“We have, Your Honor,” Young said flatly.
Sutton, who late the night before became ill with grip, fumbled his fingers on his forehead. Finally, it was over. At long last.
At the defense table, I closed my eyes and smiled.
Young cleared his throat. “We do find the defendant not guilty.”
Like the boom of a mortar shell came the roaring cheers of the densely packed courtroom. Men shouted and pumped their fists in the air. Women covered their faces with gloved hands. Applause turned into a standing ovation. Judge Sutton took great effort to stop the demonstration. He pounded his gavel until the room quieted.
He said, “It’s incredibly upsetting that the acquittal of a blatant criminal in this courtroom should be celebrated with cheering.”
A bystander in the gallery hollered: “You go to hell, Judge!”
Another yelled: “And take Cudahy with you!”
Sutton stamped his gavel again and again. The room fell to whispers. I stood smiling and shaking hands with my attorney. Sutton individually asked each juror if they felt the same way. He asked: “Was this, and is it still, your verdict?”
One by one, each juror responded without wavering: “It is.”
Juror number seven, a feeble old man who wore the same red tie over his coveralls for the whole trial and trembled with every effort like a man stricken with fear, added to his response: “And let me say something else. Pat Crowe is no criminal. He’s a hero.”
The courtroom cheered again.
“That’s quite enough,” Sutton said.
The trial was over. I was a free man. I stood and began to shake hands with the jury when Sutton forbade I do so.
I turned to the judge and spoke my first and only words of the whole trial: “You can rot, Judge. The case is over and these men are no longer jurors. They’re my friends, and I can shake hands with friends, and you can’t stop me from doing it.”
Sutton ordered the room to be cleared. Before the court calmed and before the jury filed out of their box, I exited the room as fast as I could through the crowd. I heaved my way down the center aisle as people in the audience reached out, some of them patting me on the shoulder, some of them grabbing at my suit sleeves. Many people were standing, some remained seated.
Most cheered, a few booed.
Standing at the back of the courtroom was Tom Dennison attired like a rajah in his flawless diamonds and onyx and a brilliant silk suit. His arms crossed in a pensive pose while he chewed his gum like a piece of fat. His cold penetrating eyes never changed expression. He clasped his mouth tightly.
I stopped before him. Dennison offered his hand. We shook.
He guffawed. “That verdict was a real gas, kid.”
I agreed. “Not bad for a butcher from Colorado, is it?”
“You come out alright, Paddy boy. I sure am glad. I got a car waiting for you outside with a case of my best barleycorn. You just tell my man where you want to go.”
I stammered. Old Dennison had turned out alright in the end.
“You got any notions in mind?” Dennison asked.
“I was thinking Philadelphia,” I said after a moment. The courtroom continued to throb and shriek as people exited their seats. The throng pushed in a bottleneck toward the doors, and the word of the verdict was now echoing and chanting in the streets.
“What’s in Philly?”
I thought on Billy’s sister, Mabel. It wouldn’t hurt to see. Just in case. “A woman and a little more trouble.”
Dennison smiled. “I guess I won’t be seeing you, then, kid.”
“I guess not,” I said and thanked him again as I exited the courtroom.
In the hallway I headed for the elevators. Thirty reporters barked off questions. Down in the first floor lobby, a new mob swelled around me as I was led outside, bulbs flashing. Tom Dennison’s touring car idled on the curb, his young mulatto driver at the wheel, waiting to ferry me out of town.
A grip of halcyon weather lightened the city. The rattle of firefly motors and autocars filled the streets. Breakfast sausages sold from sidewalk carts. Gumball machines stocked by men in paper hats outside confectioneries. Store glass flashed like giant heliographs. Trolleys began their morning routes. The whole city alive and welcoming the thaw. A high of forty-two degrees expected by midday. Gutter buckets gurgled like mud pots.
The reporters continued to fire off their questions. I answered those that could be heard through the clangor with a few flippant responses.
“Whaddaya say, Pat? How are you feeling this morning?” was the first audible question that arose from the chorus.
I was all smiles. “As fine as frog’s hair, boys. Nothing like the first hint of spring.”
“What do you think of the verdict?”
“It’s the bunk,” I said.
“Do you believe the jurors were convinced that you had nothing to do with the kidnapping?”
I stopped to give a full response. A hive circled around me. Ritchie stayed close at my side, beaming like a proud parent.
I said, “I don’t know what they thought any more than you do. I’m satisfied of one thing. There are a good many people in this world who like to eat meat once or twice a day, and they don’t like being picked poor to put a little food on their family’s table. We all of us in this country ought to be able to eat a decent meal without fear of poverty.”
The reporters fired off another salvo of questions. I pushed down the steps. I reached the sidewalk and stood before Dennison’s touring car with the door opened. I shook hands with Ritchie and bid him farewell. Told him we were friends for life and took one final look out at the courthouse. Its steps flooded like a wedding congregation filing out of a church to send off the bride and groom.
“What do you think of the prosecution?” one reporter asked.
“Yes, what make you of Louie Black?” asked another.
