The Sister

by R.J. Ellory

  “Upheld,” the judge said, and the PD smiled then because he had laid down three kings against something else, and thus he too had won a hand.

  And then the judge repeated what the PD had just said, as if we all needed to be reminded of the foolishness of the prosecuting attorney, and the prosecuting attorney stood there and didn’t really listen because already his mind was working like a Frenchman’s clock and he had loaded up another bullet to fire at the PD and the defendant in the hope that he would kill these two dumb birds with one big stone.

  Forty-five seconds.

  Looking back, it doesn’t surprise me that it took so long. It ran for a month, but with the weekends deducted, with three days of sick jurors’ absenteeism, a further day lost due to the stenographer’s son having a root canal and no available replacement for her at such short notice, another day while the judge completed a delayed return from a fishing trip on the other side of Lake Michigan near Norton Shores, it was really only twenty days. When I saw the judge again he looked ruddy and fresh-eyed, as if the lake air had suited him a good deal. However, his hands still seemed like bunches of strange fruit. I wondered if he hadn’t endured some debilitating skin condition as a child. That, along with his minimal height, would have made him the butt of many a joke.

  And then I remembered a silent film I had once seen with Carole. It was called The Hands of Orlac, and it featured Conrad Veidt as a pianist who had lost his hands in a terrible rail accident. New hands were grafted onto his wrists, but they were the hands of an executed killer. From that point forward, despite the best medical care, the pianist was wracked by pain and terrible anxieties. He believed that not only had he inherited the hands of a killer, but perhaps the killer’s disposition as well. He was even accused of murdering his own father, but it came out alright in the end. He had not killed his father, and he could still play the piano.

  And so I watched the man in the dock. I looked for any signs of scarring on his pale white wrists. I wondered if he had somehow been given the hands of a killer, and thus had been unable to withhold himself from strangling my sister.

  But the man’s wrists bore no scars, and his eyes seemed ever distant, and his mind also seemed as empty as a fairground balloon.

  Most of all, his hands appeared to be his own, and no one else’s.

  I sat and listened, and every once in a while I drifted away, vague memories of my childhood returning, as if to taunt me.

  We lived on the outskirts of Belvidere. That was where we were born, and that was where we were raised. Our house was nothing more than a stone’s throw and a loud shout from the Wisconsin state line. My father was a railroad man, and he wanted sons. He got two daughters and gave up trying for anything better. “More ornament than use,” he’d say, “all three of you . . .” referring to me, Carole and mom all at once, to which my mother would always respond, “Can find a handy ornament and a good use for it if you don’t mind your mouth there, Walter Shaw.”

  My mother was also a schoolteacher, and her maiden name was Munro. Had she kept her name, I would have been Maryanne Munro, and though it was spelled different, and though I looked nothing like her, I was curious as to how it would have been to spend your life being asked, “Sorry . . . did you say Marilyn Monroe?” My mother said I was a dreamer, always had my head in the clouds. My dad said there was nothing wrong with having your head in the clouds as long as your feet were still on the ground.

  I arrived first on the 10th of February, 1924, and Carole followed me three years later on the 14th of March, 1927. Seemed to me that the older we got the narrower the division was between us. Three years seemed like three months seemed like three days. We told everyone we were twins, and more often than not they believed us.

  We did not look for trouble, but trouble seemed to find us. I never imagined that trouble would keep on following Carole all the way to a drunken fight in an apartment in Chicago more than twenty years later, but it did.

  Carole grew fast, caught up with me quickly, and though she’d later say she felt clunky and oafish, she wasn’t by any means. She said I was demure and delicate, that I had a ballet dancer’s proportions, and that she was more like a longshoreman. When she died she didn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds. How she looked and how she thought she looked were not the same thing. Carole was beautiful and funny and charming, and she loved children, loved all of them very much, and she was the last person in the world to walk by when she saw someone upset or in distress. She liked the taste of bitter apples and she collected shells and pebbles, and she said that when she was married she would have three children and she didn’t care at all if they were boys or girls, and she wore spring colors in fall, and she smiled most all the time, and people said she lit up the room when she came in.

  Forty-one seconds.

  Her killer is going to the electric chair today. Irony again, but it seems like he’s going to be lighting up a room as well.

  I said that to a man I know at work, and he smiled awkwardly and called it gallows humor. I felt he was being condescending in his manner, but I said nothing. He isn’t someone I know very well, and I don’t much care for him anyway. He wears too much hair oil, and he smokes constantly.

  But when we were kids Carole and I didn’t talk about the future. We talked about today and tomorrow, and perhaps sometimes we’d talk about Christmas even though it might have been weeks away. It seemed then that the future would never really arrive, because, well, I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems like the older you get the faster the days go. When I was a little girl a month felt like a year. Now a month passes in an hour.

  Forty seconds. I watch that red hand just eat up those numbers, and I can still hear it ticking even though such a thing is impossible. Now I can feel my own heart beating. I don’t know that I have ever wanted anything so much in my life, and such a terrible, terrible thing to want . . .

