If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “What does Rich think?” Bill squinted at Edith’s hastily written message. “What does conj-vs mean?”

  “He agrees that her death was an accident,” said Edith. “But he has a better idea of what happened than the coroner does. He thinks Miri was in Porky’s tank on a conjugal visit, and that she ran out of air before they’d finished.”

  A. P. Hill shook her head. “Only you, Bill.” She sighed.

  “That’s terrible,” said Bill. “Miri was a very nice person. A little strange, I’ll admit, but maybe she was a pioneer in animal rights. Which reminds me—what’s going to happen to Porky?”

  “Apparently, nothing,” said Edith, whose cheerfulness was untouched by the tragedy. “According to Rich Edmonds nobody seems very concerned about the dolphin as a threat to human life. He’s as friendly as ever. He did all his shows yesterday, and his appetite is good. The park put a female dolphin in with him to cheer him up, and it seems to be working.”

  “That does it!” said Powell. “I’m having tuna fish for lunch.”

  “I wonder if I should go on with the lawsuit,” said Bill.

  ‘You can’t very well petition for a marriage when the bride is dead,’ Edith pointed out. “Unless you’re really going to expand the concept of civil rights.”

  “No, no,” said Bill. “I meant the case about whether or not Porky is a person. I was mapping out an argument to free him—”

  “I think you’d better drop the entire matter, Bill,” said A. P. Hill. “In the best interests of the dolphin.”

  “Why?”

  “Think about it. Do you really want to prove that Porky is a person after he’s been involved in the death of Miri Malone? As an animal he has no rights or responsibilities, and he can’t be held liable for his actions. But what if you make the court rule that he is a person, and then they charge him with murder?” She shrugged. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

  “Fish jails,” murmured Edith. “That would be expensive.”

  “You’re right,” said Bill. “Miri wouldn’t want Porky to suffer for her death. Maybe we should just leave things as they are.”

  “Had Miss Malone paid you?” asked A. P. Hill.

  “Not yet. I hadn’t billed her.”

  “In that case, partner, the matter is closed.”

  Several months later A. P. Hill had her day in court with Eleanor Royden. Powell had tried to balance her instinctive defense attorney’s delaying tactics against the need for a speedy trial to minimize the damage done by Eleanor’s relentless press conferences. “I’d rather defend O. J. Simpson,” she said in a moment of desperation. She hadn’t meant it, though. She was only tired, and exasperated, and above all frightened that her best wouldn’t be good enough to save Eleanor Royden.

  The trial lasted the better part of a week— neither side had the funds or the patience for a lengthier battle. Eleanor was vilified by the prosecution as a bloodthirsty shrew who murdered her victims out of spite. A. P. Hill retaliated by presenting the Roydens as a selfish, shallow couple who delighted in tormenting Jeb’s ex-wife. Witnesses described the same incidents from opposite points of view: he was a monster; she was a monster. It all depended on whom the witness identified with, or, in the cases of some of the middle-aged women, it depended on whom the witness was afraid to be identified with. Some affluent wives apparently thought that Eleanor should be belled and cowled like a leper. She was dangerous: she threatened the well-being of all of them. A few courageous souls (most of whom were divorced) hailed Eleanor as a terrible prophet of feminism, who could single-handedly stem the tide of trophy wives and midlifecrisis divorces, but most people treated the case as a bad joke—nothing that need have any bearing on their lives.

  Now all the hours of testimony, the psychiatric evaluations, and the media circus surrounding the trial had wound down to one focal point: a spotlight on A. P. Hill for the defense. She looked more pale and waiflike than ever in her navy-blue suit and sensible low-heeled pumps; her hair chopped into a straight bob covering her ears; and her lip gloss smeared on in haste, after she had finished throwing up in the courthouse ladies’ room. She looked as insubstantial as a pond reflection beside her client. Eleanor Royden’s newly tinted blonde hair shone like a helmet in an upswept coiffure, and her black silk dress reminded no one of bereavement. Perhaps its solemnity was marred by its low neckline and the diamond necklace at her throat. Eleanor’s makeup was vivid, and reapplied at short intervals, in case a photographer should be aiming at her with a telephoto lens. She had watched the entire proceedings with bright-eyed interest, and a cheery briskness that suggested that this was someone else’s trial. Perhaps it was A. P. Hill’s. She was growing thinner by the day as the circles under her eyes deepened.

