The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  In this atmosphere of equivocality, Drost led Dorkin down a hall to a small, windowless room with shelves filled with boxes around three walls. The only furniture consisted of two straight-backed chairs and a large table.

  “I’ll start with the clothing,” Drost said.

  He took down a box from a group of four, set it on the table, and began emptying it, carefully taking out the items one by one rather like a travelling salesman displaying his wares. There was a trashy looking white dress made out of some kind of satiny material with a V-neck and a little red cloth flower crudely sewn into the angle of the V. There was a white slip, stained slightly yellow by the wearer’s armpits, and a heavy white brassiere similarly stained, a white garter belt, a pair of rayon stockings, one with a long tear up the back, one ripped almost in two near the ankle. And there was a red belt and a small leather handbag and a pair of scuffed, black shoes. Very sad, Dorkin thought.

  After a few seconds, he picked up one of the shoes. The heels were not as high as he had imagined from the photographs he had seen in court—not more than half an inch higher than the heels of ordinary walking shoes. They would not seriously have impeded her on the forest paths.

  “And there weren’t any pants?” he said.

  “No,” Drost said. “They weren’t anywhere around the pit, and we looked along the route back to town, but we didn’t find anything. But you can’t look under every rock, and they could have been thrown into the creek.”

  “What about the purse?” Dorkin asked. “Were there any finger-prints?” Drost hesitated, shifted uneasily.

  “Yes,” he said. “Some.”

  “But none of Williams’s?”

  “Not that they could tell.”

  “Some of hers?”

  “Probably, but it was hard for them to be sure.”

  “Any others?”

  “Yes, a couple. But we’ve no way to know whose. They could be anybody’s. We can’t fingerprint the whole town.”

  “No,” Dorkin said, “I suppose not.”

  “This is what was in the purse,” Drost said, taking a smaller box out of the bigger one and putting the stuff out on the table: a dollar bill, some change, a lipstick, her wartime identification card, two photographs, one of a girl, one of a soldier.

  “That’s her,” Drost said. “The other one is of her brother.”

  Looking at the photograph of Sarah, Dorkin had the feeling he often had when looking at photographs of the dead: the sense of the instant fixed while the flow of time out of which it had been lifted drove inexorably on. She was standing in front of some chokecherry bushes, full-leaved, heavy with fruit, on what must have been, given that and the fall of the light, a late afternoon in mid-summer. She was standing with her feet apart, her hands crossed in front of her, wearing a snug, sleeveless summer dress. The bare arms were plump, the breasts pressed together between them heavy, the face round. She was laughing, looking straight into the camera, and the impression was of a big, strapping country girl, the sort of girl who from that kind of background was almost certain before very long to get herself knocked up by somebody.

  The autopsy report had said that she was five-foot-six and weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, and she certainly looked as if she weighed all of that. Dorkin recalled MacCrae’s remark that if Williams had tried to assault her, she would have beaten the shit out of him.

  Dorkin looked at the other picture.

  “What about the brother?” he asked.

  “He’s overseas,” Drost said.

  Not good for Williams, Dorkin thought. The sister of one of the boys who was risking his life for his country.

  When Dorkin had looked his fill, Drost packed up the stuff and brought down two more boxes.

  The first contained the squalid debris from the pit: cigarette packages and chocolate bar wrappers in varying states of decay; a squashed shoebox; a copy of The Daily Gleaner dated June 5, 1944, which had been soaked and dried; bottles broken and unbroken; a woman’s stocking left behind from some earlier midnight amour; a man’s cap left behind probably by some drunk; the rubber ring from a condom; two entire condoms, the contents dried, the sides stuck together.

  The final box contained Williams’s stuff: his battle dress uniform, his wedge cap with its Seaforth badge, three pairs of under-shirts and shorts, three pairs of socks, two regulation dress shirts, a regulation necktie, a handkerchief, two regulation towels, and a regulation face cloth. And a tin of Sheiks.

