The Watchman (27 page)

splattered his cheek, each bough that struck his wounded head or his mouth seemed to Jason the first of the kilHng bullets. And now it seemed the flashes of the pistol originated everywhere around him so that there was nowhere to hide, no running to another havening bush or drainage ditch. But these were only the windows of the Adena bedrooms coming alive with light, windows thrown up, doors opening, women somewhere crying words which the winds with their rains erased. From their pillows the sleepers wakened to the gunfire and in the sudden blinding hght of bedroom lamps men and women glanced at one another, smiled, knowing, then looked quickly away: kicked out of sleep by this somehow long-remembered, long-expected fusillade it seemed to them that what they now were awakened to was, curiously, an event which, though not remembered as such, was nothing more than a continuation of some indistinguishably communal dream. Each knew; for each had waited. Each, in a sense too shameful for his most arcane reckonings, had longed for this night when the killer, even if that killer killed again, might show himself to be killed. Adena's wakening spread up the town from Water Street. Even above the gusting sweep of rain and wind its angry yet rejoicing murmur could be heard. Though Jason did not hear. In an instant when he was certain he was dead, his living foot, providently, caught in a snarl of Dede Moonshine's pumpkin vines, pitching him face forward into darkness, into a dazzle of breaking, soundless lights and then, more profound, the velvet black of wooled unconsciousness: silence beyond the pistol's measured fire, beyond her finding, beyond the barking of a little dog, the cries of the wind and the rain; a sightless, senseless silence beyond earshot, as well, of that even subtler noise which was more ominous and emblematic than the others: Adena waking, stirring, flexing itself, a town rising and gathering into languid yet inexorable momentum, Adena moving: the shadowed accretion of something more old than the mound, these sleepers of Adena awakened and on the march, and crowds now of something hunched, panting and darkly primordial moving down her blustering, rainswept streets.

When Luther Alt came up Lafayette toward the Court House it had just begun to rain. Through the jail corridor he admitted himself to the dark, deserted labyrinths of its lower floors, moving through the blackness of the central hallway's

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stale and boxed-up air, breathing in its miasma of ledgered and archived molder: the dead breath of immemorable and obsolete birth, death, and tax-assessment mingling with the stinging reek of oiled and disinfected floor-wood which was an odor suggestive of that justice-temple's totaled and reck-onable sum of seventy years' unpartisan and indifferently ruthless ritual decorum; feeling his way by sense and recollection, Luther now groping toward the wall phone by the padlocked door to the office of the County Clerk and all thej while racking among his wits for the number of the home phone of Mound County Attorney Mister Christmas Janders. Leaning his jowl against the phone's mouthpiece, his bigj hand resting on the receiver, breathing a moment, trying to order his reason back into disciphned regimen, struggling to calculate, without panic, whether he was doing it all in that precise sequence and logic which is always, in such struggling moments of travail, the very exact illogic of flawless and inevitable imdoing; thinking: Their little table in the window down at the Hotel? Not there. At the house? Would have seen them together on the stone steps or the door-yard. Jill's light on in her room. Not at the house then. Only her there. So the boy, in the fatigue of too much one-night's terror, stumbled home to bed. Must hurry. Janders. Yes, it is Janders now. Janders. Maybe ought to call Hunnicutt to be sure. The boy. No. Sure of that. Sure of anything? Yes, sure of that. No margin for mistake now. Must hurry. Janders. Mister Christmas Janders. Fetch him out of bed and bring him yonder to his office for the showdown. My brain in my head: a drum. Pounding. Slow down. Hold on now. What if you'd have a stroke and drop down dead before you can die? Die right. Give Mister Janders his murderer and his clean, closed case and die properly. Must think. Thoughts sometimes racing backwards, not forward. Jane Nancy. No. For God's sake no thoughts of her nor Jill nor love nor persons loved. Think coldly. Nothing but duty now. Duty to persons loved. Think, man, think. Panic. Panic. That will do, Luther Alt. Get hold now and think. Panic! By God, now, I said that will do, Luther Alt!