  Eleanor sometimes smiled at the jurors, or nodded in sympathetic agreement with the judge’s ruling, but A. P. Hill remained impassive, as if her life, not Eleanor’s, depended on the verdict. Now she tottered to the front of the courtroom to begin her summation. The jurors were watching her, expressionless, while Eleanor gave her a grinning thumbs-up sign that almost sent her back to the ladies’ room.

  A. P. Hill took a deep breath and began. “I’m here to defend Eleanor Royden, not necessarily to praise her. I hope that Jeb and Eleanor Royden do not become the symbolic middle-class couple of the Nineties, because as a nation we deserve better role models than these two shallow, selfish, alienated creatures. But I do think they should have stayed together—because they deserved each other.

  “The prosecution has gone to great pains to show you how heartless Eleanor Royden was to have shot her husband and his new wife while they slept, and of course I can’t stand up here and say that anybody, any victim, deserves to die, but …” She paused here, and shook her head. “I’d have to say that Jeb and Staci came close.

  “The legal community here in Roanoke knew Jeb Royden as a capable attorney, a good friend, and a community leader. They all told you what a nice guy he was—and so he was—among his equals. But there was another side to Jeb Royden that his colleagues, his fellow officers of the court, never saw: Jeb the bully; Jeb the adolescent, addicted to self-gratification; Jeb the domestic tyrant, whose arrogance knew no bounds.

  “Jeb Royden made a lot of money. He thought that made him important—certainly more important than fluffy blonde Eleanor, whose very food and clothing came from his bounty. He thought he was entitled to have his own way in all things because he was the one who mattered. Eleanor didn’t matter. She was just another one of Jeb Royden’s possessions, as bought and paid for as his sports car. And as replaceable.

  “For much of their lives, Eleanor Royden had acquiesced in her husband’s delusions of grandeur. She let him have his own way. Sometimes that’s the easiest way to keep peace with a tyrant, but in the end it costs you, because tyrants feed on people who let them have their own way all the time. They take it for granted.

  “Imagine Jeb’s surprise when he wanted a new toy, and insignificant old Eleanor said no. He had the palatial house in Chambord Oaks, and the midlife sports car, and all the money he needed, and now he wanted the trophy: a new young wife— the hormonal equivalent of a face-lift, I guess. And Eleanor said no.

  “How dared she? Wasn’t he the rich and important attorney? Didn’t he deserve the best of everything? He could certainly afford it. Eleanor had tried to thwart the mighty Jeb Royden, and he thought she deserved to be punished for it.

  “His indifference toward an aging and no-longer-beautiful wife turned to hatred for an enemy. He began to use his legal skills, his power and influence, as weapons to turn his divorce into a chess game. He would make Eleanor suffer for her presumption. The tragedy is that he began to enjoy tormenting her.

  “Jeb Royden forgot that it is dangerous to torment the weak. They have nothing to lose.” A. P. Hill noticed a movement in the back of the crowded courtroom. She saw her partner slip into the last row of seats. A. P. Hill felt ridiculously glad to see him. He had driven al
l the way up from Danville just to give her moral support. No one could help her now, but she was grateful to see someone who was on her side. She couldn’t smile at Bill now; she would thank him later.

  A. P. Hill turned away and picked up where she had left off: “You’ve been told in detail all the things that were done to punish Eleanor Royden for the sin of not going away quietly. She was arrested for trespassing; the furniture she had chosen for their home was given away so that she should have none of it; she was ridiculed in front of her former friends, and made to live in poverty by a man with a high-six-figure income, while he continued to live in his usual splendor. And through it all Jeb and Staci Royden laughed at Eleanor. They made fun of her. You saw a check he wrote her, on which he put: for upkeep of cow. That cow was Jeb Royden’s wife of twenty years, the woman he had promised to love for better or for worse.

