That’s where I was wrong.
She stuck to her story and I stuck to mine until there was a flush of annoyance on Mercer’s face. The battered little man came out of the kitchen and said, “Okay, Mercer. Died between a half and three-quarters of an hour before I got here.” Mercer nodded and the old man left. I remembered her story of the key. I had been given no key to her apartment. I told Mercer as much and Sonia shrugged her shoulders as though to say, “I can’t understand the man.” I looked at her and wondered why I had thought her attractive. Her long twisted fingers began to give me the creeps. I know my eyes glowed with hate as I looked at her. It was easy to see which one of us was making the better impression on Mercer.
The next two hours were a nightmare. They took us both down to a precinct station. I sat numbly and watched the structure build up around me. It was so unbelievable and yet so logical that I wondered if I were going mad.
I was led into a small basement room containing an oak table and a few heavy chairs. There was a small barred window high up on the wall. One small bulb in a ceiling fixture lighted the room. They left me alone for a half hour. I wondered how much I could take before my mind would give way. There is an inward mental heat generated by false accusation. It sends a charge of adrenaline into your blood that makes your mouth dry, your hands shake, your heart pound and cold sweat trickle down your ribs. I knew that I must have been the image of guilt.
At the end of the half hour a key turned in the door and Mercer slouched in. He dropped wearily into the chair opposite me, his manner that of a man who has a very unpleasant job ahead of him. He nibbled at the skin next to his fingernails for a few minutes before he spoke.
“Let me summarize, Mr. Quinn,” he said. “In the first place you deny having arrived at the apartment first. I don’t think either of us can prove that one way or the other. You deny having a key. We found a key in the side pocket of your jacket. You deny any motive, and yet we read your joint statements which you mailed nearly a week ago to the D.A., and, if you are infatuated with Miss Zathrem, and she was threatened by her brother, it gives you a perfect motive. By the way, all those bucks were left to Miss Zathrem to be held in trust until she reaches forty. Her brother was named executor of the estate. His death releases all the money to her immediately. She says she was willing to marry you. That gives you a second motive — the dough. But the thing that clinches it in my mind is that you both deny having touched the weapon. Yet we find a clear print of the index finger of your right hand on the side of the barrel. You can’t laugh that off. We know you did touch the gun, and there’s no point in your denying it. I figure that since we’ve proved you in one lie, you might as well confess the whole thing.”
That was the thing that threw me — that fingerprint. I knew I hadn’t touched the gun. I wondered if the barrel could have been around the apartment disguised as something else and I had planted the print on it during a previous visit. But no, the business end of a forty-five can’t be made to look like anything else.
I shrugged helplessly and said, “I can’t help how it all looks. I didn’t shoot the guy and I didn’t touch that gun — ever.”
His lip curled a little and he answered, “Sure like to believe you, Quinn, because I’ve checked on you and find that you’ve got a pretty square past. But it’s not the first time a guy has gone over the edge for the sake of a girl. And usually when a guy like you goes out of line, you do it sloppy. You sure messed this one up. You plead not guilty and it’s three to one you burn for it. You realize you’re charged, don’t you?”
He got up and left without waiting for an answer. I sat with my head in my hands, cursing the day that Sonia had called me up. Finally they came and got me and took me downtown to a cell. I dropped onto a bunk and fell into an apathy that precluded all constructive thought. That print on the gun was what did it. It was something I couldn’t understand and couldn’t fight.
Harvey Crossman was down to see me in the morning. He is a guy who is making himself a good rep as a trial lawyer, so good in fact that they tried to disarm him by sticking him in the D.A.’s office.
It cheered me up to have him come breezing in. He had told the boys that I had already hired him. That suited me. We sat around and shot the bull for a while about our times in law school. I guess he steered it that way to put me at ease. Then he asked me the details, those that he hadn’t gotten out of the paper. I told him. When I came to the part about the print and denied touching the gun, he looked at me kind of funny.
When I was all through he sat silently for a few minutes, rubbing his fingers through the brown hair that he wears a little too long for my taste. His florid face was set in lines of thought and indecision. Then he said, “Dammit, Bill, you’re supposed to have confidence in your lawyer. You know that as well as I do. You better tell me the truth and I’ll see if we can’t cook up a better answer to the print on that gun. Anything would be better than an impossible answer, the one you got now.”
That was the last straw, to have one of my own friends believe I was lying. I doubled up a fist and I could hardly see Harvey through the haze in front of my eyes. I didn’t recognize my own voice when I said, “Get out! Get out! I’ll be my own lawyer.” He backed off at the expression on my face. He opened his mouth as though to say something, then clamped it shut so hard that I could hear his teeth click. He shouted and they let him out and he left.
I didn’t start to prepare the case until after the coroner had had the farce of charging me. When I did start, it was with a feeling of helplessness. They let me be my own lawyer. In their own peculiar way they were nice to me. They gave me access to duplicates of all the records of the police investigation. I leafed through page after page at the table they had put in my cell. Her apartment had been gone over with extreme care.
They had even checked the garbage and made a note about it. “Nothing of any incriminating nature. Coffee grounds, orange peels. One whole hardboiled egg.”
As I leafed through the reports I felt more helpless than ever. They hadn’t been able to trace the gun except to the theater in which I had served. I couldn’t prove that I didn’t bring a gun home. That was a dead end.
I spent one long sleepless night after another, looking up into the caverns of blackness that were the comers of the dark cell. A lot of the guys came to see me, and told me by their handshakes that they were behind me no matter what kind of a damn fool story I had told. But Harvey didn’t come back. And Sonia didn’t come. Not that I expected her to.
They tell me that it was on the eighteenth day that I asked for the hard boiled egg. I found out later that after one of the hired help watched me fiddling with the egg and my silver cigarette case, he told the authorities that he thought I was going mad.
But that eighteenth day was the day when hope came back.
Two hours after I bad insisted on seeing Mercer, he came into the cell wearing the same look of scorn that he had had on his face when I had last seen him.
“Will you do something for me, Mercer?” I asked.
“Within reason,” he agreed.
“Have you ever seen this before?” I held up my flat shiny cigarette case. He shook his head no. I held it out to him and said, “Please make a clear print on the outside surface of it.” He looked at me peculiarly and did as I asked. He handed it back to me carefully. “Now wait,” I told him and I turned my back on him and went over to the brightest corner of the cell. After about twenty seconds I walked over to him again and handed him the case. He noticed that I had rubbed his print off. “Take it to the lab and have them develop the print they will find on the inside of the case and then let me know whose it is.” He acted mystified and I guess ray confident look surprised him. A man who is due to die at the hands of the state has no right to look confident.