If I Die Before I Wake

by Sherwood King

  The Whim Slayer!

  The papers had got hold of that now and were playing it up strong. They’d found out about Sheila Stewart, too; they called her the ‘Mystery Woman.’ They didn’t know yet, of course, that she was really Elsa Bannister – but they might find out.

  And still she came to see me.

  ‘I have to, Laurence,’ she said. ‘I have to, don’t you see? I feel, somehow… well, as though I were responsible for your being here. If I hadn’t kept you from leaving that night—’

  Tears blurred her eyes. Her lips trembled.

  ‘That was the best thing that ever happened to me,’ I said. ‘Bannister was right – I’d been asleep before. You woke me up. Now I’m living. Now I’m alive!’

  We looked at each other, and the screen began to vibrate again.

  ‘Your trial comes up in another week,’ she said. ‘Marco says the State plans to rush it right through. They’re so sure… so sure…’

  And there she was, crying again.

  ‘He doesn’t think I have much of a chance, does he?’

  ‘He says he’s certain you didn’t do it.’

  ‘Just the same, he wants me to stand by the confession. To keep to my story that I killed Grisby, but accidentally. He says the jury might believe that – and that they’d never believe I hadn’t shot him at all, with all the evidence against me.’

  ‘He says you told a wild story—’

  ‘About Grisby paying me five thousand dollars to make believe I’d killed him? Well, he did.’

  ‘But he said you did it to help Grisby get away from his wife!’

  ‘That’s what Grisby told me. How was I to know he didn’t have a wife?’

  ‘But don’t you see? Marco was right – the jury would never believe such a story!’

  I’d thought about that myself.

  ‘Well, we could leave the wife part of it out,’ I said. ‘We could say he wanted the police to believe he was dead for another reason.’

  ‘I suppose you might… but it would have to be a good reason. Otherwise the jury would think you were saying anything that came into your head, just to save yourself.’

  That was when I began to think that maybe they wouldn’t believe it, maybe they wouldn’t believe anything I said. If I told them I had lied in the first place, about having killed Grisby, wouldn’t they think I was lying even more if I changed the story to say I hadn’t? I’d have so much more reason for lying, with the chair before me…

  ‘I’ll tell you the truth,’ I said. ‘Grisby did give me the five thousand dollars to pretend I’d killed him. He did say he wanted to get away from his wife, and that it was worth giving up everything, just to do that. But there was another reason, too – and a good one.’

  I had to tell somebody. She was the only real friend I had, the only one I could tell.

  ‘What – what was that?’ she asked.

  ‘Grisby wanted to make it look like he was dead,’ I told her, ‘because he wanted to kill somebody else. And he knew they’d never suspect him if I could “prove” that I’d killed him – accidentally, of course.’

  Her eyes, behind the veil, became very large.

  ‘Lee Grisby?’ she said.

  ‘Sure – Grisby.’

  ‘I’d never believe it! Why—’

  ‘Oh, it’s true, all right! He wanted to kill someone.’

  ‘But – why, it’s ridiculous!’

  ‘Just the same—’

  ‘Who – who was he going to kill? Did he tell you that?’

  ‘Yes. He said he was going to kill Bannister.’

  ‘Marco?’

  She couldn’t believe it.

  ‘But that’s impossible!’ she said. ‘Don’t you see how impossible it is? They’d been partners for years. They’d never even had a single quarrel. Oh, I’m sure you’re mistaken. Not Marco!’

  I began to think that maybe all Grisby’s talk about killing Bannister had been a trick too – just like the wife business – a blind to cover up something else. But what?

  ‘Well, that’s what he said.’

  ‘But what could he possibly gain from it?’

  ‘He said he was going to get a lot of money out of it – enough to keep him in velvet for years.’

  ‘But how would he get the money? Don’t you see, there must be some mistake? Even if he told you that—’

  ‘Well, I guess if you don’t believe it, I’d never get a jury to!’

