The Scarlet Letters (17 page)

Ellery staggered to his feet.

“You fool. You fool.”

Martha lay on Harrison's bed as if she had been flung there from a great height. A convulsion of arms and legs stilled as Ellery turned to her. Red stains were spreading swiftly over her head and dress. He bent over her. He could hear her breath.

There was a thud behind him, and he turned. The revolver had slipped from Dirk's hand. Dirk toppled to the floor and lay quiet.

“Nikki.”

Nikki did not move.

“Nikki.” Ellery stepped over Dirk's legs, skirted Harrison's body, went around the bed to the doorway and slapped Nikki's face, hard. She whimpered and put her hand to her cheek. “Go downstairs now. Get on the phone. Call the hospital–Stamford or Norwalk. Emergency. She's still alive. Then call the police if Tama hasn't got through.” He talked in a loud, clear voice, as if she were hard of hearing.

He spun her around and pushed.

Nikki stumbled along the hall and groped her way down the stairs.

Ellery turned to face back into the room and almost fainted.

Van Harrison, who should have been dead, was on his hands and knees, inching his way toward the wall, dyeing the black rug as he moved. He reached the wall and clawed at it. Mewing sounds were coming from his torn throat. The effort brought on a hemorrhage, and he collapsed at the baseboard, his face pressed against the white leather.

“Stop!” Ellery sprang across the room. “Harrison, don't move again.
Don't move.
They'll be here for you soon–”

The actor raised his face a little, and Ellery saw his eyes. They were trying to express something his shattered throat could not–the certain imminence of death, perhaps, and something else Ellery could not define at all.

Harrison's fingers fluttered to his chest, his abdomen, as if to specify his wounds and mark them clear. Blood got all over his hand. He looked down at it, surprised. Then something new came into his eyes, a look–Ellery would have sworn–of pleasure.

Harrison rolled over to face the wall.

He hemorrhaged again.

“For God's sake, Harrison, lie still.”

The actor raised his bloody hand with the other, steering it to the wall, holding it there. His forefinger was stiffly pointed.

The finger made a shaky, downward, diagonal red stroke on the white leather, from upper right to lower left:

/

He was trying to write something.

His hand dropped and fumbled at his stomach.

Red ink, thought Ellery. He's going for more red ink.

Ellery dropped to his knees, He braced Harrison at the armpits The replenished finger came slowly up and wrote again, another downward diagonal which began this time at the upper left and wobbled to the lower right, crossing the first mark en route:

X

Washington Market
…
Washington
…
W.
The last meeting with Martha had been
W
in Harrison's code.

W … X …

Again. He was struggling again.

He wanted to write more.

Ellery helped him. He helped dip the rigid finger in fresh blood. He raised the heavy arm, held it steady.

Another downward stroke. Beside the
X
. A stroke exactly like the first:

X /

And still another:

X Y

As the last downward stroke reached the diagonal, Harrison's body heaved in a great backward surge, as if he had been caught in an outgoing wave. He remained bridged in Ellery's arms, stiffly riding the wave, for a heartbeat or two, then his breath came out in a red spume and he went under.

All through that night, and through the timeless time that followed that night, Ellery was inhabited by a ghost. The ghost had a dripping finger, and the finger kept redly writing over and over the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth letters of the alphabet. It covered every surface of the inner man with its cryptic symbols, until Ellery thought he must burst with its corruption.

And he failed to exercise it.

