The Evening of the Good Samaritan

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  MUCH OF THE CONVERSATION in the faculty lounge that night turned upon the weather. One man or another would rise every few minutes and go to a window. The mists rolled in from the East, surge upon surge across the green, like the swells of a slow sea. It was not Covington’s habit to linger so late among his fellows—an hour after dinner perhaps before settling down to the night’s work. But he knew that he was not able to work and he knew that he would meet the last train from New York if Hogan had not reported in before midnight. He had left a message with Tad’s house mother to have the boy call him when he came in.

  At a few minutes after eleven he was called to the telephone. Person to person, the operator said, and Covington wondered if Tad were calling him from New York, perhaps having purposely missed the last train.

  Covington identified himself.

  “Go ahead, Traders City,” the operator said.

  “Mr. Covington, this is Martha Reiss, Tad Hogan’s mother.” Her voice was quite clear but a slight tremor ran through it.

  “Yes, Mrs. Reiss.”

  “You have not heard … from Tad?”

  “Not since he went off campus at four this afternoon.”

  She was a few seconds going on as though waiting for him to say something further. Then: “Doctor Reiss was murdered in New York tonight. The police have arrested Tad.”

  Over and over again going back to the moment afterwards Covington would feel that he had known what she was going to say before he heard the words. He said only: “God Almighty.”

  “I can’t get transportation to New York except the train at midnight. Will you go to him, Mr. Covington?”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t let him talk too much.”

  Covington began to recover his senses. “Shall I get a lawyer?”

  “Please do. I am most beholden to you.” And she hung up.

  Someone from the president’s office was waiting for him when he got off the phone. The news of the murder had been broadcast at eleven o’clock. Covington called the dean of the law school at home and got the name and phone number of Thomas Andrew Dobbs, one of the foremost criminal lawyers in the country and an alumnus of Rodgers University. Covington was fortunate in reaching Dobbs at once.

  “They’ll have to arraign him in night court if we get onto it immediately,” Dobbs said, and from his competent matter-of-factness, Covington supposed that was good. “They’ll try for a confession first, of course.” He was thinking aloud. “Redmond will be our man for it, I think. He’s got the connections.”

  It was almost dawn when Covington reached the city, his nerves taut, his eyes strained from concentration on the Turnpike road. He reached the court before Tad had been called. He saw him sitting on a bench between two policemen—an undistinguished looking trio among the discoverers and perpetrators of one night’s crime on the city streets. The low-ceilinged room was fairly crowded still. Beneath the naked light bulbs and against the green, sweating walls of Magistrate’s Court, all men and women, black or white, bore a greenish tinge. The monotonous hum of charges, dismissals, remands, was constant as was the scraping and shuffle of feet on the cement floor. Tad did not see the teacher, not looking to see anyone, just staring straight ahead.

  But almost at once Redmond spotted him and came up to introduce himself: Dennis P. Redmond. The two men shook hands. P. for Patrick, surely. He had the smile of a politician, the hand shake of a hurler, and the moment Tad was called up, Covington was grateful he had such counsel. When they stood before the magistrate, they seemed the very caricature of lawyer and client, the one confident, vigorous, a champion, and Tad, his narrow shoulders slumped, only his head defiant, a small, close-cropped knob shooting up as though telescoped out of his collar.

  The charge against Thaddeus Marcus Hogan was read in a quick monotone, much of which Covington could not hear. He heard enough, however, to understand that Tad was alleged to have assaulted his stepfather on a lightly trafficked street in Greenwich Village a few minutes after they had quarreled and parted at the restaurant where they had dined. The weapon was a surgical knife, part of a set given to Dr. Reiss at a testimonial luncheon that day.

  Hogan pleaded “Not guilty.” But that was the instant when Covington was first able to see the boy’s eyes. He looked sullenly, almost defiantly at Redmond before he said the words.

  Hogan was ordered held without bail on suspicion of murder, and remanded to the custody of the police. Covington was shocked at the dispatch with which so portentous a thing was accomplished.

