Johnny was listening with a sagging jawbone.
"Isn't it true," said the chaplain, "that you have always said the Bartee boy's alibi was worthless? Now, suppose you are wrong and suppose it does hold? Why then, we would know that the boy had not done it. And your daughter could go on being happy. Just as you and Miss Edith planned for her to be."
Johnny gaped at the chaplain's kind, beaming, rugged face. He was appalled by the naivete of the whole conversation.
"Look," he said. "I'm not a detective. I'm not a police officer. I'm not qualified to check . . ."
"You say she loves him?" (Johnny looked at that white saintly face and it made him uneasy.) "If I have been wrong," said McCauley, "I pray the Lord to let me know it now."
Johnny was shocked. "But Nan has to be told," he said. "You can't let her marry into that family, not knowing. Emily only wanted you to be the one to—to tell me to teU her."
McCauley straightened his slight body. "She mustn't be told," he said, "and her heart broken with this old evil business, and my sister's whole life thrown away. Not if there is anything else at all that we can do. Not if you can prove that I've been wrong."
"I agree," said the chaplain.
"Oh, you do?" said Johnny angrily. He rose. "May I speak to you alone. Father Klein?"
"Surely."
The chaplain led Johnny into a kind of anteroom.
"Look here^" said Johnny, "unless something pretty fishy has been going on, / don't agree, at all. Maybe you know what I don't know. Is that man guilty? Does he know, right now, and none better, that Dick Bartee didn't kill his wiJFe? Because he did it himself, and all this seventeen years' innocence is just phony?"
"Sometimes," the chaplain said calmly, "a prisoner gets obsessed with a phony innocence, as I see you realize. I can only tell you that ever since I've been here McCauley has believed . . ."
"Believed," said Johnny.
"Exactly. He believes that he did not do it. He has believed that the Bartee boy did.
"But what gets me is now he's willing to change his mind and believe that Bartee is innocent! Which I can't swallowl How can you swallow that? What kind of man is this? Why hasn't he been out on parole?"
"Things happen," the chaplain said vaguely. "Whenever the Board gets around to his case . . ."
"What things?"
"Oh, twice he was involved with an escape attempt. At least sympathetically—'
"I don't get it."
"Not that he meant to escape. But that stops parole, you know. Things happen to—well, keep him here. You might say he has given up the world," the chaplain went on gently.
"Then he's not normal," snapped Johnny. "He's nuts or something. And you can't believe a word he says."
"It is hard to imagine," the chaplain said slowly, "what way a man can be changed in his soul if he has had to bear justice. Perhaps McCauley has made prison his home, confinement his cross. He assists me, you know."
"He's become something like a monk?" said Johnny. "That's what you are sa>dng?"
The chaplain nodded.
"What about Bartee? What do you think? Is he guilty?"
"I don't know," the chaplain said, "That's why I suggested that you try to find out."
"What makes you think I can find out, after seventeen years? And tell me this, while you're at it. Wliy should / mix in this anyway?" Johnny felt wild.
"That I don't know either," the chaplain said. "I don't know why Miss Emily chose to send you, you see. If you could find out, of course, it would save this Httle girl heartbreak." ^
Johnny looked into die chaplain's eyes and thought he was in a dream, a romantic dream of innocence and mercy.
"The police will haidly try," the chaplain said gently. "And there's no money to hire^ a detective. It would have to be a friend."
"A woman got killed," Johnny said harshly, himting for something logical and hard and reliably true. "I suppose it wasn't suicide?"
"No."
"Now either her husband did it, or this Bartee did it, or a thiid party did it. Right?"
"Right." They were eye to eye.
"Since the husband was tried and convicted by law, this would seem the most probable. Only we don't like it much, do we? This makes the httle girl's father a killer and that's unpleasant. Nicer to think of him as a saint." The chaplain's gaze did not falter. "But Bartee," Johnny went on, "now it seems we don't like him for the part either. Nan's in love
with him. It would break her heart. The really nice way for this to come out would be to find a third party. Somebody Nan doesn't give a whoop about. All right." Johnny made a furious gesture. "I don't want Nan's heart broken either, but can't you see how silly—?" Johnny felt stormy. "You can't rearrange what happened" he said, "to make it nicer for a sweet young girl."
"McCauley has no proof that Bartee did the killing," the chaplain said gravely and steadily. "Suppose you found proof that Bartee did not? Then, when we tell Nan the story of her father and mother, as I agree we should, she will at least have the strength and the refuge of the man she loves."
Courtesy of }. Sims, thought Johimy to himself wryly.
"As for McCauley," the chaplain went on, "you find it incredible that he wishes he needn't break her heart? But I can conceive that McCauley not only wishes this but also would rather be rid of the prejudice of an old hatred, of a possible injustice in his thoughts. I can imagine that Clinton McCauley wants to be good. That is a motive that does exist, in some human beings."
Johnny felt himself flushing. He thought, O.K. I guess I'll have to see if I can prove her darling dear's an upright man. He felt very strange, hghtheaded, a little empty. He must have nodded or something because the chaplain opened the door to his oflSce.
The small man sat where they had left him, his head bowed, his lips moving.
". . . from evil. . ." Johnny thought he heard him say.
CHAPTER 5
Johnny vtent over to him. "I wish you would tell me about this whole case," Johnny said to him crisply, with neither sympathy nor hostility.
"Yes, I will do that," said McCauley.
The little lame man with the saint's face looked at the wall. "I went to the Spanish War," he began. "If you can remember it—we fought for an ideal. That's the kind of young man I was. I got hit in my right heel. Not important. Makes me limp. When I came home, Christy and the baby were living with the Baitees in the big old house in Hestia. The old lady was Christy's own grandmother by her first husband. The old lady married old man Bartee about 1917, I think. He'd had a wife before. Nathaniel was the first wife's son and Dick is Nathaniel's son. So Dick is the old man's grandson. Yet he and Christy shared no blood. Bart, Junior, now, he was in the middle. Half brother to Nathaniel, and half brother to Christy's mother. I don't know if that's clear."
"I think so," said Johnny. "His child. Her child. Their child."
"That's right. Well, they all made a big fuss over Christy and she liked it there. She hked the prestige of being a Bar-tee connection, you know, and the comfort. Christy couldn't understand why I wanted her to come away and live in poverty."
"I could have had a job up north, but it would have meant scraping along on a small income, Christy confined, taking care of tfee baby all alone.
"I can see Christy's point of view so clearly, now. Then I was a young man with a limp, a hero returned, ignored. I was frustrated and bitter. 1 wanted to be the head of my family. In that house, the old man was head, and the old lady ran the house and Nathaniel, pussyfooting around with his art and his elegant manners, was the Crown Prince. Or the old lady thought so."
McCauley's voice had changed. It was crisper and harsher. The face was harder. Young McCauley, Johnny perceived, had been no saint.
"The young boys, of course, were in and out," McCauley continued. "Young Bart had gone into the service. I couldn't, because of my foot. Or I think I would have gone. Young Dick they got rid of as best they could by sending him to a military school, not far away. He was hard to handle. His mother was dead. Nathaniel, his father, couldn't do a thing. The old man w.as the only one who could handle ; him at all.