by Rufus King
He thought: We’ve all been focused on her. She has held us like a strong beam shining in twilight. She has obscured the mise en scène.
He thought: Can that be it? Can that be it?
* * * *
Heffernan had read several biographies of public executioners and had considered them distasteful to a point that touched on the horrendous. During his two terms in office he had only once (metaphorically) wielded the ax himself. He has asked a jury to give a man a verdict of death. The jury had, and the man was dead. The man had shouted at him: “It’s you, not them, that kill me. Just because you are bright.”
It was very, very true.
The man had sliced his mistress’s throat and slit her stomach and thoroughly deserved an official execution, but Heffernan had not known the well-carved mistress whereas, during the months of waiting and during the weeks of the trial, he had come to know the man. That was what had made the difference by being bright, he had had to kill him.
And now he had to be bright again.
He wondered if when the time came Lily would shout something at him too. The probability seemed incredible, just as did the fact that Lily’s loveliness and gentle nature and all-around kindness was nothing but a deceit: a spell woven by the blackest of arts for the confusion and death by violence of (two) men. He felt a little sick when he recalled his surge of fierce joy and high determination upon taking the oath of his office, his bemused and stuffy vision of himself in shining armor, blind, as Justice is blind, to everything but the right.
You couldn’t be blind about Lily.
She had left the chaise-lounge and was seated in an arm-chair when he had come in. She seemed to be hung on hooks against the back of the chair, a marvelous replica of herself in wax, and stuffed with sawdust. This general effigy effect was further emphasized by her air of disinterestedness both in him and in his secretary, Chester Minkle—a thin young man with lush eyes sitting over at a desk with a thoroughly false attitude of blasé boredom.
Heffernan made his voice purposefully sharp.
“Mrs. Elser.”
“Yes?”
“We have reached a point where I am restricted to every legal nicety of my office.”
“Yes?”
“I want you to know your rights. I want you to reconsider, if you wish, your decision against having Gene Forrest here to advise you.”
“But I still see no reason why I should, Mr. Heffernan.”
This irritated him into a gesture of genuine impatience.
“Really, Mrs. Elser. I know why Forrest’s here. I know why Lorrimer Keith suggested his coming.”
“You must appreciate Gene’s interest in my daughter.”
He said again, “Oh, really! We both know that’s an evasion. If you won’t have him up here you won’t. I shall advise you that my secretary is taking this inquiry down verbatim and that all or any part of it may later be used. This is simply another way of saying that anything—”
“I know. I do not want to seem rude, but I know, Mr. Heffernan.”
“All right, then. Why did your husband come here, Mrs. Elser?”
“I’m sorry but I honestly do not know. I did not even know that he was living until I saw him in that room. And then he was dead.”
“Why did you go to the room?”
“I—(Nan screamed and I heard Nan scream and I ran to the room and saw Nan with the gun in her hand.) “I don’t know.”
“Why did you scream when you got there?”
“Because of what I saw when I turned on the lights.” (That’s right, I screamed. It was my scream that brought Nan running, I brought the rest running.) “There was the general disorder—Robert lying on the floor—shot.”
“Then you recognized him immediately?”
“No—not until Doctor Starr asked me whether I knew him.”
“And still you did recognize that this strange man lying on the floor was dead?”
“Yes.”
“And that he had been shot?”
“Yes.”
“In other words, you were close enough to observe the bullet hole, and still you did not recognize him as your husband?”
“I didn’t then. Not then.”
“Your daughter joined you?”
“Yes. Nan heard my scream.”
(What did he know? Had he questioned Nan? What had she told him?)
“How long were you and she together before the others came?”
“I could scarcely have been a matter of seconds.”
“When did you raise the window? Before or after your daughter came?”
“Window?”
“Please, Mrs. Elser. You must place some credence in our efficiency. Your fingerprints were on it. They were not on it earlier in the day when the room was examined in connection with Parne.”
“I remember about that now, Mr. Heffernan. It is really inconsequential. I felt faint. I raised the window for air and then closed it again.”
“Before you screamed?”
“No, naturally afterward. After the shock.”
“But before your daughter came?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve tested it, Mrs. Elser, and it has been estimated that between your screaming and the arrival of Doctor Starr and Lorrimer Keith and Gene Forrest not more than eight or nine seconds could have elapsed. And you want us to understand that you screamed, you felt faint, so you opened the window and were revived and then you closed it again, all before your daughter arrived, all within the implausible short space of three or four seconds?”
“I’m afraid I must.”
“Why did your husband come here?”
“You have already asked me that.”
“Can you suggest any reason, even though you know of no definite one?”
“No, Mr. Heffernan.”
“Would you prefer us to accept a statement from you that you opened the window to throw something out into the snow?”
“No—no, I felt faint. I’ve told you that too.”
“People have the funniest notions about the concealing qualities of snow. They think a subsequent fall or a continued fall of flakes will cover all traces. Well, in some cases it does.”
“Yes?”
