Deathwatch

by Robb White

  “I don’t know what the man who shot him was thinking about,” the doctor said. “I can only testify that Mr. Madec was shot. Five times.”

  “Five times,” Barowitz said slowly, and looked around at the men in the room. “Since all of you are expert marksmen I’m sure you’ll all agree with me that an expert who hits a man five times in five shots, but does not kill him, evidently did not want to kill him. That, in fact, to have killed him would have been a fatal error.”

  “I didn’t want to kill him,” Ben said. “You don’t have to prove that.”

  “Of course you didn’t!” Barowitz snapped at him. “Or you wouldn’t have any alibi at all.”

  He turned back to the doctor. “What caliber rifle was Madec shot with, Doctor?”

  Ben eased his head back on the chair. “He wasn’t shot with any caliber rifle. He was …”

  “Ben,” Hondurak warned. “Go ahead, Doctor.”

  “I’m not an expert on calibers,” the doctor said. “All I have is evidence of what hit Mr. Madec.”

  Barowitz took a Hornet cartridge out of his pocket and showed it to the doctor. “About the same size, same diameter, as this bullet?”

  The doctor examined the bullet and said, “Very close, I’d say.”

  “That’s a Hornet bullet, so wouldn’t you say that Mr. Madec was shot by a Hornet rifle, Doctor?”

  Before he could answer, Hondurak said mildly, “Isn’t that kind of assuming things?”

  “If that’s your opinion, sir,” Barowitz said. “All I’m trying to establish is that the doctor said Mr. Madec was hit by bullets of the same size as a Hornet’s. I really don’t think you could call that an assumption.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Let it pass for now,” Hondurak said.

  “Of course, sir. Now, Doctor, aren’t the bullets that hit Mr. Madec the same caliber as those that hit and killed the old man? Hornet bullets?”

  “Two of the slugs you showed me are about the same size, but smaller than the third.”

  Ben’s uncle looked confused. “Third? I thought he was only shot twice.”

  Barowitz sounded a little tired as he said, “Don’t you remember? Your nephew also used Mr. Madec’s gun to shoot the old man.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Ben’s uncle said.

  “Three times,” the doctor said. “Once by a bullet of considerable weight, traveling at high speed. The other two wounds were made by bullets of much less weight.”

  That made Barowitz happy. “A good doctor doesn’t need an autopsy to make a simple observation like that, does he, Doctor?”

  “No. You can look at the wounds and see the difference in tissue and bone destruction made by a heavy bullet, compared to that of a much lighter bullet.”

  Hondurak would just tell him to shut up again, Ben thought, but he asked it anyway. “Which one killed him, Doc?”

  The doctor looked at him as though he were an idiot. “The first one to hit him, of course.”

  “Then either the bullet in his throat or the one in his chest could have killed him?” Barowitz asked.

  “The one in the chest,” the doctor said.

  Ben pushed his aching feet out along the floor and slumped down in the chair, knowing that the doctor would ignore him. “Which one, Doc? The little one or the big one?”

  Ben was surprised when the doctor said quietly, “Of the two bullets that hit him in the chest, the first one killed him. That was the heavier of the two.”

  Ben jerked his legs back and sat up straight, waiting for their reaction.

  But Barowitz said smoothly, “Now coming back to the injuries sustained by my client, Doctor, would you say they are serious enough to be considered an attempt on his life?”

  Ben couldn’t stand this any longer. “Wait a minute!” he said, trying to get on his feet. “Didn’t any of you hear what he said? Weren’t you listening?”

  “Ben …” the sheriff growled.

  “He was killed by the .358!” Ben yelled. “Madec killed him! Can’t you see that?”

  “You killed him,” Strick said, coming over to him and standing in front of him. “You killed him with Mr. Madec’s gun so you could blame it on Madec.”

  “Shut up, Strick,” Ben said, and hobbled around him to the doctor. Putting his hand on the doctor’s arm, he said, “Doctor, help me.”

  “What do you think I’m doing?” the doctor snapped.

  Ben stared at him. “You’re putting me in jail.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” the doctor said.

  Ben let his hand drop. “All right, so just tell them again that the .358 killed him.”

  “I don’t even know what .358 signifies,” the doctor said.

  “It’s a bullet,” Ben said “And it killed him. Why can’t you say that again?”