Was it old tears on his cheek that pressed against the phone's black cone: sweat of fear? or the first clean drops of the vanguards of the rain? He gathered up his muscled immensity within his jacket, straightening himself, his fingers lifting the receiver from the hook, then put it back, blinking his eyes at the sudden wire of dusty gold which split the

dark a dozen feet away across the wastes of shadowless and oiled floor. Something cried thin and puling amid that razored and blinding revelation of light: the voice perhaps of aged wood speaking from the tongue of seasoned, brass-green hinge. Luther Alt glared at the wire of gold, his pupils widening as this itself grew wider: a bar of hght now, the gentle drifting open of a heavy-paneled door. Door to the chamber within which blazed with cold, judicial brilliance the desk lamp of Mister Christmas Janders. Yet he knew then that it had not been the cry of hinge nor wood he'd heard: he saw the shape of the little cat that, mewing forth, nudged and sinuously shouldered the bar of light still wider and then, breaking the goldness with the silhouette of his bleak and somehow bloodless vigilance, the black form of Mister Christmas Janders opening the door to a full flood of dusky light, bending now to scoop the Uttle cat up, cradling it in his arms, stepping back a httle now, stroking the small creature's ears, smiling at Luther Alt out yonder, blinking, with his hand on the phone.

Come in, Sheriff. Come in, said Mister Christmas Janders, You know, sir, I half expected you might be down here to see me tonight. I've been working late, as you can see. One more Uttle detail and I was about to shut up shop and go home. Come in, sir, come in.

Luther sat in the fumed-oak chair and looked at Mister Christmas Janders through the fan-shaped fall of light across his desk.

Quite an evening's labor. Sheriff Alt, said the prosecutor in that voice of deadly amiabiUty. Doesn't look it, though— does it now? Not a sheet of paper on my desk. Not so much as a note, sir. Yet, six hours at this desk tonight, Sheriff, shuffling tediously and carefully through a sheaf of nothing but notions, possibilities, guesses, fancies. All of them yonder there on my desk, Sheriff, though none of them visible, naturally. Abstractions, sir. Opinions scribbled across the strong, thin tissue of probabihties—the attorney's bond of trial-and-error. Though, I must say, in my profession if there's very much error there is damned Uttle trial.

And what have you found written on your invisible papers yonder. Mister Janders? said Luther Alt.

Why, probabilities. Sheriff. Just as I've told you—probabilities, said Mister Christmas Janders. All of them circumstantial, sir. But most damningly circumstantial, sir.

Circumstantial to exactly what, Mister landers? said Luther Alt.

To the arrest of a killer. Sheriff, said the prosecutor. And I have strong hopes to something more than arrest. I mean to the indictment, trial, conviction and execution of a killer.

The killer of Cole Blake, said Luther Alt.

The killer of Cole Blake, Sheriff, smiled the prosecutor. I think I've riddled out that killer's name among those heaped and invisible papers there tonight. Sheriff. Well, I confess it's had me in a sweat these past few weeks. And now tonight there came to me unexpectedly out of this pleasant September night the one missing piece which gave logic and sense and sequence to all the jumbled others.

Out of the night. Mister landers? said Luther Alt.

Literally, said the prosecutor. A visitor, Sheriff. Please don't press me for names, sir. Let us just say that tonight when the cat entered the courthouse the cat was let out of the bag. Isn't she a charmer? he murmured softly, stroking the little cat's gray chin with the tip of his forefinger. Such a wise, such an informing little cat. I think, Sheriff, that when all of this dirty business is over and done with and the killer safely locked up in death-row that I'll adopt this little lady and take her home with me. And not merely as a house pet. Sheriff. My, no! Small wonder the Egyptians worshiped cats—I may one day worship this one. She may have saved me from defeat at this November's polls. Tell me. Sheriff, do you think she would take offense if I made a little lawyer's joke and called her a poll-cat?

I smell something, said Luther Alt. Though I doubt if it's that cat you hold yonder, Mister landers.

Sheriff, I know very well how you feel, said the prosecutor with a smile of assentations piety. Every man feels a little bitter when a colleague gets there first. You mustn't look at it in that light. Remember the afternoon we talked here. Sheriff? —you and our efficient police chief and my humble self? Even you agreed that day that the job of finding that boy's murderer was a duty that fell between us both. Now, why should it rankle you that the answer came first to me by a pure, chance dropping-by of a friend tonight?

Yonder cat, of course, said Luther. You've spent the evening cross-examining that cat, you can.

