The Glass Village (23 page)

“Leaving, as of this moment, six.”

There was silence for some time.

“Well,” said Ferriss Adams at last, “tomorrow morning ought to see
this
nonsense cleaned up.”

Nobody replied.

Wednesday began with a bang. They heard the shot at the breakfast table and it brought them up like one man in a rush for the door.

A dusty convertible was hauled up at the intersection. The Hemus twins flanked it; smoke still drifted from Tommy Hemus's gun. A pale elegant man in a pale elegant suit of gabardine and a pearl gray Homburg sat behind the wheel, sputtering.

As they ran into the road, Burney Hackett came streaking from his house on the south corner. They joined forces at the car.

“What's ailing these thugs?” cried the stranger. His voice was fussily cultivated, falsetto with outrage. “These armed hoodlums jumped in front of my car and had the effrontery to order me to go back where I came from! When I refused, they fired a shot in the air and informed me in the most callous way imaginable that the next shot would be right at me!”

“You want to learn not to argue with a gun, mister,” said Tommy Hemus, “you'll live longer. We wouldn't 'a' shot him, Judge.”

“I'm glad to hear that,” said Judge Shinn.

“Maybe put a hole through his beautiful hat,” said Dave Hemus. “I bet that lid cost more'n ten bucks.”

“Nearer thirty-five,” murmured Usher Peague.

“I told you boys not to mess with people passin' through!” scolded Burney Hackett. “Now, didn't I?”

“Sure you did, Burney,” drawled Tommy Hemus. “But this character ain't passin' through. He's bound for Aunt Fanny's house.”

“What is this?” shrieked the elegant man. “Isn't this a public thoroughfare? I wasn't speeding, was I, breaking any of your piddling hick laws? Will someone please explain!”

“Calm down, sir,” said the Judge. “May I ask who you are and why you want to visit Fanny Adams?”

“Ask anything you ruddy well please, I don't have to answer you. Damned if I will!”

“Of course, you don't have to answer, sir. But it would simplify matters if you did.”

“The name will mean nothing to you, I'm sure,” the man said shortly. “I'm Roger Casavant—”

“The art critic?” said Johnny.

“Well! There's a fellow with at least a primeval culture—”

“Holy smoke,” said Ferriss Adams. “I'm responsible for this, Judge. Mr. Casavant phoned last night. I meant to tell you about it this morning. He asked for Aunt Fanny. Naturally—”

“Naturally,” said the Judge. “Mr. Casavant, you have an apology coming. Been driving all night?”

“Most of it!”

“Then perhaps you'll join us in a bite of breakfast. No, leave the car here. The boys,” and Judge Shinn glanced at the twins, “will take very good care of it, you may be sure. It's all right, Burney. …”

It turned out that Roger Casavant had telephoned the night before to ask Fanny Adams if he might not drive up to see her.

“I suppose you might call me,” the art critic said, a little mollified by Millie Pangman's ham and eggs, “the world's leading authority on the painter Fanny Adams. I recognized her genius long before the others and I flatter myself that I've had a little something to do with the burgeoning of her career. A great artist, gentlemen! One of the greatest of the modern primitives. As a matter of fact, I'm her biographer. I conceived the idea over a year ago of doing her life and a definitive critique of her place in modern art, and she's been gracious enough to give her consent and cooperation. She made only one condition about my book, that she have final say as to its factual content. I phoned last night to tell her that the first draft of the manuscript was finished. I meant to ask her permission to bring it up so that we could discuss any changes she wanted. Instead,” and Casavant glared at Ferriss Adams, “some furtive-sounding pinhead refused to call her to the phone and gave me such a slimy line of jabberwocky that I became seriously concerned. After all, I said to myself, she's a very old lady and she does live alone. I was so alarmed I decided to drive right up … only to find my worst fears realized!”

“I'm afraid they're even worse than that, Mr. Casavant,” said Judge Shinn. “Fanny Adams was murdered last Saturday afternoon.”

It took them some time to restore Roger Casavant's aplomb. He wept real tears and wrung his beautiful hands as he delivered tragic periods to her memory.

