He told the matron she could send my belongings later and he dragged me out front where TV cameras and newspaper reporters were waiting.
As soon as the cameras began whirring and the photographers began to aim, the lawyer kissed me on the cheek and pinned a flower on me. He made a speech saying that a terrible miscarriage of justice had been rectified. He had located people who testified that Mrs.
Crowe had given me the box — she had told the gardener and the cleaning woman. They hadn’t wanted to testify because they didn’t want to get mixed up with the police, but the lawyer had persuaded them in the cause of justice and humanity to come forward and make statements.
The lawyer had also looked into the personnel record of the dead policeman and had learned that he had been judged emotionally unfit for his job, and the psychiatrist had warned the Chief of Police that something awful might happen either to the man himself or to a suspect unless he was relieved of his duties.
All the time the lawyer was talking into the microphones he had latched onto me like I was a three-year-old that might run away, and I just stood and stared. Then when he had finished his speech about me the reporters told him that like his grandfather and his uncle he was sure to end up as governor but at a much earlier age.
At that the lawyer gave a big grin in front of the camera and waved good-bye and pushed me into his car.
I was terrified. The nice place I’d found to stay in wasn’t mine any longer. My old nightmare was back — wondering how I could manage to eat and how much stealing I’d have to do to live from one day to the next.
The cameras and reporters had followed us.
A photographer asked me to turn down the car window beside me, and I overheard two men way in the back of the crowd talking.
My ears are sharp. Papa always said I could hear thunder three states away. Above the congratulations and bubbly talk around me I heard one of those men in back say, “This is a bit too much, don’t you think? Our Bat is showing himself the champion of the Senior Citizen now. He’s already copped the teenyboppers and the under thirties using methods that ought to have disbarred him. He should have made the gardener and cleaning woman testify at the beginning, and from the first he should have checked into the policeman’s history. There ought never to have been a case at all, much less a conviction. But Bat wouldn’t have got any publicity that way. He had to do it in his own devious, spectacular fashion.” The other man just kept nodding and saying after every sentence, “You’re damned right.”
Then we drove off and I didn’t dare look behind me because I was so heartbroken over what I was leaving.
The lawyer took me to his office. He said he hoped I wouldn’t mind a little excitement for the next few days. He had mapped out some public appearances for me. The next morning I was to be on an early television show. There was nothing to be worried about.
He would be right beside me to help me just as he had helped me throughout my trouble. All that I had to say on the TV program was that I owed my freedom to him.
I guess I looked startled or bewildered because he hurried on to say that I hadn’t been able to pay him a fee but that now I was able to pay him back — not in money but in letting the public know about how he was the champion of the underdog.
I said I had been told that the court furnished lawyers free of charge to people who couldn’t pay, and he said that was right, but his point was that I could repay him now by telling people all that he had done for me. Then he said the main thing was to talk over our next appearance on TV. He wanted to coach me in what I was going to say, but first he would go into his partner’s office and tell him to take all the incoming calls and handle the rest of his appointments.
When the door closed after him I thought that he was right. I did owe my freedom to him. He was to blame for it. The smart alec. The upstart. Who asked him to butt in and snatch me out of my pretty room and the work I loved and all that delicious food?
It was the first time in my life I knew what it meant to despise someone.
I hated him.
Before, when I was convicted of manslaughter, there was a lot of talk about malice aforethought and premeditated crime.
There wouldn’t be any argument this time.
I hadn’t wanted any harm to come to that policeman. But I did mean harm to come to this lawyer.
I grabbed up a letter opener from his desk and ran my finger along the blade and felt how sharp it was. I waited behind the door and when he walked through I gathered all my strength and stabbed him. Again and again and again.
Now I’m back where I want to be — in a nice place to stay.
Clever and Quick
CHRISTIANNA BRAND
Many aficionados of pure, fair-play detection would echo the great critic Anthony Boucher in nominating the trio of John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and Agatha Christie as their big three. But there were other writers who, if not quite as prolific, could equal those three in their devotion to and talent for devious puzzle plotting. One of these was the creator of Inspector Cockrill, Christianna Brand (1907-88).
Born Mary Christianna Milne of British parents in Malaya, Brand lived in India during her childhood. Like many writers, she held a variety of jobs in her early life, including governess, model, and dancer. Her experience working as a salesperson in a fashion house inspired her first novel, Death in High Heels (1941). Brand showed she could construct puzzles with the best of them in novels like Green for Danger (1944), memorably filmed with Alistair Sim, and Tour de Force (1955). By her own account, she was equally scrupulous about polishing her style and deploying her clues, seeking to bamboozle the reader while observing absolute fair play. At various times in her career, she departed from pure detection to produce a speculation on the Marie Celeste mystery (The Honey Harlot [1978]), children’s books (Danger Unlimited [1948] and a three-book series beginning with Nurse Matilda [1964]), a fact-crime account (Heaven Knows Who [1960]), and pseudonymous mainstream novels, but crime fiction remained her main interest.
A beloved figure at mystery conventions late in her life, she is remembered in the field for her personality as much as for her writing.
In introducing her short-story collection Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (1983), Robert E. Briney recalls her speaking style: “The topics and anecdotes varied, though some of them had to be reprised by popular demand. (The story of Dorothy L. Sayers and the blood in the stairwell has become a word-of-mouth classic.) But the audience reaction was always the same. Listeners were delighted by the sharp verbal portraits; they listened intently whenever a serious note was introduced; they anticipated exactly as much of a story’s trend as they were intended to, and responded with appreciative chagrin when the punchline turned out to be other than what they had been induced to expect. In fact, they reacted much as readers of Christianna Brand’s fiction have been doing for some forty years.”
In the short-story form, Brand specialized less in pure detection than in the twist-upon-twist double-or-triple-cross crime story of which “Clever and Quick” is a prime example.
You had to keep up appearances; so the apartment was very showy, everything phony right down to the massive brass fender in front of the electric fire. But keeping up appearances was one thing and keeping up the payments was another; and with the theater as it was these days, both of them had been “resting” for a long, long time. So the fact was that they really ought to let Trudi go.