Killing Time: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  “I can handle it all right,” Detweiler said. “What about those psychiatrists you sent around, and the detectives before that, and the sessions I’ve had with you. I haven’t done any talking other than question-answering since I came to this place.”

  “That I appreciate, but your answers are often not to the point—or at least not what the court would so consider. Well, we’ll see how it goes. I alternate in my opinion. Sometimes I think you would be the most effective witness in your own behalf. There is a rhythm to any trial. I prepare a case as thoroughly as I can, but the trial is the ultimate reality, the focus of energy, a work of art, but transient, unknown beforehand, irrecoverable afterward.”

  Detweiler said: “Like every moment of life.”

  “No,” said Melrose. “Not like any other. We could not endure such a succession of moments without a rise and fall. We couldn’t and we cannot really understand anyone who can. Nevertheless, you may be interested to know that the lunacy commission appointed by the state has found you sane. Without talking to or even seeing you. You have also been pronounced sane by the newspapers, tried, and found guilty.”

  Detweiler shook his head. “It looks as if you’re all alone, Mr. Melrose. You talk of ‘we,’ but nobody else agrees with you.”

  “Doctors Brixton and Metcalfe do. But your point is well taken, Joe. I would not want it otherwise. The district attorney is going to try this case. He has never faced me before. Time and again he has sent in some young assistant to be mangled. But he thinks he can make it now, with the support of public opinion. Moreover, he could use a victory. He intends to run for governor one of these years.”

  “He has the right appearance for it,” Detweiler said. “I would probably vote for him if I could. I have never got around to voting though, because I have never lived long enough in any one place to establish residence. Have you ever thought of running for public office, Mr. Melrose?”

  “Would you vote for me, Joe?”

  “I don’t think so, with all respect. I think you are too private.”

  Melrose laughed till his eyes ran.

  “That wasn’t criticism, but rather description,” said Detweiler.

  “I know that,” Melrose said, wiping his face. He sighed. “Well, Joe, win or lose you’ll soon be leaving here.”

  “And I certainly will miss it,” Detweiler said with feeling. “I don’t imagine there are many jails as nice as this one. But then, as you always say, I am legally still considered to be innocent, so the confinement is designed merely to hold me for trial. I expect prisons, where you are sent for punishment, are hardly as comfortable. That would be ridiculous: everybody would be fighting to get in, with three hot meals a day and unlimited opportunity for cogitation.”

  “I should say the common opinion of this place is much less generous than yours. My other clients have regarded it as the Black Hole of Calcutta. But don’t you worry. If the verdict is favorable to us, you’ll probably be committed to a hospital, and you will be weaving baskets and working with clay and eating quite a lot of your favorite Jello.”

  “I’m finished with sculpture,” said Detweiler. “But I’m sure willing to try basketry…. What if you lose?

  “I refuse to consider that.”

  “Come on, Mr. Melrose. If the district attorney has the courage to try a case against you, you can show some nerve too.”

  Melrose started. He said “I’m sorry, Joe. You’re right…. Then you will be taken to prison and put into a cell in death row and, if I have exhausted every legal device without success, you will be strapped into the electric chair and a current of electricity sufficient to cause death shall be passed through your body and continued until you are dead.”

  “And God have mercy on your soul,” said Detweiler.

  Chapter 20

  BETTY AND ARTHUR were met by a crowd of reporters and cameramen at the entrance to the court and had their pictures taken again and again for TV and the papers and were the targets of shouted questions, e.g., “How’s it feel to testify against your ex-boyfriend?” “Think Detweiler will burn, Betty?” “You going on the stand, Arthur?” Some of these same newsmen had waited outside their house and followed them in from the suburbs.

  Naturally Betty was their main interest, and soon Arthur found several reporters between himself and her. Someone near him touched his elbow and said “Hi, Arthur.”

  It was Betty’s father, who had got this far unnoticed by the newspapermen, though he also was a celebrity or should have been.

