Verdict Suspended

by Nielsen, Helen

  “Well, actually,” Mrs. Moore said, “we aren’t here for that.” The awkward silence came again. Mr. Moore nudged again. “Actually,” Mrs. Moore added, her voice an octave higher, “the board of directors held a special meeting last night. They decided the choice of gift wasn’t—well, wasn’t exactly what they wanted.”

  Greta was surprised. “Not exactly …?”

  “We decided luggage would be better. Mrs. Hymes likes to travel—”

  “But I don’t understand,” Greta protested. “When you ordered the silver you said the club was tired of giving luggage to every outgoing president.”

  Mr. Moore cleared his throat impatiently. “Miss Muldoon,” he said, “my wife just told you the board of directors made a decision. She’s here to cancel the order.”

  It was blunt and definite. Greta was shocked. Before she could comment, Jaime strode across the room.

  “The lady’s name is Mrs. Dodson,” he said, “not Miss Muldoon. Is that your problem, Mrs. Moore?”

  Mrs. Moore stared at Jaime’s angry face and edged closer to her husband. “I don’t understand,” she gasped.

  “Is that the problem of the Booster Club? Greta Muldoon, the nice girl with the charming little gift shop, married that terrible Jaime Dodson—and his sister’s murder still unsolved!”

  “Jaime,” Greta protested, “don’t say another word! … It’s all right, Mrs. Moore. I’ll cancel the order. There’s a small deposit …”

  “Keep the deposit!” Moore snapped. “Honey, let’s get out of here.” He took his wife’s arm and tried to move away, but Jaime blocked the exit.

  “Mrs. Dodson has no intention of keeping the deposit,” he said. “If the Booster Club doesn’t want to do business with her, she doesn’t want the Booster Club’s money.”

  “Dodson, you’re a hotheaded fool!” Moore said. “You had one break! Don’t push your luck!”

  “A break!” Jaime repeated. “I was one of five people who were invited to Sheilah’s dinner party the day she died. One of five! But now it seems that I’m guilty of something—and my wife is guilty too! What is it? That’s all we want to know. What is it?”

  Greta’s frantic signals were a lost cause. Jaime belligerently blocked Moore’s way. Moore tried to push him aside.

  “I asked a question, Mr. Moore.”

  “Some people,” Moore replied tightly, “just don’t like other people. Does that answer your question?”

  It was an answer, but it didn’t help Jaime’s blood pressure. Something had to give. It did. It was his fist in Mr. Moore’s nicely shaved and lotioned face.

  Jaime was no stranger to the Cypress Point police station. When Captain Lennard arrived, he’d been in a cell a brief fifteen minutes—the shortest period of incarceration in his colorful career of misdemeanors. Greta was at the bank raising cash for the fine.

  Lennard stood outside the cell door and studied him quizzically. “What is it with you?” he asked. “Why can’t you keep out of trouble?”

  “I lost my temper,” Jaime said.

  “But Leo Moore’s president of the City Council. Couldn’t you find someone less influential when you feel the need of self-expression?” And then Lennard grinned. “I can name a few people—and one of them standing just a few feet from you at the moment—who might like to strike off a small medal in your honor, but repression can be the greater part of valor.”

  Jaime got up from the cot and walked to the cell door. “Why don’t you unlock this thing?” he said.

  “I will … when your fine’s paid,” Lennard said.

  Jaime poked in his pockets for a cigarette. “Well, then, at least give me a light.” Lennard produced a lighter and held it out between the bars until Jaime got his light. “City Council,” he mused. “I’ll have to remember to register for the next election.”

  “Vindictive?”

  “Civic-minded…. Lennard, what’s going on in this town? Everywhere I go I get the same reaction. I’m as welcome as a leper.”

  Lennard flicked the lighter on and off a few times and returned it to his pocket. “It isn’t you,” he said. “It’s murder. People resent murder—especially one like your sister’s. It upsets their faith in justice and happy endings. Nobody sleeps easy until they have a murderer to match every murder. Neat. Like togetherness.”

  “Then find the murderer!” Jaime said. “I’ll sleep easier too.”

