“You went in the front door. We know that,” he said. “The back door was locked. Spring lock. It could only be opened by a key from the outside. So you went in the front and you came out the back. It must have been then, when you came out with the money and the liquor, running down the alley and the car turned in...” the attorney paused to picture a map of the Elm crossing alongside the liquor store, and the Sycamore intersection a block down at the mouth of the alley.
“So it had to be then,” said the attorney, “after you’d got in the liquor store, probably with your hand in your pocket, finger pointing, saying, punk-like, ‘I got a gun here, give me your dough,’ or ‘your bread’ or whatever, pointing your finger at that poor scared woman too frozen to reach for the liquor store gun that was lying right there on the shelf under the cash register, loaded and ready, opened the cash register and let you have it, the liquor too, that you reached for just because it was handy...”
“Prove it,” said Tommy, and the attorney thought what-the-hell, the-kid-doesn’t-even-know-I’m-trying-to-help-him.
“How about someone not wanting to admit he was in that alley and saw you running away from the liquor store? Why would the witness not want to come forward? What has he got to hide?”
“Prove it,” said Tommy, knowing only that this attorney was bearing down on a witness and a witness meant they could prove stuff, and if they proved he was there that night, for sure, with someone saying it right out and all, they could prove the money and the liquor — and even the shooting without a gun, then where would he be? And he looked around in desolation at where he already was, in the closet-sized visiting room of the prison death row.
“Now, how about that someone having a key to the spring lock?” said the attorney. “And how about him not wanting to admit he was in that alley and saw you running away from the liquor, store? Why would the witness not want to come forward, unless he had something to hide.”
“Prove it,” said Tommy, not wanting a witness, any witness, to the fact that he was even there.
“Oh, hell,” said the attorney, sick to, his guts with this dumb kid and his one-track mind that didn’t know a loophole when he saw one, but feeling great sorrow for the parents who’d had to put up with him for almost twenty-one years now.
“Okay,” said the attorney, “I’ll prove it.”
Not knowing how, after a year and a half, he could prove who belonged to a pair of headlights, or even if it was important to know, but with his new and successful request for a retrial, the attorney convinced himself that Tommy was guilty of robbery only, not of murder.
When the Supreme Court ruling was. given, and the reversal was splashed all over the county newspaper on the first Wednesday of April, the town council alerted.
The business of the school crossing guards was being discussed when the chairman asked of the council members and the few attending civic-minded spectators if anyone had anything further to say, and Mr. Bruton jumped up, shouting, “You damn betcha.” He unfurled the evening paper to reveal the headline, TOMMY TYLER TO HAVE NEW TRIAL, and the discussion quickly deserted the crossing guards to center, hysterically, on the injustice, the gross stupidity and permissiveness of lawmakers in allowing that bastard killer another day in court.
Mr. Bruton’s passion was infectious and everyone in the City Hall council room that night was feverishly eager to stop the wheels of misdirected justice.
“A petition,” someone called out, and the suggestion was met with a mob-like acceptance. “Yes, a petition.” For the first time, the council stayed in session until long after eleven o’clock, it actually being almost midnight by the time the document was properly worded and plans made for its typing, duplication and distribution.
The Tylers were first confronted by one of the petitions tacked above the vegetable bin of their favorite grocery store. “We, the undersigned, are fully convinced that the Justices of the State Supreme Court did act ‘positively wrong’ in granting a retrial to Tommy Tyler and we do petition said Court to reverse its ruling,” they read. Mrs. Tyler whispered, “Oh no,” and raised quivering hands before her breast, Mr. Tyler’s shoulders sagged as they turned from the paper and its many signatures, even running along the sides in the margins.
Importantly busy, Mr. Bruton carried petitions to householders, explaining that he was the husband of the woman this mad dog killed, father of the son who had lost his mother... “I presume you are a mother, Madam, ah yes, I see the bicycle in the driveway, the basketball net on the front of the garage. Mother and son, a beautiful sight,” and he described the close relationship of his own son with his mother before they were so ruthlessly torn asunder. “Took his mother everywhere. She was his best girl. His best pal too, he even took her with him up in the hills to shoot rabbits. Yes,” Mr. Bruton shook his head sadly. “It was beautiful. When my boy lost his mother, he lost everything. Doesn’t care any more. Doesn’t go anyplace. Quit school — he even put his shotgun away, probably because she was killed with one...” and Mr. Bruton got another signature.