“Well,” I said with contemplation. “I hope that bird has an easier time as governor than he did as a lawyer.”
“Now that the trial’s over, tell us, Pat, did you kidnap Cudahy’s son?”
I shook my head, stepped into the car and held the door open to give one last response before darting away. “What’s worse? To steal one child or starve many?”
“What influence did Tom Dennison have on the outcome here today?” a newsman asked.
“I don’t know anything about him.”
“What did Dennison say to you as he left the court?”
I slammed the door shut and stuck my head out the window. “He wished me good luck and God bless.”
“Are you and Dennison pals?”
“I don’t know anything about the man.”
“Is this verdict a victory for the people of Omaha or another black mark upon her? Was this trial influenced by the men who run the city’s vice elements?”
I smiled. “I sure am sorry to let you down, but I haven’t anything to say on the subject.”
“That’s pretty boring,” one of the reporters added.
The touring car bounced forward in the slush. As camera flashpans continued to snap and explode, the lime green monstrosity hiccupped with a jolt. A spray of snow water kicked up by aching tires. I leaned my head out of the window once more.
“I’m a boring man,” I said into the wind. “And you can print that, for what it’s worth.”
All Things Made New
LET ME TELL you something about love: it’s no one else’s goddamn business. Out of all the sayings about love that are meant to whittle it down or size it up, there is only one thing about that abortive emotion that has always been and will forever remain true: it belongs only to you. You cannot give it to another. Sure, it can be showcased. But so can an automobile or a feathered coat or well-arranged produce. That’s nothing special. Anything can be put behind a pretty display
window for others to moon over.
I never stopped loving Hattie.
Whether she felt the same way or not was a moot point.
Love isn’t a transaction.
So, here I am an old man with shaking hands and a face lined in sadness, and I saddle up my courage and set off to find her. I comb my thinning hair and put on my best pair of duck trousers and a shirt with pearl buttons. Hattie was working as a housemaid for a wealthy rancher ten miles west of town. The Dunbar Family Ranch. Five hundred head of cattle, three barns and two stables, horse pasture, carriage house, bunkhouse, springhouse, a good stream with a water mill. I come upon the homestead early in the evening. The sun going down crepuscular behind willow trees. I wait on the edge of the property until night falls in full. Sunflowers as tall as teenagers along the roadbed. A thundershower looms in the distance. The sky is leaden, the color of guncotton. Lightning partitions the horizon. I imagine the bolt cracking the earth wide open. Trees drip, clouds drip, rooftops drip. All the world in a sob.
I don’t know what I expect.
I don’t go in for fanciful notions of atonement or miracle.
What little I do know is this: you never know anything.
I spot her just as the lights in the windows of the bunkhouse are dimmed. She walks down a gravel lane carrying a heaping basket of laundry toward a catchall shed that serves as her sleeping quarters. I approach the porch and stand with one hand against each side of the screen door, looking in at her as she goes about sorting the laundry she’d carried over in the basket. It takes her some time to turn around from her work to see me standing there. She spooks for a moment, but only a moment.
A smile forms at the corners of her mouth.
Hattie.
I open the screen door and strut into the room as if I were there on king’s business. Neither of us says a word to each other. I push my straw hat back on my head just enough to reveal my ebbing hairline and grin like a fool. Hattie watches me move about her small room with her hands on her hips.
She says, “Well, just let yourself in why don’t you?”
“Thanks,” I say. “Believe I will.”
I examine her living conditions. There was new wallpaper hung, a floral pattern of pale rose. Real electric lighting. A brass bed with creased sheets. I test the mattress with my hand. It feels bouncy. Free of ticking. She has a cast iron cookstove for heat. A calico cat jumps off a short bookcase and rubs itself against my left boot.
I kneel down and pet the creature. “Say, here’s three somethings I thought I’d never see all in one go. You lodging in spinsterhood with a pet pussycat and washing other people’s unmentionables.”
Hattie doesn’t respond. Her yellow hair streaked through with gray. I evaluate the room once more. “This place ain’t so bad,” I tell her. “You got print flowers on your wall and a neat little bed and some bound books. Place is fixed up nice and spritely. Good and warm in here, too.”
Hattie just stands there with her hands on her hips, exhausted and frayed.
I mosey to her bookshelf and pick up a handsome leather tome. “Well, what do we got here? Tennyson’s Idylls of the King,” I say, pronouncing idylls as idea-lees like some kind of goddamn moron. I mumble something about the full-page engravings and then say more clearly: “Brilliant rays of fairy romance from the lights of genius.”
I scan more of the titles. “Hmm,” I say. “Longfellow’s early poetry. Emerson. Hmm. You used to hate poetry. At least the stuff I used to write you.”
“Those aren’t mine,” Hattie says. “They were left here by the last resident.”
“Good taste, that gal,” I say and pick up a ball of knitting. “Ah, what’s this now? Florence crochet silk. You sew now, too? My. And they say people don’t change.”