  Covington was shocked also at the undisguised satisfaction the uniformed police showed in taking charge of the prisoner. Hogan had never been a boy for making obeisance to authority, and the authoritarians here were going to have it one way or the other. Covington asked the lawyer if he could be allowed to talk to Hogan.

  It was so easily accomplished by Redmond’s affable persuasion Covington wished the boy might take notice and example: a vain wish. If Hogan were more of that character he might have made the compromises long ago that would have halted him far short of this disaster. And it was, perhaps, his uncompromising nature which had recommended him to the teacher’s affection. On all sides that day was the prevalence of such friendly persuasion as Redmond’s. Unfriendly witnesses automatically bore testimony against themselves.

  Redmond arranged that both he and the teacher ride downtown in the police van with the prisoner and his guards. It was one of the strangest rides in Covington’s experience: the half-light within the wagon illuminating faces beneath which the bodies were lost in a murky darkness, the springless seats; the dawn to be glimpsed beyond the barred windows, a dawn that gave light but defined none of the objects one expects to see in daylight, for the fog persisted though the sun was burning through it. He was taken back in memory to wartime Holland, the springless vans jolting along the shell-pocked roads. Even the light was such as he remembered, the sun obscured by the restless dust after the night’s bombardment.

  No one in the police van spoke for a long time. The bell sometimes clanged and Tad would grin a little at the sound. It pleased Covington to see manifest some stirring of the boy’s imagination; no matter whether the grin was mocking or ironic.

  And mocking it was, alas, for he jerked his head in the direction of the driver and said, purposely slurring his usually careful speech: “That’s doin’ his dooty.”

  The policeman to whom he was manacled wrenched the boy’s wrist by giving a sudden twist to the chain between them. Tad winced, then cast him a venomous glance and said: “You son of a bitch.”

  Covington, sitting opposite him, looked at his own hands. He had never heard Tad use language like it before. The night had wrought much change in him. Redmond, next to Covington, softly whistled a few phrases from something operatic.

  “This is what they’re coddling in the universities of the country nowadays,” the policeman said, and leaning sidewise, he spat expertly between the bars of the back window.

  Oh, yes. Tad would get on marvelously with the police.

  There was not much time left. Covington tried to find a way to put his question that would not provoke some bitter, self-injurious retort from the boy. He had not yet acknowledged even the presence of the teacher. Finally he asked simply: “Is there anything you want me to do, Tad? To say to your mother when she gets here?”

  The boy lifted his eyes, the wide dark blue eyes that met Covington’s frankly and then narrowed as he withdrew again into isolated misery. Covington had held his own gaze steady, trying to convey a little understanding at least. And a little was all he had, for such a hatred as this boy had cherished for Nathan Reiss was beyond the teacher’s reckoning. There was nothing in his own life by which he could relate to it.

  Hogan turned his head away as though he would have hid his face if that were possible, and Covington saw the quick movement in the boy’s throat, the thrust of pain without tears, and he assumed that something of his unworded message had got across. He rode out th
e rest of the interminable journey in aching suspense himself. One of the cops said it was clearing up, and the other said he was glad because he had promised to take his kids to the zoo that afternoon. “If it don’t clear up,” he said, “I’ll have to take them to the Museum of Natural History. The dead zoo, my kid calls it. Ain’t that something, the dead zoo!”

  Covington had been staring at the window. In the afterglow he could see nothing but striped patches of light wherever he tried to focus his vision. His sight was still bleared when the vehicle slowed down. That and the tires’ rubbing against the curb, indicated their arrival at the city prison. He laid his hand on the boy’s knee. “Anything, Tad?”

  The boy shook his head, but murmured, “Thanks.”

  The van door was opened from the outside, and then in the instant they stood all of them together, the men getting their legs steady beneath them, Tad said: “Mr. Covington, if you would tell my mother …” By his own choice, the boy left off the sentence there.

