Корнелл Вулрич - Manhattan Love Song

“Why did you leave me that night?” she said tenderly. “This wouldn’t have happened to you—”

“How is it out today?” I said. “Very warm, or is it cooler than it was before?”

She saw what I meant, so she answered, “It’s pretty warm, warmer than it was yesterday—”

“Where do you live now, Maxine?” I said. “In the same place?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I’ve been in the hospital; I just got out yesterday, that’s why I couldn’t come to you any sooner.”

“Feeling all right now?” I asked, letting my eyes stray around vacantly.

“Yes,” she said readily, “it was just the suddenness of the thing, on top of everything else—” Then she went on, “I have a lawyer for you; he’ll help you out of this.”

“I don’t want a lawyer,” I said.

“I want you to tell him everything, when he comes to see you,” she pleaded vibrantly. “He’s the best I could get hold of; it’s not too late yet — that awful confession, what did they do, grill it out of you? — there’s still every chance in the world, if you—”

“All I want,” I told her. “is to get it over with.”

“Wade, for my sake, if not your own,” she begged. “Won’t you give me this one last break? It’s taken every cent I had—”

“No, Maxine, no! I want to go!”

“Wade, darling,” she groaned, “for Bernice’s sake, then. She wouldn’t want you, she wouldn’t want any one to have this happen — she was too nice a girl!”

“Bernice is gone,” I answered. “There isn’t any more Bernice.”

“Wade, you didn’t do it, you know you didn’t! You’re lying your very life away!”

“I did it, Maxine!” I shouted passionately at her at last. “I choked her to death with my own hands! Now will you believe me? Now will you go away and leave me alone?”

“God forgive you for what you’re doing to the two of us!” was the last thing she said.

The lawyer’s name was Berenson. He came to see me the next day, and scowl as I would that I didn’t want to see any one, wouldn’t leave my cell I was brought in to him. It wasn’t important enough one way or the other, after all, for me to dig my heels between the boards of the floor and put up a physical struggle about.

“Your poor wife,” one of the first things he said to me was, “sold the very wedding ring off her finger, sold her radio, sold everything, to be able to get someone’s services in your defense. At that, the money she came to me with, wouldn’t have paid for the first half-hour’s conference we had. I have it put aside in my safe right now, and she’s welcome to it back the day the trial ends — no matter what the outcome. Now believe that or not. Wade, whichever you prefer!”

“I’d believe anything these days,” I told him.

“I’ve taken this case over,” he said, “because I’m interested in it — because I have a hunch it’s going to turn out to be the biggest case in years — and because I think I can squeeze enough prestige out of it before I’m through to last me the rest of my career. Do you get me?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t. Y’better lay off it, if it’s prestige you’re after, because you’ve got a client that doesn’t want to be defended and a case that can’t be won!”

“Why can’t it?” he snapped. “You didn’t kill her!”

“Didn’t I? I say I did,” I said sullenly. “How do you know I didn’t?”

“You were all the way down at Grand Central in a cab the first time.” he said, “and you turned around and went back there. If you’d done it, nothing could have gotten you within a mile of that place that night!”

“Why not?” I decided. “I couldn’t get away with it, that was all.”

“You would have gone to the nearest police station, then — not to the very room she was lying in, alone. Don’t try to tell me; I ought to know a little about human nature by now!”

“All right, Mr. Berenson,” I said, “build up your beautiful case! Build it sky-high! And when you’ve got it all spic and span and foolproof, I’m going to stand up there in the stand just the same and tell the world I killed Bernice Pascal!”

“You think you’re the kingpin in this, don’t you, Wade!” he told me scathingly. “You think the whole case is centered around you and whether you’re guilty or whether you’re not! Well, let me tell you, my dear boy, you’re not as important in this affair as that very colored girl she had working for her — you’re nothing more than the sucker that’s taking the rap!” He opened a dull silver cigarette case and held it toward me with the contemptuous air of some one feeding peanuts to a rather smelly animal in the zoo. “You loved her, didn’t you?” he said.

In thinking it over after he’d gone, I realized that it was at about this point I began to fall for him.

“Maybe I didn’t!” I assented wistfully.

“Your wife told me as much,” he went on. “She had an idea that that might be the reason for your whole fool attitude from the time of the arrest. Pascal’s gone, so you don’t give a damn one way or the other now.”

“Which is just about the size of it,” I said stiffly, “and my own privilege in the bargain.”

“Fair enough,” he agreed, “but it makes a pretty poor showing, when you come right down to it. Leaving yourself out of it altogether, you’re letting the real guys that killed the woman you love get away with murder. You don’t seem to feel that you owe that much to her — to get busy and settle accounts for her. In other words, Wade, you may be standing up and telling the world that you killed her — but what you’re telling yourself, and her, is that she’s not worth avenging! That she deserves what she got!”

“God knows that isn’t true!” I burst out. “I’d choke the rats that did it with my own hands if I only knew who they—”

Then I knew by the smile on his face that I had told him I hadn’t done it.

“I’m taking the case, Wade,” he let me know. “I mayn’t be able to keep you out of the chair, but at least I’ll keep you out of the witness box!”

But I went back to the cell shaking my head and thinking, “What good is it if he does get the right guys? What good is it if I do get even for her? What good is anything? Will it bring her back?”

I must have been a funny client, though! After that first day, I told Berenson anything he wanted to know, didn’t hold back a thing — and yet never again, after that first slip of the tongue, would I admit I hadn’t done it. I noticed he didn’t waste much time arguing out that point with me (and to me it seemed all that mattered in the whole thing: whether I said I did do it or said I didn’t do it) but seemed more interested in a whole lot of other things, side issues like the party at Jerry’s that Saturday night, and the way Bernice had once begged me to stop seeing her, and the man that had answered her phone the night I had called her from the restaurant, and the way I had met Marion on the street and she had had a spasm of jealousy over what I told her, and so on.

Sometimes I would tell him things that it seemed to me he should have gone into ecstasies over, should have congratulated me on remembering, and he would brush them impatiently aside and remark, “That’s not a bit of good to me.” And then again, he would suddenly flap his wings and lose feathers all over the room about some trivial detail that didn’t have the utmost bearing on the case, as far as I could see. I used to wonder sometimes if he was really a good lawyer.