  Barowitz stepped past Ben to Hondurak. “Isn’t it really immaterial, your honor, which bullet killed him? Isn’t the material thing here not what, but who?”

  “Yeah,” Hondurak said vaguely. Then he leaned around Barowitz and said, “Doc, how do you know which one killed him? I mean, how can you tell?”

  “Doctor!” Barowitz said coldly, “I advise you not to answer that. It’s a question for a forensic pathologist, not a general practitioner.” Then he turned to Hondurak. “I appreciate the doctor’s efforts to clear up this matter, but of course you realize that only an experienced pathologist could determine a thing like that.”

  “Let me talk a little,” Hondurak said. “Doc, you said the .358 killed him. Can you back that up, or not?”

  “The heaviest bullet killed him,” the doctor said.

  “You embarrass me, Doctor,” Barowitz said. “And you embarrass your profession. You are not competent to make such an assumption.”

  The doctor went on talking to Hondurak as though Barowitz hadn’t said anything. “The first bullet to hit that old man was the heaviest of the three that hit him. I don’t know the name of it—.358—Hornet—but it was the bullet that killed him.”

  Barowitz flung out his arms. “Inadmissible! Conclusion! Assumption!”

  The doctor paid no attention to him. “The other two bullets did not hurt that old man at all.…”

  “Not hurt!… In the throat?…” Barowitz screamed. “In the chest …”

  “He was dead,” the doctor said calmly. “When those two bullets struck him he had been dead for almost an hour.”

  Ben could feel that statement hitting everybody in the room. They moved, sitting up straighter, listening, looking.

  Barowitz’ voice broke the silence as he said quietly, “Doctor, did you have, as required by law, the family’s permission to perform an autopsy on that man?”

  “No autopsy,” the doctor said.

  “Doctor,” Barowitz said in a pained voice, “I’ve had years of court experience with some of the world’s leading doctors in forensic medicine so I hope you won’t continue this line of absurd assumptions and guesses. You are making statements of fact that could only be determined after a complete autopsy by a competent pathologist.”

  The doctor didn’t even look at Barowitz. “When a bullet hits a living man, he bleeds,” the doctor said. “But after a man dies the functions of his body stop, his heart stops, blood stops moving in his veins and arteries. His tissues die, and after he’s been dead for a little while he can no longer bleed. Two wounds in that old man, made by smaller, lighter weight bullets, caused no bleeding, either internally or externally. Which proves that he had been dead for some time before they hit him.”

  “Mr. Hondurak,” Barowitz said, going toward the table, “I’m sure that a justice of your experience realizes how embarrassing it would be for you to present this sort of incompetent, inadmissible and arrogant testimony to the court. I would strongly suggest, sir, that you strike all of this doctor’s testimony from the record and, to save further embarrassment, that we listen to no more of it.”

  “You mean,” Hondurak said vaguely, “that because he’s not a pathologist, only
a doctor, he doesn’t know about that sort of thing?”

  “Exactly, sir. I’m very glad you see it my way.”

  “Well …” Hondurak said, looking up at the ceiling. “I don’t think I see it all your way. Doc, you got anything else you want to say?”

  “Not much,” the doctor said.

  Barowitz cut in, his voice very affable. “No one could object to the doctor going on with his nonsense. But to save ourselves embarrassment, sir, it shouldn’t be a part of the record.”

  Sonja looked up from her machine, but Hondurak said, “Oh, take it down, Sonja. I don’t embarrass easy.”

  The doctor was rooting around among the instruments in his pocket but at last found what he was looking for and held it out to Hondurak. “I extracted this from the wound in Mr. Madec’s right wrist.”

  “What’s that?” the sheriff asked, coming over to look at what the doctor was holding. “That’s a buckshot!” he said. “Looks like about a double-O buckshot to me.”

  “It is,” Ben said. “It’s what I used in the slingshot.”

  “Of course,” Barowitz said. “That nonexistent slingshot. Your honor, I don’t like to say this, but don’t you think that there’s collusion here between the doctor and the accused? A doctor can produce any sort of object and claim he extracted it from the wound of a victim.”

  “If there’s any collusion,” the doctor said, “Emma William’s in on it, too. She’s the one who first saw this thing. I only took it out.”

