by Clark Howard
“Black,” Devlin acknowledged. He lowered himself into a convenient lounge chair. The chief brought the coffee and dragged a straight chair over to sit down.
“I’ve got two deputies getting a search warrant for Keyes’ office and a subpoena for that locked file cabinet of his. Do you think we should charge his secretary with anything?”
Devlin shook his head, taking a brief sip of the steaming coffee.
“She wasn’t criminally involved,” he said. “She knew about some of the things after they happened, but she wasn’t an accessory. Her guilt is moral. Let her live with it.”
“I wonder if we’re going to be able to prove anything against Keyes,” the chief mused. All that information that the Sundean group had about abortions, for instance: that has to be substantiated in court. If we can substantiate it, we can get the Carlyle girl, Dan Merritt, Hal O’Brien, the two waitresses who had abortions, and the doctors involved. But if we don’t have collateral evidence—”
“Maybe that file in Keyes’ office will give you what you need,” Devlin said.
“Maybe. I hope so. But even if it does, we might have difficulty using it in court. There have been some recent rulings, you know, that using a defendant’s private records as prosecution evidence is tantamount to forcing him to give testimony against himself.” The chief shook his head in exasperation. “You know, Dev, it seems like it gets harder every year to send criminals to jail.”
Devlin nodded and thought: Odd. That’s exactly how the Eden Movement felt.
“I remember back when I was a young deputy D.A. just out of law school,” the chief continued, “we didn’t have half the problems getting convictions that we have today. Courts didn’t pamper criminals back then. The law was the law, brother, and there were no two ways about it. Man pulled a stickup with a gun, it was armed robbery, plain and simple, five-to-ten years and that was that. Today they’ve got social workers, probation officers, court psychiatrists, rehabilitation experts and a dozen other kinds of highbrow civil servants who seem bent on doing nothing but proving that any given crimes was society’s fault instead of the criminal’s. I don’t know,” he sighed wearily, “sometimes I wonder if maybe we aren’t losing our perspective.”
The two men turned as a doctor in a wrinkled surgical gown entered the waiting room and walked over to them.
“Your patient is out of danger,” he said to the chief. “He was a little too heavily anaesthetized but fortunately he didn’t go into shock and it doesn’t seem to have affected his heart.”
“He’s going to be all right then?” the chief asked.
“I’d say so, yes. Except for his eyes, of course.”
“His eyes?”
“Yes. His retinas have been removed. He’s blind.”
“Retinas can be replaced, can’t they, Doctor?” asked Devlin.
“In some cases. Not in this one, however. Whoever worked on this man’s eyes was an expert. The nerves serving the eyeballs have been destroyed. There’s no possible way his eyesight could ever be restored.” The doctor looked at the chief. “Do you want him kept here or will you be moving him?”
“Keep him here, I guess,” the chief said quietly. He handed the doctor his card. “Let me know when he’s ready for discharge.”
The doctor walked away and Devlin and the chief looked at each other in silence for a long moment.
“Blind,” the chief said finally. “The court would turn him loose for sure, no matter what we found in that file.”
“Probably,” Devlin agreed. “But it doesn’t matter now. He’s got his punishment—and there won’t be any time off for good behavior
The chief nodded thoughtfully. After a moment he stood up and buttoned his coat.
“Drive you back to town?”
Devlin shook his head. “I’ll stay here a while longer. I can make it in all right.”
“Get some rest,” the chief said.
After the chief left, Devlin lighted a cigarette. He smoked it slowly between sips of coffee. The mixed taste of the two was bitter in his mouth; he wished that he had some brandy. But it wouldn’t be much longer, he thought, until he was finished. The case was almost closed, the job almost over. Just one more thing to do.
He drew himself up and crossed the waiting room to a public telephone to call Jennifer.
She arrived an hour later.
Devlin heard the click of high heels on the lobby tile and knew it was her even before she appeared in the waiting room door. He closed the file he had been reading, Todd Holt’s file, and looked up to see her hurrying across the room to him. She wore a belted raincoat and both it and her long, loose hair were damp with late night mist. Her face was pale, absent of makeup.
