Стюарт Стерлинг - The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

“You committed murder,” the lawyer reminded him coldly. He stood up. “I’ll petition to have you examined by alienists, as the first step toward entering a plea of insanity for you.” He left abruptly, all smiling encouragement.

As soon as he was gone, Swanson began to rattle the bars desperately, to call the guard back again. The latter, when he finally came, was surprised to see this erstwhile phlegmatic, untroubled prisoner suddenly turned into a white-faced, panic-stricken hysteric.

“Malloy,” he panted. “Oh, for the love of heaven, get me a piece of paper and a pencil right away, will you? I’ve got to send a wire!”

And when the guard had acceded to his request, this is what he handed back to him through the cell grate:

Mrs. Helen Swanson,

c/o General Delivery,

Tucson, Arizona.

Come back right away, I’m in for bad trouble.

“Send this right off for me, will you, Malloy?” he pleaded.

“What’s the matter, what’s come over you all of a sudden?” asked the guard, trying to calm him down. “Here, want to read the paper? Here’s today’s paper.” He thrust it through the bars at him, turned to go and get permission to file the message. He had hardly reached the end of the corridor when a deep groan sounded in the cell he had just left. He turned and went trotting back again.

Swanson was sitting where he had left him, white as chalk and shaking uncontrollably from head to foot. The paper that he had just opened across his knees had fallen to the floor and he was staring with glazed, horrified eyes at the blank cell wall opposite him.

The guard, alarmed, unlocked the grate and let himself in to find out what was the matter with him. He picked up the paper and read: “Seven Dead in Arizona Bus Crash.” And under that a list of casualties!

The boy had escaped injury; his name was among the survivors. Swanson was on his feet, pawing pathetically at the guard’s uniform. “Lemme out of here! What am I doing in here now? My kid’s alone in the world. I’ve got to get out of here! I didn’t do it, I tell you, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it! ”

“Did you want to see me, Swanson?” the dick named Butler asked gruffly, as he entered the cell.

“Any one of you fellows, I don’t care which one. They told me you were the most human of the lot; that’s why I asked for you.”

“Most human, eh?” The detective grunted. “What was I supposed to be, chromium-plated? I feel a favor coming up.” He grunted again.

“If your kid was dying by inches under your eyes, if your wife was starving, and you were broke and had no job, and you read in a paper that you could get a thousand bucks just by telling them you killed someone, what would you do?”

“A man can’t answer that truthfully until he’s been in that same fix,” Butler told him gravely. “And I haven’t, so I can’t say. Are you trying to tell me that’s why you’re in here?”

“Trying is right.”

The dick fanned his hand scornfully between their faces. “The attempt is unsuccessful.”

“I figured it would be,” Swanson said desolately, biting the tips of both thumbs at once. “But that isn’t why I asked to see you. I’ve got to have a chance to talk to Mrs. Ranger again.”

“What do you want from her?”

“Mister, I know what I know. I don’t ask you or anyone else to believe me. Mrs. Ranger is mistaken about my coming up to her outside her house when she was leaving for the theater that night. She may have been excited, high-sterical; just because she saw me handcuffed in front of her, she thought it was me. In fairness to me, won’t you let her give it another try? She may be ashamed, in front of all of you, to admit she was wrong the first time. Won’t you let me see her alone, without any of you guys around? Won’t you give me that one chance? It’s my only one. That’s all I’m asking; I won’t ask another thing.”

Butler got up and went toward the cell door to be let out, left Swanson hanging on his delayed answer. He didn’t give it to him until after he was already outside in the corridor. “See what I can do for you.” Which meant yes.

Mrs. Ranger came into the room with one of the other dicks, not Butler. At sight of Swanson, she turned to her escort displeased. “I didn’t know I’d have to face this — this criminal again. It’s very painful for me. I was under the impression I was simply wanted down here to—” Then as she saw the guard with Swanson about to withdraw: “You’re not going to leave me alone in here with him, are you? Why, this man’s dangerous; he’s liable to—”

“There’ll be somebody within call, Mrs. Ranger, just a few steps down the hall. He’s asked to be permitted to speak to you alone. It may be to your interest to hear what he has to say.”

“I still don’t like the idea at all,” she complained querulously. The dick and Swanson’s guard strolled out of the room without seeming to hear her, softly closed the door after them.

She sat down as far across the room from him as she could get. “Well, what is it you want of me, murderer?” she said brittlely, lighting a cigarette. “Make it snappy.”

“Mrs. Ranger.” Swanson faltered. “ Please take another look at me. Look closely. Look good. Look at my height when I’m standing straight like this. Look at the shape of my face. Look at the distance between my eyes. I know there are plenty of people that look like somebody else, but can’t you see I’m not that man that came up to your car outside your house that night? You know I’m not.”

“Do I?” she said mockingly.

“This is just between us—”

“Is it?”

“We’re alone now by ourselves, there isn’t anyone in here with us.”

She pronounced each word with the slow clarity of a death sentence. “You are the man I saw!”

“But I know I couldn’t be, because I wasn’t there where you say you saw me that night. Don’t you see you must be mistaken?” In his despair he groped for any argument that might possibly convince her, blurted out the first thing that came to his mind. “There’s a doctor somewhere in this town will tell you—” He stopped suddenly, checked himself.

“Will tell me what?” She held her cigarette poised half-way to her lips.

He finished it, as long as he’d gone that far. “Will tell you I couldn’t have been there at the time, because he was up at my flat, my wife’s and my flat, that Wednesday night working over our kid, from nine until nearly midnight, and I was up there with him the whole time. He’ll tell you more, he put the idea into my head—”

She was staring at him with fixed intensity, but that wasn’t unnatural. “He put the idea into your head of going out and killing my husband?”

“No, no. He first put the idea into my head of getting the money in any way I could, by hook or crook. But he’ll remember that he was up there, he must keep a record of his calls.”

“A likely story!” she sneered, but her eyes, hard, glittering, calculating, kept roving the room, along its baseboards and its ceiling joints.

“It’s true, I tell you!” Swanson burst out helplessly. “Meredith is his name, Dr. Bradley Meredith. Please! You call him up for me. You ask him! He’ll tell you I wasn’t out that night. Then you can tell the cops you were mistaken. Please call him!”

Again she stared at him inscrutably. “Dr. Bradley Meredith,” she repeated mechanically. Then she let the cigarette fall out of her hand, put the tip of her shoe over it, stood up. She adjusted the silver fox piece over her shoulder. “I will do no such thing! I still say I saw you, and” — very low, almost inaudibly as she moved toward the door — “it’s my word against yours.”