  Hondurak reached over and picked up the buckshot. “What do you make of it, Ham?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” the sheriff said. “Ben says he only hit him with a slingshot, and if the bullet was still in Madec’s wrist it couldn’t have been going very fast.”

  “Was it inside his wrist, Doc?” Hondurak asked. “Not just lying around somewhere?”

  “It was embedded in the tendons of Mr. Madec’s wrist. His other wounds were also made by soft lead projectiles, not by bullets with brass cases like those I’ve been shown, because there are traces of lead in all his wounds.”

  Barowitz pushed roughly past the doctor to confront Hondurak. “Your honor, I have to object! You can’t let this man continue his contrived assumptions as to weapon and ammunition when all he has produced is a common buckshot, available in any dime store.”

  As Barowitz talked, the doctor rooted around in the big pocket again.

  At first Ben thought it was one of his surgical instruments, the metal shining in the light. And then he saw the rubber tubes, the little leather pouch.

  The doctor tapped Barowitz on the back with the butt of the slingshot. “And this …”

  Barowitz didn’t look around as he said, “For your own position, sir, you should strike all this from the record.”

  The sheriff took the slingshot and said, “Where’d you get this, Doc?”

  “Out of the trash basket. In the emergency room. I saw Madec throw something away when he first came in, and when I found the shot, I wondered,” the doctor said.

  At last Barowitz turned around. He looked at the slingshot for a moment and then looked around at all the people looking at him.

  There was a dead silence in the room for a long time and then Hondurak said, “Les, how about you and Denny going out in the morning and see if you can find anything in that tunnel—bird bones, maybe a lizard skin.…”

  Barowitz’ voice sounded mechanical. “I have already established that dead birds prove nothing.”

  They weren’t listening to him any more as Hondurak went on. “… and maybe Ben left some blood across that funnel. Wouldn’t be any other way to get it there.”

  Les didn’t seem to be listening to anything. He sat, his legs stretched out in front of him, frowning down at the floor. Then at last he looked up. “I could kick myself,” Les said, and then turned to Ben. “Ben, I’m sorry. I apologize. I could just kick myself. Judge, when I was at the Jeep talking to Madec, Ben couldn’t have had his gun up in the mountains or anywhere else. I just remember now that I saw that old Hornet of Ben’s in the windshield scabbard of the Jeep.”

  Hondurak said to the sheriff, “Ham, we’d better keep that deputy on duty down there with Mr. Madec. Yeah, we’d better do that.”

  Barowitz was shaking. “Don’t think for a minute that this is the end of this!”

  “Well, I don’t think it is, Mr. Barowitz,” Hondurak said mildly.

  Barowitz whirled away from him, and the two lawyers walked out of the room, their briefcases swinging in unison.

  Nobody said anything. Nobody even looked at Ben. His uncle was looking up at the ceiling and Les was pulling at a loose thread in his pants and Denny was examining the floor and Sonja was putting a cover on her stenotype machine and Strick was cleaning something off the butt of his gun with his fingernail and the sheriff was showing the doctor how to hold the slingshot and Hondurak was pushing some papers into a pile.

  And then, at last, Hondurak looked up at Ben. “Ben, you see, it was just so hard for me to believe that any man could do the things he did to another man. I just couldn’t believe it, Ben.”

  “Neither could I,” Ben said.

  Hondurak looked vaguely around the room. “We’ll have to charge Mr. Madec with something.… Aggravated assault?…” He looked at Ben. “He tried to kill you, didn’t he, Ben? He shot you. So, will you testify to intent to commit murder and assault with a deadly weapon?”

  “No,” Ben said. “I came in here to report an accident.”

  ALSO BY ROBB WHITE:

  The Lion’s Paw

  All Ben wants is for his father to return. Ben is sure that if he finds a rare shell called a lion’s paw, his father will somehow turn up as well. So he sails for Captiva Island in the Gulf of Mexico, picking up Penny and her brother Nick as shipmates, even though the two are runaways from the orphanage and landlubbers who don’t know port from starboard. But Penny and Nick catch on fast as the three navigate the rivers of the Florida Everglades to Captiva Island, where the greatest adventure awaits them.

  Robb White’s adventure novel The Lion’s Paw is available in a hardcover edition from A. W. Ink Publishing, established by Mrs. Annie White, the author’s widow. For information, contact A. W. Ink Publishing by phone at (805) 969-1862 or by fax at (805) 969-6123.