  ‘And where was he going to go? Where could he hide?’

  ‘He was going down to the South Seas.’

  ‘The South Seas? Why, the whole thing’s fantastic. Laurence!… You haven’t told this to anyone else, have you? Not to the police?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘And not to Marco – Mr Bannister?’

  ‘Oh, Lord, no!’

  ‘Well, you mustn’t – or the police, either! It’s the worst possible thing you could say.’

  ‘But it may be my only chance!’

  ‘Oh, I know, I know… but don’t you see? Even if it’s true – particu-larly if it’s true – if you said you had agreed to help him kill somebody else, do you suppose they would hesitate to think you had killed him? They’d be sure of it, then.’

  That’s when I began to get really scared.

  ‘But I can’t believe it,’ she said, ‘I can’t believe either that Lee Grisby would do such a thing, or that you would help him!’

  If it hadn’t been for her I wouldn’t have. I had to make her see my side of it.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t really going to kill anyone,’ I said. ‘I was just going to make it look that way. All I was supposed to do was fire a shot into the sand. That’s all I did. And now they’re trying to send me to the chair for it! For a shot in the sand!’

  She was silent for a while, trying to understand all this, and not having an easy time of it, I could tell.

  ‘So that’s why you think Marco killed him,’ she said. ‘You think he did it in self-defense?’

  ‘I can’t see how else it could have happened.’

  ‘But if it was self-defense, wouldn’t he say so? Why would he try to hide it? He wouldn’t need to! No jury in the world would convict him. But you—’

  ‘Five minutes,’ said the guard. ‘Time’s up.’

  She brought me fruit, and saw that I had good meals. She brought me newspapers and books.

  So everything was all right. I’d been afraid that maybe she’d hold it against me, being in a scheme with Grisby to kill her husband. Because she believed it, finally, even though she couldn’t understand it. But she believed it only after she’d found out something – something I hadn’t known myself. There had been a hundred-thousand-dollar partnership insurance policy between Grisby and Bannister.

  ‘But what I can’t understand,’ she said, ‘is how he expected to collect on it, if he was supposed to be dead himself?’

  ‘And now Bannister gets that money?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  That seemed the height of something, I didn’t know what. The whole thing was getting more mixed up every minute.

  ‘Supposing they both had died at the same time,’ I said, ‘what would have happened then? Who would have got the money?’

  ‘Well, I suppose if Grisby had been married, part of it would have gone to his wife, too. But this way it would have gone to me. So he couldn’t have profited in the least by killing Marco.’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  ‘Laurence, why did you do this?’ she asked suddenly.

  I nearly jumped.

  ‘Kill Grisby, you mean? But—’

  ‘No, I know you didn’t do that. I believe you. I mean, why did you agree to go in with him on this? Oh, I know, he offered you five thousand dollars, but don’t you see how foolish you were? Could all this possibly be worth five thousand dollars?’

  �
��No,’ I said. ‘But I wasn’t going to do it, either. That night when you met me outside the garage, when I was going away, I said I was going because I wasn’t cut out to be a chauffeur. I was a sailor. I said I was going back to sea. Well, I was going back, but not for that reason. I was afraid if I didn’t go through with it, Grisby would get me, too. So I was clearing out – fast.’

  ‘And I stopped you! Oh, Laurence, if you’d only told me.’

  ‘I did start to tell Bannister. I wrote him a letter. But when we came back from the beach, I – well, I tore the letter up.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because it wasn’t me that was going to kill anyone. If Bannister couldn’t look out for himself… And then, most of all, there was you.’

  I could hear her catch her breath.

  ‘I see…’

  ‘That’s why I did it, really. I thought everything would work out – differently.’

  ‘Oh, Laurence—’

  ‘You said yourself you thought Bannister would be better off dead. Then he wouldn’t be worrying so much about his leg.’