He obtained on an average of a hundred individual signatures a day, so occupied that he again enlisted Mr. Hergesheimer’s help in the liquor store.
“That rotten kid,” Mr. Hergesheimer told Mr. Polk, who dropped in after work, “here he made a mess of the boy by killing his mother and how they’re going to give him a new trial. Probably let him go free next time...”
“Probably pat him on the head, give him a new gun and tell him to go out and do it again,” suggested Mr. Polk. “Think Bruton’s got a chance with that petition of his?”
“I hope so,” said Mr. Hergesheimer, and pointed at a copy scotch taped to the counter. “We’ve filled up three of them right here.”
“Bruton’s sure working on it, isn’t he?”
“Sure is, and he’s got the whole town behind him.”
Along with a re-hash of the first trial, the newspaper listed a daily count of petitioners objecting to a second. Mr. Bruton, interviewed, stated in print that he would personally carry the petitions to the State Capitol as soon as the number reached 30,000. “And, by God,” the newspaper quote him as saying, “we’ll see if that bastard gets free to kill another good boy’s mother.”
The attorney was busy visiting Tommy on death row and getting the same “prove it” answers to every question asked until he was on the verge of executing the prisoner with his own two bare hands to save the State and petitioners the trouble.
He talked to Mr. and Mrs. Tyler who were resigned to their son’s present fate, resigned to a new trial, resigned also to a reversal should the petitioners win. The attorney felt alone as he drove down Main, up Sycamore to the alley and turned, his headlights brightening the alley to Elm. He made this small journey many nights and at different times from ten, having had no help from Tommy as to time, to eleven, the time at which Mr. Bruton had discovered his wife. The alley was always deserted, but had a thief emerged from the back door of the liquor store, the attorney would have seen the shadow of him. He parked once behind the liquor store and tried the door. It was locked.
He would have recognized Mr. Bruton from his constant attendance at the trial more than a year and a half ago, so it was not Mr. Bruton who stood behind the counter that late afternoon the attorney walked in and purchased a few items. He glanced at the. petition scotch taped to the counter.
“How is it going?” he asked.
“Good,” said Mr. Hergesheimer. “That’s the fifth one we’ve got filled up here.”
“Mr. Bruton’s working hard on it. Right?”
“Sure he is.”
“Wants this kid to get what’s coming to him?”
“Why not? Look what he did to his family. The boy, Myron’s the boy’s name, he’s a lost soul since his mother got killed. Took it hard,” and Mr. Hergesheimer told the story again as he had told it so often to whoever would listen, pointing out the position of the body, assisted by Mr. Polk, who on his way home to Elm Street, stopped in at the liquor store to add his imaginative recollection of hearing the get-away car that night. “It zoomed,” he said, “made an awful racket and I thought then whoever’s in that car is running away from something. And, sure enough, he was running away from murder.”
Mr. Hergesheimer said, “I’m standing right on the spot where Bruton found his wife. Right here, with the liquor store gun, loaded, laying on the shelf above her head, so that punk of a kid must have walked in right behind his shotgun and froze her in her tracks—”
“Who knows?” said the attorney mildly. “It might have been like that. She also might have frozen at the threat of a gun by an unarmed goon. It’s possible too that later, when the killer came through the back door—” the attorney glanced that way at a door inset not more than two feet so that anyone who stepped through could be seen from any position at the counter — “she saw and recognized who had entered, and so did not reach for the gun, not because she was frozen with terror, but because she knew and trusted him and did not realize she needed to defend herself until he brought out the shotgun and killed her dead.”