I find a couple bottles of perfume and recite their labels. Quadruple extract of violet. Lily of the valley. “It’s important to smell good when you’re scrubbing rich folk’s dirty drawers. That’s for certain. Yes, ma’am. And what’s this? A turkey duster?”
Hattie snatches the duster from my hand. “Why did you come here?”
I shrug and shake my tobacco pouch. “I don’t know, now that you ask it. I thought maybe you might like to go sparking in private. For old time’s sake.”
Hattie grimaces.
“Or maybe we could play us a card game. Maybe a little Roger Cuddle?”
“I don’t have any cards.”
“Well, let’s skip the Roger part altogether and just cuddle. That’s how the sparking usually starts, anyway.”
Hattie lights a cigarette and sits down on her bed. “You got ants in your pants.”
I smile. “Yeah. Them buggers ain’t the only thing I got in there.”
“Boy, aren’t you just romantic as hell?”
“I tried romance the first time with you and it didn’t go over so hot. This time I thought I’d give old-fashioned immorality a go.”
Hattie blows smoke dispassionately.
I come around the room full circle. “Tell you what, I got me an old army blanket out there on my saddle roll. How about we go spread it over your master’s flower bed and have ourselves a little reacquainting tryst?”
“That sounds very Presbyterian,” she says.
“Well, if it’d make you feel better, we can get eloped first. There’s a chapel down the road a piece. Have us a couple prime rib dinners at Pelinko’s afterward to celebrate? I’d even consider a bridal tour in Kansas City if you’re feeling rambunctious. Then maybe you and I spend the second half of our lives pretending like the first halves never happened.”
Hattie squashes out her cigarette. “The second half?”
I blush. “Well, at least the next half year. Who knows how much time we’ve left? I’m old, and you’re not too far off. I don’t know about you, but I still feel as spritely as the devil.”
If Hattie is anything else besides bored and unimpressed, she’s a good enough actress to cloak it. She asks, “Aren’t there other women in the world for you to harass?”
I sit down on the other end of her bed. “I’ve harassed plenty,” I say. “But nobody else gave me the mitten like you. You used to be quite the little noisemaker. I just thought I’d come by one last time and see if you can still howl like you used to.”
“Well, ain’t that just keen.”
“Why did you run off on hubby number two? Little George Cudahy, right? Or was it Tom? I can’t remember. He deny you a pearl necklace or something?”
“He left me, if you must know. After he found out you had a hand in all that kidnapping business with his nephew, well, he figured I must’ve motivated that some. For you.”
I cluck my tongue. My heart sags. “That whole family’s rotten to the core,” I tell her.
“And what’re you?”
“I’m the handsome sonofabitch that spent all day prettying up for you is what I am.”
Hattie squashes her cigarette into the soil of a potted plant.
I spot a bottle of brandy on top of her bookshelf. “Hey now, I say. How about we have us a cap of that purple?”
“Never did give up the drink, did you?”
“I’ve got the dipsomania.”
“You’re a lousy drunk is all you are.”
“If you want to get into one of our old rows about what we’re both lousy at, we can have that discussion. I was hoping to be past all that by now.”
Hattie softens. “Why did you come here? Really?”
I pour myself an inch of brandy into a coffee mug and take it down. I say, “Well, darling, I’ve harassed other women like you say. All kinds. Thirty years is a long time for a man to be on his lonesome. There were big old buffalo gals and dainty little deacons’ daughters and even a squaw once and all other kinds in between. I’m a sight wiser for it now and still stupid enough to come back here and see about you. I
thought you at least ought to know I still love you. I thought that might be something worth telling. So, here I am, telling you. I love you as much as I did the day we moved into that little pink house on Orchard Avenue. You remember our first night together in that place? We hadn’t a stick of furniture yet, and we slept on a couple old blankets right on the floor? God, I’ll never forget that in all my born days.”
“Oh, Pat,” Hattie says without much emotion. “We were both too young and naïve about the world to have had that last.”
“And now I’m near on sixty.”
“You’re well past sixty.”
“I might be yet. I might be seventy. God knows.”
“We were carried by storm to the altar.”
“And by storm I was driven from my home.”
“There’s no use in thinking we can replicate those days now.”
“I know it,” I say and dig a folded sheet of paper out of my pocket. I hand the square to Hattie, but she doesn’t reach for it.
“More poetry?” she asks.
“No. Not poetry.”
“Unless it’s a treasure map, I don’t want it.”
I smile and wag the paper. “A funny notion that is,” I say.
Hattie takes the sheet and studies the contents with a furrowed brow.
Lo and behold: a map.
I tell her: “I got some eight or nine thousand dollars buried in a little nectarine orchard down in Arizona by the Mexican border. Nogales is the name of the town. You’ll have to dig about three feet under the exact tree marked there, but it’s all yours if you’re game enough to go find it.”
“And where would we go after that?”
“Wherever you wanted. Nine thousand isn’t a fortune, but it’s enough to start a new life without having to be some rancher’s laundress and sleeping in a shed. You could buy a cozy house, some furniture, maybe use the excess to start a millinery store or whatever it is you fancy doing in the daytime.”
World, Chase Me Down Page 35