  ‘I – I shouldn’t have said that. I was furious…’

  ‘But you meant it, didn’t you?’

  ‘Please, Laurence—’

  ‘You did mean it!’

  ‘I guess I did – at the moment. Sometimes, when he broods, and is irritable—’

  ‘You’re not in love with him, I know that.’

  ‘No. I guess I never was, really. I guess it was always just – pity. It still is. If it hadn’t been for that I would have left him a dozen times. It would have hurt him too terribly. Besides, he would never give me a divorce. He’d fight it if it took every penny he had.’

  ‘But what are we going to do when I get out? If,’ I said, ‘he gets me out?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll have to think about that – when the time comes.’

  Bannister came in so soon after she had left that it made my hair curl. I wondered if he’d seen her.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s all set. The trial comes up tomorrow. The State has a strong case, but we can beat it. That’s what I want you to keep in your mind – no matter how black they make things look for you, cling to the accident plea.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘The State will charge you with murder in the first degree. Our line of defense will be excusable homicide – accident. Remember, it’s the State’s job to prove you guilty, not ours to prove you innocent. If you say you didn’t shoot him at all, and try to prove your innocence, you’ll simply be helping the State to prove your guilt – the weight of evidence to bear out their theory that you did shoot him, even though that evidence is only circumstantial, is too strong.’

  ‘But if I’m innocent, they can’t prove me guilty, can they?’

  ‘They certainly can. They’ll evolve a theory of the shooting, then bring up facts to bear that theory out. When they get through with their witnesses, there won’t be a single man on the jury who’ll believe you didn’t shoot Lee Grisby. We’d be foolish to dispute it; we have no proof that you didn’t. Of course, they have no actual proof that you did, either. But the weight of evidence is on their side.’

  ‘We can prove I didn’t do it with the gun I had – McCracken said so. He said I couldn’t have done it with that gun!’

  ‘Yes, but we can’t prove you didn’t have another gun. How could we? And they’ll say you did – and they’ll seem to prove it by the very fact that we can’t disprove it. Besides, as I said, they will have convinced the jury, through their witnesses, that you did shoot him. And since they wouldn’t believe it if we said you didn’t, they’d hesitate to believe us when we said it was an accident. No, the issue we’ll have to stand or fall on is whether the shooting was premeditated or accidental – and I think I can throw enough doubt on that score to prevent your conviction. At any rate, it’s our only hope.’

  So I went on trial for my life claiming to have killed a man I hadn’t killed – and hoping they’d believe me, but not to the extent where they’d send me to the chair for it.

  PART FOUR

  I

  The courtroom was crowded and noisy. There were a lot of women, but I saw Elsa almost at once. She wasn’t wearing the veil this time, not even a hat. Sunlight shooting down from a high window lighted her red hair. She smiled and I smiled back.

  Bannister was sitting at a table up near the judge’s bench. He looked around to see what I was smiling at. Elsa was folding a handkerchief in her lap. He turned back to me frowning and drew out a chair beside his own.

  ‘Scared?’ he asked.

  ‘A little,’ I said.

  ‘Well, don’t be. Sit down. Don’t smile, but don’t look pessimistic, either.’

  The judge was rapping for order.

  ‘That’s Judge Ditchburne,’ said Bannister. ‘He’ll see that you get a square deal.’

  The judge had scraggly white hair and brows over a red face. A sour smile was on his lips.

  A voice droned: ‘Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. All ye who have business draw near, give attention, and ye shall be heard.’

  ‘The main thing today,’ said Bannister, ‘will be to choose the jury. That may or may not take time, depending upon how much sifting Galloway and I have to do.’

  ‘Who’s Galloway?’

  ‘He’s the District Attorney. Ordinarily he wouldn’t be prosecuting the case himself, but he wants the publicity on this one. It’s enough out of the ordinary to get a lot of attention. Besides, he’s sure he’s going to win it.’

  ‘Which one is he?’

