Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests

by Inc. Mystery Writers of America

Bass jabs his fingers in my chest. “Don’t go righteous on me, Counselor. You tried to frame me too.”

  “Aren’t you worried she’ll set you up?”

  “No. Lucky for me, Eve likes outlaws better than lawyers.”

  There isn’t much to say after that. Bass looks at his watch and tells me he has a plane to catch. He unlocks the bathroom door and walks out.

  The bartender is clearing the table where Bass was sitting. As I walk by, he puts his hand on my chest. I recognize him as one of the cops who searched my house.

  “Stone’s waiting for you across the street,” he says.

  I push through the back exit and cross the street to the pawnshop’s parking lot. I knock on the side door of the gray cargo van parked in the shadows. Lois Stone opens the sliding door and steps out into the afternoon heat. She’s wearing a dark green pantsuit that complements her auburn hair. There’s something on her lips—lipstick or gloss—that leaves them shiny. I’d like to think she did it for me, but that’s wishful thinking.

  “Did you get it?”

  “Loud and clear. There’s enough for arrest warrants. Eve Toscar and Dexter Bass won’t be spending her money anytime soon.”

  “How’d you know he wouldn’t find the bug?”

  Stone grabs the van’s door handle. “Jack, guys like you and Bass always think you’re smarter than the rest of us. That’s your downfall. Once he frisked you and didn’t find anything, I knew he’d stop looking. There was no way he’d suspect we bugged the john.”

  I know she’s right. “So is our deal back on?”

  “Yeah, it’s back on. You’ve got until Monday to get your affairs in order.”

  I shake my head. “I’m gonna die an old man in prison.”

  Stone’s face softens for a moment. “Cheer up, Jack. With good behavior, you could get paroled in fifteen, twenty years. You’ll still have plenty of life left.”

  “Not quite what I had in mind.”

  She shrugs. “A word of advice?”

  “Sure, what’ve I got to lose?”

  Her eyes sparkle. “When you’re in the shower, don’t drop the soap.”

  THE LETTER

  BY EILEEN DUNBAUGH

  The rag-and-bones man was the terror of my childhood. “Useless girls, like useless things, go to old Rags,” my mother would say if I slacked on the chores she’d assigned. We knew him only as “Rags,” the small, swarthy collector of junk, until the day my father got saddled with him as a client. Despite my mother’s constant warnings, Daddy always seemed to be in the courthouse at the wrong time, when some judge or other was assigning lawyers to represent the latest crop of indigents who’d come before the bar. There were no public defenders back then, and the fool lawyer who ended up at the end of a judge’s pointing finger took the case pro bono. It was possible to decline, but woe to the attorney who did if he found himself before that particular judge again.

  I don’t know why Daddy was always at the courthouse, unless it was because he was lonely. Each evening before he came home my mother would comb her hair and change her dress—and then spoil it all by talking at him, endlessly, and mostly in the same groove, telling him that a smart lawyer would keep away from the courthouse except when it was necessary to be there on a paying case, and that the way to feed your family was with last wills and testaments. I used to imagine that she was a record and that her voice would distort and finally stop if only I could figure out how to make the machine wind down.

  She and Daddy had moved to Chicago from Missouri, mostly because of Mama’s “aspirations.” That was the word she used, proudly and without irony; she “aspired” to a better life. So instead of taking his share of the family farm, my father went to law school, moved to Chicago, and set up a one-man office on the fifth floor of a building on State Street. For a while, my mother was satisfied. The business boom of the twenties was big enough to bring well-paying work even to unambitious lawyers. And it wasn’t that Daddy was lazy; his “problem,” as Mama put it, was that he “pondered” too much. In the evenings he’d read, and when he could get away from the office, you’d find him puffing contemplatively on his cigar as he threw his fishing line into the stream not far from our house. We lived on the North Side then, in a tiny one-story, two-bedroom wood house that had seen better days. The neighborhood grew all around us in the twenties, but we still had country at our backs.

