Killing Cousins (13 page)

She knew, of course, that she had done very badly, in spite of trying so very hard to do well. Now there was nothing more to say that would undo what had foolishly been said and done, but she said, nevertheless, with the peculiar and culminating courage of desperation, the only thing that she could think to say.

“I was frightened,” she said. “I hope you will understand and pay no attention to it.”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand at all.
Do you, Mr. Hogan?”

He was looking up and beyond her now, over her shoulder, and she turned and looked in the same direction, but there was no one there. There was only a closed door that opened into the next room. She turned back to find him staring at the door as if he were expecting someone to open it at any moment, and someone did open it, in fact, and stood behind her without speaking, and it was then, at the moment of the door’s opening, that she became fully aware for the first time of the little box on Necessary’s desk, an intercom. Everything they had said, she understood, had been overheard in the next room by Quincy himself and probably another policeman, and it was Quincy Necessary had spoken to, and Quincy now standing behind her. She stood up and turned and looked at him with a little smile, lifting her hands in a gesture of entreaty, and she thought that he was somehow smaller than she had remembered, thin and frail.

“Quincy,” she said, “Lieutenant Necessary doesn’t believe me. Please tell him that I told the truth.”

He shook his head, smiling, and the smile seemed to be an acceptance of the damned and perverse nature of things in general.

“Sorry, Cousin. Old Fred has put me in an untenable position, God-damn him. I’m afraid I must begin to protect myself.”

“Are you trying to put the blame on me, Quincy, after all I’ve done to save you?”

He continued to shake his head, still smiling.

“It won’t work, Cousin. I have the gun, you see. I kept it as insurance, with your fingerprints nicely preserved, for just such a contingency as this. I must say, however, that I hoped never to use it.”

Necessary stood up. His movements gave the effect of carefully controlled violence. Looking at Quincy, he kept seeing Willie. His feeling for her was not merely ambivalent. It was so complex, composed of such diverse and conflicting elements, that it made him feel grotesque, physically and mentally monstrous.

“Where is the gun?” he said. “And where is Howard Hogan?”

“You will find the gun in my apartment,” Quincy said. “As for old Howard, you’ll have to dig for him.”

EIGHTEEN

 

Willie sat in the visitors’ room of the Quivera County jail. She had been there for some time, talking with Mr. Greenbaum, who was now making some notes in a notebook with a black limp-leather cover. Released from the necessity to listen and respond, Willie looked up and out through a high window into the green leaves of an oak tree. She could see a couple of sparrows among the leaves, and she could hear the comfortable scratching of Mr. Greenbaum’s pen.

It was absolutely remarkable, Willie thought, how kind everyone had been. At first she had been frightened and depressed all the time, but now she was frightened and depressed only part of the time, and the rest of the time she had the most wonderfully serene feeling that everything would come out all right in the end, after all. Take Mr. Greenbaum, for instance. He was really a big lawyer from KC, and she had not expected to have such a lawyer, but then someone had started a collection in Quivera to hire him for Willie, and it was the truth that thousands of dollars had been collected from all sorts of people in practically no time. Then a committee had gone to KC to ask Mr. Greenbaum to take the case, and Mr. Greenbaum had made an eloquent little speech of acceptance, saying how he could do no less than reflect the faith of these good citizens in Willie’s innocence, and it had been in the KC papers and other papers all over the country.

The daily paper of Quivera had been more than fair and kind. Of course, a newspaper couldn’t come right out and express a conviction one way or the other in a matter like this, because it wouldn’t be fair to the other side, but it was made pretty plain, just the same, whose side exactly the Quivera paper was on, and quite a lot was written and published about Howard’s unreasonable jealousy and abuse, and particularly about how he’d tried to get away with the money, which was practically stealing, and morally wrong, if not legally. Officials at the jail had been very nice about bringing in the papers and letting her read the stories, which were encouraging and exciting, and look at the pictures of herself, which were very satisfying because she was naturally photogenic, but even more encouraging and exciting and satisfying had been what had happened when she was taken at different times from the jail to the County Court House for questioning by the county attorney. Each time, the news had leaked out somehow, and there were crowds of people all along the way, going and coming, shouting their support and blowing kisses, and altogether it had made her feel exhilarated and humble and almost like crying.