  “Could you open that?” Dorkin asked.

  It contained two condoms in their little cardboard sleeves. One of the original three was missing. Williams had not had occasion to use a condom. And whoever had raped Sarah, if it was rape, had not used a condom. Dorkin wondered what had become of the third condom. He made a mental note to ask when the time was right.

  “Okay,” he said. “I guess I’ve seen it all.”

  He waited while Drost packed up the stuff and put it back on the shelf.

  “You don’t think he did it,” Drost said, when they were back in the office.

  His air of uncertainty persisted, and he was obviously fishing.

  “A defence attorney always thinks his client didn’t do it,” Dorkin said.

  They both made as if to laugh.

  “But there’s still the missing hour,” Drost said.

  Dorkin hesitated. He had no intention of giving anything away to Drost, but he wanted to pick his way. So long as Drost believed that he was on a fool’s errand—or that he was being used by the army to make a pretence of caring for even the humblest Zombie that fell—he would be co-operative, perhaps more co-operative than he realized. But the minute he began to feel that Grant’s case, and therefore his own ass, was being seriously threatened, he would shut up like a clam.

  “There’s not really that much time missing,” Dorkin said. “They dawdled along talking. If you think about it, it’s hard to see how he could have had time to do what was done.”

  Dorkin watched it work. Drost put him down as either a fool or a surreptitious accomplice. Either would do. Dorkin left feeling pleased with himself.

  By the middle of the afternoon, the Zombies under the direction of Sergeant MacCrae and Private Smith had his office ready. The room was far larger than he needed, and he would much rather have had two smaller rooms—one for himself and one for Smith— but he had ordered them to use a couple of filing cabinets and a bookcase to make a divider that reached halfway across the room and gave at least an illusion of privacy.

  He sat down at his desk to make a beginning. He circled in red on his calendar Tuesday, September 26, the day on which the trial was now scheduled to begin. He had exactly five weeks in which to prepare. The printed evidence that Meade had secured for him made a thick pile at one corner of his desk. He laid out a foolscap pad, took off at random the first deposition, and began to read:

  “On Saturday, July 1, I, Lavinia Jean Page, of Wakefield in the County of George…”

  The sun shone all that week, and most of the next, but August was waning, the overnight temperatures dropping towards frost, the first leaves turning. Every morning, Dorkin got up early, breakfasted at the hotel, then came back to his desk in the armoury to work on the case, reading, reflecting, making notes, getting up now and then to look down into the street in front of the armoury—a street of picturesque Victorian residences, tended lawns, beds of flowers.

  Inside the armoury, the atmosphere was less poetic. Captain Fraser’s campaign of persecution against the Zombies went on unabated, and twice a day, rain or shine, MacCrae marched them for half an hour in full kit up and down the parade square at the back. There was also a blizzard of petty orders and a daily trail of bedraggled miscreants to Fraser’s office to be put on charge and confined to barracks. It was all vaguely insane, and every minute Fraser was in the armoury, his paranoia pervaded the atmosphere like the smell of something dead in the woodwork. Fortunately, at four o’clock every afternoon, he locked his desk and went off to the lo
cal golf club to work on his cirrhosis of the liver. Immediate command of the armoury then devolved on MacCrae, the air cleared, and a great calm would descend, which would last until nine o’clock the next morning.

  Although they didn’t see much of each other around the armoury, Dorkin had quickly come to like MacCrae. In spite of his bluff, lumberjack face, he came across to Dorkin in their occasional chats as an intelligent, capable man, who, although he would never say it out loud of a commanding officer, saw as clearly as Dorkin did what a worthless shit Captain Fraser was. And in conversation with Carvell one day, Dorkin learned that one of the little ribbons on MacCrae’s tunic was the Military Medal, which he had got for hauling wounded men out of the water when their landing barge had been hit by a mortar bomb off Dieppe. He was so badly wounded himself that he was later invalided home. Poor old Fraser, Dorkin thought. In addition to having to put up with a snotty-nosed Jewish lieutenant, he was saddled with a non-com factotum who was a decorated war hero.

