Shock Treatment (15 page)

Then I remembered Macklin’s warning. He had said it would be fatal to Gilda if I lied about taking her to the Italian restaurant and Boos found out. But I couldn’t tell him now. I knew, if I did, he would get the truth out of me. I knew too he would jump it on Gilda and she might deny it.

I had to take the risk of him finding out.

“I swear to that,” I said. “She was nothing to me!”

He stared at me for a long moment, then turned away.

“For your sake, Regan, I hope you’re not lying. I’m going to check. If I find out you are lying, you’re going down for an accessory rap, and if I don’t get you fifteen years, I’ll turn my badge in.”

I felt I was over the danger now — anyway for the time being.

“To hell with you, Lieutenant,” I said. “You can do what you damn well like.”

He suddenly grinned.

“Okay, Regan. Maybe she wasn’t such a dope as to remove the glass. I always thought it was crummy the glass wasn’t there. Well, we’ll see. Come on: I’ll drive you back.”

II

Two days later I had a telephone call from Macklin.

“Hunt is taking the case,” he said. “He wants to talk to you. Will you be at his office at eleven this morning?” I said I would.

Macklin sounded curt and unfriendly, and after he had given me Hunt’s address, he hung up.

Lowson Hunt had a set of offices in the fashionable quarter of Los Angeles. I knew him by reputation as did anyone who read the murder cases in the papers over the past ten years.

I had never seen him, and I was surprised to find that he was small, thin and frail looking. He could have been anything from fifty to sixty years of age. His thin pale face was nondescript: it was only his eyes that gave a hint of the man behind the mask. They were remarkable eyes: small and washed out and blue, but they gave me the impression of being able to look through a wall and see well beyond it: the most disconcerting eyes I have ever had to meet.

“Sit down, Mr Regan,” he said, waving to a chair. He made no attempt to get up or to shake hands. “I’ve been through the case against Mrs Delaney. I understand you are offering to finance her defence.”

“That’s right.”

I then got the full blast from his eyes, and the searching stare made me move uneasily.

“Why?”

“That’s my business,” I Said curdy. “What’s it going to cost?”

He leaned back in his chair, resting his small white hands on the desk, and continued to stare at me.

“It happens to be my business if you want me to get Mrs Delaney off,” he said. “Let me explain: when I started to try to make a reputation for myself as a defending attorney, I had the bad luck to run up against Maddox of the National Fidelity. I was defending a man who was charged with the murder of his wife. She was insured, and the money came to him. There wasn’t much of a case against him, and I felt confident that I’d get an acquittal, but I was wrong. When Maddox got on the stand and began sounding off about his instincts for spotting a phoney claim I could see the jury sliding away from me. Simply by stating facts and figures over the period he had been investigating claims, Maddox put so much suspicion into the minds of the jury that my client went to the gas chamber. During my career I have come up against Maddox three times, and each time he has licked me. I’ve accepted the fact now that he is an expert witness; he can sway juries and he is a deadly danger to anyone standing trial for murder. Maddox has been able to lick me because in every case he has been right. He has this odd instinct that tells him long before he even digs up the evidence that a claim is a phoney, and that the man or woman insured by his company has been murdered. He has sent eleven men and five women to the gas chamber during the past ten years. He now has a reputation that is almost impossible to shake. The jury and the press know that when he is connected with a prosecution the man or the woman on trial is a goner.” He drummed on the desk while he continued to stare at me. “He has never been proved wrong for the simple reason he isn’t ever wrong. Maddox says Delaney was murdered, and that means Delaney was murdered. It’s my job when defending a client to get him off whether he is guilty or not. I don’t give a damn how guilty he is. When he hires me, I’m his, body and soul, until he either walks out of a court a free man or goes to the gas chamber. I’m telling you this because, if I am going to lick Maddox, I must have the whole truth and all the facts. Whatever you tell me won’t go beyond this room. It’s up to you. It’s your money. If you want to save her, you’ll have to give me the facts.” He pointed a finger at me. “But remember this: even if I get all the facts, I’m still not guaranteeing that I’ll save her. I have had three failures against Maddox. I’m determined to lick him before I quit this racket, and this case may be my chance. I don’t give a damn if Mrs Delaney did murder her husband. All I care about is pricking Maddox’s ego. Once I show that he can be wrong, I’ve got him where I want him. No jury will be impressed with him as they have been in the past. It’s going to make my other cases in which Maddox is involved a lot’ easier for me.” He paused, then went on, “So if you have anything to tell me that I should know, now’s the time.”

