Роберт Артур - Alfred Hitchcock’s A Hangman’s Dozen

And the telephone screamed.

I leaned against the door and let my nerves do whatever they wanted. But I knew I couldn’t stay there. The telephone would only make that noise again. And again and again and again, until finally I gave up and answered it. The thing to do, I told myself calmly, was to answer it now. Then it couldn’t make that noise any more.

A good plan. I was full of good plans. I went over and picked up the phone.

“Hiya, neighbor I” shouted a male voice. “This is Dan O’Toole, of WDEW. Can you Top That Mop?”

“What?”

“This is the grand new radio game everybody’s talking about, neighbor. If you can Top That—”

I suppose he kept on talking. I don’t know. I hung up.

I caught myself about to light a cigarette, and made myself stop. I also forced myself to be calm, think rationally, consider the circumstances. The house, except for my own ragged breathing, was silent.

With waning fervor, I studied once more the tableau I was leaving for the police. The dead woman in the kitchen, the ransacked house. All that remained was to fix the back door to make it look as though the burglar had forced his way in.

It seemed as though my plan should work perfectly well. It really seemed that way.

Slowly, I trudged out to the kitchen. For some reason, I suddenly no longer believed in my plan. All of life was involved in a great conspiracy against me. And it occurred to me that I hadn’t known until today what Janice’s existence at home had been like, and that her reckless spending might simply have been a form of escape.

At the back door, I paused, listening for doorbells and phone bells and church bells and jingle bells, but there was only silence. So I opened the door, and a short round woman was standing there, our next-door neighbor, wearing dress and apron and holding an empty cup.

I stared at her. She looked at me with puzzled surprise, and then her gaze moved beyond me and came to rest on something behind me, at floor level. Her eyes widened. Then she screamed and let go of the cup and went dashing away.

With the scream, I went rigid. I stared at the cup. It seemed to hang there in mid-air for the longest while, and then, very slowly at first, it started to fall. It fell faster and faster and finally splattered with a terrible crash on the patio cement.

And when the cup splattered, so did I. I went all limp and sat down with a bump on the kitchen floor.

And there I sat, waiting. I sat waiting, waiting for the census taker and the mailman with a Special Delivery letter, for the laundry man and the Railway Express driver, for the man from the cleaners, a horde of Boy Scouts on a paper drive, a political candidate, five wrong numbers, the paper boy, the police, a lady collecting for a worthy charity, the milkman, a call from the tax assessor’s office, a young man working his way through college selling magazines...

With a degree of bitterness, a lawyer has been defined as one who can make black appear white or white appear black. Our detestable, forensic hero is singular only in that he proved a red traffic light green.

It was murder, although slaughter was a better term for it — or even assassination. Naomi Shawn settled on murder because it was a word that felt strangely at home in her mind. The crime, by any name, was happening to a bewildered citizen, one Henry Babcock, whose place of execution was the witness stand in Judge Dutton’s court. Henry Babcock was in a somewhat similar circumstance to the late Agnes Thompson, housewife, who had been struck down by a Mercedes-Benz and subsequently buried. Henry was being buried, too; but he had the uncomfortable disadvantage of not being dead.

From her seat among the courtroom spectators, Naomi watched the scene with fascinated eyes. Arnold Shawn was a man of electrifying virility, persuasive charm, and intellectual dexterity. He was a dramatist, a strategist, a psychologist, and could, if need be, display the touch of the poet. He was more handsome at fifty than he’d been at twenty-five, more confident, more successful, more feared and much more hated. He was a lawyer who selected his clients with scrupulous care, basing his decision solely on ability to pay. But once a retainer was given, the accused could sit back with whatever ease an accused can muster and know that his fate was in the hands of as shrewd a legal talent as money could buy.

And the biggest heel.

Naomi Shawn’s vocabulary wasn’t as extensive as her husband’s. He would have found a more distinctive way of describing his own character. In fact, he had done that very thing only a few hours earlier.

“I’m not cruel, Naomi; I’m honest. I could lie to you. It would be easy, easier than you know, my dear. I could prove to you, beyond your innermost feminine doubt, mat I am an innocent, loyal, devoted husband who is passionately in love with you, and everything you think you’ve learned to the contrary is pure illusion. But I won’t lie. There is another woman.”

Naomi tried not to listen to echoes. Arnold was speaking, and Arnold commanded attention when he spoke.

“Now, Mr. Babcock,” he was saying, “you have testified that you saw my client’s automobile run a red light, strike the deceased, Agnes Thompson, drive on for a space of some fifty yards, stop, back up to a spot parallel with the body, and then drive on again without my client, Mr. Jerome, so much as alighting from the vehicle...”

Mr. Jerome. He was nineteen. A slight nineteen, with an almost childlike face and guilty blue eyes that stared disconsolately at his uncalloused hands laced together on the table before him. His blond hair was combed back neatly, and he wore a conservative tie, white shirt and dark suit, as per Arnold’s instructions. Kenneth Jerome looked more like an honor Bible student than a cold-blooded hit and run killer. And he was that; Naomi was the one spectator in the courtroom who knew. She had gone to Arnold’s office one morning. He hadn’t been home all night, a situation that was becoming alarmingly frequent. It was time to have a showdown. But young Jerome and his father had come to the office that day, and she was shunted off to another room. She heard the story. Kenneth Jerome couldn’t deny hitting his victim; the police had already traced his car to the garage where it was being repaired.

“I didn’t know I’d hit a woman,” Kenneth Jerome explained. “I didn’t see anyone. I thought I felt a thud, but it’s open country out near the airport. Sometimes you hit a rabbit or even a cat late at night. And it was late. Somewhere near three-thirty, I think. Anyway, I thought that’s what happened when I got home and saw my right front fender. I thought I’d hit a rabbit or a cat.”

And Arnold’s voice had queried him from across the desk.

“Is that what you told the police?”

“Sure, it is. What else could I tell them?”

“Is there a traffic signal at that intersection?”

“There is — but there wasn’t another car in sight.”

“Was the signal with you, or against you?”

“It was with me. It was green.”

“Is that what you told the police?”

“Sure, it is. I said the woman must have tried to cross against the light. I didn’t see her at all.”

And then Arnold had smiled. From the next room, Naomi couldn’t see the smile; but she could hear it in his words.

“Very good, Mr. Jerome. Now, unless you want me to throw this case back in your teeth, tell me what really happened last night. I don’t deal with clients who aren’t honest with me...”

Honest was one of Arnold’s favorite words. It had an exceptional meaning to him.

“To be perfectly honest with you, Naomi, I never did love you. Not the way a man wants to love a woman. Your father had influence and I needed a start. It was that simple.”