, I let my instinct, like an aged horse, carry me on to the Underground and home to Gloucester Road, and there discovered the rissoles, like some traces of a vanished civilization, fossilized in the oven. She Who Must Be Obeyed was already in bed. feigning sleep. When I climbed in beside her, she opened a hostile eye.

“You’re drunk, Rumpole!” she said. “What on earth have you been doing?”

“I’ve been having a legal discussion,” I told her, “on the subject of the admissibility of certain evidence. Vital, from my client’s point of view. And, just for a change, Hilda, I think I’ve won.”

“Well, you’d better try and get some sleep.” And she added with a sort of satisfaction, “I’m sure you’ll be feeling quite terrible in the morning.”

As with all the grimmer predictions of She Who Must Be Obeyed, this one turned out to be true. I sat in the Court the next day with the wig feeling like a lead weight on the brain and the stiff collar sawing the neck like a blunt execution. My mouth tasted of matured birdcage and from a long way off I heard Wrigglesworth say to Bridget O’Dowd, who stood looking particularly saintly and virginal in the witness box, “About a week before this, did you see the defendant, Edward Timson, on your staircase flourishing any sort of weapon?”

It is no exaggeration to say that I felt deeply shocked and considerably betrayed. After his promise to me, Wrigglesworth had turned his back on the spirit of the great Christmas festival. He came not to bring peace but a sword.

I clambered with some difficulty to my feet. After my forensic efforts of the evening before, I was scarcely in the mood for a legal argument. Mr. Justice Vosper looked up in surprise and greeted me in his usual chilly fashion.

“Yes, Mr. Rumpole. Do you object to this evidence?”

Of course I object, I wanted to say. It’s inhuman, unnecessary, unmerciful, and likely to lead to my losing another case. Also, it’s clearly contrary to a solemn and binding contract entered into after a number of glasses of the Bishop’s putative port. All I seemed to manage was a strangled, “Yes.”

“I suppose Mr. Wrigglesworth would say—” Vosper, J., was, as ever, anxious to supply any argument that might not yet have occurred to the prosecution “—that it is evidence of ‘system.‘ “

“System?” I heard my voice faintly and from a long way off. “It may be, I suppose. But the Court has a discretion to omit evidence which may be irrelevant and purely prejudicial.”

“I feel sure Mr. Wrigglesworth has considered the matter most carefully and that he would not lead this evidence unless he considered it entirely relevant.”

I looked at the Mad Monk on the seat beside me. He was smiling at me with a mixture of hearty cheerfulness and supreme pity, as though I were sinking rapidly and he had come to administer extreme unction. I made a few ill-chosen remarks to the Court, but I was in no condition, that morning, to enter into a complicated legal argument on the admissibility of evidence.

It wasn’t long before Bridget O’Dowd had told a deeply disapproving jury all about Eddie “Turpin” Timson’s sword. “A man.” the judge said later in his summing up about young Edward, “clearly prepared to attack with cold steel whenever it suited him.”

When the trial was over, I called in for refreshment at my favorite watering hole and there, to my surprise, was my opponent Wrigglesworth, sharing an expensive-looking bottle with Detective Inspector Wainwright. the officer in charge of the case. I stood at the bar, absorbing a consoling glass of Pommeroy’s ordinary, when the D. I. came up to the bar for cigarettes. He gave me a friendly and maddeningly sympathetic smile.

“Sorry about that, sir. Still, win a few, lose a few. Isn’t that it?”

“In my case lately, it’s been win a few, lose a lot!”

“You couldn’t have this one, sir. You see, Mr. Wrigglesworth had promised it to me.”

“He had
what?
”

“Well, I’m retiring, as you know. And Mr. Wrigglesworth promised me faithfully that my last case would be a win. He promised me that, in a manner of speaking, as a Christmas present. Great man is our Mr. Wrigglesworth, sir, for the spirit of Christmas.”

I looked across at the Mad Monk and a terrible suspicion entered my head. What was all that about a present for the Bishop? I searched my memory and I could find no trace of our having, in fact, bought wine for any sort of cleric. And was Wrigglesworth as inexperienced as he would have had me believe in the art of selecting claret?

As I watched him pour and sniff a glass from his superior bottle and hold it critically to the light, a horrible suspicion crossed my mind. Had the whole evening’s events been nothing but a deception, a sinister attempt to nobble Rumpole, to present him with such a stupendous hangover that he would stumble in his legal argument? Was it all in aid of D. I. Wainwright’s Christmas present?

I looked at Wrigglesworth, and it would be no exaggeration to say the mind boggled. He was, of course, perfectly right about me. I just didn’t recognize evil when I saw it.

DEAD ON CHRISTMAS STREET – John D. MacDonald

The police in the first prowl car on the scene got out a tarpaulin. A traffic policeman threw it over the body and herded the crowd back. They moved uneasily in the gray slush. Some of them looked up from time to time.

In the newspaper picture the window would be marked with a bold X. A dotted line would descend from the X to the spot where the covered body now lay. Some of the spectators, laden with tinsel-and evergreen-decorated packages, turned away, suppressing a nameless guilt.

But the curious stayed on. Across the street, in the window of a department store, a vast mechanical Santa rocked back and forth, slapping a mechanical hand against a padded thigh, roaring forever, “Whaw haw ho ho ho. Whaw haw ho ho ho.” The slapping hand had worn the red plush from the padded thigh.