  “Hello, Father.” Arthur had never called him that before. But he had not seen him since the night of the murders. Arthur’s great change had taken place during those months. He had matured. He no longer considered so many alternatives, but took action when it was called for. He had ceased to worry incessantly over what was just in an abstract way, but he was more a man of honor than he had ever been in the days when he killed time by weighing choices, and he gained more respect from other people.

  “I was sick at the time of the funeral,” Starr said. “I never got in touch since because I didn’t think she would forgive me.”

  In the old days Arthur would have assured him otherwise, but now he said: “You’re right. She hasn’t.”

  “She always hated me,” Starr said. He had his ashen, freshly shaved look. His clothes seemed soiled though they may not have been. Arthur believed the same might be true of Starr’s life in general.

  Arthur felt an impulse and, in his new style, instantly acted on it. “Father,” he said, “here you go.” He pushed at him a folded bill.

  Starr recoiled, they being now at the margin of the crowd where maneuver was possible. “I got funds,” he said. “I’m doing a book on the case. Do you know who with?” He had begun to crow. “Alloway, the guy who did Betty’s series.”

  “Watch him,” Arthur said. “That’s my advice.”

  “He’s all right,” said Starr. “I seen the contract. We split fifty-fifty…. You going to testify? I always liked Joe. He treated me right. I guess he’s crazy—” He looked furtively about. “The D.A. guys told me not to say that. But he was nice, a real nice guy. You don’t find many. Of course you have been real decent too, Arthur. And you did not murder anybody. Hey, I hear this Melrose can be mean in cross-examination. I need a shot of something.”

  They shook hands, and Starr managed to slip the bill out of Arthur’s fingers without acknowledging it. He slunk off, heading away from the court.

  Arthur moved towards Betty. The newsmen stood their ground and had to be shoved aside, which they made no show of minding. But the last one he encountered, the reporter in Betty’s immediate presence, who was scribbling in a notebook, protested. He used a fountain pen, and he dropped it in the scuffle. It was stepped on and crushed.

  Arthur had not meant to do that. But when the reporter, inconsolable, shoved him back, he intentionally struck the man in the eye and as the newsman went down, kicked him. Then Arthur seized the camera from a nearby photographer and hurled it to the pavement. A colleague of the stricken fetched one of the uniformed policemen who guarded the entrance of the court. Arthur raised his fist to smite this officer, but before he could get in a blow the cop subdued him with a nightstick.

  So Arthur was booked for resisting an officer, assault, and other counts. All of which the D.A.’s office had quashed several days later, but Arthur did have to pay for the broken camera.

  On their way back to court from the precinct house, Betty told Arthur: “I’m proud of you.”

  Arthur shrugged: He said: “I just can’t stand the kind of pushing around you get every day in this city. The rudeness, the boorishness, the conspiracy of ugly little people to make life as ugly and little for everybody as it is for them. Respect is a rarity. You have to beat it out of people.” He winced and touched his midsection, where the cop had given him a taste of the nightstick, following which he had capitulated. “Have you ever noticed that only the weak say violence is senseless?”

  Bet
ty was not interested in the subject, but she agreed about the scarcity of respect. She said: “You know who always had it? Joe Detweiler.”

  Arthur was somewhat jealous. “Of course I never really knew him.”

  “Maybe he’ll be found insane. That’s his only hope. I don’t want to see him die, and God knows I am the one who suffered for what he did.”

  “You know, in some primitive tribes they didn’t officially punish murderers, the society, that is. The offended parties, the surviving relatives, were expected to deal with the criminal, as being the ones who had suffered the loss.”

  “O.K.,” Betty said, “but revenge is illegal here and now, so don’t go trying anything. I want my baby to have a father who is not in jail.”

  Betty had got pregnant some weeks before, long after the last time she had been intimate with Tierney. And she had had no lovers since. She felt sisterly towards the young editor, who had certain girlish traits though he was not exactly queer: showed sullen hurt if she resisted his suggestions on the rewriting of her book, had a womanly hard vanity as opposed to the soft self-admiration of men—yes, soft, Tierney had been soft; like most men he could not take criticism. Whereas she and the young editor had frequent spats, made it up over cocktails or the telephone or in notes, giggled and made faces at each other, and then soon were at it tooth and nail again. “Too bad you’re already married,” he said. “We would make a great pair.” But he did not mean it in a sexual way.