  Fraser’s attitude toward Dorkin remained one of imperfectly concealed resentment and rage, but Dorkin pretended blandly not to notice. He saluted Fraser whenever they met and made the kind of regulation small talk about the weather and the war that a subordinate makes to a superior officer. But mostly he did his best merely to stay out of his way, closeting himself in his office with his papers.

  He began by going carefully through everything: the transcript of the preliminary hearing, the depositions from the people who had been at the dance and those who had seen Williams in the hours and days afterwards, Williams’s own, partially perjured statement about that night, Clemens’s statement about Sarah (if it was Sarah) and the soldier (if it was a soldier), the dreadful autopsy report with its still more dreadful photographs, the forensic reports on the examination of Sarah’s clothes and those of Williams.

  He took his time, letting things settle of their own accord, not pushing, trying not to impose theories too soon. When he had gone through everything, he shuffled the pile of depositions so that he could deal them to himself in a different order and went through them all again. What he was searching for was the raw material out of which he could construct an edifice of reasonable doubt, but his more extravagant hope was that hidden somewhere in the criss-cross of evidence there would turn out to be some corner undiscovered by the Mounties in which the real murderer lurked.

  Sometimes after lunch he took a walk around the centre of the town, becoming something of a familiar figure, exchanging nods and comments about the weather with storekeepers who occasionally stood outside their doors, soaking up the sun. Sometimes in the afternoon or in the early evening, he took his staff car and drove out into the country. Late one afternoon, travelling further afield than usual, he drove across the bridge to the other side of the river and up over the side of the valley eastward along a gravel road.

  He drove for almost ten miles, the road deteriorating with every mile but still drawing him on, until he came out at last at a small settlement—a miserable collection of a dozen unpainted houses with swayback rooftrees and collapsing porches strung out along the road.

  In one of the yards, watched by an enormous boy as shapeless as a slug, he turned the car around and headed back.

  The valley came upon him suddenly. The road mounted a long, shallow rise, and at the top of it the trees abruptly opened out on both sides into hayfields, and there below was the river with the big island that the Zombies guarded so faithfully, the open land of the valley, the town with its roofs and steeples. He stopped the car and got out to look.

  As he stood there, a three-ton truck turned out onto the road from a side road further down and began slowly climbing the steep gradient towards him, its engine labouring heavily in bottom gear. As it passed, the face above the steering wheel looked out at him with brazen indifference, a round face with several days’ growth of beard under a dirty cloth cap. The body of the truck had four-foot-high slats on the sides and a slatted gate at the back, and it smelled like the yard of a slaughterhouse.

  A little way up the hill, the truck stopped, turned on a culvert, and came crawling back and parked behind Dorkin’s car. The driver got out.

  He wore a checked shirt and trousers made out of some woollen material so heavy that they looked as if they could have stood up by themselves. He was perhaps five foot six, bowlegged, pot-bellied but with powerful shoulders and arms like a wrestler.

  “Ya got trouble? Ya got a flat?” the man asked.

  “No,” Dorkin said. “No trouble. I’m just admiring the view.”

  The man threw a glance down at the river and then looked at Dorkin as if he thought he was being made the butt of some joke. He let it pass.

  “I’m Louie Rosen,” he said. “You probably heard of me.”

  “No,” Dorkin said. “Not yet.”

  “No?” the man said. “I thought everybody knew Louie Rosen.”

  “I’m not from here,” Dorkin said.

  “I know who you are. Everybody knows Louie Rosen. Everybody but you anyways. And Louie Rosen knows everybody. Around here, everybody and everything. You’re a Saint John boy. I got a sister in Saint John. Married. Two nice daughters. Her name’s Abrams now. Her husband works in his father’s furniture store. You know him?”

  “No,” Dorkin said, “I don’t. I know the store. And one of the girls went to school with me.”

