“I’ve taken this case over,” he said, “because I’m interested in it — because I have a hunch it’s going to turn out to be the biggest case in years — and because I think I can squeeze enough prestige out of it before I’m through to last me the rest of my career. Do you get me?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t. Y’better lay off it, if it’s prestige you’re after, because you’ve got a client that doesn’t want to be defended and a case that can’t be won!”
“Why can’t it?” he snapped. “You didn’t kill her!”
“Didn’t I? I say I did,” I said sullenly. “How do you know I didn’t?”
“You were all the way down at Grand Central in a cab the first time.” he said, “and you turned around and went back there. If you’d done it, nothing could have gotten you within a mile of that place that night!”
“Why not?” I decided. “I couldn’t get away with it, that was all.”
“You would have gone to the nearest police station, then — not to the very room she was lying in, alone. Don’t try to tell me; I ought to know a little about human nature by now!”
“All right, Mr. Berenson,” I said, “build up your beautiful case! Build it sky-high! And when you’ve got it all spic and span and foolproof, I’m going to stand up there in the stand just the same and tell the world I killed Bernice Pascal!”
“You think you’re the kingpin in this, don’t you, Wade!” he told me scathingly. “You think the whole case is centered around you and whether you’re guilty or whether you’re not! Well, let me tell you, my dear boy, you’re not as important in this affair as that very colored girl she had working for her — you’re nothing more than the sucker that’s taking the rap!” He opened a dull silver cigarette case and held it toward me with the contemptuous air of some one feeding peanuts to a rather smelly animal in the zoo. “You loved her, didn’t you?” he said.
In thinking it over after he’d gone, I realized that it was at about this point I began to fall for him.
“Maybe I didn’t!” I assented wistfully.
“Your wife told me as much,” he went on. “She had an idea that that might be the reason for your whole fool attitude from the time of the arrest. Pascal’s gone, so you don’t give a damn one way or the other now.”
“Which is just about the size of it,” I said stiffly, “and my own privilege in the bargain.”
“Fair enough,” he agreed, “but it makes a pretty poor showing, when you come right down to it. Leaving yourself out of it altogether, you’re letting the real guys that killed the woman you love get away with murder. You don’t seem to feel that you owe that much to her — to get busy and settle accounts for her. In other words, Wade, you may be standing up and telling the world that you killed her — but what you’re telling yourself, and her, is that she’s not worth avenging! That she deserves what she got!”
“God knows that isn’t true!” I burst out. “I’d choke the rats that did it with my own hands if I only knew who they—”
Then I knew by the smile on his face that I had told him I hadn’t done it.
“I’m taking the case, Wade,” he let me know. “I mayn’t be able to keep you out of the chair, but at least I’ll keep you out of the witness box!”
But I went back to the cell shaking my head and thinking, “What good is it if he does get the right guys? What good is it if I do get even for her? What good is anything? Will it bring her back?”
I must have been a funny client, though! After that first day, I told Berenson anything he wanted to know, didn’t hold back a thing — and yet never again, after that first slip of the tongue, would I admit I hadn’t done it. I noticed he didn’t waste much time arguing out that point with me (and to me it seemed all that mattered in the whole thing: whether I said I did do it or said I didn’t do it) but seemed more interested in a whole lot of other things, side issues like the party at Jerry’s that Saturday night, and the way Bernice had once begged me to stop seeing her, and the man that had answered her phone the night I had called her from the restaurant, and the way I had met Marion on the street and she had had a spasm of jealousy over what I told her, and so on.
Sometimes I would tell him things that it seemed to me he should have gone into ecstasies over, should have congratulated me on remembering, and he would brush them impatiently aside and remark, “That’s not a bit of good to me.” And then again, he would suddenly flap his wings and lose feathers all over the room about some trivial detail that didn’t have the utmost bearing on the case, as far as I could see. I used to wonder sometimes if he was really a good lawyer.
For instance, during one of our talks I suddenly recalled how I had walked out of Bernice’s place the first night I met her, wearing somebody else’s hat by mistake. Not only that, but by some quirk of memory the size and make of it even came back to me! I at once gave him the dope on it, afraid I might forget all about it again. “Y’better put that down,” I advised, “size 6⅜! And inside the hatband it said Boulevard des Capucines!” And waited for him to fall all over me when he heard it. My life was pretty colorless, I guess.
All he said was, “Don’t let’s waste time. Wade; I’m not running the fashion column for men in the theater programs.” And then, on the other hand, one time when I was trying to recall, more for my own morbid satisfaction than his benefit, what my last words to her had been when I left there the afternoon it happened, I recollected that they hadn’t been to her at all, but to Tenacity, who had stopped me on my way out to ask me if Bernice was “fixing to fire her, or what?” He no sooner heard that than he stopped me then and there and demanded excitedly, “Why didn’t you tell me that before? That the colored girl was still in the place when you left! I’ve had a feeling all along that she’d be our trump card in this!”
I didn’t follow him, and gave him a look that told him so.
“I’d like to bet,” he said, slapping his knee, “that she was drawing pay from other sources besides the wages Pascal paid her!”
I still didn’t get him but no longer bothered signaling the fact. “I read in one of the tabs,” I said, “that they had her down at headquarters the day after, questioning her. I think they’re going to use her as a witness against me—”
“Let me get my hands on her!” he said viciously. “I’ll find out who Pascal’s friends were!”
“Anyway, she left the place herself five minutes after I did that afternoon,” I remarked indifferently. “The doorman and the elevator man both backed her up on that, according to what the paper—”
“Oh, her alibi’s as good as gold,” he interrupted caustically. “A little too good, if you want to know the way I feel about it. She wasn’t satisfied with asking the doorman what time it was — she had to let her Ingersoll slip out of her hand while she was pretending to wind it and break the crystal on the floor, and then make some remark about that meaning bad luck, a death in the house or something to that effect. And the doorman, being colored himself, wasn’t likely to forget that when the time came. Then on top of that, as though that weren’t enough, she conveniently remembered some phone message Pascal had asked her to deliver, and used the downstairs phone — as though she couldn’t have thought of that while she was still upstairs!”