What had made her feel most like crying, however, was the episode involving Tommy Cochran, which was a kind of demonstration, it seemed to her, of the way almost everyone seemed to feel. Tommy Cochran was a reporter for the Quivera paper, a young Irishman with black curly hair and blue eyes; and one night in her cell, which was on the second-floor rear of the jail, she had looked out through the bars to see what had happened to the moonlight that had suddenly stopped coming in, and there was Tommy in the way of the light. At first she was terrified, and couldn’t imagine how he’d got there, but luckily she hadn’t screamed, and it turned out that he’d climbed up a big elm in the yard and out along a limb, from which he’d jumped over onto the flat roof. He had a coil of rope, and he tied one end around a chimney and dropped the other over the side, and then he slid down the rope to her window, and that was how he’d got there. What he had in mind was to get her out and run away with her. He said he had it all thought through. They would go, he said, to New Orleans, where they would catch a boat to a certain country in South America that had no extradition treaty with the United States. He asked her if she would agree to go, and she said Yes, of course, because he had gone to so much trouble, and because it was a night when she was feeling frightened and depressed. He said he would be back the next night with a hack saw to begin sawing the bars, and, sure enough, he was back and began sawing, wrapping a heavy cloth around the saw to muffle the sound, and it might actually have come off successfully, which would have been tremendously exciting, if he had not unfortunately fallen to the ground and broken his back, besides several other bones. He didn’t die, she was told later, but it was likely he would be paralyzed for the rest of his life from the waist down.

Well, Tommy Cochran was just an example of the way people seemed to feel about her. Even Gwen Festerwauld had come to see her and tell her how she remembered Howard’s shouting threats and accusations at various times. Gwen hadn’t actually realized that they were threats and accusations when she’d heard Howard shout them, but now she did, looking back, and she was prepared to swear to it if necessary, and Marv would damn well swear to it, too, if he knew what was good for him. It was no wonder that Willie felt, on the whole, serene and hopeful most of the time, as she felt now, watching the sparrows in the leaves and listening to the scratching of Mr. Greenbaum’s pen. Mr. Greenbaum’s pen, however, had stopped scratching, and she lowered her eyes to see the great lawyer watching her with a fatherly expression.

“I must be going now,” Mr. Greenbaum said, “but let us be certain first that we understand our basic position. Your husband was unreasonably jealous, frequently violent. He threatened several times to kill you, and you had become afraid of him, although you suffered your fear in silence in the hope of saving your marriage. The night of his death, after he deliberately deserted you for no good reason, you came home to find him waiting in a deadly rage. He accused you falsely of infidelity and said he intended to kill you. That this intent was, in fact, premeditated, and had been so for some time, is supported by the preparations for flight that he had obviously made. He came toward you with his hands outstretched. He was, in your judgment, beyond reason. In your terror, you remembered the gun in the bedside table. You ran there, took the gun, fired. Your husband dropped dead with a bullet in his heart. Afterward, not knowing what to do, you called your Cousin Quincy, who was your good friend. Upon his advice—which was ill-taken, perhaps—you decided to dispose of the body with his help, becoming involved in some rather incredible ramifications, and this foolish act was, in reality, your only crime. This is the whole truth, isn’t it, my dear?”

She nodded, looking up again at the sparrows among the leaves.

“It sounds like a bad dream, doesn’t it? Do you think the jury will believe it?”

Leaning forward, he took one of her hands in one of his. In his big palm, the little hand was almost lost. He squeezed it gently.

“I think so, Willie,” he said. “I really think they will.”