  Like the trial. While I was there it seemed to go on forever, but then it was done and it seemed to have passed in no time at all. And it seems like only yesterday that I sat in the closed hearing and heard them sentence Carole’s killer, and watched him as he stood silent, his long white pianist’s fingers gripping the rail, a shaving cut beneath his left ear that had bled onto his collar. I can close my eyes and see the prosecuting attorney saying, “I present now a copy of the indictment returned by the Grand Jury of Illinois, that you did murder the person of Carole Grace Shaw against the peace and dignity of the State of Illinois. Do you understand the charge that has been brought against you?” and feel a shudder along the length of my spine, like an electric charge, and I wish that she were still alive, I wish so desperately and utterly and completely that she were still alive, and that we were together somewhere, the sun on our faces, the wind in our hair, perhaps back in Belvidere as children and talking about Christmas even though it was weeks and weeks away.

  I wanted to ask the killer if she knew Carole at all. I wanted to know where they had been that day, what they’d talked about, how they had met. I mean, of course, the prosecutor asked all these questions in court, but he never really answered them in anything but vague terms.

  “We met in a diner at breakfast time.”

  “And you had never met Carole Shaw before?”

  “No, sir, I had not.”

  “And how were you introduced?”

  “She spilled her coffee, and I helped her clean it up.”

  “So you were seated together at the counter in the diner?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And she spilled her coffee?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you assisted her in cleaning it up?”

  “Yes sir, like I said.”

  “And then you got to talking?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did you talk about?”

  “Oh, anything really. She told me she was a schoolteacher, and I asked why she wasn’t in school, and she said that she took a day off on the third Monday of every
month, and that she was going to the Field Museum to see an exhibition.”

  “And you went with her, correct?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did she invite you to join her, or did you invite yourself?”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  “Did Carole Shaw invite you to attend the Field Museum exhibition herself, or did you tell her that you were going to accompany her in such a way as she would have felt obliged to let you accompany her?”

  “I’m sorry, I still don’t understand the question, sir . . .”

  “Did you intimidate Carole Shaw? Did you force your attentions upon her?”

  “Objection! Counsel is badgering the witness, asking him to provide an answer as to the state of mind of the victim.”

  “Yes indeed, counsel. I would ask you to phrase the question in such a way as to enable the defendant to give his answer without assumption or hypothesis.”

  “Who initiated your accompanying Carole Shaw to the Field Museum exhibition?”

  “She did, sir. She asked me if I had to go to work, and when I said I did not, she asked me if I would care to see the exhibition.”

  “And this was an exhibition of what?”

  “Old stuff, sir. Museum stuff.”

  I remembered that moment. There was a flurry of repressed sniggers in the courtroom, and I wondered how people could laugh at such a time. They knew they were doing wrong, otherwise they would not have tried to hide their smiles behind hands and scarves. To his credit, Carole’s killer did not smile, nor did he rise to that moment as if he had scored a point. He was serious, deadly serious, just as he was all the way through the trial. I don’t believe I ever saw him smile. Not once.

  “So you’re telling us that Carole Shaw, a single twenty-nine year old kindergarten schoolteacher, invited you, a complete stranger, to attend the museum exhibition with her?”

  “Yes sir, I am.”

  I believed him. That was exactly the kind of thing that my sister would have done. She was a flirt, no doubt about it. She wasn’t mean, she wasn’t manipulative, but she did like the attention she received from men.

  Thirty-five seconds. My palms are sweating. If I squeeze Patrick’s arm I will leave a mark on his sleeve.

  When we were younger, she always had her eye on boys. I mean, she wasn’t promiscuous, not at all. In fact, she was very proper about all that sort of thing. I don’t think she lost her virginity until she was twenty-five, and that was with a boy called Eddie Machin from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Eddie was nice enough, all things considered, but he couldn’t dance worth a nickel and he told jokes that he thought were really funny but, honestly, they weren’t funny at all. When someone laughs at their own jokes more than everyone else, you know there’s an insecurity issue somewhere. I read that in a magazine in a dentist’s waiting room just a week or so after I moved to Chicago back in January of 1953. It made a lot of sense to me. I had to see the dentist because I thought I had an impacted bicuspid, but it was something else. Anyway, that insecurity issue reared its ugly and anxious head in the early summer of 1952, and I think that was half the reason Carole decided to move away from home and take the school job in Chicago. I mean, before that she’d been happy enough teaching kindergarten in Belvidere, but Eddie Machin broke her heart a little, and she felt a change of environment would do her good. By that time mom and dad had been dead three and four years respectively, and there was just nothing to hold her back. She was always braver than me, and I admired that. So she applied for the job in Chicago, and when they gave it to her she was so excited. She wanted me to move with her, but I didn’t come until the early part of 1953. I took a secretarial job for a small paper and stationery company called Rex Humboldt & Son. Rex died a long time ago, but his son, Michael, is a very pleasant man, and my supervisor, Edith Young, has been very understanding about everything, and she has given me the time I need to attend to all that’s going on.