  “You,” Lennard remarked dryly, “will be awake easier. Jaime, lad, you don’t understand. Your chickens are coming home to roost. You’ve spent ten years stirring up as much hell as possible in Cypress Point. You tell people the truth about themselves. Nobody likes to hear anything that unflattering. Sheilah had more tact—”

  “Sheilah was an operator,” Jaime said.

  “In a society of operators, that’s the best thing to be. Honesty makes people uncomfortable…. As far as finding Sheilah’s murderer is concerned—it’s strange, but we haven’t had so much as a burglary since her death.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Good pinochle games.” And then Lennard looked at Jaime closely, intently. “Jaime,” he said, “what’s wrong with you anyway?”

  Jaime was a fast smoker. Short, quick drags. He took one last one and dropped the stub to the cement floor. He ground it out with his heel and looked up to see Lennard still staring at him.

  “I’ve had you in this jail twenty or thirty times in the past ten years,” he said. “Every charge from drunk, disorderly, and passing bad checks that Sheilah always covered. You’re tough. Mad at the world. I know you. There’s a volcano inside, but volcanoes are illegal—”

  “Captain,” Jaime protested, “let’s skip the analysis.”

  “I’d rather not. In fact, that’s what I’m leading up to. What did the head doctor tell you?”

  “Head doctor?”

  There was this about Jaime Dodson—he had no guile. If he asked a question, surprised and bewildered, it meant he was surprised and bewildered. Lennard knew this. Jaime was confused; he wasn’t a liar.

  “Don’t you remember the head doctor?” Lennard asked. “At the hospital. After you were picked up at Hanson’s Pier.”

  “There were two state psychiatrists,” Jaime reflected. “They testified at the hearing.”

  “Do you remember them at the hospital?”

  “Yes … I remember. They tried to break through the block. It was useless. They said something must have happened … some shock that made me forget about two hours of the day Sheilah died…. What was the shock, Lennard?”

  “I don’t know,” the captain said. “I didn’t get to you until after the crack-up at Hanson’s Pier. For the first twenty-four hours you didn’t even know you were still alive…. But I didn’t mean the state doctors, Jaime. I meant Steve Quentin’s head doctor.”

  Jaime listened, but the words had no meaning. “Steve’s doctor?” he echoed.

  “Don’t you remember him? What was his name? Curran … Curry? Something like that. I met him one day at the hospital. He was on his way up to see you then. He said he was hired by Steve Quentin.”

  “I don’t remember him,” Jaime said slowly.

  “Well, he was there. I thought he might help you. You’ve been a mixed-up kid for a long time, Jaime.”

  “I wonder why I don’t remember,” Jaime said. “Why didn’t he testify at the hearing?”

  Lennard shrugged. “I suppose he didn’t have any more success than the state doctors. It was Steve’s case. If his doctor could have helped you, he’d have testified…. Jaime, are you listening to me?”

  Jaime wasn’t in the cell any more. He stood so close, Lennard could have reached through the bars and touched him; but something was working deep in his mind and for several seconds he might have been a haberdasher’s dummy attired in what a gentleman of taste wears on an afternoon session at the county jail. Then Jaime returned from the place his mind had gone. He looked at Lennard strangely, as if neither of them should have been ther
e.

  “You look funny,” Lennard said. “Are you sick?”

  “No,” Jaime answered. “I’m all right. I thought for a minute I remembered something … something I should remember. Maybe I try too hard.” And then his mood changed swiftly. “Look,” he said, “all I did was hit somebody who insulted my wife. It’s an old American custom. How long are you going to keep me in this tax-supported resort?”

  Before Lennard could answer, a door opened at the far end of the hall. A uniformed policeman came down the corridor with a key ring in his hand. He nodded at Lennard.

  “About as long as it takes you to hit the sidewalk,” Lennard told Jaime. He stepped aside while the door was unlocked. It swung open and Jaime stepped out of the cell, but Lennard’s hand hard on his shoulder restrained him a moment longer.