“Saturday afternoon, you say? What an irony! Exactly when? … No, that's
too
much. Lay another crime at the feet of television! I'd fully intended to come up here Friday evening for the weekend. But last Wednesday I was asked to join a Saturday round table TV program emanating from Chicago—on a discussion of modern art—so I flew out there instead on Friday evening. And there I was, in a wretchedly humid Chicago studio on Saturday afternoon between one and one-thirty, breaking lances against the impenetrable density of two so-called university professors, when but for that stupid waste of time I might have been here saving the life of Fanny Adams!”

Casavant seemed barely able to assimilate the vigilante situation in the village. He kept saying dazedly that he hadn't seen a word of it in the papers.

“That magnificent, that God-given talent,” he kept repeating. “A trial, you say? Then you've run the animal to earth. Good, good! Why didn't the newspapers—”

Far from bridling at the warning that he might not be permitted to leave Shinn Corners for a day or two, Casavant tilted his delicate chin and said that a legion of ruffians could not drive him from the village now. There was so much to do. He had to catch up on Fanny Adams's recent paintings; this was his first visit since the previous August. He must see the one they said she was working on when she died—the last, the very last painting from that inspired brush. … In the end, to be rid of him, Judge Shinn asked Ferriss Adams to take Casavant over to the Adams house and turn him loose among the paintings in the cabinets.

“Will it take you long, Mr. Casavant?”

“Oh, days and days. I'll be making copious notes—”

“Well,” the Judge sighed, “as long as you stay out from underfoot …”

The first witness Wednesday morning was Selina Hackett, the constable's mother. (“Long as we're engaged in a mathematics problem,” said the Judge, “we may as well cancel out old Selina, too!”)

Each question had to be shouted in the old woman's ear, and half the time her responses made no sense. But finally they got out of her a reasonable picture of her Saturday. Burney had left the Haclcett house, she said, well before noon to drive to Cudbury. She had given her grandchildren their lunch at about a quarter past twelve—Joel had to run over from the Pangmans' and run right back—and after lunch she had made Cynthy and Jimmy go out with her to the small vegetable garden Burney had put in behind the garage to hoe and weed the carrots and onions and lettuce and beans. The rain at two o'clock had driven them back indoors, and there they had remained, through her son's return from Cudbury and after, until Prue Plummer came running over to tell her about Aunt Fanny's murder.

“Fine thing!” shouted Selina Hackett bitterly. “Fine thing when a body's own child can't tell his mother
first
, but I have to hear it from a neighbor!”

She was still glaring at her constabulary son when Ferriss Adams helped her out of the witness chair.

Judge Shinn called a short recess while Constable Hackett took his mother across the road to Shinn Free School, where the children were segregated, and brought back Sarah Isbel.

Merton Isbel got half out of his campchair when his daughter came in. But Orville Pangman seized the old man's arm, Hube Hemus leaned over, both said something insistent to him, and he sank back, mumbling.

The Isbel woman spoke in whispers while the jury looked at the paintings on the walls, at the ceiling, at the hands in their laps.

Nobody looked at Merton Isbel.

Sarah had been in her workroom at the Isbel farm with her child Saturday from lunch time on, she said, sewing and fitting a dress; neither of them had set foot out of the house. The workroom was at the back of the house; it had been the smokeroom of the original farmhouse; her mother—this was almost inaudible—her mother had changed it over. Until the rain began her father was visible to her and Mary-Ann through the window. He was plowing behind Smoky, the old gray. The rain had brought him in; he had stabled Smoky. He had his smithy in a corner of the horse barn and she had heard the clang of his hammer on the anvil on and off until Prue Plummer phoned. When the news came, her father hitched Smoky and Ralph to the farm wagon—they had no car—and they drove into the village at a gallop.

When Andrew Webster signified that he had no questions, Sarah Isbel fled.

Ferriss Adams called Merton Isbel to the stand.

The old farmer began quietly enough. When the rain drove him into the barn, he had taken the opportunity to reshoe the two horses. No, he had not left the barn. … He dropped to a mutter. The Swedish iron that he used to use for the nails … Johnny could not make out whether the Swedish horseshoe nails were no longer available or Isbel could no longer afford them. … The lined face, full of pits, a face of weathered granite, came alive in the most curious way. Muscles and nerves began to move, so that the stone seemed turning to a lava, heating more and more from below, until the whole rocky structure was in motion.