  Betty had not yet found the nerve to tell him of her pregnancy: she feared it would dull what was so piquant in their relationship.

  Tierney was obliged to accompany Detweiler into court. They had not seen each other since the grand-jury indictment.

  “Hi, Joe,” Tierney said.

  “Tierney!” said Detweiler. “I have something to tell you of the utmost importance.”

  “We’ll talk about that later.” Appearances in court were what Tierney liked least about his job. For hours you had to wait around at the pleasure of lawyers, whom, whether in the service of prosecution or defense or on the bench, he mistrusted and feared. His work, in which at any time he might be killed, ended in this: endless language. Like all city policemen, but unlike most other persons who practiced dangerous professions, Tierney often remarked bitterly to himself that he might get killed. Other risk-takers—human flies, racing drivers, secret agents—seldom mentioned this eventuality lest the thought bring on the event. But cops used it as a moral nightstick with which to batter law-abiding civilians: we might get killed for you, yet you give us little money and less respect: in reality, we are your victims. Unlike an acrobat treading the high wire over no net, Tierney saw the audience as immortal, himself transitory.

  He had an impulse to tell this to Detweiler, because Detweiler was crazy and could not use it against him, but suppressed it for the same reason. Anyway, there wasn’t time.

  What Detweiler wanted to discuss with Tierney was that he saw Mr. Melrose and Mr. Crews shaking hands and talking in a very friendly fashion, though they were supposed to be enemies. He assumed it was against such an eventuality that Melrose had warned him not to trust his counsel. For Melrose had consistently spoken of the D.A. with dislike and contempt. Detweiler believed Tierney could explain the situation, but Tierney would not talk now. He seemed frightened. Perhaps in the high-ceilinged room, with its various levels of dark wood and odd odor—like stale cookies—he lost his power. He took Detweiler to the defense table and melted away.

  It was then that Detweiler achieved his Realization. The contrast must have done it: he had not had any large space around him since he entered jail, no space that was ultimately contained, for, unlike the exercise yard, the courtroom was roofed, indoors, and yet had magnitude, and a good many people were moving about, undoubtedly to a purpose but to all appearances doing nothing, shifting papers, coughing to the echo, murmuring; someone blew an empty nose like a horn: utter nullity, as opposed to the rich sense of the jail, where space and time were perfectly correlated: mealtimes, mopping the floor, exercise, mental deliberation.

  The remarkable character of the Realization was that Detweiler was present in this time and place, every feature existed as always except it was otherwise, including himself, Daniel M’Naghten on trial in London in 1843 for the murder of Sir Robert Peel’s secretary. Mr. Melrose wore a wig, as did Mr. Crews. All spoke with English accents. The judge, also bewigged, was addressed as “your worship.” M’Naghten stood in a high place, isolated, admitting his supposed target had been Sir Robert. His barrister spoke against the thundering charges brought by the Crown…

  “You can sit down now,” Melrose whispered to Detweiler. “Sit down, Joe! Do you hear me?” He finally had to apply force, and there was laughter, in the courtroom. Which might be all to the good, being a genuine demonstration of the defendant’s difference from other men, to which the normal responded initially with amusement, which is founded on embarrassment, and embarrassment is the first step towards horror.

  Melrose intended to horrify the jury to the degree that its members would be purged of other emotions: vengeance, pity for the victims, and especially, the yearning to see justice done. A dangerous game indeed, for Crews would obviously be trying for the same effect, towards another end. Crews’s was a routine mind, a politician’s imagination. He was trying Detweiler only for the murders of Billie and Appleton, and thus admitting he had no case against the defendant for the strangling of Mrs. Starr, for which there was no evidence of premeditation. That was to say, the first killing in chronology, the first Detweiler had ever been known to commit, the only life owned by Mrs. Starr, the death which was the direct cause of the two which followed, was being ignored by the state.