I hesitated for about three seconds, then I told him. I gave him the whole story from the moment I first met Gilda to the last time I saw her. I held nothing back, and it was a relief to get the whole thing off my mind.

He sat listening, not moving, his eyes fixed on the paperweight on his desk.

When I was through, he got abruptly to his feet and began to prowl around his big office, his hands in his trousers pockets, his face looking leaner than ever.

“That guy’s instinct for smelling murder!” he said. “It’s fantastic!”

“But she didn’t kill him,” I said. “He killed himself.”

He turned to look at me.

“That was your luck. The setup was for murder, and Maddox spotted it. I’m not so sure that what you’ve told me couldn’t make it tougher for her. The DA is going to prove that Delaney was a drunk. He’s got the maid who worked there who’ll tell the court Delaney began to hit the bottle as soon as he got up in the morning and went on hitting it. He’s going to show that Mrs Delaney could have put the cyanide in his whisky which killed him instantly. Now that you’ve claimed to have found the glass, the DA is going to say she washed the glass out, then rinsed it in whisky and put it by his side. You spoilt that planted clue of hers by absent-mindedly picking up the glass and putting it away. He is going to show that it was Mrs Delaney who arranged the TV set so that it looked as if he had electrocuted himself. If it gets out that you two were lovers, there’s not a thing I can do for her. I’ve got to make the jury believe she was loyal and faithful to him and because he had no more money, he took his life.”

“That’s how it did happen!” I said. “They’ve got to believe it!”

“Well, we’ll see. You can leave it to me now. Everything depends on whether the police find out you two were lovers. If they do, both of you are sunk. If they don’t, then she has a chance. Now remember this, if she is found guilty, they won’t send her to the gas chamber. She’ll get maybe ten years. So don’t do anything crazy like confessing, because it won’t help her. She’ll get a longer sentence, and you’ll be in trouble too.”

“Well, okay,” I said uneasily. “How about paying you? Do you want money now?”

“No. When it’s over and the excitement’s died down, I’ll want five thousand bucks from you. But right now I’m going to put out the story that I am so sure Maddox has made a mistake this time that I’m going to defend her for nothing just for the satisfaction of proving Maddox is wrong. The press know all about the fights I’ve had with Maddox. They’ll lap up a story like that. It’ll also make an impact on the jury. You leave all that to me. I’ll go and talk to her this afternoon.”

I went back to my cabin.

Soon after the trial, I would have to find five thousand dollars to pay Hunt. To raise the money I would have to part with practically every dime I had saved. I would be cleaned out.

I would have to leave Glyn Camp after the trial and it wouldn’t be possible now for me to start again on my own. I would have to find a job, and there and then I wrote to a firm in Miami I had had dealings with, asking them if they could make use of my services.

There was nothing for me to do now but to wait the outcome of the trial and to hope Boos wouldn’t find out about the Italian restaurant.

I wanted badly to write to Gilda, but I didn’t dare.

She was in my mind, night and day, day and night, and I wondered continually if she was thinking of me.

Not knowing now how she felt about me tormented me.

III

Five weeks after Gilda’s arrest, on a hot September morning, the trial opened in an atmosphere of tension and excitement.

Those five weeks had been anxious ones for me, but as the days passed and I heard nothing from the police, I began to feel more confident that they hadn’t found out about us nor had anyone apparently recognized Gilda at the Italian restaurant — and they would have done I felt sure, for, by now, every newspaper carried photographs of her.

As one of the principal witnesses for the prosecution I was kept in the witness room away from the court during the opening proceedings.