  8

  COVINGTON MET ASSISTANT DISTRICT Attorney Reginald Tripp in his office at a little before noon. Redmond had told him he was likely to be called and advised him to be cooperative without volunteering anything, above all opinions. But with Mr. Tripp himself, Covington thought after a very few minutes in his company, fact and opinion were hardly distinguishable.

  Tripp was a tough, but soft spoken man with the crisp manner of being able to get things done. He was well under fifty, and Covington had no doubt, ambitious. But then, one was always likely to think of a prosecutor as ambitious, and sharp. This fellow was sharper than most. And Covington realized just where he was trying to go very early in the interrogation.

  “Did Hogan tell you why he was going into New York?”

  “To have dinner with his stepfather.”

  “Was there anything special about the occasion?” the lawyer asked.

  “About their having dinner, not to my knowledge.”

  “You didn’t know Doctor Reiss was in town for a testimonial luncheon?”

  “Yes, I knew that.”

  Tripp smiled a little and said casually: “Hogan didn’t think much of the Conference of Jewish Women, did he?”

  “I don’t think I could answer that.”

  “He called them a corny outfit,” Tripp said.

  “I suppose,” Covington said, “I would say the same thing about most fraternal—or benevolent organizations.”

  “Would you,” the lawyer murmured, and Covington realized he had volunteered an opinion.

  “Have you ever heard him make any other anti-Semitic remarks?”

  “That, sir, was not an anti-Semitic remark. Nor is the boy anti-Semitic.” Covington was not a quick-tempered man, but the lawyer had come very near to making him one then.

  Tripp himself merely drew a line across the blank piece of paper before him as though striking a question. “In other words, professor, you don’t think that’s an issue in this case?”

  “I do not.”

  “Then let’s try and clear up a couple of thing if we can,” the lawyer said, and scratched his ear. “Ever have your ear go numb on you? Maybe I get it from the telephone … Schlaacht’s Restaurant. That’s as German as Hitler. As a matter of fact it was a Bundist hangout back in the thirties. What do you suppose persuaded Reiss, a Jewish refugee to have dinner there?” Covington did not answer. “Especially when he himself had had a reservation made at Jacques’.”

  “From my knowledge of Hogan, I know that he would have preferred Jacques’,” the teacher said.

  “You know, professor,” Tripp said, “according to you, the boy and his stepfather should have got along beautifully. But we both know that isn’t so, don’t we?”

  “I know that Hogan did not like his stepfather,” Covington said coldly.

  “What do you know about this character, Bergner?”

  Covington was aware again of being led, the word “character” would be meant to disarm him. “Practically nothing,” Covington said. All he did know of Bergner was Tad’s contempt for him: “Nathan’s broom.”

  “A friend of the family, would you say?”

  “Probably a friend of Doctor Reiss’.”

  “Not a likely confidant of the boy’s?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” Covington said.

  “And yet Hogan seems to have confided to him yesterday afternoon that he thought Nathan Reiss was responsible for his father’s death … In fact, Hogan himself admits saying it. And he goes further: he claims to have said it to Reiss—and that at dinner in a restaurant called Schlaacht’s—Reiss refused to deny it. You know, professor, it would take very little persuasion to get that boy to plead guilty, and I’m not at all sure it wouldn’t be in his own best interests.”

  The lawyer raised his hand to forestall Covington’s protest. “Let me go over with you just for a few minutes the way it looks to this office right now:

  “First there’s the matter of physical evidence and the findings of the medical examiner’s office. I assure you, everything in that is going to be checked out. Our job right now is looking to motive. We have to go back a ways for that, I think.

