Robert Sinclair: The Eleventh Hour

“Did you say you loved me?” he asked.

“You know I do.”

“Gates seemed pretty sure he could get me off with seven years. Maybe — maybe even less.”

“It’s so much better than taking a chance.”

“Would you wait for me?”

“I’d marry you this minute if you wanted me to — and if we could. But that would be putting a noose around your neck.”

“I know that. But would you wait for me?”

“I couldn’t help myself,” she said. “I love you.”

Conway looked at the lovely face, and into the warm, fervent eyes, and forced himself to confront reality. “We’re talking like schoolkids,” he said harshly. “You can’t promise to wait five or seven or ten years.”

“I would.”

“And if you could, and did, wait, you can’t promise to love me then,” he went on with relentless logic. “Nobody in the world could.”

“ I could,” she said. “But if you don’t believe me, what do you want me to do?”

“Do you think you can go on loving me until after the trial?”

“You can’t do that — you can’t take a chance on—”

“I’ve taken one chance — I’ve got to take another. Go back to Topeka, Betty, tonight. That’s the one thing Gates said that made sense. Just don’t fall in love with anybody else for a few months.”

“Darling, I won’t let you do this on my account. I’ll—”

“I’m not doing it just on your account. But I can’t let them get away with this — it would be a miscarriage of justice. If I let them lock me up for seven years, I’d be really insane. Don’t worry, my sweet — I’ll see you in Topeka.”

Arthur Conway sat, his head in his hands, as Assistant District Attorney Davis swung into the conclusion of his summing up to the jury. Conway wondered why he had ever thought of it as a perfect murder: it didn’t sound like one as Davis told it.

“The one thing you have to decide is whether this defendant has told the truth,” Davis said.

Conway reflected that he had told the truth, and practically nothing but the truth. Not, of course, the whole truth, although, in a way, he had been closer to it than the prosecution.

“... How can anyone believe this man’s story that he was in the theatre at the time the murder car was parked by the murderer?” Davis continued.

How, indeed? Conway wondered. His own attorney — the one he had engaged when Gates refused to take the case except on his own terms — hadn’t believed him; had urged him to accept the prosecutor’s offer right up until the opening of the trial. But — might there be one — just one — of those twelve men and women who had believed him?

“... His only defense, his only alibi, is that he was in the theatre at that time. But he has been unable to produce one single witness to support that alibi...”

That was true, too. And there had been no way to shake the testimony of the couple who established the time the car had been parked; no way, that is, except to reveal that he himself had parked it at ten.

“... We have shown that the defendant had a motive — two motives, in fact...”

All the motives in the world except the right one, Conway reflected.

“... The defendant has claimed that he and his wife were on good terms — a bald-faced He, for she hated the defendant, intended to divorce him and planned to marry Taylor. When he discovered, in the drugstore, that she had withdrawn the money from the bank, she saw no reason for any further concealment, and she told him about Taylor. And then he strangled her — murdered her in cold blood.”

How can he he so wrong, and yet so convincing, Conway wondered. Can’t they realize that if it had been that way, I could have divorced her? I wouldn’t have had to kill her. He found himself looking at the entire proceedings in a detached fashion, rather like a critic watching a somewhat implausible play. He still found it hard to believe that he could be convicted of a crime, even though he had committed it, on such a web of utterly false and circumstantial evidence.

“... I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, to remember one further thing. The murdered woman is not on trial here. If she took money from their bank account which was not all hers, there are laws covering theft, and this defendant could have found redress in the courts. If her conduct with Taylor was not above reproach, there are laws which provide for divorce. Instead of invoking the law, this man murdered her, and there are laws covering that, too. Your duty is to see that this man pays the penalty the law provides for murder.”

The jury was back in less than two hours with its verdict. Guilty. Murder in the First Degree. Without recommendations.

After his appeal had been denied he received a note, unsigned, but postmarked Topeka. “I wish you’d believed me,” it read, “because I’m going to go on loving you all my life.” But he told himself that the message was intended to convey more solace than truth; that it could not be an accurate prophecy.

But until the end — which came shortly after he entered the gas chamber at San Quentin — Conway vowed that he was the victim of the foulest miscarriage of justice in the history of California. And, in a sense, he was.

Was, that is, if you view justice as a sort of game, played strictly according to rules, with the method, and not the ultimate result, the important thing. If, on the other hand, you string along with the dictionary definition, then Conway received no more nor less than justice, for he was rendered what was his due. So, in a sense, justice was served, too.