Маргарет Миллар - Spider Webs

The judge contemplated his answer while he finished changing his clothes. “I had a coonhound once, used to bay at the full moon. It wasn’t of much significance however, since he also bayed at the new moon, fire sirens, garbage trucks, passing trains and automobile horns. He even bayed at my wife, until one day she bayed back at him. It was an interesting confrontation, but I believe my wife won. She had a way with animals.”

The judge closed the lid of the trunk with a bang. He recalled his last personal conversation with Miss Foster regarding bras, and lack thereof, and decided to stick to the relatively safe subject of coonhounds as long as possible. “Have you ever had a coonhound, Miss Foster?”

“I don’t think so.”

“If you had, you’d be sure of it, by the neighbors’ complaints, if nothing else. It’s an unusual breed. I don’t believe mine ever saw a coon. Perhaps that’s why he made so much racket, out of sheer frustration. What do you do when you’re frustrated, Miss Foster?”

“I don’t bay,” Eva said grimly.

“Pity. I’d rather like to hear that sound again. Primeval. I have made a small personal study of primeval sounds. Among birds, for instance, I have found the loon’s call to be the wildest, not in this area, where they are winterlings and haven’t much to say for themselves, but farther north on their breeding grounds. Their call is one of utmost abandon, ecstasy, madness. Human beings have translated these sounds into words, but I must say they’re a poor substitute for the real thing.”

As the judge warmed to his subject, his audience was rather obviously cooling. With a sigh he unlocked the passenger side of his car, and Eva got in. He took his place behind the wheel, unclipped the sunshades from his glasses and returned them to his pocket. He thought of steering the conversation in a more positive direction by complimenting her on her appearance. In fact, she looked quite chic in a black and white print silk dress with a black jacket and a bright red scarf at the neck. But before he could think of the right words, she began to weep quietly.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that, Miss Foster,” he said.

She continued weeping. He sat and waited, wondering about this whole business of tears. Like words, they were a creation of man and a substitute for the real thing. This was fortunate under the circumstances. The prospect of Miss Foster wailing and keening — and possibly attracting a few loons as well — was mind-boggling. Miss Foster would undoubtedly wail and keen just as efficiently as she did everything else.

Finally she stopped crying, wiped her eyes, blew her nose, got out of the car to dispose of the used tissue in a trash container and returned to the car. The judge watched this sequence of events with interest. Grief or no grief, Miss Foster never forgot her training.

“I’ve fallen in love,” she said finally. “It doesn’t make any sense whatever. There are a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t have. I could even see it coming, and I didn’t duck or turn and run. I just stood there and let it happen. Now I wish I were dead.”

At this point the judge would have opted for some wailing and keening, but it was too late. He sighed, reflecting that he did a great deal of sighing lately. Perhaps there were more reasons for it as the years passed. Sighing was, he believed, simply the act of taking in more oxygen to help the brain cope with an unusual or difficult set of circumstances.

“My life has always been so orderly,” Eva said. “Look at the mess it’s in now. I’m in love with a man on trial for murder, a black man with kids and a common-law wife. And that isn’t the worst of it. He doesn’t love me back. I think I could make him love me back if I had the chance. Am I going to get that chance?”

“Are you asking me to predict what the jurors’ verdict will be? Nobody on earth can do that. No mind reader, no computer programmed with every detail of every juror’s life from day one can give a readout on what a verdict will be.”

“Can’t you please give me your opinion on how strong the case is against him?”

“That would be highly irregular.”

“I know.”

“And you’re asking me to do it anyway?”

“Yes.”

The judge removed his glasses, wiped them with a handkerchief and put them back on his nose. The images seen through them were no clearer: the rear of the car in front of him; his own hands on the steering wheel, misshapen with age; and Miss Foster’s face, pale and strained. In the distance there were all the masts of pleasure boats like a leafless forest.

“The evidence against him is purely circumstantial, of course,” he said almost as if he were talking to himself. “He took a woman on board the Bewitched with him, and that woman was later found dead in the water, tangled in a bed of kelp. An autopsy clearly revealed grooves on her throat, which the prosecution contends were left by thumbs during the act of strangulation. When the Bewitched docked, the defendant went ashore and pawned the diamond studs the dead woman customarily wore in her earlobes. He lied to the pawnbroker, as he had to Harry Arnold, about having a toothache and needing the pawn money to pay a dentist. His teeth, according to a deposition given by the jail dentist, are in almost perfect condition. The prosecution contends that what he needed the money for was to pay his living expenses while he holed up in some motel until the scratches on his cheek healed. The question that immediately arises is: Why would a man be so anxious to hide some scratches on his face? The obvious answer, indeed, the only one I can come up with, is that those scratches implicated him in a crime.”

“Not necessarily murder,” Eva said.

“True. There is no incontrovertible evidence that the woman was strangled since the pathologists are not in full agreement in interpreting the grooves on her throat, whether they occurred before or after death. The defendant’s tendency to drink too much and lose his temper easily while drunk has been hinted but not actually proved.

“Missing from the prosecution’s case is a case of another kind — to wit, the green leather one containing Mrs. Pherson’s valuable heirloom jewelry. It was in her possession when she came on board, but no trace of it or its contents has shown up. Sometime after the woman’s body was found, a fisherman retrieved her coat from the sea. It proved a significant find because it was still buttoned. Mrs. Pherson, the testimony has shown, always hung her clothes carefully on hangers, buttoned or zippered to retain their shape. She could not have been wearing the coat when she went overboard. Wave action can tear a coat off a body, but there is no way it can rebutton it. Common sense tells us it was thrown overboard, and since Harry Arnold claims to have seen the defendant toss some clothing into the water, it’s possible or even likely the coat was disposed of in that manner by Cully King. Still, it’s not evidence of murder.

“The possibility of suicide has been suggested but not taken seriously. True, Mrs. Pherson had been despondent after the death of her mother, with whom she’d been planning a trip to Hawaii. That this was the destination of the Bewitched may have been a contributing factor in Mrs. Pherson’s decision to accompany Cully King. We’ll never know. We can’t read a dead mind. Mrs. Pherson’s actions resembled those of a woman bent not on suicide but on having a hell of a good time getting away from the structured life she led with a rather puritanical husband. You may recall the chambermaid hearing her talk to herself in her room before leaving the hotel as well as her conversation with Mr. Elfinstone at the hotel desk. It was the happy, excited talk of a woman who, in her own words, was going to do something she’d never done before and would never do again.