  “Doctor Reiss came to this country, a refugee, in ‘39 or ’40, according to Bergner. He got out, we may assume, with enough money, enough of everything to take care of him until he was established. He was a man, shall we say, not ostensibly Jewish—despite his subsequent activities in this country. I say all of this because he shared a practice which probably wasn’t Jewish at all with Doctor Hogan at one time. He was affiliated with three hospitals at the time of his death. None of them is Jewish sponsored. His wife is not Jewish. All that is one side of the man. The other side is something else. He became active in the Zionist movement, he was honored yesterday by a Jewish organization. It’s my feeling, Mr. Covington, that a man does not survive handily where several million like him perished without carrying the burden of their martyrdom for the rest of his natural life. And it gets heavier all the time. Such a man, I propose, might literally beg for persecution. I mean he’d want it—like food, like sex, deeply, pathologically, trying to provoke people into it. I think you and I know enough of human nature to realize that if anybody asks for a beating, he’s going to find someone to give it to him.”

  Covington sat, determined to hear the man out. He could not deny the ring of truth in the theory he was sounding: and Tad responded always where Nathan Reiss was concerned as though deliberately goaded into some new expression of hatred.

  “And so we come to young Hogan: he grew up in the house with this strong-willed man, this—masochist. I don’t deny for a minute, Covington, that Reiss was a bastard where this boy was concerned. I shouldn’t be surprised if he deliberately turned him into an anti-Semite. That’s what I meant by saying it might be better for the boy to plead guilty: his lawyers could expose Reiss for what he was—and save the boy’s life.” Tripp leaned across his desk. “I’m not trying to shock you into anything, Covington. I assure you that if you were to read Bergner’s and the boy’s own testimony as to what he went through last night you would understand our line of reasoning.”

  Covington said: “But he pleaded ‘not guilty’, Mr. Tripp.”

  “I think he will change that plea … voluntarily. Because I think he’s proud of what he did.”

  “I swear to God, sir, that boy is not anti-Semitic. No!” Covington pushed himself away from Tripp’s desk and got up. “No, sir. You’re wrong there and you’ve got to be wrong in the rest of it. Whatever happened last night, I tell you, Nathan Reiss did not, could not brainwash that boy. You’ve come closer doing that to me than ever he did to Hogan.”

  “All right,” Tripp said placatingly. “I’m not going to argue it with you. There’s not much point, is there? Would you like some coffee?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Sure?” He picked up the phone and ordered two cartons of it sent up anyway.

  Covington, given the moment’s respite, began to contemplate why the
lawyer had put him through that gambit: he was hoping, Covington came to suspect, that the teacher might persuade the boy and his lawyers to change the plea: that was what he wanted. And realizing it, Covington suspected that the District Attorney did not actually have sufficient evidence on which to hold Hogan otherwise.

  Covington’s whole line of reasoning must have shone in his face, for as soon as Tripp hung up the phone, he said: “He’s going to be arraigned soon, you know. And we’re going to charge him with first-degree murder … So if there’s any way in which you think you can help him, it ought to be now.”

  “God knows, I want to,” Covington said.

  The lawyer studied him for a moment. “Have you any idea why he should have wanted to telephone a woman named Madame Johanna Schwarzbach at twenty minutes to nine last night?”

  “Why he should have wanted to, I don’t know,” Covington said slowly.

  The lawyer sighed. “That makes two of you. He doesn’t seem to know either.”

  “Have you asked Madame Schwarzbach?”

  “Do you know her?”

  “I know who she is,” Covington said.

  “Then you know why I haven’t asked her. I’m waiting for the boss’ okay.”

  There were some things, some people on whom the city of New York could wait apparently. Covington said: “She used to be Doctor Reiss’ mistress, Mr. Tripp. Perhaps that should enhance her privilege even more.”

  Tripp was a few seconds before he spoke. Then: “Does young Hogan know that?”

  Too late Covington turned his bitterness on himself. He answered truthfully: “That’s where I found it out.”

  9

  THAT SAME NOON CAME for Martha as the train on which she rode pulled out of Albany, down along the widening Hudson River. The mist lay in patches sometimes severing a bright sky from a clouded landscape. Heaven and earth were never joined, she thought. She sat at the window of the compartment in much the same position as she had sat the night, not even having had the bed lowered. She moved her lips now and then, the habit of prayer no less strong than the need for it.