He didn’t open up until the next night, when he came home with resolution and worry and hopefulness all mixed on his face and told us he had a witness who would prove that the dead girl was put on the cart after Mr. Keresztnévz finished his rounds. The man worked for Mr. Keresztnévz occasionally, helping him sort the things he collected and deliver them to whoever was willing to pay. The afternoon of the murder he and Mr. Keresztnévz had been sifting through the cart looking for cotton clothing, having been offered ten cents a laundry-basketful by a local printer who would use them in press cleaning. They’d poked through the whole bed of the cart, pulling out shabby garments that could be torn up to make that ten cents, and it was impossible, the witness claimed, that a body could have remained unobserved.
A problem with this testimony was that Rags had not said anything about sorting through the cart with his sometime employee when he was interviewed by the police. If he had, it would certainly have been known to my father. The only possible explanation, if this witness was telling the truth, was that Rags failed fully to understand the nature of his situation. And truly he hadn’t seemed quite right in the head since his arrest; clearly terrified, he’d mostly rocked back and forth and moaned, instead of helping Daddy figure out how to save his life.
The last-minute emergence of a witness for the defense was a big break, even if there were holes in the story just waiting for the prosecution to rip open. For the first time, a ray of doubt about Rags’s guilt started to shimmer in my mother’s eyes. She was so absorbed in this new turn of events that we were on dessert before she imparted herbig news. Someone had stolen her grocery money, which was kept in a coffee can on a high shelf near the door to the back porch. Our doors were usually left unlocked, and my mother was convinced that a hobo had come inside while she was out and found the money.
“I’ve told you before to lock the doors, Alice… . Let’s all try to be more careful,” my father said, putting a reassuring hand on hers.
____
THE DAY BEFORE the State of Illinois v. Keresztnévz went to the jury, a letter addressed to my father arrived with our morning mail. On light blue stationery, marked Personal and confidential,it sat on the kitchen table, where my mother and I hovered over it like bees every time we passed.
Daddy came home that night well past dinnertime, as he had throughout the trial, but early enough that I was still up doing homework. Mama and I exchanged a look when we saw that he was as surprised as we’d been by the letter. He took it out to the porch to open it, though, causing suspicion to cloud my mother’s face. Then he came back into the house, put the blue envelope in his breast pocket, grabbed his coat, and said he had to go back to his office.
He must have come home sometime in the early morning to wash up and change his clothes, but neither of us heard him. It was his day to sum up for Mr. Keresztnévz, and then the junk collector’s fate would be in others’ hands.
Mama woke me up that morning slamming doors. I assumed she was upset over the unexplained letter on what was clearly a woman’s stationery. But whatever jealous thoughts might have been eating at her, she was determined to be at the courthouse for the summation. I begged her to let me take off school and come with her.
It was the first and only time I ever saw my father in a courtroom. Rags had someone there too. In the row behind the table where the accused sat, there huddled a tiny woman with a babushka on her head and a toddler clutched to her breast. “Mr. Keresztnévz’s wife,” Mama whispered as the court was being called to order.
I shrank inside my thin dress as the prosecution lawyer got up and had his say. I’d never been able to stand up to vindictiveness, and I didn’t expect that my father would be able to either. But I learned something that day. When it was his turn to speak, some fire rose up in the man I’d known only as a gentle father. He commanded the room in a way the prosecuting attorney had not, for all the harsh accusations he’d flung about. And it wasn’t my father’s words that moved his listeners either; it was the faith in Mr. Keresztnévz that resonated in his voice. When he’d finished, Mama and I looked at each other and the thought passed silently between us: That jury’s got to let Rags go.
There was nothing for it now but to wait for the verdict. My father gave Mr. Keresztnévz an encouraging pat on the back and made his way to the back of the courtroom, radiating gratitude at the sight of us. My mother affected a stern look at first, punishment, I suppose, for his mysterious behavior over the letter. But by the time we reached the streetcar, they’d linked arms and offered me a hand. My mother was proud of her husband, and of me. I think jealousy made her see that.
We’d just reached the house, and I was about to suggest we all go out to dinner, when my mother took a good look at my father’s haggard face and stopped in her tracks.
“Dear God, Matthew,” she said, putting a hand on his forehead, “we need to get you to bed.”
She bundled him up with a hot-water bottle and extra blankets and sat with him through the night. By morning I could hear the rasp of his breathing all the way down the hall. A doctor was called, with the effect of frightening rather than comforting me, because money for a house call wouldn’t be spent except in the worst case.
About the time the doctor pulled up in his Essex, a messenger came to the house to say that the jury was back. My father managed to raise himself up and get out of bed. Compassion outweighing his disapproval, the doctor drove us to the courthouse and waited with us while the verdict was read.
After the calling to order of the court, the judge’s questions to the jury, and the unbearable moments of silence while the judge read what was written on the paper handed from the jury foreman to the clerk to him, the words—“not guilty”—rushed through me like a tonic. The pressure was off. Daddy would recover now, and our life would go back to normal.