The ambulance arrived, with a brisk intern to make out the DOA. Sawdust was shoveled onto the sidewalk, then pushed off into the sewer drain. Wet snow fell into the city. And there was nothing else to see. The corner Santa, a leathery man with a pinched, blue nose, began to ring his hand bell again.

Daniel Fowler, one of the young Assistant District Attorneys, was at his desk when the call came through from Lieutenant Shinn of the Detective Squad. “Dan? This is Gil. You heard about the Garrity girl yet?”

For a moment the name meant nothing, and then suddenly he remembered: Loreen Garrity was the witness in the Sheridan City Loan Company case. She had made positive identification of two of the three kids who had tried to pull that holdup, and the case was on the calendar for February. Provided the kids didn’t confess before it came up, Dan was going to prosecute. He had the Garrity girl’s statement, and her promise to appear.

“What about her, Gil?” he asked.

“She took a high dive out of her office window—about an hour ago. Seventeen stories, and right into the Christmas rush. How come she didn’t land on somebody, we’ll never know. Connie Wyant is handling it. He remembered she figured in the loan-company deal, and he told me. Look, Dan. She was a big girl, and she tried hard not to go out that window. She was shoved. That’s how come Connie has it. Nice Christmas present for him.”

“Nice Christmas present for the lads who pushed over the loan company, too,” Dan said grimly. “Without her there’s no case. Tell Connie that. It ought to give him the right line.”

Dan Fowler set aside the brief he was working on and walked down the hall. The District Attorney’s secretary was at her desk. “Boss busy. Jane?”

She was a small girl with wide, gray eyes, a mass of dark hair, a soft mouth. She raised one eyebrow and looked at him speculatively. “I could be bribed, you know.”

He looked around with exaggerated caution, went around her desk on tiptoe, bent and kissed her upraised lips. He smiled down at her. “People are beginning to talk,” he whispered, not getting it as light as he meant it to be.

She tilted her head to one side, frowned, and said, “What is it, Dan?”

He sat on the corner of her desk and took her hands in his. and he told her about the big. dark-haired, swaggering woman who had gone out the window. He knew Jane would want to know. He had regretted bringing Jane in on the case, but he had had the unhappy hunch that Garrity might sell out, if the offer was high enough. And so he had enlisted Jane, depending on her intuition. He had taken the two of them to lunch, and had invented an excuse to duck out and leave them alone.

Afterward, Jane had said. “I guess I don’t really like her, Dan. She was suspicious of me, of course, and she’s a terribly vital sort of person. But I would say that she’ll be willing to testify. And I don’t think she’ll sell out.”

Now as he told her about the girl, he saw the sudden tears of sympathy in her gray eyes. “Oh. Dan! How dreadful! You’d better tell the boss right away. That Vince Servius must have hired somebody to do it.”

“Easy, lady.” he said softly.

He touched her dark hair with his fingertips, smiled at her, and crossed to the door of the inner office, opened it and went in.

Jim Heglon, the District Attorney, was a narrow-faced man with glasses that had heavy frames. He had a professional look, a dry wit, and a driving energy.

“Every time I see you, Dan, I have to conceal my annoyance,” Heglon said. “You’re going to cart away the best secretary I ever had.”

“Maybe I’ll keep her working for a while. Keep her out of trouble.”

“Excellent! And speaking of trouble—”

“Does it show, Jim?” Dan sat on the arm of a heavy leather chair which faced Heglon’s desk. “I do have some. Remember the Sheridan City Loan case?”

“Vaguely. Give me an outline.”

“October. Five o’clock one afternoon, just as the loan office was closing. Three punks tried to knock it over. Two of them, Castrella and Kelly, are eighteen. The leader, Johnny Servius, is nineteen. Johnny is Vince Servius’s kid brother.

“They went into the loan company wearing masks and waving guns. The manager had more guts than sense. He was loading the safe. He saw them and slammed the door and spun the knob. They beat on him. but he convinced them it was a time lock, which it wasn’t. They took fifteen dollars out of his pants, and four dollars from the girl behind the counter and took off.

“Right across the hall is the office of an accountant named Thomas Kistner. He’d already left. His secretary, Loreen Garrity, was closing up the office. She had the door open a crack. She saw the three kids come out of the loan company, taking their masks off. Fortunately, they didn’t see her.

“She went to headquarters and looked at the gallery, and picked out Servius and Castrella. They were picked up. Kelly was with them, so they took him in, too. In the lineup the Garrity girl made a positive identification of Servius and Castrella again. The manager thought he could recognize Kelly’s voice.

“Bail was set high, because we expected Vince Servius would get them out. Much to everybody’s surprise, he’s left them in there. The only thing he did was line up George Terrafierro to defend them, which makes it tough from our point of view, but not too tough—if we could put the Garrity girl on the stand. She was the type to make a good witness. Very positive sort of girl.”

“Was? Past tense?”

“This afternoon she was pushed out the window of the office where she works. Seventeen stories above the sidewalk. Gil Shinn tells me that Connie Wyant has it definitely tagged as homicide.”

“If Connie says it is, then it is. What would conviction have meant to the three lads?”

“Servius had one previous conviction—car theft; Castrella had one conviction for assault with a deadly weapon. Kelly is clean, Jim.”