Afterwards, when he looked back, it seemed to him that many confusing things had happened on that night, in all of which he comported himself with gravity and dignity and no faintest grasp of the issues. He had the clear recollection that the Darien police came, and the state police, and the county people from Bridgeport; that Martha was taken to Norwalk Hospital under guard and put immediately on the operating table; that Dirk Lawrence was whisked away, his mouth fish-like, unable to utter an intelligible word; that the wrecked bedroom and the ruins of Harrison were photographed and measured and the body carted out under the eye of the County Coroner; that newspaper people from New York City and various Connecticut towns and cities gathered rapidly in swarms over the lawns, hammered at doors, popped flash bulbs, attracted great clouds of mosquitoes and millers and crunchy beetles; that he was interrogated over and over, and Nikki, and the Japanese houseman; that some time during the night his father materialized at his side and remained there, pale and wary; that at one point Leon Fields appeared and by some magic won a few minutes alone with him; that at dawn he and Nikki and Tama–and the Inspector–were seated in some office in Bridgeport talking to the State's Attorney, who wore a jacket over his undershirt and no socks … All these things Ellery remembered, yet he could not have repeated the slightest significant detail of the night past the point when Van Harrison died in his arms. Everything was clouded over by a red fog composed of
X's
and
Y's
, like a sort of bloody alphabet soup vaporized and darkening the air.

XY
…

The scarlet letters.

He had a vague inverted view of himself standing before the leather wall like a professor at a fancy whiteboard, pointing to the bloody
XY
and explaining patiently Harrison's code, up to and including the brief meeting at Washington Market; but even that had no real existence, because he had been unable to tell them why Harrison had fought death back in order to paint those symbols on his wall.

There was another memory, of Nikki and the Inspector and himself standing inside the screening curtains surrounding a bed in the emergency room of the Norwalk Hospital, watching Martha breathe. There was very little of her to see, because of the bandages on her face and the tight hospital precision of the sheets, with other bandages beneath. It seemed to Ellery that Nikki had kept saying over and over, above the noisy engine behind the bandages, that Martha needed a specialist, a specialist, and that he had kept assuring Nikki the specialist was there, at the other side of the bed, and a number of other very competent medical men, too. And that somebody told them it was touch and go, but while there was life there was hope. And that now they really must go.

But that memory was all mixed up with Nikki's eyes turning over as her knees buckled. And then there was the long drive home … Nikki curled up in his own bed … the reporters … and, much later, the inquest …

The next day Nikki went back to Norwalk, where she took a room. Martha was still alive; the hospital people said this as if it were very good news. She could not be seen. Nikki camped in the corridor.

The only reality of that time was Van Harrison, who was dead.
XY
…

Yes, the next meeting place was to have been code
X
–a Mexican restaurant on West 46th Street. And after that, code
Y
–the great playing field of the New York Yankees.

But why should the next two meeting places have seized and held Harrison's dying attention? Was something to have taken place as a result of those meetings–something unprecedented which Harrison wanted Ellery to learn?

Ellery went down to West 46th Street and he stood outside the Xochitl Restaurant, with its green neon sign and its kneeling Indian figure and its front window surrounded by creamy green tile. And he shook his head, and went in, and made inquiries, and came away in the same red-toned darkness. Van Harrison was not known there. Martha Lawrence was not known there.

And Yankee Stadium? He went to Yankee Stadium, and he talked with club officials, and he went away still shaking his head. No one there knew anything about Van Harrison or Martha Lawrence beyond the outpourings of the newspapers.

XY
…

The papers were calling it “the Scarlet Letters Murder,” with that affinity of the press for the elegantly mysterious. It was a rich case for the newspapers. A cameraman for one of the tabloids had put a ladder against the terrace wall and taken a flash shot through the shattered oval window at a dramatic moment. The ambulance men were just raising Martha onto the stretcher, and Harrison's riddled corpse was in focus to one side. The Scarlet Letters Murder … They called it other names, too, not so literary.

And some of them, jumping the gun, pluralized “Murder.”

XY
…

When the trial began, Ellery knew no more of the meaning of Harrison's dying message than he had known at the moment Harrison wrote it.

And for all the tons of newsprint which had been dedicated to the subject, not one word–and Ellery read all the words–suggested a single plausible line of speculation.

It was going to be a short trial. Everyone agreed on that–Darrell Irons, the famous trial lawyer who had been retained to defend Dirk Lawrence, the State's Attorney's office, Judge Levy, the newspapers, and–somewhat to their disappointment–the jury. There was no question about the nature of the crime; the only question was of the social advisability of the punishment. It was not a “lawyer's case,” but a jury's.