“Your arm—” She knelt beside his chair touching the sling with her fingertips. “You’ve been hurt—”
“My collarbone is broken,” he said. “It’s not serious.”
She blinked her eyes several times as if she might cry. Devlin touched her hand gently.
“All right,” he told her.
“Is—is it all over?” she asked hesitantly.
“Yes. My part of it, anyway. There’ll be a trial, of course.”
“And Walt? What will happen to him?”
“I don’t know. There’s a possibility he may have to face charges, too, because of what Todd and the others found out about him. But if that happens, I’m sure whatever sentence he receives will be suspended.”
Jennifer frowned. “Suspended. But why, Dev?”
“Your husband is blind, Jennifer,” he said quietly.
“Blind?”
“Yes. That was part of the punishment his abductors had planned for him. They never got around to the rest of it.”
“I see—” She nodded slowly. “Well, I suppose he had it coming. I wonder why they didn’t kill him.”
“They tried; one of them, that is.”
Her frown disappeared and a look of understanding came to her face.
“And you prevented it.”
“Yes.”
“You fool—” She shook her head and swayed slightly. Devlin reached out quickly to steady her.
“Sit down,” he said. “Here—” He gave her his chair and moved onto the one the chief had left.
“Why?” she asked incredulously. “Why didn’t you just let them do away with him once and for all?”
“Because,” he said quietly, “they had no right to.”
“No right!” she said. “What on earth does right have to do with it? They had no right to take him in the first place. Walt had no right to do all the rotten things he’s done in life. None of them were concerned with right. They’re all criminals, all corrupt—”
“No,” he said, “you’re wrong. Keyes was corrupt, yes, but not the men who had him. Corruption is an abandonment of what is right. Those men didn’t abandon right, except in their methods. They were misguided, very badly misguided; and what they did was as completely wrong as it is possible to be wrong. But they weren’t corrupt.”
“Then why did you go to so much trouble to find them, to stop what they were doing?” she asked. “You sound almost as if you were on their side.”
“In principle, I am,” Devlin admitted. “In principle I have to be.” He leaned toward her almost urgently. “Men seek justice in many ways, Jennifer. Sometimes those ways are right, sometimes not. But right or wrong, good methods or bad, the search itself is the important element because it never fails to teach a lesson. In the wake of every search for better justice, there will always be left some new thought to spur on the seekers yet to come.”
Devlin frowned at his own words, as if a new interpretation of them had just come to life in his mind.
“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “the men who had your husband knew that. Perhaps they realized that even if their movement failed, its purpose would succeed.” He thought of Noah Sundean. “Yes, they must have known that. The fact that they selected a person like Keyes to test it on convinces me that
they knew it.”
“Dev, I’m sorry,” Jennifer said impatiently, “but I don’t understand you at all. ”
“Your husband is the answer to the whole scheme, Jennifer. He was ideal for the purpose of these men. He was someone intelligent, wealthy, influential, and at the same time someone who made his own rules, established his own guidelines of personal conduct and lived a life virtually without conscience. He flaunted every moral obligation of civilized man, flaunted them as flagrantly as he chose, and did it so cleverly that he was able to completely circumvent justice as applied in its proper form in our society. He was a social criminal, and by virtue of the position he held in his own society he was totally immune to the laws of that society.”
Devlin sat back, watching the woman closely, straining to find in her some sign that she understood the word picture he was drawing.
“It was for Keyes,” he continued, “and others like him, that this group of men, these people who abducted him, banded together in an attempt to apply justice in a stronger way, a way that would reach him. They sought the same justice that other good men seek, but because they were aware of Keyes, aware of his kind, they were more desperate than those of us who apply justice in its proper form. And they were more frightened of what Keyes and his counterparts were doing in the world. Perhaps they had more foresight than the rest of us, or perhaps simply more fear. Whatever it was, they were driven to do battle with the evil that was being spread. And so haunted were they by the dread that they might not be able to stem the saturation of that evil, that they chose the most reckless way of all as their method: the ancient way—fighting fire with fire.
“They had found someone who, although a deadly threat to society, was immune to punishment by society. The reason for his immunity, they decided, was certain inherent weaknesses in the manner in which justice was currently being applied by society. So they determined to point out those weaknesses in as vivid a manner as possible. And the method which had the greatest potential of being successful was the one which would create the most furor, the most sensation. That method, ironically, was lawlessness itself.”
