Judge Chalmers rapped for order. “Very well, Mr. Foreman. Defendant, rise and face your jury. Mr. Foreman, what is your verdict?”
The foreman grimaced, bit his lips, and burst out, “Yer honor, we find this defendant — not guilty.”
And that was that. The only way it could be.
Judge Chalmers dismissed the jury, and the case. For a moment it was very quiet. Then the spectators began to leave amid a soft mumble of conversation. Roy Blaisedell came to the rail, his suntanned face split in a humorless grin. He said quietly, “I’ll be seeing you, Vendise. Count on it.”
Jack Vendise jumped up. “Drop dead, rube,” he said, and started laughing. He shook his head wonderingly. “I beat it.”
Blaisedell turned away and followed the crowd out of the courtroom. Vendise yelled, “I beat it, man. I beat it!”
The big, grizzled, rawboned sheriff of Pokochobee County stalked over to join me. “Glad Roy didn’t start any trouble,” Ed Carson said.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
I stepped across the aisle to congratulate the defense attorney, old P. J. Kimmons. He didn’t look at all happy. He had taken the case because the court had appointed him to it. That didn’t make him like it. Now he was putting papers into his briefcase, pointedly ignoring his erstwhile client.
We shook hands. P. J. smiled wryly.
Then Vendise shoved between us. “What you doing, shaking hands with this guy?” he demanded. He turned on me. “Tried to send me to the chair, you did. But you didn’t make it, did you, Mr. County Attorney Gates?”
I stepped back. I had a strong urge to belt him one.
“Shut your filthy mouth,” P. J. broke in, glaring at Vendise.
Before Vendise could reply, the old lawyer had grabbed up his briefcase and was on his way out of the courtroom.
“Get him,” Vendise said. “Geez. What a bunch of rubes.”
Ed Carson said, “Come along, son. Come along with me now.”
“Huh? Where to? For what?”
“Over to the jail. You want to get your things, don’t you?”
“Yeah, yeah, okay. Let’s go. Quicker I’m away from this lousy burg, the better I’ll like it.”
I said, “The feeling’s mutual, believe me.”
Vendise swaggered out. At the door he turned and called back to me, “Better luck next time, Gates.”
Then he left, followed by the sheriff.
I was alone in the muggy, hot courtroom, I lit a cigarette and went over to the windows. I looked down on the parched lawn that surrounded the ancient courthouse. I could hear a few birds singing dispiritedly among the trees on the lawn, all withering in the summer afternoon heat.
I thought about the case just concluded, wondered if there’d been anything I could have done that I didn’t do. But I knew there wasn’t. Knowing a man has committed murder, and proving it to the satisfaction of the law are two different things. I’d found that out, along with a lot of other unpleasant facts of life, during the four years I’d been Pokochobee County Attorney.
Take this case. Jack Vendise had drifted into town about a month ago, one of a traveling group of salesmen. This particular bunch had stayed in Monroe only two days.
On the first evening, Jack Vendise had wandered into a drugstore in downtown Monroe. There he’d seen a flock of local high-school girls — among them, Betty Blaisedell. She had responded with giggles and fluttering eyelashes to Vendise’s overtures. It wasn’t every day that she got to meet a boy from a city far away from Pokochobee County.
But Betty was only interested in flirting in front of an audience. When she left the drugstore for home, she wasn’t at all interested in Vendise following her, which he did. Then he hung around on the sidewalk in front of the house, until finally Bob Blaisedell had come out and told him to get away from there.
Vendise did, but not for long. He went to the nearest bar and had a couple of shots. Then he returned to the Blaisedell place.
Like most people in Monroe, the Blaisedell’s didn’t pull their window shades until bedtime. So it was no problem for Vendise to discover which room was Betty’s.
At eleven o’clock Betty went to bed. An hour or so later she woke up to find a man standing beside her bed. She screamed, and kept on screaming. The man rushed across the room and out the open window.
Later, we found footprints in the flower bed under Betty’s window. They Were worthless for identification, but they did help to establish what had happened. The intruder had stood around there until Betty turned her light off and went to sleep. Then he had used a pocket knife or something similar to slit the window-screen, reach in and turn back the hook.
He pulled back the screen and slid inside. Betty awoke, saw him, and started yelling. As he hurried back out of the window, she saw him for a brief second silhouetted against the moonlight.
But she couldn’t swear that it was Jack Vendise.
By that time old Bob Blaisedell was up and ran into Betty’s room, his shotgun in his hands. Betty stammered out what she’d seen. Bob rushed out, leaving Betty with her mother. What happened then, only Jack Vendise could have told us for sure, though it wasn’t hard to guess.
Moments later the two women heard a shot from the alley behind the house. They waited awhile, but when Bob didn’t return, they stole out of the house to the alley. There they found Bob Blaisedell with the top of his head blown off. Beside the body lay the shotgun.
Within the hour, the night deputy had picked up Vendise in a downtown bar. Vendise had no alibi, but he needed none. He simply denied any knowledge whatsoever of the killing. Nothing could shake him.
Ed Carson threw him in jail, and I indicted him for second degree murder. Without a confession it was pointless, and Ed and I both knew it.
There was just no physical evidence. No fingerprints, no nothing. The girl’s testimony was worthless. She was so obviously concerned with getting her picture in the papers as a femme fatale that the first appeal court would have reversed any decision made on her evidence. This being true, it was better that Jack Vendise be acquitted here, in Monroe, where the crime had taken place.
He’d spent his month in jail waiting for the trial and, as he kept yelling, he’d beaten the rap.
I sighed, stubbed out my cigarette on the window-sill and flicked the stub away. I wanted to see Vendise just once more.
Leaving the courtroom, I went down the two flights of marble stairs and along the corridor to the back door. The red-brick jail was separated from the courthouse by a parking lot. By the time I got to the jail, my shirt was plastered fast to my back with perspiration.
I found Carson, a deputy, and Vendise in the jail office. Vendise was signing a release form as I entered. He glanced up, laughed, “Here comes Mr. County Attorney.”
“I’d like a word with you, Jack,” I said.
Carson and his deputy left the office, Ed saying, “I figure it’s about time for a coke break.”
I looked at Vendise. “You know you can never be tried again for killing old man Blaisedell?”
He shrugged, grinning widely with his toothpaste smile. “You tell ’em, man. This cat has beat the rap.”
“Uh huh. But just for my own satisfaction — and no witnesses to bug you — did it happen about the way I said in court?”
Vendise hesitated. “Yeah, more or less. This old jerk, he came running out in the alley, see, with his shotgun. Well, what am I supposed to do? I pretended to go along with him, see. He kind of lowered the gun, and I jumped him. I got the gun away from him, and I...”
His voice trailed off into silence. He glanced uneasily around the office.
“You don’t have to worry,” I said. “You can’t be tried twice for the same crime.”