The other witnesses waiting with me were Delaney’s Mexican maid, Maria, Sheriff Jefferson, Doc Mallard, the pharmacist who had sold Gilda the cyanide and a fat, important looking man I hadn’t seen before who kept to himself.

There was a police officer in the room and he didn’t allow us to talk. I could see poor old Doc looked pretty shaky and unhappy and he had lost all his arrogance.

Jefferson was grim-faced, and he just nodded to me and then studiously avoided looking at me. I didn’t blame him. I knew he had guessed I had had something to do with Delaney’s death, and it was through me to a large extent that he had been forced to resign.

It wasn’t until half-past two in the afternoon that I got my call, and that was after Doc Mallard, Jefferson and the pharmacist had been called.

I braced myself.

I hadn’t seen Gilda now for six weeks and I remembered Hunt’s warning.

As I walked down the corridor towards the courtroom I asked the police officer escorting me how the trial was going.

“That guy Maddox!” he said. “This is the fourth time he’s tangled with Lowson Hunt and from the look of it, he’s scored again. You should have heard him sound off. By the time he was through with his figures and his hunches, the jury was looking away from her, and that’s always a bad sign.”

As I walked into the courtroom, I didn’t look at Gilda. It wasn’t until I had taken the oath that I glanced in her direction.

My heart gave a lurch when I saw how strained and pale she was. But she looked beautiful. I had never seen her look more beautiful, and I longed to go to her and take her in my arms.

She didn’t look at me and that hurt. She sat motionless beside Hunt, staring down at her hands.

I glanced over at the jury. They were a dead-looking lot: three of them women, the rest men. They stared at me, their eyes bored.

The DA got up and began questioning me about the TV set.

I went through the story of how I had found Delaney and why I had assumed he had died from an electric shock.

The DA took me over the story about finding the glass.

The jury now lost their bored expressions and I could see they were listening intently.

“I believe there was an experiment carried out by you and Mr Harmas,” the DA said, “to do with the removing of the back of the set. Would you tell the jury just what this experiment was, Mr Regan?”

“Mr Harmas seemed to be under the impression that Delaney, paralysed as he was, couldn’t have reached the bottom fixing screws that held the back of the set in place,” I said. “I tried to remove the screws from Delaney’s wheel chair and had great difficulty in reaching the screws.”

“Is it not a fact,” the DA said, “that when you were tied into the chair you couldn’t get anywhere near these screws? Nor could you pick up the screwdriver that was lying on the floor?”

“That’s right,” I said, and I had to make an effort not to look at Gilda.

The DA wasn’t satisfied with that. He took me over the experiment again in different words, asking questions, enlarging, and generally hammering into the minds of the jury that Delaney could not have taken off the back of the set nor could he have picked up the screwdriver.

At last he seemed satisfied he had made his point and he stepped back.

“Okay, Mr Regan, that’s all,” he said, and glanced at Hunt.

Without even bothering to get out of his chair, Hunt said he had no questions to ask me, but he would call me later.

I was taken out to spend another hour in the stuffy little witness room; this time on my own.

I heard from my police escort that the DA called Harmas after I had gone and took him through the story of the experiment.

It was on this business of taking the back off the set that the case against Gilda rested, and the DA hammered it home.

Around four o’clock I was called into the courtroom. There was an atmosphere in the room you could lean against.

The fat, important looking man who had been in the witness room was on the stand. He told Hunt that his name was Henry Studdley, and he was a specialist in the diseases of the spine. He said Delaney had been his patient.

He explained that there was nothing unusual about Delaney’s disability. His spine had been injured resulting in total paralysis from the waist down. Hundreds of people had been disabled in car accidents as Delaney had been disabled.

“Much has been made by the District Attorney,” Hunt said, “of the fact that Delaney could not have reached the two lower screws on the set. It is on this point that my client is being tried. I want to get this clear, doctor. Tell me, in your opinion, would it have been possible for Delaney, seated in his chair, to have removed those two bottom screws?”

“It would have been quite impossible for him to have reached the screws,” Studdley said emphatically.

This caused a major sensation, and the DA, thinking that Hunt had walked into a trap of his own making, was scarcely able to suppress a guffaw.