Loftus looked a little puzzled. “Well, if I have to have a lawyer, Mr. Meecham will suit me fine. He’s been very kind.”
“Kind?” Cordwink raised his eyebrows, exaggeratedly. “This I must hear.”
“When he thought I was just a bum, he offered me two dollars.”
“Well, well. Where’d you get the two dollars, Meecham, selling phony oil shares to war widows?”
Meecham’s smile was a little strained. “I object to the question on the grounds that it is intimidating and forms a conclusion.”
Dunlop put down his pencil, and said, with a faint whine, “When everybody keeps talking like this, I don’t know what to write down. Everybody shouldn’t keep talking like this.”
“Don’t write anything,” Cordwink said. “Call a patrol car and take Loftus down and book him.”
I’m going to jail, Loftus thought. But he still couldn’t quite believe it. Jail was for criminals, for thieves and thugs, for brutal angry lawless men. He said, with the surprise and disbelief evident in his voice: “I’m going to... to jail?”
“For the present, yes.”
“Why do you say, for the present?”
“We have no facilities at the jail for looking after a dy— a sick man. There’s a prison ward at the County
Hospital. You’ll be transferred there eventually.”
“The County Hospital.” Loftus laughed, holding his hands over his belly. It hurt him to laugh, but he couldn’t help it. “That’s funny, isn’t it? The final irony. After all that’s happened, I’ll end up where I started — in a ward at the County Hospital.”
The sound of his laughter faded, though his mouth kept grinning. He saw Cordwink and Meecham exchange uneasy glances. “You’re uncomfortable, aren’t you? — disturbed? — you wish you’d never seen me? Yes, it’s the same everywhere I go, I make people uncomfortable. I don’t have any friends. No one wants to be near me, people are afraid to be near a man who’s walking a step ahead of death. I make them too conscious of their own fate, and they hate me for it. I’m not blaming them, no, I understand how they feel. I loathe myself more than anyone could loathe me. I loathe this decaying body that I’m trapped inside, hopelessly trapped inside. This isn’t me, this grotesque body, it is my prison. What prison have you to offer that could be half so terrible?”
He didn’t realize that he was crying until he felt the sting of salt on his lips. He sometimes cried when he was alone at night and the hours seemed so ironically endless; but never in front of anyone, not even his wife on the day she left him. He wiped his eyes with his coat sleeve, ashamed that he had broken down in front of these three men.
Cordwink stared out of the window, motionless, his face like granite. Inside, he felt something begin to move, like a steel claw, reaching out and clutching his stomach, squeezing. It could be me. Or Alma and the kids. Don’t let it happen. Me or Alma and the kids.
A pair of headlights swerved up the driveway. He glanced across the room at Loftus. Loftus had slumped forward in his chair, his hands covering his eyes. The back of his neck looked very young, a boy’s neck, thin and vulnerable and white as wax.
“Loftus.”
There was no reply, no stirring in response to his name.
“Loftus,” Cordwink said again. “The car is here.”
Loftus raised his head slowly. He seemed dazed, as if he’d flown his prison, had gone miles and years away, and was now returning, like a soul to hell.
“I’m ready,” Loftus said.
6
611 Division Street was a three-story red-brick house on the outskirts of the college district. Light and noise poured from nearly every window. On the second floor two young men were bending over a microscope. In the adjoining room a boy sat at a table by the window, absorbed in the blare of the radio beside him, his head resting on an open book. Meecham couldn’t see into any of the rooms on the top floor, but it sounded as if a party was going on up there. There was a continuous babble of voices punctuated by sudden peals of laughter.
The left part of the lower floor was dark and the shades were drawn.
Following Cordwink up the sidewalk Meecham thought, it’s a funny place for Loftus to live — a dying man in the midst of all this noise and youth.
The sidewalk forked to the left. A little path no more than a foot wide had been shoveled through the snow and sprinkled with cinders. This was Loftus’ private entrance.
Cordwink took out the ring of keys that Loftus had given him. “Still want to tag along, Meecham?”
“Certainly.”
“What do you expect me to find?”
“The bloodstained clothes he was wearing Saturday night.”
“You seem to have a lot of confidence in that confession. Wishful thinking, Meecham?”
“Could be.”
“You and Loftus are kind of palsy for a couple of guys who never met before.”
“I’m palsy with everyone.”
“Yeah. You got a heart of gold, haven’t you? Cold and yellow.”
“You’re getting to be a sour old character if I ever saw one.”
Cordwink inserted one of the keys into the lock. It didn’t fit, but the second one did. The flimsy door, curtained at the top, swung inward. “By the way, it wouldn’t be quite ethical to take on a second client while your first client is still in jail.”
“She won’t be in jail long. Your forty-eight hours are nearly up, Cordwink. By tomorrow morning you have to charge her or release her.”
“And if she’s released, you’d take on a lost cause like Loftus?”
“One minute you’re implying that his confession is a phony and the next minute he’s a lost cause. Make up your mind.”
“He’s a lost cause to you, anyway. He hasn’t much money.”
“Well?”
“Or at least that’s what he claims.” Cordwink turned on the light switch inside the door, but he didn’t look at the room. He was watching Meecham. “Suppose you were in Loftus’ shoes and wanted some money.”
“Money isn’t much good, where’s he’s going.”
“Suppose he didn’t want it for himself. For a relative, maybe, or a close friend. It seems to me that Loftus had something very valuable to sell — his absolutely certain knowledge that he’s going to die anyway. No matter what he does, he has nothing to lose.”
“So?”
“So he committed a murder. For money.”
“Whose money?”
“Virginia Barkeley’s.”
“That sounds reasonable enough,” Meecham said calmly, “except for a few little things. First, Mrs. Barkeley only met Loftus once, in a bar, for about five minutes. That’s not quite long enough to arrange a big deal like murder.”
“She could have known him before. They’d both deny that, naturally, if there’s a deal on.”
“In the second place, if she paid him to kill Margolis, she wouldn’t have arranged the matter so that she’d be caught as she was.”
“Maybe she’s very, very subtle.”
“In the third place she hasn’t any money and neither has her husband. I’ve checked. They live up to their income, the house is mortgaged and the furniture isn’t paid for.”
“There are ways of raising money.”
“And in the fourth place you don’t even know that Loftus has any money.”
“I’ll find out.”
“Your trouble is stubbornness, Cordwink. You were sure Mrs. Barkeley was guilty and you can’t admit you were wrong even with Loftus’ confession staring you in the face.”
“What’s staring me in the face is a lot of funny coincidences and right in the middle of them is a lawyer called Meecham.”
“Is that a fact?”
“That’s one. Another one has just occurred to me. Suppose Loftus was paid for services rendered, what did he do with the money?”