He heard it too, and yelled: “Get out, get out of there, you!” Then he fired, not up at me, but down. With the blaze of the shot still around us, I let go with my right. I slammed down as I’d expected, but didn’t wind up under her, over him, or anything of that kind. I yawed off, under the ladder, not on it, and swung out on the other side, so my left hand was wrenched clear off. I had tried the third time and missed.
Almost.
My right did wrap, or try to.
It fanned around, touched cloth, and grabbed. Somehow I knew this was pant leg, and that whatever I did I must hang on. I started spinning, like a gator twisting the leg off a pig, while above me he started to moan. Then I was falling, still hanging on to the cloth, the moan rising up to a shriek. Then the volcanoes of hell hit me, and their fire shot through my brain.
Chapter XVII
“Come on, Webster, you making a deal or not? Here they hang you — it’s not no friendly gas chamber. You killed Valenty, didn’t you — you and this here wife?”
“You think I did, sure enough?”
“Listen, we know.”
“Very idea scares me.”
“She got him up on that tank — we can prove it. You followed him up — we can prove it. You made him jump at gun’s point — we can prove it. And he knocked you off coming down — we can prove it. Now you own it up and we’ll do what we can with the court — get you clemency, all that stuff. You keep this up and you get it — feet first, through the trap. And she does. You might consider her.”
“Boys, I hear all you say. Somebody, I’m sure is dead, and some dame is in trouble. But all I know is what I’ve told you before: I did hit Pabby Ramos. I did lam out of Ojai. I did board a truck at Ventura, and I did doze and slide off. I must have, to wake up falling. But that’s the last I remember, and that was east of Yuma. You say this is Maryland, and you’ve brought me stuff to prove it — newspapers, anyhow, whatever they’re supposed to show. But I say it’s Arizona, and I say I’m not going back. You want me in California, you extradite me, see? I’m instructing this gentleman to see the Governor.”
“You lying crumb.”
“You even talk Arizona.”
It was in the courthouse corridor, on the second floor at Upper Marlboro, a few minutes before the trial. I’d been brought on a stretcher, by the county in private ambulance, from the same old hospital at Cheverly, and carried in by police. “This gentleman” was a lawyer she’d got, a gray-haired guy named Brice, who came up after I’d been put on the floor. Talking were cops — not Daniel, but others — who had hammered me six long weeks, in my hospital room, trying to open me up. Arizona wasn’t so good, but it was the best I could think of in the way of a cover-up, to keep from having to talk. Because unfortunately she had talked, and plenty, as there was really no way she could help it. Both of us there on the ground had been breathing when she got down, groaning along pretty lively; and hoping to hush things up, she had grabbed the gun and hid it, back of a smokehouse cinder-block. Then, when she dived for the house, she found herself locked out, from phone, handbag, keys, and everything, so she couldn’t call for help, start her car, or anything. She had to run down to 5 and get such help as she could, and the first thing that stopped was a truck. She talked about “gauging the tank,” how the “men slipped and fell,” and so on. And one thing led to another. And when Val died during the night and the shells were found next day, nothing she said matched up. She was arrested that afternoon, and held without bail at Marlboro. She was not only in jail, but there was no way we could talk.
Because I was still in concussion, and stayed that way three days, and after that in anesthetic, for the operations they did on me, to set broken bones and tie up stuff inside. I came out of it little by little, but with something whispering to me, after seeing one night some police blue in the hall. I knew, by then, what it means to sign a paper, and back-pedaled into my cover-up. When Mr. Brice came to see me, I was afraid to let down my hair, for fear he’d ethic on me, and I’d be one hundred per cent in the soup. However, I did mention the “mystery lady,” and say: “If she’s nice, please give her my love.” He said he would, gave me a long, hard look, and said: “On the whole, Webster, if you could manage, consistent with conscience, to postpone recovery of memory until the trial gets under way, it might be a good idea.”
All in all, I piled a few points up, as she did, since she hadn’t talked under oath, and perjury wasn’t involved. And of course she was who she was, a big point in her favor. But the total tote was bad. Arizona caught on with the papers, and then there I was, by wirephoto from the West, all posed up in trunks, no good in southern Maryland, where they don’t think much of boxing. Her “hunger strike” caught on too, to hurt us most of all. I of course knew the reason. She was terrified to be tried looking as she had looked, and the strike was to get proper food brought to her there in the jail. But in print it was wacky, and not only got laughs, but lost her a lot of the ground her family had given her.
So that’s how it stood, there outside the courtroom, when Brice ran the cops down the hall, and I saw the top of her head. She came upstairs fast, a young officer at each elbow, dressed completely in black, but I was shocked at the change in her looks. From being soft, plump, and pretty, she almost verged on thin, with hollows in her cheeks and no color at all. Her eyes were big as saucers, and though she let them cross mine, to tell me we still had our love, they also told me we didn’t have much else. She went in the courtroom, and the police bearers picked me up. They carried me down the aisle, past a mob that was there, to a table inside the rail, and set me down on top of it. She was a few feet away, at another table, where Brice sat down beside her. The prosecutor, Mr. Lucas, a small, neat man around forty, with a pink face, sat at a table facing her, one or two assistants beside him. Outside, beyond the rail, on the first row of benches, were police, people I’d never seen, and Lippert. Behind them were Bill and Marge, and Mr. and Mrs. Hollis, Bill and Holly’s parents, that I’d seen just once at Waldorf. From behind the bench came a judge, and everyone but me stood up. An old geezer said this honorable court was now in session. The judge sat down. The people sat down.
Coming up for the bell, round one.
Allowing for every point that could be counted, it was ten times worse than I’d feared, as it had nothing to do with my caper back in the spring, the confession, boxing, her hunger strike, or anything of the kind. Mr. Lucas was quiet, but once the jury was picked, he put it right on the line, and said he would prove we had fallen in love, that we had decided to kill Val “as a convenient way to get rid of him,” that we had hit on the water tower as a way of doing it, that she had “enticed him up” after letting the tank run dry, and that I had climbed up under him and compelled him at gun’s point to jump. He said the scheme had backfired, as I had fallen too, but insisted that “clumsiness of execution is no mitigation of guilt, and sets up no reasonable doubt.”
Never mind the Valenty sisters and what their brother had told them, or the neighbors and what they had seen, or the cops and what she had told them, or Lippert and his two cents’ worth — or all the rest of the stuff that put us in love, which a blind man must have seen. The first jolt to our button was the bags all packed up — mine in the cottage, hers in Waldorf, all ready, as Mr. Lucas put it, “for the projected honeymoon.” Next came the light man, who had asked her why the meter reading was low, and been told of “restricted use of the pump on account of the drought.” He had warned her, he said, just in a friendly way, to gauge the tank, and had been “struck by the interest she showed.” Next was a colored boy, who had been on 5 that night, walking home to Clinton, and heard “a shot, a bop, and a screech.”