“I try to.”
“What about other people? Say your client had someone dear to her, or him. Would you protect him or her? I mean, if you stumbled over something very unpleasant?”
“It would depend on the circumstances. I don’t have a lawyer’s right of silence where clients are concerned. Even a lawyer’s right is severely restricted. We all have to live with the law, you know.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything illegal.”
“What are you asking me to do? It’s about time we got to that, don’t you think?”
“Yes. I just want your word that you won’t go running to people with what I tell you, or what you find out on your own.”
“You have my word on that. I’m the closest-mouthed man you ever met. And you’re the closest-mouthed girl I ever met. Tell me one thing. Has there been a crime?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you suspect one?”
“Yes.”
“Murder?”
“I wouldn’t call it that. No, it wouldn’t be murder.” She twisted her mouth. “It’s a terrible word, isn’t it?”
“A terrible fact. Now who is involved in this non-murder?”
She looked at me as if she hated me. The unobtrusive lipstick on her mouth came out bright red against her pallor. She fumbled at the catch of her bag, produced the dark glasses, put them on. I was afraid that she was going to leave.
I didn’t want her to. I wanted her to stay and share her trouble with me. Call it romanticism – the late romanticism that boils up sometimes in middle age and spills a kind of luster on certain faces. But my impulse was more paternal than anything else. It stayed that way.
“I have a suggestion, Miss Maclish. If you want better security, you can employ me through your lawyer friend in Lamarina. Then anything I find out, anything I’m told, has the same legal status as information confided to a lawyer. What did you say his name was? Griffith?”
“Griffin. But I can’t do that. He’d have to know all about it if I did that. Sooner or later he’d go to Father with it. Mr. Griffin is one of Father’s attorneys.”
Change of Venue
Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).
I got into the Garvin case late, when it was just about all over but the gas chamber. Garvin was due to be shipped to San Quentin in the morning. He seemed already to be holding his breath.
He let it out in a sigh. “No, Mr. Archer. I don’t want any private detective work done on the case. I don’t want you or anyone else raking over the mess I’ve made of my life.”
“It’s been thoroughly raked over in the newspapers.”
“That’s the point. I’ve had enough.”
He looked at me bleakly, his head between his hands. He was still a young man, but his hair was gray. His very skin was gray, and hung slack on his face. The long trial after months of waiting had carved him down to the bone.
The third man in the interview room spoke. He was Alexander Stillman, Garvin’s defense lawyer. And Garvin’s personal friend as well, I gathered:
“I know you’re tired, Larry. But you can’t give up.”
“Why not? I do. I have.”
“But surely not in the ultimate sense. You want to go on living.”
“I wouldn’t have taken the sleeping pills if I’d wanted to go on living. I see nothing to live for now.”
“There’s Sylvia,” Stillman said.
“She’ll be better off without me.”
“That’s not true, Larry, and you know it. Sylvia loves you deeply and passionately.”
“Leave it on the cob where it belongs,” Garvin said harshly. “Are you trying to break my heart?”
“I’m trying to save your life.” Stillman’s bulldog face was fierce with intensity. “Even if you don’t value it, there’s more than one man’s life involved in this. There’s principle involved. I’m not going to let a man who isn’t guilty go to the gas chamber.”
“I must be guilty. Twelve good men and true found me guilty.”
“Eight of the twelve were women, Larry. The jury was carried away by the idea of a high school teacher mur – doing what you were alleged to have done. The whole town was carried away. I did everything within the realm of possibility to obtain a change of venue–”
Garvin’s sharp voice cut in on the lawyer’s orotund one: “I know all this. You don’t have to rehash it.”
Lawyer and client glared at each other across the steel table. They were sick and tired of each other. The trial had been like a long illness which they had shared. Which threatened to end in the death of one of them.
I said to Stillman: “Could I possibly talk to Mr. Garvin alone?”
“I have nothing to say to you, Mr. Archer. And I’m expecting a visit from my wife.”
“She isn’t here yet,” Stillman said. He got up heavily and tapped on the battleship-gray door. A guard in deputy’s suntans let him out.
Do Your Own Time
Published in The Archer Files (Crippen & Landru, 2007).
It was a dead-end street in Malibu. The blue emptiness of the sea glared through the narrow gap between the houses. The one I was looking for needed paint, and leaned on its pilings like a man on crutches.
Nothing happened when I pressed the bell-push. I knocked on the door. Slowly, like twin bodies being dragged, footsteps approached the other side of it.
“Yes?” a man’s voice said. “Who is it?”
“Archer. You called me yesterday.”
“So I did.” He opened the door and leaned through the opening. “I call you yesterday, you keep me waiting all night. What kind of a way is that to do business? I been sitting here biting on the nail.”
He meant it literally. The fingers holding the edge of the door were bitten down to the quick. He saw me looking at them and curled them into a fist, more defensive than aggressive. He was a man of fifty-five or so wearing an open-necked white shirt from which his head jutted like a weathered statue. The sunlight struck metallic glints from his gray-white eyes.
“I been waiting twenty years. You had to keep me waiting one more day, didn’t you?” His voice was a groan modulating into a low yelclass="underline" “What have you got to say for yourself?”
Goodbye was the first thing I thought of. I thought again. Another ten years and a face like his, aggressive and defensive, might be peering at me out of the bathroom mirror. Men got old. I said with all the tact I could muster:
“I had a job to wind up, Mr. Barr. I explained that to you on the telephone. I’m sorry if you misunderstood me. I was working until two this morning.”
“Yeah. I get impatient. I get impatient.”
He looked up at the high sun as if he hated it. Without another word he turned and padded into the house. He left the door open, presumably for me, and I followed him in.
The room was lofty and raftered. Spiders had been busy in the angles of the rafters, webbing and blurring them. The rattan furniture was coming apart at the joints. One of the pieces, a cushioned settee, was supported at one corner by a stack of girlie magazines; at least the top one was a Playboy. The Navajo rugs around the floor had been trampled into brown rags.
The redeeming feature of the room was the double glass door that opened onto a balcony and the sky, where white gulls circled. Barr stood with his back to them. His bare feet were horny and knobbed.
“One-seventy a month I pay for this dump, in the off-season. Two months in advance, and the landlord won’t even fix the furniture. He says when he fixes the furniture he raises the rent. The rent goes up to five hundred on the first of June, anyway.” He glared at me as if I’d come to collect it. “The country has changed, I tell you.”