  “Jaime,” he said, “everybody of voting age or older is walking around with a bomb inside waiting for someone or something to set it off. Be careful. You’re vulnerable. You can be hurt. You can be a target for a lot of hate and resentment that has nothing to do with you or Sheilah…. Play it cool, Jaime. I don’t want you in here again, understand?”

  Jaime absorbed the lecture with no change of expression. “Find Sheilah’s murderer,” he answered. “I’m a taxpayer too.”

  Greta waited in the booking room. She smiled a brave “I-love-you” smile and took Jaime’s arm. She walked out proudly with him, poised and untouched by the poison around them. He could feel her strength flowing into him. Outside, the air was cooling. Autumn was autumn everywhere. The wind off the ocean was turning cold, and the fog would come in ahead of the sunset. They walked to where the convertible waited at the curb, and then Jaime stopped and stood in the center of the sidewalk. He stared up and down the strange and foreign street of this town in which he’d been raised. The doors of the shops were always closed at this time of the year, but now there was hostility in their tight faces. A few pedestrians were on the street. They were people Jaime had seen often without noticing. Now they were potential enemies.

  “Jaime,” Greta scolded, “don’t scowl that way. Nothing’s that grim!”

  But Jaime continued to stare at the street. “My town,” he reflected. “So filled with nice, friendly people.”

  “It’s just temporary,” Greta protested.

  “A lynch mob is temporary.”

  “But you bring trouble on yourself, Jaime. You know people are upset about Sheilah’s death.”

  “Sheilah’s death! What they’re upset about is the loss of the lubricant she used to oil palms and wangle contracts!”

  “Jaime!” Greta held him at arm’s length. Her loyalty could be a flogging thing. “Don’t talk that way. Don’t even think that way! People expect a little sorrow, Jaime. A little mourning. The way you talk about Sheilah—so bitter. Do you want people to think you hated her?”

  Greta waited for an answer. Jaime stood silent until she heard it. Her arms dropped slowly to her sides. Softly she said: “Poor Jaime. You did hate her, didn’t you?”

  Chapter 7

  In his freshman year at college, before making the nerve-shattering discovery that he had no talent for the field, Ralph Howard Curry had gone out for dramatics. Reconciled to the fate of not being a thespian, he still liked to play his role in life with color and enthusiasm. Ordinarily it was rather dull, giving little scope for expression; but as Ralph Howard, biologist, on a literary sabbatical to Cypress Point, he had the opportunity to expand. The house he’d rented was one of the older crop, not created in the image and likeness of a Las Vegas motel. It was a frame structure, freshly painted white with light blue shutters and window trim. It had been built by a retired sea captain who crowned the structure with a glass-enclosed lookout complete with telescope. A spiral metal staircase descended from the lookout to the study—a huge room facing the sea in a semicircle of small-paned windows and one small-paned door leading to the terrace and a set of wooden steps which gave access to the beach twenty feet below.

  The terrace was also accessible from the street, and it was there that Steve Quentin waited when Dr. Curry returned from his walk. The study was unlocked. Curry took a cold pipe from between his teeth and opened the door.

  “I wondered how long it would take you to find me,” he said.

  “Not long,” Steve admitted. “I saw you walking on the beach early this morning. I know every rental agent in the Point, and this is the only house leased within the past eight days. It had to be yours.”

  The door swung open on an impressive clutter: crates of books, opened, books piled on tables and the floor. An ancient standard typewriter on a desk facing the sea, a row of glass fruit jars containing specimens preserved in alcohol, a microscope and a tin washtub filled with sea water and a few small fish. Dr. Curry watched Steve’s amazed reaction with wry amusement. He went to the closet and came back wearing a pale blue laboratory smock. Out of one pocket he took a pair of tortoise-rimmed glasses and fixed them in place.

  “Now,” he said, “don’t I look professorial?”

  “What the devil are you doing here?” Steve demanded.

  “I’m a biologist. I’ve got some books, you see—rented from a student—and a microscope. Fascinating gadget. The typewriter’s my own. Exactly twenty-one years old. And the smock”—he held out the skirts proudly—”came from a costuming house in Hollywood. Pale blue because of the camera lights, or some such thing. I think it’s a good color for my eyes.”

