Mr. Polk, who lived on Elm, and swore he heard the getaway car that night, spent all his free hours in the liquor store listening to Mr. Hergesheimer, and when he could get a word in edgewise, he swore again that he had heard the getaway car, believing it, finally, he had sworn it to be the truth so many times.
“I sure heard that getaway car,” said Mr. Polk, “and you know I wasn’t, surprised when it was the Tyler kid! He’s been asking for it for years, out of one scrape and into another. This time, he’ll get it good. This time they won’t sit him down in juvenile hall and give him a talking to.”
“That rotten kid,” said Mr. Hergesheimer. “He really ruined the Bruton boy’s life.”
“They won’t rap him on the wrist with a vacation at that boys’ camp, either,” said Mr. Polk. “No siree, this time he’ll get the works.”
The Tylers saw their son twice a week in the visiting room of the jail, facing him sadly and helplessly on one side of the separating table while Tommy sat withdrawn on the other. The conversation, twice each week, was uniformly the same, sterile and succinct, the father’s offered in droop-shouldered submission, “How are you, son?” to receive a noncommittal okay. “Are they treating you all right?” with the same expressionless reply — the mother’s tense and protestive, “You look thin, Tommy,” raising her hands against his frozen silence, palms out as if to protect her sagging breasts. “Are you getting enough to eat?” covering herself with the same gesture at Tommy’s scornful “sure.”
They had hired the best defense counsel they could afford and, as usual, having done for their son all that they could do, they waited, submissively tense, for what would happen next.
The defense counsel, turned off by the kid as people were always turned off, tried harder, hoping to make up by extra effort what he could not offer in understanding.
“Now, Tommy,” he said, “tell me all about it.”
“What’s to tell?” said Tommy.
“How you went to the liquor store that night.”
“Prove I did,” he said.
“It’s already been proved,” said the attorney patiently. “The money was found.”
“Prove it was from that liquor store,” said Tommy, his eyes blank.
“There was the Scotch. The only store in town sells that brand.”
“So prove I didn’t buy it. From that liquor store. Before.” Tommy swung his legs off his cell bunk and sat on the edge of it. “You gotta prove all that before you can even say I killed that old lady, and you can’t prove a thing because no one saw me there,” said Tommy, staring just beyond the attorney, hopeful that whoever belonged to the headlights that swung into the alley that night didn’t know what he was looking at, or couldn’t put two and two together or just wanted to stay out of it. Without a witness to place him at the scene of the crime, Tommy reassured himself in frightened despair, nobody could prove anything for sure, and without proof he wouldn’t be indicted for murder.
But he was.
Defense counsel, fed to the eyebrows by this uncooperative client, requested a change of venue, which was rejected. He knew he would be unable to get an unbiased jury, and he knew he had no case, so when it came to court in late winter, the trial was short and the jury verdict immediately unanimous. Tommy Tyler was sentenced to death.
“Oh no,” cried Mrs. Tyler and Mr. Tyler’s shoulders drooped low.
Mr. Hergesheimer, who still worked part time at the liquor store with Mr. Bruton so tied up with attending the trial and all, was not surprised.
“It’s no more than he deserves,” he declared, “killing that poor boy’s mother.”
“Do you know his father says he won’t even talk about her he’s so broken up? Just goes around like a lost soul.”
“Too bad,” said Mr. Polk, less interested in the bereaved than in the bereaver, “they say he won’t be executed. How many are there on death row now? And how long has it been since one of them’s been executed? But he should be. The way they mollycoddle killers these days is a crime.”
Mr. Bruton added an addendum to his usual comment. It was, “Well, I say an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, like the Bible, you know. So I can’t say I’m not pleased with the verdict. But it won’t bring my boy’s mother back to him. He really doted on her, too much maybe. He don’t eat, don’t sleep. You know where he goes? Out to the cemetery and sits there.”
When the Tommy Tyler case was denied an appeal, defense counsel was not surprised and prepared to try again, using once more community bias, rephrased, as cause for retrial, desperately needing something new, and what new evidence could he dredge up? What new angle to offer the State Supreme Court? Nothing, he thought, greatly distressed, not about his client but the Tyler parents, so helpless, so resigned, hopelessly driving one hundred fifty miles to the prison once a month to see their son, the stranger, and listen to his short replies to questions that were only a repetition of those asked in the city and county jails.
“Are you all right?” and “How are they treating you?” “Do you have enough to eat?” with dooped shoulders and protective hands.
To the attorney, the father | timorously quoted, “He says they didn’t prove anything.” The attorney assured Mr. Tyler that it had all been proved, the stolen money which was found, the liquor placing him at the scene of the crime — and as far as the shotgun that had done the killing, that was circumstantial, becoming evidential when added to the other proofs.
“Well, I don’t know,” said the father, believing his son had never owned a gun of any kind, but not sure, not sure of anything about Tommy, and dropped his shoulders in resignation.
It was eleven visits and eleven months later that the father again ventured, “He says there wasn’t a witness to him being there.”
“There didn’t have to be a witness,” explained the attorney patiently. “The found money and the liquor bottles were the witnesses. You know that.”
“Yes, I know that,” the father agreed, “but Tommy says that since whoever drove into the alley that night didn’t say anything, that made no witnesses, and if there weren’t any witnesses, nothing was proved.”
“There rarely are witnesses to a major crime,” patiently explained the attorney, smiling gently. “So he admitted at last that he was in the alley that night — now there is an admission...” and caught himself up. “Who drove into the alley and when?”
The father did not know. All he knew was that his son was sullen and bitter, and occasionally spoke more than a word or two in his bitterness.
“I’ll go see him,” promised the attorney and the mother said, “Oh no,” realizing the futility of seeing her son, and the father drooped his shoulders, convinced that such a trip would be fruitless.
The kid was the same. He turned the attorney off.
“You admitted to your folks you were in that alley,” he said.
“Prove it,” said Tommy.
“It’s been proved,” said the attorney. “There was a witness who saw you there.”
“Nobody said so.”
“You said so. You said there was a car. When did you see the car?”
“You can’t prove I saw one. You can’t prove I was in that alley.”
“The man in the car can,” said the attorney.
“He saw me?”
“Look, if he was in the alley and his headlights were on, he saw you. Right?”
“But lie doesn’t know it was me. He has to prove it was me.”
The attorney wanted to throttle the kid.