The Glass Village (28 page)

“Set it down!” shouted Judge Shinn. “Never mind how! Just so we can get at the trunk!”

The coupé came down with a crash.

Men leaped from every direction.

In a moment the trunk compartment was open. …

It was full of firewood.

Ferriss Adams sagged. He would have fallen if not for the Hemus twins.

“One, two, three, four, five—” Johnny kept flinging the sticks to the ground as he counted aloud.

Kowalczyk was there, too, beside Burney Hackett. His hands were still tied with a rope. He was gaping at the wood, his eyes glaring in the pink light.

“Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—”

Samuel Sheare's lips were moving.

“Twenty, twenty-one …”

Hubert Hemus stepped back. There was a look of enormous uncertainty on his gaunt face. He was blinking, grinding.

“Twenty-four,” said Johnny. “And that's the last, good friends and kindly neighbors.”

Burney Hackett untied Josef Kowalczyk's wrists. He took the rope over to Ferriss Adams and the Hemus twins jammed Adams's wrists together and Hackett tied them.

Hube Hemus turned away.

Slowly the people followed.

The peepers and chugarums were really going at it in the Hollow. A calf bawled in Orville Pangman's cow barn; the Scotts' dog was howling faintly at the moon. The street light above Berry's Variety Store on the east corner lit up the deserted intersection.

Judge Shinn puffed a smoke screen from his cigar and complained: “I really ought to screen this porch. Promise myself to do it every summer, but I never seem to get around to it.” He waved his arms at the insects.

“Quiet tonight,” said Johnny.

“Enjoy it while you can, my boy. With dawn's early light come the reporters.”

The Hackett house, Prue Plummer's, the Pangman farmhouse were dark. One window of the parsonage glowed.

They smoked peacefully, reviewing the noisy aftermath of the swamp … the arrival of the state police, the magical reappearance of Sheriff Mothless and Coroner Barnwell, Ferriss Adams's twitching face in the studio as he re-enacted his crime, his hysterical confession, the silent villagers looking on and then melting away, Hube Hemus the last to leave, as if defying Captain Frisbee to arrest him for the wounding of the trooper. … They were all gone now, the police and the officials and Adams and Peague and Casavant and Andrew Webster. Only Josef Kowalczyk remained; Samuel and Elizabeth Sheare had taken him into the parsonage, where they insisted he spend the night.

“Hard to believe it's all past,” remarked the Judge.

Johnny nodded in the darkness. He was feeling empty and restless. “The stupidity is still with us,” he said.

“Always,” said the Judge. “But so are perception and the right.”

“But late,” grinned Johnny. “Anyway, I was referring to myself.”

“Your stupidity? Johnny—”

“For letting that trick alibi of his take me in.”

“What should I say?” growled the Judge. “I didn't see it at all. Still don't, entirely.”

“Oh, you were on the phone with the Governor when Adams told all.” Johnny flipped his cigaret into the dark garden. “His trick was so simple it was clever. Adams's alibi was that he'd left his office in Cudbury just before one o'clock Saturday afternoon and got back to his office ‘about two-thirty' to find Emily Berry's note saying that she was at the dentist's office and he was to phone her there, she had a message for him from his aunt. So, Adams said, he used his office phone to call Mrs. Berry and she gave him his aunt's message to go right over to Shinn Corners and he did—arriving here, he said, at three-thirty, over an hour and a quarter after her murder. Emily Berry confirmed the note business, Adams's phone call at two-thirty; we ourselves saw him get to the Adams house at three-thirty. … Complete. A rounded picture of his innocent afternoon.

“Only,” said Johnny, “we'd been conned. In all that mess of testimony and confirmation we lost sight of the only important fact in it:
that Emily Berry had merely Adams's word for it that when he phoned her at Dr. Kaplan's at two-thirty he was calling from his office phone in Cudbury
. The vital part of his alibi was completely without substantiation. A phone call can be made from anywhere. He might have been calling from New York—or Shinn Corners.

“So at two-thirty Saturday afternoon Ferriss Adams wasn't necessarily in Cudbury, twenty-eight miles from the scene of the two-thirteen crime. And if Adams wasn't necessarily in Cudbury at that time, neither was Adams's car. In other words, neither Adams nor his car had a real alibi for the time of the murder, and that's why I staked everything on my proposal to dig that coupé out of the muck.”