But it wasn’t to be. When my father turned from the defendant’s table, he was a spent man. And this time when he was laid down on his sickbed, he wouldn’t ever get up again. We sat with him for two days while he tossed uncomfortably—murmuring, in his waking hours, that he had to get to his office, that there was something he had to do.
At first Mama thought he was raving. “It’s all right, Matthew,” she kept repeating, “Mr. Keresztnévz’s been acquitted.” But finally she ushered me out, shut the door, and sat talking to him for a long while alone.
When she opened the door again, it was to tell me my father had died.
The agony of that moment comes back to me in the small hours of lonely nights to this day. But there was no time for it to sink in then, because my mother would not let us rest. She arranged for the funeral to be the next day. There were few mourners besides the Keresztnévzs, who laid a huge wreath on the fresh-covered earth, and no sooner had the tiny reception concluded than Mama told me she would be keeping me home from school to help clear my father’s office.
Clearing the office was a pretext for finding that mysterious letter, I suspected, but my mother would not discuss it. When she found the blue envelope she opened it right away, scanned the single sheet inside, and tore it all to bits. Then she made me help her tear up several folders full of other papers, and we tumbled all the pieces together in the garbage can.
I never dared ask her what was in the letter.
Our lives resumed, though with a different dynamic. With my father’s death, my mother was transformed. She never threatened me again. Evident as her own grief was in the premature gray that quickly frosted her hair, she set her mind immediately to protecting me, using the small savings we had left to pay for a typing course. Before long, she’d landed a job as a secretary.
There was another surprising turnabout too: My father wasn’t two weeks gone when she started urging me to resume my friendship with Gretchen Hilgendorf. “They’ve been through a lot, those children,” she said. “You should ask her to come home with you one afternoon, Sadie. It’s the charitable thing to do.” And instead of avoiding Adelaide when she made her Tuesday del
ivery, my mother now insisted on bringing the girl inside for a cup of tea and a chat, often over Adelaide’s strong objections that she still had other deliveries to make.
Clearly Mama was trying to make friends with the Hilgendorf girls, but whether her purpose was to atone for my father’s defense of Mr. Keresztnévz I couldn’t be certain.
My own picture of my father was slowly, inexorably changing. While I wouldn’t have tolerated anyone else saying it, I wondered if the term “philanderer” had applied to him—because I couldn’t get that letter on a woman’s stationery out of my mind. I remembered the smile on his face as we’d walked with the pretty woman in the red feathered hat and wondered if she had written it.
In time, my transition to adulthood pushed such questions about my father into the background. What would I do when I finished high school? It was Mama’s wish that I go on to college, where, I suppose, she believed I would meet an appropriate sort of man.
She scraped together enough money for me to enroll at the city campus of the state university, where I met a plucky young Irishman called Pete O’Rourke, whom my mother came to adore, her prejudices about the Irish notwithstanding.
By the time I graduated, the war was on. Unwilling to marry a man who was shipping off overseas, I did something that shocked my mother speechless: I enrolled in law school.
It was three years later, on the day I learned I’d passed the bar exam, that she sat me down and turned my whole world inside out.
“Do you remember that letter that came for your father during the trial of Mr. Keresztnévz?” she said.
In an instant I was covered in pins and needles—as if after nearly fifteen years I was coming painfully awake. I wanted to shut her up, tell her not to speak—protest that there was a time when I had wanted to know, but not anymore.
Before I could object she continued, “You must have wondered who wrote it.”
“No—what’s the point? He’s gone.”
My mother laughed. “You think there was another woman, don’t you? Your father and I were in love, Sadie, whether you knew it or not. There was never another woman.”
Women of my mother’s generation looked nothing like the fifty-somethings of today’s boomer generation. They looked old: hair gone to white, middles stout and barrel-shaped. I found it hard to connect what I saw before me with being in love.
“What, then?” I said, fear starting to crawl up my spine.
“It was about the murder. I’m telling you now because you are about to enter your father’s profession. Because you have just been admitted to the bar, and if he’d lived, your father might well have been disbarred. You aren’t going to be accepted easily, a woman in a profession like that. You’ll need to be careful.
“Maybe I’m also telling you because I’ve spent all these years wondering what I would have done in your father’s shoes.”
It was a punch to the solar plexus. Several moments passed before I could draw a normal breath.
“You remember that terrible man who came to the house, the witness who saved Rags?” she continued.
“Of course.”
“Your father paid him.” Bald as that, it came from her mouth. “He took the grocery money from the jar where I kept it and he paid him.”
“Paid him to give his testimony, you mean?!”
“Worse. He told him what to say.”
I flushed so hard it felt as if my skin would burst.
“Don’t judge him too harshly,” my mother said, studying my face. “That’s why I never told you when you were younger. You idolized your father so. I always saw his faults, and I loved him anyway—”
“We’re not talking about faults here!” I interrupted. I stood up and leaned toward her, staring her down as if she were before me in a witness box. Anything to make her recant her terrible testimony. “We’re talking about lying. Breaking the law!”
“He was so certain Mr. Keresztnévz was innocent,” she said calmly. “And there was little doubt he’d be executed if your father lost the case.”
“What has the letter got to do with it?”