Not exactly, smiled Mister Christmas landers. Let us just say I spent the evening listening interestedly to someone the cat followed into the courthouse.

Would you object to teUing me the name of that informant?

Sheriff, with the case as good as ended, laughed the prosecutor. Why should we degrade a pleasant evening's talk with sordid and unpleasant details. Believe me, sir, if there were any question left—if the case were still under investigation— I, naturally, would have no right to such reticence. But now, Sheriif—what are names to us?

You want your murderer mighty bad, don't you, Christmas Janders? said Luther.

Mighty bad. Sheriff, said the prosecutor, his face not smiling any more. Mighty bad.

And you fancy that you've as good as got him?

Him, Sheriff Alt? smiled Christmas Janders pleasantly. I know I have my murderer, if that's what you meant.

Who, Mister Janders? smiled Luther Alt boldly back into that most questionable smile.

Don't you know. Sheriff Alt? asked the prosecutor. I do.

And so, said Luther Alt, ignoring this, you plan to have your office make an arrest for the county?

Yes, Sheriff. That is correct.

When?

Tonight, Sheriff, said Mister Christmas Janders.

He fixed Luther with a slitted, glittering gaze, smiled, stroking the cat with one hand, tapping his fingers Ughtly on the desk top with the other.

Would you care to make the arrest yourself. Sheriff? he said softly.

On the basis of the word of a police-informer?

The pieces fit. Sheriff Alt, said the prosecutor. They fit with a beautiful, wonderful inseparableness—they dovetail fast and tight! The strands of a rope, Sheriff. Let the jury try them—let it take the whole cloth of it in its hands and tug it—wrench it—pull the fabric from every corner—every angle. Let the jury see if it slips apart. That's their job—mine wiU be done by then. I'll have the testimony of a state's witness of unimpugnable character.

Someone who saw Cole Blake's murder? asked Luther.

Unfortunately, no, said Christmas Janders. But someone who nonetheless has absolutely irrefutable authority for what he says. Nothing will more surely send the accused to the electric chair than what he will say at the trial.

What finally brought this informer around to you?

Sheriff, the emotion that brought him round to me is that

priceless, human sentiment without which the police machinery of civilization would—within a very few days—come to a grinding and chaotic standstill, said the prosecutor. Perhaps it is not one of the higher feelings of man: this emotion. And yet sometimes the lowest sentiment can make possible the most lofty justice.

What brought him round to you? said Luther again. Fear, said Mister Christmas landers. Cowardice. Selfish, craven terror. Pin any mean word on it you can think of, Sheriff, and it won't make it ugly in my eyes. Label it with the lowest of words and that won't make it any the less noble and beautiful if it leads to a noble and beautiful justice. Can you sit yonder as a peace officer, Sheriff, and tell me that the whole Christian structure of law enforcement would last long without a world full of obliging Judases?

And why was this little Judas so afraid? whispered Luther Alt.

Why, because we made him afraid, said the prosecutor. Fear's no different from any other emotion, really. Love, hate, pity, mob-fury—Sheriff, you know as well as I do how easily they can be made synthetically. I sensed this man knew something. I got busy. We followed this man. We built up a sound, imaginary case around him. I must say I think it was so perfect that I think I could have sent him to the chair with it if he hadn't come round to my way of thinking. By the time we'd done our work I actually think he half-believed he'd really killed young Blake.

And to think, whispered Luther, glaring upward into the heavens far beyond the architecture of that fantastic, ageless structure. To think that tonight I could have killed him. To think that I held a gun in his beUy tonight and listened to him rave on that he'd do anything to get what he wanted despite me or heaven or hell! I could have killed him. Didn't I see it plain in his eyes?—that he'd as good as told me if he didn't get the thing he wanted he would see it destroyed! By God, lawyer, if you knew the jokes They've played on me up there. Lawyer, you're so wise—which is it: They or Him —gods or the Lord? God knows I've stopped believing in Him any more. Thank the Lord for that, at least—that 1 believe in Him no more. To sit as I must sit tonight and hear the hedging, hinting, never-saying snickers of scum like you tell me of the treachery of scum like him! That boy— that Jason. By God, I'd not have guessed they come that low that young. And what else did he tell you tonight, prosecutor?

And what did he tell you about my girl tonight? What did Judas Jason tell you, lawyer?