“Are you saying that they deliberately broke the law in order to strengthen the law?” Jennifer asked dubiously.
“Yes,” Devlin answered, “I think they did. And I think they—or perhaps one of them, their leader—planned it that way, so that even if the movement itself failed, its purpose would succeed. The lesson would be taught.
“And what, exactly, is that lesson?” she inquired.
“That when the law falters or weakens,” Devlin told her, “lawlessness will rise up among good men as well as evil. That the law, justice, will then have to deal with both. And that in so doing, it will grow stronger. ”
“Has it grown stronger as a result of this?”
Devlin nodded.
“It started growing stronger the instant I killed my best friend in its name.”
“And now?” she said. “What happens now?”
“We begin making amends,” he answered in a voice that matched the flat, steady gaze of his eyes. “Amends for the evil we’ve allowed to dilute our society. ”
“Allowed?” Jennifer asked pointedly. “Or aided? Which do you mean?”
“Take your choice,” Devlin said. “You’ve done both.”
“You’re drawing your fine lines again, I see.” Her face, like her voice, was hardening.
“Yes.” He stood up, holding Todd Holt’s file in his good hand. Looking down at her, she suddenly seemed very far away. “As usual, however, I ask no one to follow them. My standards are mine alone, and I am the only one who has to live by them.”
Jennifer sighed a heavy sigh and nervously took a cigarette from the pocket of her coat. Devlin handed her a book of matches and she lighted the cigarette, inhaling deeply.
“I don’t suppose,” she looked up at him, “that you think anyone else could live by your standards?”
“Some people could,” he answered. “But I don’t think you’re one of them. I don’t think you’re strong enough. If you were, a lot of this wouldn’t have happened. ”
“You think I’m to blame?”
“For part of it, yes. You knew about it; some of it, at least, just as Evelyn Lund did. Both of you contributed to it, Jennifer, simply by remaining silent.”
“I see,” she said again, nodding her head thoughtfully. For a long moment she stared down at the burning cigarette between her fingers, her eyes fixed on the curling grey smoke as if entranced. Devlin stood silently before her, waiting to let her end it in whatever way was easiest for her.
When she was ready, Jennifer let the cigarette fall to the floor where she extinguished it with the toe of her shoe. She stood up, adjusting the wide collar of her coat and brushing back the loose blood red hair that had slipped over it. She looked into Devlin’s eyes and smiled brilliantly.
“Well, as they say in my profession, this is our swan song then.”
Yes, Devlin thought. The woman is gone and the actress has returned.
“It’s been lovely,” Jennifer said. “I’ll never forget you, really I won’t.”
Devlin said nothing. She held out a lovely hand to him.
“Goodbye, Mr. Devlin.”
He took her hand and found that the magic of their touch was gone.
“Goodbye, Miss Jordan.”
Devlin turned and left, leaving the waiting room and crossing the quiet lobby to the hospital entrance. Outside it was cool and misty-damp. Walking to his car across the dark parking lot, he felt his shoulder begin to ache again. But in an hour, he thought, he would be home, and there he would be able, with brandy and the morphine tablets, to find sanctuary not only from his pain but also his thoughts. And in a few days, after he had rested and his shoulder was better, he would see about the boy that Todd had told him about.
If he could help the boy, if at least that much good came out of it, perhaps Noah Sundean and Todd, wherever they were, would rest easier.
About the Author
Clark Howard was born in Tennessee and raised in a series of foster homes in Chicago, and he served with the US Marines in Korea, Howard is the author of many novels and true crime books, as well as more than two hundred short stories, primarily in the crime and mystery genres. His work has won the prestigious Edgar Award, five Ellery Queen Awards, and the Derringer Award, and he has been nominated for Anthony, Shamus, and Spur Awards, among other honors. Additionally, Howard’s stories have been adapted for both film and television.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1969 by Clark Howard
Cover design by Ian Koviak
ISBN: 978-1-5040-6065-3
This edition published in 2020 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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CLARK HOWARD
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