  Steve was impatient. “I mean,” he insisted, “what are you doing here?”

  Curry peered at him over the heavy rims of his glasses and then took them off altogether. “I could give you two answers,” he said. “I could say that I’m here because I’ve been working too hard. I’m taking a sabbatical—and the book I hope to write has nothing to do with biology. That would be half the truth. The second answer would be complete. I’m here because I’m responsible. A week ago I sat in a courtroom and heard a coroner’s inquest fail to indict a man whose confession to murder I had witnessed myself. You hired me to examine your client, Mr. Quentin. In a sense, he’s still my patient.”

  “Then you’re here to watch Jaime,” Steve said. “Does he know that?”

  “No. We met in a store in the village last night. A horrible little store run by an evil old man—”

  “Chad Winters!” Steve exclaimed. “So you were the stranger who left the groceries in Jaime’s car.”

  “I was,” Curry admitted, “but he didn’t recognize me. You must remember that Jaime was under narcosis when I questioned him. The room was dark. He never saw me clearly. I left the hospital before he came out of it completely.”

  “You’re worried, aren’t you?” Steve asked.

  Curry dipped the pipe into the pouch and then tamped the tobacco into the bowl. His eyebrows met in consultation over the bridge of his nose. “If the display of public reaction I saw last night is typical,” he reflected, “we should both be worried.”

  “There’s more of it,” Steve said. “Trench, Sheilah’s houseman, refuses to work for Jaime. They had a row over it yesterday.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. Trench was hostile in court.”

  “And this afternoon,” Steve continued, “Jaime came to blows with one of the leading citizens. I don’t know the details. All I’ve had is a brief report from Greta when she went out to raise bail.”

  Dr. Curry’s face twisted into a tight mask of dismay. “Violence …” he mused. “Mr. Quentin, our patient is getting ahead of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Guilt. Guilt becomes pressure. Pressure lashes out.”

  “But Jaime doesn’t know he’s guilty.”

  “Of course he knows. He confessed, didn’t he?” Curry stopped to touch a match to his pipe—a large kitchen match that blazed like a torch and then burned down slowly to a charred coil between his fingers. Curry watched it until the last whisper of smoke was gone. “Everything Jaime Dodson has said or done in his entire life is buried
somewhere in his mind,” he added. “When the pressure gets too great it has to break out.”

  “But he’s always been a hothead,” Steve protested. “This ‘lashing out’ was going on for years before Sheilah’s death. What was he guilty of then?”

  “That’s an interesting question,” Curry said. “What’s your answer?”

  “I’m a lawyer,” Steve said. “I work with evidence—not answers. I know Jaime’s sensitive and high-strung. That’s why I want him to leave Cypress Point—go upstate and start a new life.”

  Curry was surprised. “You want him to leave—now?”

  “Of course, now. I know this town. The gossip will die out. People forget.”

  “People, yes. But what about Jaime?”

  “He’ll forget too. He has a wife to think about now.” Steve was curt and impatient. He moved restlessly among the props in Curry’s study—paused before the tank of sea specimens and stared at it in disgust. “Why are you playing with these things?” he asked.

  Curry joined him at the tub. He removed the pipe from between his teeth and surveyed the collection with fatherly pride.

  “I’m not playing,” he said. “I find all forms of nature extremely informative—plant, animal, human. I’ve been cracking a few books just in case I might be involved in conversation and have to uphold my laurels. Do you know anything about eels?”

  Steve looked at him narrowly. “You didn’t find an eel in these waters!”

  “No, I didn’t. There’s nothing of importance in that tub. It’s only here to impress callers. I found the eels in one of these texts. Fascinating creatures. A certain variety finds its way across the Atlantic each year—always by the same route. No radar, no sextant, no compass. But no feat of navigation can compare with it. You might say they have an innate sense of direction.”

  “What has this to do with Jaime?” Steve asked.

  “A sense of direction?” Curry smiled. “I’m not sure yet. I saw him only once. I don’t know his pattern…. Does he want to leave Cypress Point, Mr. Quentin?”