“But there are ways. The snowfall since you opened the window has been negligible, Mrs. Elser. There’s that to begin with. Then there was the light.”
“Light?”
“Shaft, really. We took a spotlight and shafted it almost horizontally over the area covered by the window. It narrowed the field amazingly by showing the indentations and making them quickly obvious. We found this by digging.” Heffernan took a gun from his pocket and placed it on the piecrust table beside their chairs. Lily looked at it. It looked like the gun all right, and the spotlight business did make sense. It irked her strangely to have to remain so stubborn, so willfully unseeing, but there was no other course. She could admit nothing, agree to no point whatever, without her whole defense crumbling and leaving, not her, but Nan naked to the state’s attack.
“I understand your contention, Mr. Heffernan. I do not admit any knowledge of that gun, and certainly I refuse to change my statement that a feeling of faintness caused me to open the window.”
“Just as you wish, Mrs. Elser.
He left the gun lying there for Lily to look at, in the accepted tactics of it being a disturbing factor to prod her sense of guilt and in the hope that it would help him swiftly to break her down. As the ax must fall he wanted to wield it quickly, to have his former deeply admired friend confess in toto her horrific sins and throw herself upon the mercy of the state, accept a lesser plea and languish for twenty-odd years at some penal tasks, but at least escape with her life. As he would then in turn escape from her ultimate and nerve-destroying shout when the death penalty would be imposed. He held n
o question as to Lily’s guilt, but he did hope for palliative circumstances and he wanted to find them out.
“Let us go back, Mrs. Elser. Way back. To when you and your daughter came here to Laurel Falls.”
“I’ve done so just now, Mr. Heffernan, to Doctor Starr.”
“Then repeat it, please for me.”
Lily did. She gave him the bones of the framework with their dates and ignored any of the flesh, which was the really important thing and consisted of her years of distress when she had suffered as a brutally deserted woman. Heffernan considered them briefly in silence.
“I feel better, Mrs. Elser. We return to a normal groove. I am accepting your statement as to the divorce and the legal declaration of your husband’s death because both can be checked at their documentary sources. Frankly it spoils my thoughts on a motive. Equally frankly it presents me with a more unpleasant one.”
“You will forgive me if I fail to follow you.”
“It occurs to me that the coming of Parne and Hangaway and your first husband to this house begins to make sense. We have Parne’s initial interest in the Sheraton secretary. We have your husband’s search of the room which Parne occupied and in which he was killed. I refer to the slits in the mattress and the opened pillows, the general disorders of a search. Papers, documents of some nature naturally spring to mind. Equally so your documentary proofs of the divorce and the declaration of legal death also spring to mind. I suppose you kept them here, Mrs. Elser. Or are they at the bank?”
“No, I kept them here. Because of my early contention of being a widow I preferred to hold them privately.”
“Where?”
“I have kept them since Mr. Elser’s death in the Sheraton secretary.”
“Well, we’ve searched it and there’s nothing of their nature there. Or are there secret compartments?”
“No. There is a locked drawer for more private papers. I kept them in that.”
“Yes, I know the drawer. It has been forced. By Parne, I imagine.”
Heffernan frowned. He was deeply bewildered and puzzled. He forgot for a moment in his concentration on the problem the relationship that currently existed between himself and Lily, with himself a bloodhound baying slaveringly after this (once) delightful, delicate creature as she skipped with such pitiful indecision across her perilous and tipsy cakes of ice. His manner changed to one of a man who is having an impartial discussion about a knotty problem with a friend.
He said, “I suppose we must consider it that way, that Parne found them in the secretary and took them and that your first husband was looking for them when he was shot. Only why? Can’t you see how foolish it is?”
Lily couldn’t. She was beyond seeing anything much, that is, as to its folly or brightness, and a dreadful, passionate longing to go away someplace and lie down and sleep was betraying her again. She meditated about this absently, thinking it queer, because of all times it was right now when she should be lively and electric and in all ways on her mettle, ready with parry and thrust to beat off this important gnat who was bent on destroying her.
“In what way is it foolish, Mr. Heffernan?”
“Because they are not documents of source. Anybody could go to the place where you got your divorce and look it up in the official records, and it’s stupid to consider that they could be done away with.”
He looked for understanding in this now-impartial friend and saw none. Her lovely eyes with their deep shades of blue and violet seemed a touch out of focus and windowed with glass. He wondered for a scandalized moment whether she had been paying any attention to him at all or had just remained wrapped up in her glassy daze and throwing him mechanized in the manner of an intelligent automaton.
He said sharply, “The same thought holds true, of course, with the legally dead business. So why all this frantic to-do about getting hold of your copies?” An odd idea took shape in his mind and he stared at her strangely. “Why do you call that man Robert Warden, Mrs. Elser? Don’t you know that his name is Worthby Haines?”