“The letter was from someone who had information about the real killer. The trouble was, it came too late. Your father’s witness had already testified, and if what the letter said was true, Margaret Hilgendorf’s body must have been in Rags’s cart—without Rags realizing it—before he parked it for the night.”
“And if Daddy had taken the letter to the police,” I said, seeing where this was going, “it might have come out that he bribed his witness to concoct a false story.”
“That’s right. And there was no guarantee the prosecution would believe what was in the letter and drop the charges against Mr. Keresztnévz anyway.”
“What did the letter say, Mama?”
I still stood over her, but less menacingly now.
She hesitated for a long while. Finally she said, “It was an anonymous letter, from one of the Hilgendorfs’ neighbors. It said that on the afternoon Margaret Hilgendorf went missing, the letter writer was in an upper-story room of her house, which gave a vantage point above her backyard fence. She saw Mrs. Hilgendorf, or someone who looked like her, running along the backs of the houses with a bundle in her arms. She deposited that bundle in Rags’s cart.”
“Why didn’t she sound the alarm right away then?”
“Because there was nothing unusual in someone forgetting they had something for Rags and catching up and putting it on his cart. There was no reason to think there was something wrong until Margaret was discovered dead. By then, Rags had already been arrested. And the letter writer wasn’t confident she’d be believed if she said something against the grieving mother when the whole city already had its scapegoat. When her conscience finally got the better of her, she laid the decision at your father’s door instead of going to the police. I’m sure she was surprised that nothing ever came of her writing that letter. She couldn’t know that your father’s hands were tied by then.”
“But it can’t be true. You’re saying that Mrs. Hilgendorf killed her own child!”
“No, Sadie. I’m not saying that. But just in case there was something to the letter writer’s story, I tried to keep an eye on those Hilgendorf girls over the years. I let them know there was another adult they could come to.”
I looked at the white hair and worn face of the woman I’d been about to visit my wrath upon and my heart expanded. Yes, you did, I thought. And I never knew why.
I sat down and recalled my own childish fears of Mrs. Hilgendorf and her broom. I’d seen her more often in recent years, since Adelaide and Gretchen had married. She still baked for old clients like my mother, but she had to deliver the cakes herself with her girls gone. She was anything but scary in the twilight of her life. Bovine and passive was more like it, with big, sad eyes.
Surely she could not have killed her own child. And yet… I remembered those strange burns that had run down one side of Margaret’s body. And suddenly I knew what had caused them.
“She did it, Mama!” I said.
She stared at me.
“No one ever explained the burns, did they? I mean, I know Daddy thought they were from a hobo’s fire, but why straight along one side like that?”
She said nothing, just continued to stare.
“It was the water heater. Mrs. Hilgendorf used to chase Margaret and Margaret would hide behind the water heater. I saw it with my own eyes. But the day Margaret died, when Mrs. Hilgendorf found her daughter out of her reach, she must have been unwilling to give up. If she could just catch hold of one of Margaret’s arms she could yank her out and punish her. I think she banged Margaret’s head accidentally—but fatally—and scalded the side of her body against the heater as she tried to pull her out.”
My mother put her hands to her face as if she was sorry she’d ever started down this road.
“Not Mrs. Hilgendorf,” she said at last, folding her hands sadly in front of her. “Mrs. Hilgendorf was training Adelaide to join her
in the business. They were saving to open a real bakeshop when Adelaide finished high school.”
She sighed and looked regretfully into space. “The day Margaret was killed, Mrs. Hilgendorf had to go downtown with her husband. It was a proud moment for Adelaide, who was entrusted with baking the coffee cakes—the stollen—for the first time. Only Adelaide and Margaret were home. Adelaide thinks Margaret must have envied the attention her mother paid her. Whatever got into her, she waited until the stollen were all braided and left out to rise and Adelaide had left the room, then she picked them up and threw them onto the floor of the kitchen fireplace. I remember those rages a four-year-old can get into from when you were little, Sadie… . Anyway, when Adelaide came back and saw what her sister had done, she was determined to thrash her, but Margaret slipped past her and ran for her hiding place in the basement, taunting Adelaide all the way. Adelaide was more persistent than her mother. She caught hold of her sister and pulled. And then it was just how you say. She banged the little girl’s head.”
“She told you this?” My whole body went cold. “It was Adelaide?”
My mother nodded. “I’d given her a cup of tea one evening. You weren’t home… . I asked after her mother and her face collapsed. Then it just… came out—along with her sobs.
“I believed her, because it made sense of something I’d been unable to reconcile: how a mother could put her own child out with the rubbish. It wasn’t Mrs. Hilgendorf who put Margaret there, of course. It was Adelaide—tall, big-boned Adelaide. Wearing her mother’s apron, she’d have looked a lot like her. Big as she was, though, she was only fifteen, still a child. She did what a child instinctively does—tried to hide the evidence of her crime.
“I’m sure she expected me to tell her mother. Maybe that’s why she confessed it all to me. Because she didn’t know how to tell her herself.”
“But you didn’t,” I said, bitterness creeping into my voice.
Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests Page 10