  If Mama reminded me of a record, like all records of that time she played only two songs. She didn’t like the grammar I picked up from the children of the slaughterhouse-working Poles and tried to arrange for me to play with the daughters of Dr. Adams, from our street, instead. She nagged my father until he built a playhouse in the backyard, thinking the Adams girls wouldn’t be able to resist it. When they didn’t come, her song for me—her “wayward Sadie”—became a lament.

  I preferred it to the song reserved for my father—a relentlessly upbeat march, as if he only needed the example of others put before him to catch the rhythm and fall in line. He must have been lonely, for how can you confide your secret fears and doubts to someone who responds by pointing out that others don’t have any? I think he had one friend, a man called Tom Fenton, who dealt in stocks and had an office in my father’s building. It was a name, at any rate, that sometimes came up at the dinner table. He never brought Tom Fenton home, though, and in my partiality to my father I assumed it was because he didn’t want to subject his friend to my mother’s endless talk.

  I would run a dozen blocks to meet my father on his way from the streetcar each evening. It may sound irresponsible to let a child wander alone through city streets, but it wasn’t unusual—before the murder anyway. Children weren’t supervised much as long as they chipped in around the house and were respectful in sight of a parent. Outdoors—and out of adult sight—we mostly did as we pleased, playing on construction sites amid broken glass, asbestos, and oil; sneaking in and out of hobo camps; climbing trees in the snatches of woods that remained. It was anything but a childproof world, but then accidents, even inside homes (where the absence of insulation in walls and on appliances made tinder boxes of the houses), were accepted as part of life.

  What was not accepted was the default of trusted institutions such as the banks with the stock-market crash of 1929. I was nine. Old enough to sense even before Daddy came home ashen-faced on “Black Thursday” that something was wrong. My mother sat him down in a chair and knelt on the floor to take his hand. It was the tenderest moment I ever witnessed between them. I wasn’t told until years later that my father’d heard a gunshot that afternoon and rushed to the next-door office of the broker named Tom Fenton to find he’d shot himself through the mouth.

  We all knew our life was about to change. Now my father hung around the courthouse hoping to hear of paying work—any paying work. People didn’t need a lawyer to draft a will when all they had was two sticks to rub together.

  My mother started her own small millinery business from our house, and it was then that her threats about the rag-and-bones man began in earnest. She needed my help, and I was getting old enough to provide it. Gone were the Polish washerwomen who’d sloshed and wrung and hung and ironed our laundry. I watched Mama do it herself, surprised at the strength of her hands, which I’d never seen put to such hard work before. We didn’t have the powerful detergents then that came out after the war; you got things clean with water heated in a tank without a temperature or pressure control, and with a washer that didn’t rinse or spin. Before long my mother’s hands turned lobster red from the scalding water, just like the hands of those sturdy Polish women. We both looked out at my playhouse as if it were a relic from an irreclaimably happy past, and for the first time I understood her “aspirations.”

  All three of us now lived in fear that we’d end up even worse off than where she and Daddy began. We never lost our tiny house, but we knew we could, and unlike many others who had family they could move in with, my parents had too thoroughly severed their ties back home to expect
help in a crisis.

  My mother passed her anxiety on to me through her threats about old Rags. I was young enough to take her seriously, and what made it worse was that Rags used to park his cart, which was pulled by a bony horse with an overlarge head, half a block down our street while he stopped to get a soda from a nearby shop. You couldn’t see the shop from where he parked the cart; he chose the spot, I suppose, because there was a big tree there that shaded the horse on hot days.

  For me, his parking place was a constant worry. It meant he didn’t just pass our house shouting “Rags and old iron!” at a pace that allowed people to run out with their recyclable trash—the old clothes, bottles, tin cans, and iron he’d pay a penny or two for. My mother would have an hour each Tuesday to catch him and sell me to him.

  If my mother was an unsympathetic adversary to me during those years, she surprised me by showing a strong streak of compassion and generosity toward others. She had something mildly disparaging to say about just about everyone whose background wasn’t exactly like ours. But she never let her prejudices stop her from giving assistance to anyone who needed it. She even used our few saved dollars to buy extra food for the endless stream of homeless men who knocked on our back screen looking for work.