Lily’s pale face grew paler as the blood left it slowly and she thought, becoming at once all awake: That’s the name Mr. Hangaway asked Nan about. He asked her if she knew Worthby Haines, and Nan said no. He asked her how she had got wise to Worthby Haines. He asked her how much she had shaken him down for. He had said to Nan: “Haines is hard—as you know. He’d see to it that somebody wrapped you up in cement just as quick as he’d pick a daisy. You’d better turn the proof over to me.”
“Worthby Haines? I’m afraid not, Mr. Heffernan. I have never known Robert otherwise than as Robert Warden.”
“Were the divorce and the other papers issued under that name?”
“Yes.”
“And the name Worthby Haines, Worthby Haines of Detroit, means nothing to you, Mrs. Elser?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing, Mr. Heffernan.”
He seemed unbelieving and astounded that it should not, and Lily thought that Robert or (now) Worthby Haines must be a man of noted importance. She tried to imagine Robert, her earlier cruel and ferally exciting Robert, as being now a man of importance, with his hard and, she hoped, reasonably unique tendency toward putting people in cement.
A startled look of sudden shock spread over Heffernan’s face.
“Mrs. Elser, why did you send your daughter to Detroit?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t send her. Nan herself suggested going. She won a design contest conducted by the Detroit Free Press. She is a graduate in fashion design. That is why Nan went to Detroit, Mr. Heffernan.”
Lily tried with the very essence of her heart to have Heffernan believe this because so far as she knew it was true, and she wanted to make the truth of it so ringing that he would have to accept it. She watched the alarm fade from his face and his expression change to one of disgust and pity, like the look, she reflected, reserved for all the feet that ever were of clay.
He started addressing a jury, not Lily.
He said, “The roots of these crimes lie in this house, Mrs. Elser. They lie in those documentary proofs. But the tree and the branches spread over Detroit. Parne and Hangaway are shadowed by them, and so is the man whom you call Warden and whom I know to be Haines.”
Lord, he thought, but this is silly. I’m talking to her as though I were summing up. She ought to throw me out of the house. She can’t. She can’t do a thing but sit there and listen to me, to my cheap pseudo-oratory, and hold her neck out until it pleases me to slice it with an ax. He was back to that image again, the bloodhound role no longer of use, because he had her. He had her right on the block. He wanted to apologize for his bombast but did not dare permit himself the least weakening into softness. He took some notes from his pocket and studied them for a while.
He said to Lily, “A shorthand transcript wasn’t kept the last time I questioned you, but this is approximately what you told me, Mrs. Elser. I shall ask you the same questions again and my secretary will take down your answers. Please consider them well, as you may care to answer differently than you did before.”
“I feel certain that I shan’t, Mr. Heffernan.”
“This is about the way it went. I asked you what you did concerning Parne’s room after he got here. You said you went up to it while he and Sheffield were putting his car in the garage. You checked the linen. You lifted his bags from the floor to the luggage stand. The only other time you went to the room was immediately after Hangaway had told you about the body. You then went up and stood in the doorway but did not enter the room at all. I guess that was about it.”
“Yes. It still is, Mr. Heffernan.”
“Wait please. I shall put the questions to you somewhat differently, and Mr. Minkle will take down your answers. When you went upstairs to check the room had Parne been in it as yet?”
“No, he did not go up until after he had put the car in the garage.”
&n
bsp; “Now in regard to his bags, Mrs. Elser. Sheffield has told me that he placed them on the luggage stand. You tell me that you did.”
“I’m afraid that Sheffield is mistaken. Perhaps I am myself mistaken. The matter seems very unimportant. So very many more important things have happened.”
“Still, if you will forgive me? Were the bags unpacked?”
“No.”
“Why did you search them, Mrs. Elser?”
(Because I was looking for a gun or hot money or a case of dope, and later I searched them, looking for the letters he had written in the library and which might contain references which would connect him with Nan, and this later time I found the cabinet photograph of Nan which had been taken in Detroit. You can see how that proved that there was something between them. Are pieces of cardboard carried away completely; or do they sometimes remain, and do the police examine the traps and the drains as a routine procedure in the expectation of finding just such incriminating things?)
“But I didn’t search the bags, Mr. Heffernan.”
Heffernan went off on a tangent. He said angrily, in anger at the entire situation, “There is this about a person’s statements; there is this about the truth, about knowing anyone personally and believing him a truthful person. You catch him out in a lie, even in a little lie, but you know it to be a deliberate one. Everything else he says, everything he has told you before collapses. Surely you understand that.”
“Of course I do.”
“And still you tell me that you did not search the bags and that they were not unpacked. And still your fingerprints are all over the smooth leather case in which Parne kept his toilet articles, a case which had not been unpacked but which was inside his Gladstone bag. What in heaven’s name do you want me to think, Mrs. Elser?”
“If you will give me one moment—”
“I will give you all the time you like.”
Not that one moment or one year or one eternity would do any good. What was the use of a respite, no matter how long, if you were to spend it in this state of utter unliveliness—for she was back in that condition again—and were incapable of anything but the most febrile sort of fencing, because your head was asleep and all the rest of you was dead on its feet.