Mr. Hergesheimer looked confused and said, “Huh?” Mr. Polk offered his memory of the get-away car. “Oh, come on,” Mr. Hergesheimer said as if he suspected the customer of being one of those liberal softies always crying over criminals and excusing them for their crimes, “you’re being real far out. The kid came in the front door, got the money and the liquor, then got trigger-happy and blasted away, and flew out the back door.”
“I heard the getaway car,” interrupted Mr. Polk.
“How could anyone come in the back door without a key? The only people who had keys to that back door were the Brutons.”
“Yes,” said the attorney. “Bruton and the son.”
“Hey,” said Hergesheimer, “you trying to accuse Bruton of killing his wife? Why, he was at the council meeting and the boy was home studying — that’s what Mr. Bruton said. He said when he went home to tell Myron what had happened, there he was, studying.”
The attorney laughed easily. “I was only theorizing,” he said. “After all, with this new trial coming up, people wonder and suppose things.”
“You don’t have to wonder about the Brutons,” said Mr. Hergesheimer with conviction. “Why, Mr. Bruton! There’s no finer man ever lived! Practically worked himself to death in this liquor store to provide for his family. He was here all the time except for those first Wednesdays of the month when he went to council meeting. And the son, well now, Myron was the kind of son any man’d want, studied hard and got good grades. Wonderful to his mother. Took her every place. You wouldn’t catch him with a girl. He dated his mother. Fine boy, real fine boy. That’s all changed now after she got killed. You wouldn’t know him. Dropped out of college. Doesn’t do anything because everything he did he did with his mother, Mr. Bruton said. Like playing cards and chess and going places. Even target practice and shooting rabbits—” and a muscle jumped in the attorney’s jaw.
“But no more. Not even that. Mr. Bruton told me he found the shotgun in the back of the boy’s closet, wrapped up, he said, in one of his mother’s dresses. Now, that’s pitiful, the boy grieving that way.”
“Isn’t it though?” said the attorney thoughtfully.
“Spends a lot of his time out at the cemetery just sitting there by her grave.”
“I heard the getaway car just as clear,” said Mr. Polk.
The attorney picked up his purchases and turned from the counter.
“How about signing the petition?” asked Mr. Hergesheimer.
The attorney turned back.
“No,” he said. “I want a new trial for that boy on death row. I am his attorney.”
Mr. Hergesheimer watched him out the door, and then said softly, “Hey, what was he doing?” and Mr. Polk’s imaginative memory became so faulty that he wondered if, after all, he wasn’t watching television the night of the murder, with the sound turned high as he always watched television, every night.
By the time Mr. Bruton had collected 30,238 signatures and had taken off for the State Capitol, surrounded at the airport by civic-minded well-wishers and tight-lipped crime-busters, counsel for the defense had obtained a court order to search for and examine a shotgun in the Bruton home which, when found, was wrapped in one of Mrs. Bruton’s dresses just as Mr. Hergesheimer had said it would be.
“What else could I do?” asked Myron, once the slugs from the shotgun were discovered to be identical with the slugs in Mrs. Bruton’s body, a statement that baffled the police but not the psychiatrists. “She was my mother.”
“So this is a whole new ball game,” patiently explained the attorney to his client. “You will be charged now with robbery only.”
“Prove it,” sneered Tommy Tyler.
His parents were confused.
“You mean,” ventured Mr. Tyler, “that there will be a new trial even after all those names on all those petitions in all those stores?” His shoulders sagged with the weight of more trouble. “Oh no,” quavered Mrs. Tyler, protecting her breasts.
Mr. Hergesheimer continued to tend the liquor store that was doing a land office business. Mr. Polk still dropped in after work.
“The Bruton boy,” said Mr. Hergesheimer, “that Myron. He always seemed so great,” and shook his head in bewilderment. “Do you think,” he asked, leaning over the counter whose shiny top was slightly marred by the dull and sticky squares left by scotch tape, “Do you think Mr. Bruton knocked himself out with those petitions to keep that poor kid from a retrial simply because he knew, all along, that his son had killed his mother?”
Mr. Polk considered the question, remembering his own hallucinatory recollection, and said, “No. He didn’t know. And that was the pity.”