“The firewood,” murmured the Judge. He shook his head in the darkness. “And you say there's no justice, Johnny? He's going to roast in hell over that firewood.”

Johnny said nothing.

The Judge's cigar glowed brightly.

“Tell me,” said the Judge at last, “about his confession. He found Em Berry's note earlier Saturday, I take it?”

“Yes. He got back from lunch not at two-thirty but about twenty after one—he'd grabbed a sandwich at a diner. The note mentioned that there was a message from his Aunt Fanny. Instead of phoning Emily Berry at the dentist's, Adams phoned his aunt direct … at one-twenty, from his office. And what Fanny Adams told him over the phone at that time sealed her fate.”

“What did she say to him? Why in God's name did he kill her?”

“Nothing epic,” said Johnny. “He's been scrabbling along with his law practice, barely making a living, and as Fanny Adams's only relative he'd always expected to inherit from her when she died. She told him over the phone that she'd decided to make a will leaving her entire estate in trust to Shinn Corners—a permanent fund to be administered by the town elders for school maintenance, making up budget deficits, loans to needy villagers, and so on. She wanted him to draw the will for her … What you might call killed by kindness.”

“Johnny,” said the Judge.

“Well, wasn't she?” Johnny was silent. Then he said, “He got his car and drove to Shinn Corners. It was just about two-ten when he drove down the hill into the village and saw a tramp running out of his aunt's house stuffing something into a pocket. Adams parked in the driveway and went in. His aunt was painting away in her studio … At this point,” said Johnny, “our big bad killer starts whining. He had no intention of killing her, he says. He'd just come to plead his cause—the blood tie, his need, his hopes, the rest of his piddling concerns. But she cut him short and said he was still young and the town was old and in need. So he went blind-mad, he says, and the next thing he knew he found himself over her dead body, the bloody poker in his hand.”

Judge Shinn stirred. “The legal mind. He's already setting up a plea of unpremeditated murder.”

“The whole thing, he says, took no more than two or three minutes. Right away his brain cleared—it's wonderful how these attacks of temporary insanity go away as suddenly as they come! He needed an alibi and a fall guy, he says. Luck seemed to be with him. The tramp who'd been running away … Adams found the empty cinnamon jar and realized that the tramp had robbed the old lady. Made to order. He must be headed for Cudbury—the road went nowhere else—and going on foot he'd be a sitting duck any time that afternoon Adams chose to sick the hunters on him.

“As for the alibi, Adams says he had to use what means he had. He simply picked up his aunt's phone in the kitchen at two-thirty and phoned Emily Berry at Dr. Kaplan's office in Cudbury, telling her he was calling from his own office. The record of that call, by the way, ought to be a strong link in the evidence against him. It's a toll call and will be in the phone company's records.”

“So will the call from his office to Aunt Fanny's at one-twenty,” said the Judge grimly. “And the firewood business?”

Johnny struck a match and held it to a fresh cigaret. “That's where friend Adams began to get clever. He decided to make the case against the tramp look even blacker. He'd noticed the freshly split firewood stacked in the lean-to. Obviously his aunt at ninety-one hadn't been splitting wood; therefore, he reasoned, it must have been the tramp's work, payment for the half-eaten meal on the kitchen table. Adams went outdoors, threw the twenty-four sticks into his coupé trunk, removed the evidences of Kowalczyk's axwork behind the barn. That would make the tramp out a liar.… Adams still thinks it was an inspiration.”

“Then he noticed the painting on the easel,” said Judge Shinn. “I see, I see. She'd already sketched the firewood into the picture—”

“Yes, and he realized that he either had to replace the wood or get rid of the painting. To put the wood back in the lean-to meant wasting time and running the further risk of being seen. And he couldn't bring himself to destroy the painting—even intestate, her estate came to him and her paintings constituted the valuable part of it. So he began rummaging in the closet for a possible substitute picture which showed the lean-to empty. He found
September Corn in the Rain
. He put that one on the easel and stowed the unfinished picture away in the cabinet. He figured that by the time it was dug out again the paint would be dry and it would simply be dismissed as a picture she'd once started and never completed. The seasonal differences between the two canvases just never occurred to him, Adams says.