  “So,” Louie said, “what are ya doin’ up here defendin’ a sex murderer?”

  “It’s part of my job,” Dorkin said.

  “You’re gettin’ us a bad name.”

  “Oh? What ‘us,’ Louie?”

  “You know what ‘us,’ for Christ sake. Us. God’s chosen people who have to make a livin’ around here.”

  “What have you got in the back of the truck, Louie?” Dorkin asked. “I could smell you coming half a mile away.”

  “Hides. Cow hides mostly. A couple of pigs. You know. You kill a cow. People eat some of it. Foxes eat some of it. Some of it gets ground up for fertilizer. The hides you make leather out of. I collect them and clean them and send them off to the guys who make leather.”

  “You mean if I defend this guy, no one is going to sell you their cow hides? Who are they going to sell them to?”

  “It ain’t that exactly. It just don’t look good. People say you want some dirty work done, go find a Jew. You’ve heard it?”

  “Sure. I’ve heard lots of things. We boil babies up and eat them at midnight. Only sometimes it’s Catholics who do that. Unless you happen to be a Catholic and then it’s the Orangemen.”

  “You bought him a radio,” Louie said.

  “So who knows besides you and Mr. Meltzer?”

  “Everybody in town.”

  “Having heard it from you and Mr. Meltzer.”

  “Who knows? Everything gets around.”

  “Louie,” Dorkin said, “you’re talking a lot of shit. Anyway it isn’t dirty work. The boy didn’t do it.”

  “Are you gonna prove that?”

  “Maybe,” Dorkin said. “Anyway, if you know everything, tell me who knocked the girl up before she got killed.”

  “Now that I don’t know,” Louie said.

  “Any ideas?”

  “No. I thought it must have been the soldier. And he killed her because he didn’t want to marry her. She put the heat on him.”

  “No,” Dorkin said. “He didn’t knock her up. Somebody else did, and I’m wondering who. Did you know her?”

  “Sure. I mean I knew her, but I never talked to her. I knew her to see. I bought some hides from her old man a couple of times. But I don’t know nothin’ about the girl’s boyfriends.”

  “Would you tell me if you did?”

  “Maybe,” Louie said. “If you didn’t let on to nobody where you heard it. I gotta live here, remember.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “I gotta go,” he said. “A man’s waitin’ for me. Take it easy.”

  He climbed back into the truck, and Dorkin watch
ed it labour up the hill and drop away over the crest.

  By the middle of the second week, Dorkin had been back and forth over the written evidence half a dozen times. It told him nothing. He had found no nook where the real murderer might lurk. There was no neat, self-referencing little group whose members might have conspired to lie for each other. The only person unaccounted for during the hour between Williams’s departure from the dance and his arrival at the canteen was Williams himself. Whoever had murdered Sarah (assuming that it wasn’t Williams) had come from somewhere outside the magic circle that the Mounties and Whidden had drawn, perhaps from among the drinkers, the fighters, the loonies who had hung around outside in the woods or on the roads, someone perhaps whose act had been one of random violence to which no path of logic could lead.

  There was one other angle that Dorkin had not yet explored, and that was the possibility of having Williams’s statements to the Mounties thrown out of court on the grounds that Williams had not been properly cautioned. Dorkin had visited Williams every day since he had come back to Wakefield to see if he needed anything and to cheer him up as best he could, but he had avoided discussing the case until he had finished his search through the evidence. Now, he decided, it was time for another talk.

  Williams still did not look good, but he was clean-shaven and as neat as it was probably in his nature to be.

  “I want to talk to you about the second time the police questioned you,” Dorkin said. “Did they warn you at the beginning that what you said might be used as evidence against you?”

  “I don’t remember,” Williams said. “I don’t think so.”

  “All right,” Dorkin said. “Tell me what happened first. What did they say to you?”

  “Corporal Drost asked me to tell him again about when I had last seen Sarah Coile the night of the dance. He told me what he remembered that I had said before and asked me if that was right and I said yes.”