  “Then there was Staci Royden, Jeb’s little Giselle. Eleanor had a host of other names for her replacement. Can you blame her? Staci Royden knew that her prospective suitor was married from the moment she met him. She didn’t particularly care. Jeb was rich, and Staci was young and beautiful. And Eleanor didn’t matter.

  “Our society seems to say that to people, through our advertising, our television shows, the attitudes of public figures—they all say: ‘Rich people, young people, pretty people matter. The rest of you don’t.’

  “Eleanor Royden thought that she mattered. Perhaps a wiser woman would have been content to wait for Staci to grow old and learn the unhappy truth about youth and beauty not lasting forever, but I think Eleanor’s pain was too great for wisdom. She isn’t much given to introspection, anyhow. She is shallow. Could anyone who wasn’t shallow have loved Jeb Royden? I don’t think so.

  “Eleanor is not without pride, though. And there was a limit to her endurance. Jeb and Staci taunted Eleanor for a couple of years, and finally she decided that it had to end. You know what she did then. She took her pistol, and she went to Jeb’s fine mansion, and she put an end to the torment. You believe that she shot Jeb and Staci. I believe it. But you know who doesn’t believe it, not really, deep down?”

  A. P. Hill pointed to her client, who was no longer smiling. “She doesn’t believe it! Eleanor Royden cannot comprehend what she has done, because it is still incredible to her that someone as almighty as Jeb could be stopped by a nickel’s worth of lead. She still talks about him in the present tense, ladies and gentlemen. Now, you may think that it is insane to shoot someone, and then refuse to believe that they are dead. It certainly suggests that no intent to kill was there.

  “Jeb and Staci made sport of Eleanor—and you know which sport it was? Bearbaiting. It’s an old, barbaric custom that we’ve done away with as far as bears are concerned; sometimes our next of kin are less fortunate. The way it worked: people chained a bear to a wooden stake, and they let dogs loose to attack it, forcing the bear to fight back. Usually the bear was hurt or killed, but often it managed to dispatch some of the attacking dogs before it died. That’s what the Royden case reminds me of, ladies and gentlemen. A poor trapped creature who could not defend herself against a rich and powerful ex-spouse was baited and teased and ridiculed until she snapped. And she fought back.

  “Don’t use this tale as a parable of divorce. Most people are not Jeb and Staci and Eleanor. But this one time, two cruel and brutal people underestimated the rage of their victim, and she struck back, with fatal results. Whether they drove her insane, or whether she was acting in self-defense from the emotional abuse, the fact remains: Eleanor Royden did not commit murder in cold blood, and she should not be made to suffer further. The bear is still tied to the stake, but it has managed to defeat the dogs. Can we not call a halt to the sport now, and let her go in peace?”

  The rest of the trial was something of a blur to A. P. Hill, who tended to develop stage fright after a performance rather than before. Dimly, she heard the prosecution’s argument, and she made herself watch the jury as they filed out to begin their deliberations. Then she went back to the ladies’ room, and was sick.

  Eleanor Royden was returned to the cell to await the verdict, and A. P. Hill hung around the courthouse, pacing and wishing she smoked, for as long as she could stand it. Finally, Bill MacPherson lured her back to the Marriott with take-out hamburgers, after first securing promises from everywhere that they would be notified the moment any word came from the jury room. “We’re only five miles away,” he told her. “You could get there in less than ten minutes if you drove like a madwoman. Which you would.”

  “I keep wondering if there was something else I should have said,” A. P. Hill said. She had kicked off her sensible shoes and was sitting curled up in an easy chair, watching hamburger grease congeal on the waxed paper in front of her. It was past seven o’clock now, and outside the light was fading, but A. P. Hill neither noticed nor cared.

  “You gave a good speech,” said Bill. “Maybe better than your client deserved. I’m not sure I approve of sympathy for people who execute those who annoy them.”

  A. P. Hill nodded. “You wonder how married people can become such strangers. I can’t imagine hating anyone enough to want them dead. But, then, I wouldn’t choose someone like Jeb Royden for a husband, either.”