  He nodded to a man in a brown suit over at another table, standing with his back to us, going through a lot of papers. He was a short, bull-necked man with big shoulders and a completely bald head that gave him a streamlined effect – trimmed for action. When he turned around I saw that he had a big jaw and large brown eyes with a twinkle. He smiled at me and looked up at the judge. This was the man who was going to do his best to send me to the chair.

  The courtroom quieted down. The business of picking the jurors began.

  Galloway didn’t seem much interested in who the jurors were, as long as they had nothing against sending me to the chair. Bannister turned some of them down, but I couldn’t tell why. Finally, just after the adjournment for lunch, they had twelve of them all sitting up in the jury box – two women and ten men, all freshly scrubbed and dressed to kill.

  Then they brought me up to the bar to plead.

  ‘Not guilty,’ I said.

  I went back and sat down beside Bannister.

  Galloway didn’t lose any time. He swung right into action, getting more and more worked up each moment.

  ‘May it please the Court,’ he began. ‘We are here in the matter of the People of New York against Laurence Planter.’

  It was funny to hear my name in that place, with those twelve people looking at me. And the more Galloway talked, the worse it was.

  ‘The defense will try to delude you,’ he said to the jurors, ‘into the belief that this outrageous crime against society was committed by accident. I shall prove that nothing could be further from the truth. I shall prove that he was preparing to leave the country. I shall prove that he saw the unhappy victim of his avarice, Lee Grisby, draw five thousand dollars from the bank. And I shall prove that he killed him to obtain this sum – practically in the presence of witnesses. These witnesses will speak to you for themselves, testifying under oath. You need have no hesitation in accepting their word; you need have no hesitation in returning a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree!’

  If he had said nothing else, if the jurors had gone right out then and there and taken a vote on it, they would have said ‘Guilty!’ I knew it. I knew I was sunk. There wasn’t anything we could say that would change it, unless I told the truth. And Bannister had said I couldn’t do that; it would sink me quicker than anything else we coul
d say. So what was left? I didn’t know.

  Galloway’s voice rang out: ‘Call Dr Colbert.’

  Cold shivers went up and down my spine.

  Dr Colbert, it turned out, was the medical examiner. He proved, to everyone’s satisfaction, that Grisby was dead.

  ‘And how was this death inflicted, Dr Colbert?’

  ‘By a bullet entering the heart.’

  ‘Fired straight or from the side?’

  ‘From the side – the left side.’

  ‘At what distance would you say?’

  ‘At a very short distance. Powder burns visible on the coat suggested that the pistol was held very close.’

  ‘The shot could, then, in your opinion, have been fired by one sitting beside Mr Grisby at the wheel of a car?’

  Bannister came to his feet.

  ‘Objection. Question can only elicit opinion, not fact,’ he said.

  Galloway looked at him in surprise.

  ‘We are only trying to secure expert medical opinion,’ he said, ‘to bear out a statement given as fact by the defendant himself. In the confession I am about to read as soon as death and cause of death have been established—’

  ‘Objection overruled,’ the judge snapped. ‘The District Attorney may proceed.’

  ‘The witness may answer,’ said Galloway.

  ‘Very well. In my opinion the shot could most certainly have been fired by a person sitting on the left side of the deceased in a car.’

  ‘That’s all,’ said Galloway. ‘Your witness, Mr Bannister.’

  ‘One question, for the records,’ said Bannister.

  Galloway was still frowning at him, puzzled.

  ‘Counsel doesn’t question there has been a death?’ he asked.

  ‘I should like to establish the exact means of death,’ Bannister explained. ‘Dr Colbert, can you tell me the caliber of the bullet removed from the deceased?’

  ‘Yes. It was a .32.’

  ‘Perhaps the District Attorney would be kind enough to offer it in evidence?’

  Galloway picked the bullet up from the table. It had a tag on it.

  Bannister took it, looked at the tag, and handed it up to Dr Colbert.