  And though we were both in Chicago, well, Carole had her work and her friends, and I had my work and not so many friends, and I wanted to spend more time with her but there always seemed to be something else happening that was more important. I mean, we’d see each other at least once a week, sometimes two or three times, but it wasn’t like when we were kids, or even when we were in Belvidere. The bigger the city, the more people there are, and yet the greater chance there is of loneliness. Odd, but true. Anyway, I’d seen her with men she knew from her school, and there was a bar we’d sometimes go to called O’Shaughnessy’s, and she always seemed to know everyone there, and men would greet her, and they would look at her in that way that men so often do, as if it’s some kind of quantity survey they’re undertaking, and Carole loved it. She wore very red lipstick, and she had this thing done to her hair that was a little like Susan Hayward, the way it was swept up from the hairline, and it emphasized how bright her eyes were, but I don’t think the boys were all that interested in her eyes.

  So I know she might well have asked that man in the diner to go to the Field Museum exhibition with her, and—if what he said in court was true—then they spent the entire day together. That day was her last day on earth, and it should have been me that spent that day with her, not the man who strangled her.

  Thirty-three. Oh why, oh why can’t it go faster? I know it’s bad to wish away time, like you’re wishing away some of your own life, but I would happily wish away an hour to have this finish now. I would wish away a day of my own life to see the end of someone else’s . . .

  I think she was a good teacher, however. I say however like I’m judging her for her flirtatious disposition around men, but I’m not. She never did anything wrong. She never misled them. She was a proper girl, and she would no more have had sex on a first date than she would have . . . well, than she would have flown to the moon. I know she liked a drink. She liked whiskey sours, but only when they were made properly with good bourbon, sugar, lemon juice, a slice of orange and a maraschino cherry. She sometimes liked a Ward 8, which is the same thing, but they use rye and lemon and orange juice together and grenadine syrup as a sweetener, instead of the sugar. She smoked Viceroy cigarettes. I know all the ads say they’re actually good for you, but I’ve never believed it. I told Carole she shouldn’t smoke, that I honestly felt it was harmful, but she said that her cigarettes had the new cellulose acetate filter and if there was anything harmful about tobacco then those filters stopped it from getting into your body. I don’t know if she was right. I don’t know science and things like that. All I know is weights of paper and how long an Everwrite ballpoint pen will write for without running out. Apparently you can draw a line with an Everwrite for more than a mile, but I don’t believe that either.

  Thirty-two seconds left, and I’m wondering where this telephone is. Where is this telephone? Who will pick it up, and what will they hear?

  So, Carole asked the man in the diner to go to the exhibition, and they spent the whole day together, and they had lunch, and then they had dinner as well, and she wanted to go to a show but he said he would rather just spend more time with her and not be somewhere where they couldn’t talk. She said okay, at least he said she said okay, and then they went to another bar and then she said she was tired and he offered to see her home safely. They took a bus ride together, and they had the bus driver come into court, and he was sworn in, and he said he had seen the man in the dock and the woman who was murdered get on the bus together. He said they had gotten off the bus at the corner of Lombard and 19th Street, and that would have been right because that was the stop nearest Carole’s apartment. The bus driver had the pinky missing on his left hand, and I wondered a lot about how something like that had happened.

  So Carole went up to her apartment, and when she reached the door she asked her killer if he wanted a nightcap. I wondered where that expression came from. I think it means the last drink of the night, to sort of cap off the day. We all know the other meaning as well, and this is the meaning that the killer interpreted from Carole’s
words. Or so he said. He stood there in the dock with his pianist’s hands, and when the public defender asked him if he believed that Carole was offering him sex, he said, “Yes, that was what I thought. I thought she was inviting me to stay the night with her.”

  “And so you went in, honestly believing that Carole Shaw wanted you to stay the night in her apartment, and that she also wanted to engage in sexual congress with you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But the prosecution is saying that that was not what she meant.”

  “I know, sir.”

  “And what do you have to say about that?”

  “The prosecution was not there, so I don’t know how he can know what she meant.”

  There was another flurry of sounds, whether it was smiles or sniggers or what I don’t know, but the defense counsel didn’t pause to let it impinge upon his line of questioning.

  “So there was no doubt in your mind that she wanted you to stay, and that she wanted to become physically intimate with you?”

  “No, sir, that’s what I believed to be the case.”

  “And then what happened?”

  Well, it seems that they went inside Carole’s apartment, and she was already very drunk, and he was drunk too, and Carole had some bourbon, and he fetched ice from the icebox, and they stood in the kitchen and drank their drinks, and at one point he leaned towards her and kissed her, and she let him kiss her and then she kissed him back.

  “And did she make any indication that she was unsettled about your advances?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And then you touched her in a more sexual manner?”

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “In what way did you touch her in a more sexual manner?”

  “I put my hands on her waist, and I carried on kissing her, and she set her drink down on the countertop, and she put her arms around my neck, and we kissed for a while longer.”