“And then all he had to do,” Johnny yawned, “was drive up the hill and off the road, and park. He waited in the woods till he judged he could safely make his appearance as Horrified Nephew, and then he did just that.”

“Lucky,” muttered the Judge. “Lucky throughout. Not being seen. The heavy rains. Kowalczyk's pushing his car into the bog—”

“And there he snafued himself,” Johnny said, grinning. “He'd completely forgotten the wood in the trunk of his coupé—just went clean out of his mind, he says, otherwise he'd have dumped the twenty-four sticks in the woods somewhere before going back. When he saw his car sinking into the muck late that afternoon it all came back to him with a thud. Of course he pretended to be riled, but you'll recall he also gave us some cogent reasons on the trip back to the village after Kowalczyk's capture why he wasn't going to ‘bother' salvaging the car. He simply can't explain why he forgot about the firewood till it was too late for him to do anything about it.”

“Mr. Sheare could probably explain it,” remarked Judge Shinn, “citing chapter and verse to boot. There goes the light in the parsonage. I imagine Josef Kowalczyk will sleep soundly tonight.”

“More likely have nightmares.” Johnny stared over at the little dark house of the Sheares. “By the way, what happens to Kowalczyk?”

“Well, I called Talbot Tucker in Cudbury last night—he owns the tanning factory. Talbot said to send Kowalczyk to him, and that's where Kowalczyk's headed tomorrow morning. With a visit first to Father Girard of the Catholic church. I talked to Father about Kowalczyk, and he's finding him a place to live, get him settled, and so on.”

“I didn't mean that. He still has a theft rap hanging over his head.”

“Oh, that.” Judge Shinn dropped his cigar neatly over the porch railing, and rose. “Who's going to press the charge—Ferriss Adams?”

Samuel Sheare held open the door of the parsonage. Josef Kowalczyk stepped into the early sunlight, blinking.

Most of Shinn Corners was gathered on the parsonage lawn, the men in their sweaty work clothes, the women in their house dresses, the children in dusty jeans and shorts.

They faced him silently.

Kowalczyk's eyes rolled toward the minister. He took a jerky backward step, his gray skin darkening.

His trousers and tweed jacket looked almost spruce this morning. He wore a tie and shirt of Mr. Sheare's, and he carried an old black felt hat from the same source. A tin lunch box was clutched to his ribs.

He had not shaved, and his hair was still long. “He was anxious,” Mr. Sheare explained later, “to get away.” His beard was very thick now, its ends beginning to curl. A blond beard with gray in it. It gave him a curiously dignified appearance.

Mr. Sheare put a hand on his arm and murmured.

Josef Kowalczyk let his breath go; he even smiled. But the smile was nervous and perfunctory, a polite flickering of the muscles about his mouth.

His eyes remained wary.

Now Hubert Hemus stepped out of the crowd, one hand out of sight behind his back. He was almost as gray-skinned this morning as Kowalczyk; his eyes were inflamed, as if he had not slept.

He wet his lips several times.

“Mr. Kowalczyk,” he began.

Kowalczyk's eyes widened.

“Mr. Kowalczyk,” Hube Hemus began a second time. “As First Selectman of Shinn Corners, I'm speakin' for the whole community.” He swallowed. Then he went on in a rush. “I expect, Mr. Kowalczyk, we used you hard. Made a mistake.” Hemus's jaws ground futilely. “Bad mistake,” he acknowledged.

And he stopped again.

Kowalczyk said nothing.

Hemus cried suddenly, “We're a law-abidin' community! Don't ever think we ain't! Town's got a right to protect itself. That's how we figgered.” Then his narrow shoulders slumped. “But I guess we went off half-cocked … went about it the wrong way. Seemed so open and shut …”

Hube Hemus stopped once more, bitterly.

Kowalczyk's lips tightened.

“I go Cudb'ry,” he said.

“Wait!” Hemus sounded panicky. He brought his concealed hand around and thrust it at Kowalczyk. It held a purple-stained pint berry basket. ‘We're askin' you to accept this, Mr. Kowalczyk,” he said rapidly. “Here.”

Josef Kowalczyk stared into the basket. It was full of bills and coins.

“Here,” Hube Hemus said again, urgently.