And then, with a roar, Mert Isbel erupted.

“
Whoreson! Seducer! Antichrist!
”

He was on his feet in a crouch, left arm dangling, right arm leveled, chin and nose thrust forward in total accusation.

He was addressing Josef Kowalczyk.

Kowalczyk pressed back in his chair like a man flattening before a hurricane. Andrew Webster's bony little bottom lifted itself clear of his seat as he grasped the edge of the pine table.

“Merton,” said Judge Shinn in a shocked voice.

“Mr. Isbel—” began Adams.

“Mert!” Burney Hackett reached.

But Merton Isbel roared again, and as he roared the people held their breath. For this was not the outburst of a sane man heated to anger; it was the explosion of sanity itself. Mert Isbel was hallucinated. For the moment he thought Josef Kowalczyk was the traveling man who had destroyed his daughter Sarah a decade before. And he damned the destroyer and praised God for delivering him into his hands.

“
Robber—despoiler of virgins—father of bastards—furrin scum!
”

Before their immobilized eyes the old farmer lunged across the pine table and pulled the stupefied prisoner from the chair, his powerful hands about the man's throat.

“
Ten years I've waited—ten years—ten years …
”

Kowalczyk's skin turned from gray to gray-violet. His eyes popped. He made strangling noises. …

It took six men to drag Mert Isbel off the prisoner. They held him down on Fanny Adams's trestle table, pinning his arms, hanging onto his thrashing legs. Gradually his struggles subsided, the madness went out of his eyes. They got him to his feet and took him upstairs to one of the bedrooms.

Judge Shinn surveyed the wreckage wildly.

“We'll recess, we'll recess,” he kept saying. “Will you people please help clean up this mess!”

Lunch was solitary. Each man chewed away at Millie Pangman's sandwich tastelessly.

It was only when Ferriss Adams rose to return to the Adams house that Judge Shinn remarked, “Better polish it off, Ferriss. We're going nowhere with extreme rapidity. Were you intending to rest?”

Adams said, “I was, but Casavant said something this morning when I took him over to Aunt Fanny's that I think ought to come out.”

“That earbender?” The Judge frowned. “What can he possibly contribute?”

“It's about the painting on the easel.”

“Oh?” Andy Webster looked up, interested. “What about the painting on the easel?”

“Never mind,” said the Judge. “All right, Ferriss, put Casavant on and wind up. Does it matter what he has to say, Andy? Or what you have to say? What have you to say, by the way? You'll have to make some gesture at a defense.”

“We have no defense,” grunted the old man. “Truth is our defense, only nobody'll believe it. I can only put Kowalczyk on the stand and let it go at that.”

“You may not be so sure Kowalczyk's telling the truth, Judge Webster,” said Adams slyly, “when you hear what Casavant says.”

“Oh?” said old Andy again.

Adams left, whistling.

Usher Peague glanced curiously at Johnny. “Judge Shinn's been telling me some fabulous stories about you. What are you doing, son, preparing to serve us a hasenpfeffer from that rabbit you've got up your sleeve?”

“No rabbits,” said Johnny. “Or anything else up my sleeve. You heard the testimony this morning. Old Selina and the Hackett kids, the three Isbels—that's six more whose alibis eliminate them, and since those were the only six left to eliminate …”

“Zero,” said Peague thoughtfully.

“Yep,” said Johnny. “By the trickiest kind of luck everybody in town has an alibi. Everybody, that is, but one. And that's the one who was tagged for it from the start.”

“Well,” said Andy Webster, slamming down his napkin, “that's that!”

Judge Shinn was massaging his head.

“There's always,” said the Cudbury editor brightly, “the man from Mars.”

“Oh, sure,” said Johnny. “If Kowalczyk didn't kill her, someone else did. And since everybody's whereabouts for the time of the murder is confirmed as having been elsewhere, that provisional somebody is an unknown. The only thing is, I've queried and requeried everyone in sight, with special attention to the kids, and nobody saw the slightest sign of one. There just wasn't any stranger in Shinn Corners Saturday but Josef Kowalczyk.” Johnny shrugged. “Therefore Kowalczyk it's got to be. It's got to be Kowalczyk if only because—always excepting the man from Mars—there's just no one else it could have been.”