  Old Rags, as we called him until the day he became Daddy’s client, had a name that was unspellable, let alone pronounceable. Something with a jumble of z’s and other consonants. Naturally that made his background a subject for discussion at our dinner table. A Russian, my mother was certain, but Daddy said no, he was Hungarian. A Gypsy, then, my mother insisted.

  But Rags’s roots were not discussed with my mother’s usual nonchalance. Her voice was hushed, because of the horror of the thing he was said to have done. It was my father’s first murder case, and not one he’d elected to take. Why he’d taken it at all, even at the behest of the judge with the pointing finger, my mother could not understand.

  A little girl had been found dead in Rags’s cart, under some pieces of iron and a lot of loose clothing. I was ten, and they felt no need to shield me from their conversation as one would protect a child’s tender ears today. As I listened, I was filled with new loathing for my mother. I thought her a hypocrite, without knowing the word. So this was what happened to girls who were sold to old Rags. And my mother had threatened me with it a hundred times. I wondered if my father knew how close I’d come to being the girl on that cart.

  No one could change Daddy’s mind about representing the ragman. We were already feeling the impact of the Depression, and my father’s health, by this time, had also started to give out. My mother was right that he shouldn’t be subjecting himself to the strain of such a notorious case, but he’d heard other lawyers murmuring that they’d give Rags short shrift if he was assigned to them, and he wasn’t going to turn his client over to someone who’d get him summarily convicted.

  We never knew exactly what was wrong with my father, just that it was some kind of wasting illness that made him more gaunt with each passing month. He’d consulted a doctor, who could find no cause, and that was not an era when people got “second opinions.”

  If anything could have made my father’s situation worse, it was that the body was identified, three days after its discovery, as that of Margaret Hilgendorf, a girl whose older sister was once a classmate of mine. When my mother heard the news, she tsked over the length of time it had taken the family—who were German immigrants—to report the girl missing. Their reluctance to trouble the police only reinforced her opinion that there was something sheeplike and unquestioning in the German character.

  My impression of the family didn’t fit my mother’s stereotype at all. Mrs. Hilgendorf was a broom-wielding Brunhilde of a woman who made me think of bears, not sheep, and she stood no nonsense at all from any of her three daughters. I’d stopped at their house after school two or three times back when Gretchen was in my class, and Gretchen had immediately ushered me out of her mother’s presence to a recess under the basement stairs that she’d turned into an Aladdin’s cave. We were playing there one day when Mrs. Hilgendorf came clattering down the steps above us in pursuit of four-year-old Margaret, who ran into the narrow space behind the water heater to evade her. Mrs. Hilgendorf had given up that day, content to shout a threat at the little girl and retreat back upstairs with her broom. But the incident had frightened me, mostly because of the sheer size of the woman.

  When Margaret’s body was identified, the pressure on my father intensified. The family lived right in our neighborhood, and that seemed to provide a nail for Rags’s coffin, since our street was near the end of his Tuesday round and the place where he parked his cart to take his late lunch at the soda shop. The Hilgendorf house was a block down the street that intersected with ours to the west, but this was still the outskirts of the city, and there was a large open field that ran from where the horse and cart were parked along the backyards of the houses on the Hilgendorfs’ street. Most of the backyards had been privatized by fences or bushes, but the Hilgendorfs’ had been left wide open and could be seen from where the horse was tied. The district attorney’s theory was that Rags had spotted the pretty child playing in her yard and used the cover of the bushes and fences that backed the other yards to travel the few hundred feet to kidnap her.

  What Rags’s motive was, no one could say. There was speculation that it was something “indecent,” and perhaps something involving torture, for Margaret’s body was covered with third-degree burns all along one side. When the coroner’s report came back saying she had not been sexually assaulted, Daddy breathed a big sigh of relief. But there were still the burns, and the talk continued that Rags was a “pervert” who tortured children. A pervert my daddy was defending.