  “No?” said Bill between french fries. “I thought you liked brilliant, powerful people.”

  His partner considered it. “I admire people like that, yes. They might be wearing on a daily basis, though.” She thought about all the bright high achievers she had known in law school. Some of them were even more ruthless than she was, and in partnership together they might have become fast-track legal piranhas, but instead she had chosen— proposed it herself, actually—to practice law in a small Virginia town with good old Bill MacPherson. He would probably never argue a case before the Supreme Court, but he brought her hamburgers and sat with her while she sweated out a verdict. A. P. Hill decided that she had made the right choice—at least for now.

  “I can’t imagine you ever being a battered woman,” Bill was saying.

  A. P. Hill looked appraisingly at her law partner. “No,” she said. “I don’t suppose I will be.”

  They had finished eating, and Bill was reading the room-service menu in hopes of persuading Powell to join him for coffee and dessert when the phone rang. She sprang past him and snatched up the receiver. “Yes? They’re coming in? Of course. Give me ten minutes.”

  Bill stood up. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “No. I have to do this alone.”

  He could see that it would be useless to argue with her. “You’ll come back, won’t you?”

  She almost smiled. “It’s my room, Bill.”

  “Well… I hope it goes well. Good luck, partner.”

  “I’ll need it,” said A. P. Hill, closing the door gently behind her.

  Bill decided that pacing the floor waiting for Powell to return would be a waste of energy. She was doing enough worrying on her own. He had never seen her so emotional. Privately, he thought that it was lucky the case was ending, regardless of the verdict, because A. P. Hill’s nerves wouldn’t stand much more of the Eleanor Royden circus. She must have lost ten pounds at least, and she didn’t have them to spare. He glanced at the half a hamburger Powell had left uneaten. Things had to get back to normal soon. Bill resolved to pour the bottles of pink medicine down the sink as soon as he got back to the office by way of celebrating the end of the ordeal.

  Meanwhile, he called room service and settled back on the king-size bed to play remote-control roulette while he waited. He caught the last half of a Star Trek rerun, and was flipping desultorily back and forth between CNN, the Home Shopping Network, and Unsolved Mysteries, when he heard a soft tapping at the door. “Powell?” he called out.

  “Yes.” The answering voice was quiet, but that didn’t tell him much. He couldn’t picture his partner whooping it up because she had won a case. Powell took everything calmly.

  He flung open the door, waiting for his c
ue. She just stood there for a moment, looking dazed and tired, and then she flopped facedown on the bed, beating the counterpane with clenched fists.

  She wasn’t crying, though, a fact for which Bill was thankful. He might be able to cope with rage; but grief made him sweat. He hovered over her, wondering if a hug would be in order, but deciding against it. “Tell me,” he said.

  He heard her take a deep breath. “Guilty,” she said without looking up.

  “I figured that. But how bad is it?”

  A long silence. More deep breaths. Finally A. P. Hill sat up. “First degree. They decided that the crime was premeditated because Eleanor took the gun with her.”

  “I thought she always kept it in her purse. Which is illegal, of course, but—”

  “I’ll appeal. I don’t think it will do much good, since every silverback in the court system is a friend of Jeb, but I will try.” She smiled bitterly. “At least they stipulated that she not receive the death penalty. Wasn’t that big of them?”

  “It’s one less thing for you to worry about,” said Bill.

  The cold smile again. “Sure, no problem! Eleanor Royden could stay in prison until she’s seventy-five, that’s all. Good old Jeb wins again.”

  Bill said quietly, “Jeb Royden is dead, Powell.”

  “He still wins. He wanted Eleanor to suffer and, by God, she will. It was over for him in an instant, but not for Eleanor. She will suffer at leisure.”

  “How did she take the verdict?”

  “She had that tight little smile that Southern women put on, no matter what. I don’t think the truth has sunk in yet for her. She’s clinging to the notion that an appeal will save her, but I doubt that it will. I have to get a trial transcript, and start looking for loopholes—”