  What Crews intended to show as peculiarly horrible, and deserving of punishment by execution, were only those homicides which had allegedly been deliberate: Detweiler had had a motive for killing Billie and Appleton, one any normal person could recognize as rational. Irrespective of why he strangled Mrs. Starr, he had killed the others so as to eliminate them as witnesses. So the district attorney would seek to prove.

  As a lawyer Melrose was obliged to show at least a superficial respect for reason: it was a kind of code, like the traffic laws, which one tended to observe habitually but abandoned without declaration in an emergency, and all his cases were emergencies, all crimes, all arrests, all trials. Though premeditation in itself was not necessarily either reasonable or normal, if it came to that. He could prove as much to any twelve human beings who understood the English language, and more importantly, he could make them remember it beyond the prosecutor’s rebuttal and the judge’s instructions.

  “If a deed is insane in the commission, can the planning of it be sane? I will explain my point”—Melrose often appeared pedagogical in his summations and usually tried to usurp the bench’s function and give instruction in the law, until ordered to desist: juries like to be taught, crave acknowledgment of their state of holy ignorance. Crews was the type of prosecutor, Melrose knew from his preparatory reading in transcripts of the D.A.’s past performances, who might erroneously assume it would flatter a jury to treat its members as one’s peers, but few men could bear that obligation in these circumstances. Juries were neither compassionate nor cruel; they were merely human.

  “I will explain what I mean, and it is not T or ‘mine,’ but justice and decency and sense and humanity”—nevertheless, Melrose would accompany these remarks with idiosyncratic gestures, odd motions of his bladed hands, wrists screwing, striding about and halting at inconsequential moments, movements which could not be other than personal. He was the point he made, and he asked incessantly: Do I speak, dress, and move as though I could lose?

  “If a human being, for example, living in our place and time and culture, plans to kill another man, roast his thigh, and sit down at a table and eat it with gravy, mashed potatoes, and string beans, is he not mad? Must he actually devour such a loathsome repast before we who are more fortunate can conclude h
e belongs to a different order of creatures than we? And then what? My learned friend no doubt would say destroy him like a piece of filth. But even more learned men, as I believe I am safe in saying the distinguished prosecutor, who tempers his splendid talents with modesty, would agree, have said it is medieval, if not Neanderthal, to kill what we do not understand. Easy enough to do when one has the power, and all is well again—

  “—until that terrible day when you look down and see the next cannibal at work on your own leg.”

  In his summations Melrose preferred to speak at length about another, and worse, crime than the one with which his client was charged. When he eventually returned from cannibalism to the stabbing or shooting at issue, the latter was considerably devalued.

  He was not worried about what Crews would do to establish premeditation. The D.A.’s case was certainly going to be weak when it came to Appleton’s killing, which had manifestly been committed in self-defense. Which left the strangling of Billie.

  Melrose had a special feeling about Billie. Ordinarily he never took an interest in the victims of a client, especially if they were deceased. To put it simply, they were not his business except insofar as their existence, or the disposition of their remains, was inimical to his defendant, in which event Melrose would do his best to destroy their reputations, expose them as bogus or greater scoundrels than the accused—the deceased Appleton, for example, the forgotten man in this case, had not been forgotten by Melrose, whose investigators dug up dirt on him: a minor role in some PX scandal during a tour of Army duty; a short-lived career, two decades earlier, in semipro boxing, not criminal but useful to the defense of a man who had killed him, a prize-fighter’s hands being classified at law as deadly weapons.

  But Billie was different. For one, she had been beautiful. The many extant photographs banished all doubt of this: it could not have been faked that often. Honey hair, grape eyes, peach cheeks, a body like a gastronome’s larder. Nowadays if Melrose believed a woman edible she had reached the summit of his tastes. He could not be said to have fallen in love with pictures or a corpse. Nor would the real Billie, resuscitated, have been his meat. Much too vulgar. But the thought of it, the ghost of it in the photographs, the slightly opened mouth, the archness of her breasts, the suggestion in her smile of a wickedness that could be imagined only by the utterly innocent. She had been too pretty to work as a call girl, too frivolous to model legitimate underwear, too lazy to aspire to the stage and she slept with the wrong people.