"My God!" Durand groaned.
The commissioner rose, went to the water cooler, and drew him a cup of water. He ignored it.
"And the money ?" he said at last, exhaustedly. "A woman can rob a man of his life savings, under your very noses, and you cannot help him, you cannot do anything for him? What kind of law is that, that punishes the honest and protects malefactors? A woman can walk into a man's house and--"
"No. Now hold on. That brings us back again to where we were. A woman cannot do that, and remain immune to reprisal. But a woman, just any woman at all, did not do that, in your case."
"But--"
"Your wife did that. And the law cannot touch her for it. You gave her signed permission to do just what she did. Mr. Simms at the bank has shown me the authorization card. Under such circumstances, where a joint account exists, a wife cannot steal from her husband, a husband from his wife."
He glanced sorrowfully around at the window behind him.
"She could pass by this building this very minute, out there in the street, and we could not detain her, we could not put a hand upon her."
Durand let his shoulders slump forward, crushed. "You don't believe me, then," was all he could think of to say. "That there's been some sort of foul play concealed in the background of this. That one woman started from St. Louis to be my wife, and another suddenly appeared here in her place--"
"We believe you, Mr. Durand. We believe you thoroughly. Let me put it this way. We agree with you thoroughly in theory; in practice we cannot lift a hand to help you. It is not that we are unwilling. If we were to make an arrest, we could not hold the person, let alone force restitution of the funds. The whole case is circumstantial. No crime has been proven committed as yet. You went to the dock to meet one woman, you met another in her stead. A substitution in itself is no crime. It may be, how shall I say it, a personal treachery, a form of trickery, but it is no crime recognized by law. My advice to you is--"
Durand smiled witheringly. "Forget the whole thing."
"No, no. Not at all. Go to St. Louis and start working from that end. Get proof that a crime, either of abduction or even something worse, was committed against the true Julia Russell. Now listen to my words carefully. I said get proof. A letter in someone else's handwriting is proof only that--it is a letter in someone else's handwriting. Dresses that are too big are only--dresses that are too big. I said get proof that a crime was committed. Then take it--" He wagged his forefinger solemnly back and forth, like a pendulum-- "not to us, but to whichever are the authorities within whose jurisdiction you have the proof to show it happened. That means, if on the river, to whichever onshore community lies closest to where it happened."
Durand brought his whole fist down despairingly on the commissioner's desk top, like a mallet. "I hadn't realized until now," he said furiously, "there were so many opportunities for a malefactor to commit an offense and escape scot-free ! It seems to me it pays to flout the law! Why bother to observe it when--"
"The law as we apply it in this country," the commissioner said forebearingly, "leans backward to protect the innocent. In one or two rare cases, such as your own, it may work an injustice against an honest accuser. In a hundred times a hundred others, it has preserved an innocent person from unjust accusation, false arrest, wrongful trial, and maybe even capital punishment, which cannot be undone once it has taken place. The laws of the Romans, which govern many foreign countries, say a man is guilty until proven innocent. The Anglo-Saxon common law, which governs us here, says a man is innocent until he is proven guilty."
He sighed deeply. "Think that over, Mr. Durand."
"I understand," Durand said at last, raising his head from its wilted, downcast position. "I'm sorry I lost my temper."
"If I had been tricked into marriage," the commissioner told him, "and swindled out of fifty thousand dollars, I would have lost my own temper, and far worse than you just did yours. But that doesn't alter one whit of what I just told you. It still stands as I explained it to you."
Durand rose with wearied deliberation, ran two fingers down the outer sideward crease of each trouser leg to restore them. "I'll go up to St. Louis and start from there," he said with tight-lipped grimness. "Good day," he added briefly.
"Good day," the other echoed.
Durand crossed to the door, swung it inward to go out.
"Durand," the commissioner called out as an afterthought.
Durand turned his head to him.
"Don't take the law into your own hands."
Durand paused in the opening, held back his answer for a moment, as though he hadn't heard him.
"I'll try not to," he said finally, and went on out.
27
The City of Baton Rouge reached the St. Louis dockside at 6 P.M., days later. That was Wednesday, the eleventh.
He'd never been in the town before, but where a year ago he would have relished and appreciated all its differences, its novelty: its brisker, more bustling air than languorous New Orleans, its faintly Germanic over-all aspect, impalpable but still very patent to one who came from the French-steeped city down-river; now his heart was too heavy to care or note anything about it, other than that his trip was at an end, and this was the place where it had ended; this was the place that was going to solve the riddle for him, decide his problem, settle his fate.
It was a cloudy day, but even in its cloudiness there was something spruce, tangy, lacking in New Orleans overcasts. There was energy in the air; less of graciousness, considerably more of ugliness.
It was, to him at any rate, the North; the farthest north he'd yet been.
He had Bertha Russell's address ready at hand, of course, but because of the advanced hour, and perhaps also without realizing it because of a latent cowardice, that strove to put off the climactic ordeal for as long as possible, he decided to find himself quarters in a hotel first before setting out to locate and interview this unknown woman upon whom all now depended.
He emerged cityward of the pier shed, was immediately accosted with upraised whips by a small bevy of coachmen gathered hopefully about, and climbed into one of their vehicles at random.
"Find me some kind of a hotel," he said glumly. "Nothing fancy. And not too far into the town."
"Yes sir. The Commercial Travelers' be about right, I reckon. Just a stone's throw from here."
Even the colored people spoke more rapidly up here than at home, he noted with dulled detachment.
The hotel was a dingy, beery, waterfront place, but it served his purpose well enough to be accepted. He was given key and directions and allowed to find his own way to a cheerless bedroom with an almost viewless window, triply blocked by a brick abutment, a film of congealed dust ground into its panes, and a dank curtain, its pores long-since sealed by soilage. But twilight was already blurring the air, and he wouldn't have looked forth even if he could. He hadn't come here to enjoy a view.
He dropped his bag and settled down with heavy despondency in a chair, to chafe his wrists and brood.
He pictured again the scene to come, as he had been doing all day on the boat, and the night before. Heard again the reassuring voice he hoped to hear. "She was always wild, Mr. Durand; our Julia was like that. This isn't the first time she has run away. She will come back to you again, never fear. When you least look for her, she will suddenly return and ask your forgiveness."
He must want it to be that way, he realized, always to shape it so in his imaginings. To be assured that she was the actual Julia; a cheat, a robber, an absconder, but still the person she had represented herself to be. Why, he wondered, why?