  My father’s case was weak, and the dimmer the junkman’s prospects looked, the more my father insisted on our referring to him with respect. We weren’t allowed to say “Rags” anymore. Now it was Mr. Keresztnévz.

  Mr. Keresztnévz’s defense, as Daddy presented it, was that he hadn’t the nerve to kidnap or kill a girl and then coolly partake of his lunch at the nearby shop. Several witnesses put him at the soda shop for at least a half hour, and others testified to seeing him leave the shop, collect his cart, and proceed up our street in the opposite direction from the Hilgendorfs’. The only time Mr. Keresztnévz’s movements were unaccounted for was the time before he sat calmly sipping his soda and eating his sandwich.

  Another point in Mr. Keresztnévz’s favor was that the autopsy showed no evidence of Margaret having been bound or gagged; and it established that she’d been burned while still alive, which suggested to my father that she’d been killed before ever being put in Mr. Keresztnévz’s cart, in some private place where a gag was unnecessary. He told us over dinner one night what he thought had happened: that Margaret had wandered away from home, stumbled into a vagrant’s camp, and burned herself accidentally on a barrel fire. A hobo would be frightened by a burned little girl’s screams and might have panicked and killed her while attempting to shut her up.

  Two boys rummaging in the rag cart for metal pipe with which to make smoke bombs had found Margaret’s body at dusk, about two hours after Mr. Keresztnévz parked for the day, in a shed not a half mile from our house. That was plenty of time for someone other than Mr. Keresztnévz to have put the body in the cart and disappeared without leaving a trace. So went Daddy’s argument. But he knew very well that under pressure of cross-examination, some of those witnesses who accounted for the ragman’s whereabouts during the crucial afternoon would break down and say maybe they weren’t so sure what time it had been after all. And besides, Mr. Keresztnévz was always going to be Rags to the people on that jury—a hunched little man with unfathomable, deeply hooded eyes who wore a dirty coat. What my father needed was someone who could testify unequivocally that no body had been in Rags’s cart when he left it in its parking place that night.

  It was wishing for the impossible.

  But then the impossible happened�
�� .

  It was September, a week before the trial was to begin. I’d run out to meet my father as usual, but he stepped down from the streetcar deep in conversation with a pretty woman in a red feathered hat. I got a welcoming pat on the back, but they were too busy talking about some book they’d both read to bother with introductions. We were late getting home because my father insisted on walking by a much longer route that was on the woman’s way. We’d only just come in and sat down together with the comics when a heavy hand thumped on the door.

  That time of the evening, it could only be one person. The oldest Hilgendorf girl, Adelaide, delivered coffee cakes and strudels for her mother’s at-home bakery business. We had a standing order for Tuesdays, but now that Daddy was representing Mr. Keresztnévz my mother was embarrassed to answer Adelaide’s knock.

  “Will you get it, please, Sadie?” she called out. For once I understood how my mother felt. I tried to avoid Gretchen at school for exactly the same reason. If only the Hilgendorfs would just refuse to deliver to us anymore. But they remained as faithful as the rising sun. The only time Adelaide had ever missed a delivery was the Tuesday Margaret disappeared.

  The knock sounded again as I slid off the couch, grabbed some change from a dish near the front door, and swung the door open with my hand out ready to pay Adelaide.

  But it wasn’t Adelaide. It was a rough-looking man with a couple of days’ growth of beard, wearing a tattered vest over a dirty work shirt.

  The murder fresh on my mind, I shouted “Daddy!” with such alarm that both my parents hurried to the door.

  Mama didn’t know what to make of the unexpected visitor, but my father seemed to recognize him and invited him to come sit on the back porch, a glassed-in space that had the advantage of being away from my mother’s ears and mine.

  I think my mother and I both assumed the man’s business had something to do with Rags, because none of my father’s normal acquaintances dressed so shabbily or had such an air of furtiveness. When the man was gone, though, Daddy stubbornly refused to say what it had been about.