Should a man be convicted of murder who has caught his wife and her lover in an adulterous relationship?

Darrell Irons's defense was the Unwritten Law.

“The Unwritten Law,” Irons told the jury in his opening, “assumes that a measure of immunity shall be granted those guilty of certain criminal acts, especially of those acts arising out of the natural and even noble desire of a man to avenge his honor when it is besmirched by seduction or adultery.

“In this case you will in your humane wisdom be deliberating whether a young husband may not be forgiven for blindly lashing out, in a moment of agonized revelation, at the betrayer of his good name and at the conscienceless love-bandit who seduced her into a sordid bedroom romance and with whom she committed repeated acts of adultery. There is no greater affront to a husband's manhood than to find his wife in the arms of another man. You will not, I think, punish this husband for doing what any man or woman of you might have done in his place under similar circumstances. Let the husbands among you, ladies and gentlemen, imagine finding their wives in the bedroom of another man; let the wives imagine finding their husbands in the bedroom of another woman …

“As a law-abiding citizen as well as a member of the bar I hold with the State that human life may not be taken with impunity. But while laws are just, men are understanding and merciful; and in this case I say to you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, look into yourselves, study the evidence as to the provocation, consider the damning circumstances, and you will surely find this betrayed and unhappy young man not guilty.”

Irons then briefly stated the facts that the defense would prove, and he sat down with the indulgent air of an adult who has just been assigned an exercise in child's play.

The State opened its case by presenting the testimony of various law officers, putting into evidence official photographs of the victims and the scene, identification of the murder weapon, ballistics testimony linking the identified murder weapon with the bullets found in the victims' bodies, the Coroner's findings, the testimony of the Eye Witnesses–one Ellery Queen and one Nikki Porter, both of New York City–as to the actual events of the shooting … all the details necessary to prove what everyone in the courtroom granted in advance: That on the night of Friday, September the fourth, at or about seven-forty-five
P.M
., the defendant, Dirk Lawrence, thirty-three years old, by profession writer, of such-and-such a number Beekman Place in New York City, and husband of Martha Lawrence, had shot and killed one Van Harrison, actor, and seriously wounded said Martha Lawrence, his wife–so that her death also might ensue at any hour–in the master bedroom of said Harrison's home in the Town of Darien, County of Fairfield, State of Connecticut.

Irons's cross-examination was restricted to the testimony of Ellery and Nikki.

Part of Ellery's direct testimony had included the incident of Dirk's Army .45 automatic–a transparent attempt on the part of the State to lay the groundwork for premeditation. On cross-examination Irons went carefully to work on this point, eliciting from Ellery the ultimate fate of the .45, and stressing again the fact that the accused had followed the guilty wife to the fatal rendezvous carrying no weapon except his two bare hands.

Irons's case was in two parts. The first presented the jury with the clear and overwhelming facts of Martha's infidelity. This Irons did largely through Ellery and Nikki, who found themselves in the curious position of being witnesses for both sides. Into the record went the numerous details of Ellery's black notebook, naming dates and places of meeting he had witnessed between the wounded woman and her dead lover, beginning with the rendezvous in Room 632 of the A·—Hotel; identification and reading of the bundle of love letters signed by Martha and discovered in the bottom drawer of Harrison's bedroom desk; identification of certain feminine garments found in one of the two closets of Harrison's bedroom as having been the property of Martha Lawrence–it was a long recital, and through it all Ellery carefully avoided looking at Dirk, who sat catatonically in his chair hour after hour, staring at the flag behind the judge's chair. Nikki testified to the code letters and the marked guidebook (which had never been found); she also identified the clothing found in Harrison's bedroom closet. And, under Irons's surgical questions, Nikki went over the preliminaries of the afternoon and evening of September fourth–the rash telephone call from Harrison, Martha's panic and hasty departure, Dirk's overhearing and reaction, the SOS call to Ellery, their futile chase to Connecticut.