Burgess felt the back of his neck. “I don’t know how to put it myself. It’s a funny thing for a dick to do,” he admitted. “I know my job with you ended when you were indicted by the Grand Jury and bound over for trial— It’s sort of hard to bring out,” he ended lamely.
“Why? It shouldn’t be. I’m just a condemned guy in a cell.”
“That’s just why it is. I came up to — well, what I’m here to say is—” He stopped a minute, then blurted out, “I believe you’re innocent. Well, there it is, for what it’s worth, and it’s not worth anything — to you or me either. I don’t think you did it, Henderson.”
Long wait.
“Well, say something. Don’t just sit there looking at me.”
“I don’t know what to say when a guy digs up the corpse he helped to bury and says, ‘Sorry, old man, I guess I’ve made a mistake.’ You better tell me what to say.”
“I guess you’re right. I guess there’s nothing to say. But I still claim I did my part of the job right, on the evidence there was to go by. I’ll go further than that. I’d do the same thing over again tomorrow, if it had to be done a second time. My personal feelings don’t count; my job is to work with concrete things.”
“And what brought on this profound change of conviction?” Henderson asked, with a dull sort of irony.
“That’s as hard to explain, to make clear, as any of the rest of it. It’s been a slow thing, it’s taken weeks and months to soak through me. About as slow as water soaking through a stack of blotters. It started in at the trial, I guess. It worked by a sort of reverse process. All the things that they made to count against you so heavily, they seemed to point the other way around, to me, later on when I ran over them in my own mind.
“I don’t know if you can quite get what I mean. Framed alibis are always so clever, so smooth, so chock full of plausible details. Yours was so lame, so blank. You couldn’t remember a single thing about this woman. A ten-year-old child would have been able to do a better job of description. As I sat in the back of the courtroom listening, it slowly dawned on me: hey, that must be the truth he’s telling! Any lie, any lie at all, would have more meat on its bones than that. Only a man who was not guilty could frustrate his own chances as thoroughly as you did. The guilty are smarter than that. Your life was at stake, and all you could muster to protect yourself was two nouns and an adjective. ‘Woman,’ ‘hat,’ and ‘funny.’ I thought to myself, ‘How true to life that is.’ A guy is all riled up inside from a row at home, he picks up someone he’s not interested in the first place. Then right on top of that comes the mental cloudburst of finding out there’s been a murder in his house and hearing himself accused of it—” He gestured expressively. “Which is more likely: that he’d remember such a stranger in exhaustive detail, or that what little impression remained of her in the first place would be completely washed away, leaving the slate blank?
“It’s been on my mind a long time now. It’s kept coming back to me with more and more pressure each time. Once before I already started to come up here, but then I turned around and backed out again. Then I talked to Miss Rich-man once or twice—”
Henderson elongated his neck. “I begin to see light.”
The detective said, sharply and at once, “No, you don’t, at all! You probably think she came to see me and finally influenced me— It was the other way around. I first looked her up, and went to have a talk with her — to tell her pretty much what I’ve told you today. Since then, I admit, she’s been to see me several times — not at Headquarters but at my own place — and we’ve had several more talks about it. But that’s neither here nor there. Miss Richman nor nobody else can put anything in my mind if it wasn’t in there already. If there’s any changing with me, it’s got to be done on the inside, and not from the outside in. If I’m up here to see you today, it’s on my own hook. I’m not here at her suggestion. She didn’t know I was coming up here. I didn’t myself — until I did.”
He started to walk back and forth. “Well, I’ve got it off my chest now. I still won’t retract. I did my part of the job the only way it could have been done, the way the evidence called for it to be done. And you can’t ask any more of a man than that.”
Henderson didn’t answer. He sat staring moodily at the floor. It was a sort of quiescent brooding. He seemed less actively bitter than in the beginning. The shadow made by Burgess’s pacing kept passing and repassing him. He didn’t bother to look up at its source.
Then the shadow stood still, and he could hear the sound of coins jangling thoughtfully inside a pocket lining.
Burgess’s voice said, “You’ve got to get hold of someone that can help you. That can work at it full time for you.”
He jingled some more. “I can’t, I’ve got work of my own. Oh, I know in movies and such there are these glorified detectives that chuck everything just to go off on some sideline of their own. I’ve got a wife and kids. I need my job. And you and me are strangers, after all.”
Henderson didn’t move his head. “I didn’t ask you to,” he murmured quietly.
Burgess quit jingling finally, came part of the way back to him. “Get someone that’s close to you, that’s all for you” — he tightened his fist and hoisted it in promise, “—and I’ll back him up all I can.”
Henderson looked up for the first time, then down again. He said one word, dispiritedly, “Who?”
“It needs someone that’ll put a passion into it, a belief, a fervor. Someone who isn’t doing it for money, nor for his own advancement. Someone who’s doing it for you, because you’re Scott Henderson, and no other reason. Because he likes you, yes even loves you, because he’d almost rather die himself than have you die. Someone that won’t be licked, even when he is. Someone that won’t know it’s too late, even when it is. That’s the kind of flame it needs, that’s the kind of juice. That and only that’ll swing it.”
His hand had come to rest on Henderson’s shoulder while he spoke, in an accolade of insistence.
“You’ve got a girl that feels that way about you, I know. But she’s just a girl. She’s got the flame, but not the experience. She’s doing what she can, but it isn’t enough.”
For the first time Henderson’s bleak expression softened a little. He shot a brief look of gratitude, meant for her, by proxy at the detective. “I might have known—” he murmured.
“It needs a man. Someone that knows his way around. And yet has that feeling for you she has. You must have someone like that. Everyone has someone like that in his life.”
“Yes, when they first start out. I used to, I guess, like everyone else. They seem to drop off along the way, as you get older. Especially after you get married.”
“They don’t drop off, if they’re what I’m talking about.” Burgess insisted. “Whether you keep in touch with them or not has nothing to do with it. If it’s once there, it’s there.”
“There was a guy once, he and I, we were as close as brothers,” Henderson admitted. “But that was in the past—”
“There’s no time limit on friendship.”
“He isn’t here right now, anyway. The last time I met him he told me he was leaving the next day for South America. He had a five-year contract with some oil company.”
He quirked his head at the detective. “For a fellow in your line of work, you seem to have quite a few illusions left intact, haven’t you? That would be asking something, wouldn’t it? Expect someone to come back three thousand miles and can his whole immediate future, to go to bat for a friend at the drop of a hat. And not a current friend either, mind you. Remember, you get thicker skinned as you get older. Some of the idealism peels off. The man of thirty-two isn’t the same pal to you the lad of twenty-five was, and you’re not to him.”