“I don’t know,” I said.
“Will he—”
“Go to the electric chair?” I said.
She shuddered.
“No,” I said. “There’s not much chance of that. The prosecution has a good case, but the evidence is all circumstantial. It’s probably enough to send him to prison, but not enough to—to hang him. Or electrocute him.”
“But how can they call it murder? Don’t they need a corpus delicti?”
“They’ve got that.”
“You mean Milani’s body was found?”
“You don’t need a body for corpus delicti. All corpus delicti means is evidence that a particular crime was committed. And there’s plenty of that, body or no body.”
There was enough for the grand jury to return an indictment, at any rate. I was in the courtroom for the hearing, along with Joyce and a few of Murray’s other friends. The prosecution’s case sounded even more damning in a courtroom with a judge and jury and batteries of lawyers on either side.
If Murray had actually been guilty, he might have been in a position to make a better case for himself. By telling how Milani had been blackmailing him and bleeding him white, Murray could have built up a lot of sympathy, and by a little legal footwork he could have had the charge reduced all the way down to manslaughter, with a possible bid for temporary insanity or self-defense, the two traditional refuges for the accused having committed murder with extenuating circumstances.
But Murray couldn’t take any refuges even if he had wanted to. He couldn’t tell them what Milani had been blackmailing him for. Murray couldn’t locate the corpse. He could only stammer and scream about a frameup.
And nobody was listening.
The outcome was never really in doubt. The jury indicted Murray Rogers for murder in the first degree. The offense is not a bailable one. I sat there and watched the guards take him away, shoulders slumped and face drawn and eyes vacant. He passed a few feet from me and didn’t seem to see me at all. It was just as well. I couldn’t have met his eyes.
Friday night.
I sat in my bedroom alone and did card tricks in front of a mirror. My hands weren’t too nimble because I was tight. The bottle of Cutty Sark was on the dresser. Every now and then I took a swig and the whiskey went right down without my tasting it at all.
During the days I had been a machine. I had made the motions at the office, and the motions when I took prospects out to lunch or met them at their homes. Nothing had seemed to reach me. Once I had spent an hour with a prospect, had talked at length about everything under the sun, and had wound up selling him a nice bundle. And when I had left him and returned to the office to type out some forms, I hadn’t been able to remember his name. Everything had been automatic, mechanical, and nothing had made any impression at all.
The nights had been a little different. The nights had been solo ventures for the most part, with Barb on hand now and then, more often than I wanted her and less often than she would have preferred it. It had been funny because I was clear now. Joyce had let me off the hook, and I could court Barb and marry her if I wanted to. But things had changed since Murray’s arrest. Something very significant had taken place, and Barb’s version of what had happened did not mesh with mine because she did not know what I had done.
And I couldn’t tell her.
Which had made a difference. The little middle-class nook that had seemed so desirable included a wife with whom you could discuss everything—excluding your semi-annual infidelities, at least. And the more bits and pieces there were that I could not possibly tell Barb about, the less I could imagine myself spending the rest of my life with her.
So we had cooled off a little. I had never shared her bed after that one night. She hadn’t asked why. She may have written it off as mood, or she may have decided that I was an intensely moral person. Whatever, I had been spending most of the nights alone—after Murray’s arrest and indictment.
But the nights had been rarely spent sober. I had become blind drunk only once. That had been on the night after the indictment had been returned, and that night I had wound up getting tossed out of a wino hangout on Skid Row and crawling in the gutter while my insides had spilled out. Most of the time I just put a heavy edge on and sat around thinking. Maybe I was drinking to keep from dreaming, because without a good skinful I had some dreams that woke me up sweating and panting.
The hell with it.
It was Friday night, and I was doing card tricks poorly in front of a mirror, and I was about half in the bag, and the phone rang. I put down the cards and answered.
It was Joyce.
“You weren’t supposed to call,” I said. “We aren’t supposed to get in touch with each other.”
“I know.”
“So what’s it all about?”
“I have to see you, Wizard. There are some things I have to talk about with you.”
“Go ahead.”
“Not on the phone. In person.”
“I don’t like it,” I said. “It’s no good if people see us together, find out we’re spending any time with each other. We’re not airtight, you know. All they have to do is start checking me and the fat’s in every fire in town.”
“You mean your background?” Joyce said.
“To hell with my background. Give that clerk at the Glade two looks at me and he’ll recognize me as Milani. We’re safe as long as they don’t check us. That’s all.”
“I know,” Joyce said. “But there’s nothing suspicious about a man’s good friend coming to see his wife in her hour of need. Sy and Harold were over yesterday. It would look even worse if you don’t come, you know. As though we were staying apart for a reason.”
That made strong sense. I straightened up my clothes and combed my hair. I hurried the Ford over to her house and parked in front. She opened the door before I could hit the bell. I started to say something but she motioned me inside, shut the door. She didn’t look good. Her face was drawn and her eyes were a little bloodshot, as though she had been drinking or as though she hadn’t slept much lately.
“Why, Bill,” she said. “It’s—nice of you to come. Can I get you anything to drink?”
There was a girl curled up in an armchair in front the television set. She was reading a book and ignoring the set. She glanced up at us and smiled.
“You’ve met Jenny,” Joyce said, “haven’t you?”
“I don’t believe I have.”
Joyce introduced me to the girl. Jenny was about seventeen, dark-haired and pretty. She had Murray’s features but they were softer on the female model.
“Daddy used to talk about you all the time, Mr. Maynard,” she said. “Gee, isn’t it awful?”
“It certainly is.”
She stood up from the chair, shaking her head bitterly. “Somebody must have framed Daddy,” she said. “Don’t you think so?”
“I guess so,” I said.
Her face clouded. “Because he couldn’t have—couldn’t have—killed somebody—”
She stopped talking. Her eyes closed, blinked, opened. She forced a smile to her lips, then shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I’ll let you and Joyce talk, Mr. Maynard. It’s been very nice meeting you.”
We stood there, silent, while she dejectedly quit the room. Her bedroom door closed with a bang. Joyce was shaking now and her eyes kept darting around aimlessly. I put a hand on her shoulder to steady her and she sagged against me, limp as a eunuch. I caught her, made her sit down.
“There’s a bottle of scotch in the bar,” she said, pointing. “I need some.”
“Ice?”
“Just scotch in a glass.”
I poured scotch into a glass and took it over to her. Joyce drank off half of it and put the glass down on the coffee table. I gave her a cigarette, lit it for her. She took two drags. Then she had some more of the scotch.