Корнелл Вулрич - Manhattan Love Song

For instance, during one of our talks I suddenly recalled how I had walked out of Bernice’s place the first night I met her, wearing somebody else’s hat by mistake. Not only that, but by some quirk of memory the size and make of it even came back to me! I at once gave him the dope on it, afraid I might forget all about it again. “Y’better put that down,” I advised, “size 6⅜! And inside the hatband it said Boulevard des Capucines!” And waited for him to fall all over me when he heard it. My life was pretty colorless, I guess.

All he said was, “Don’t let’s waste time. Wade; I’m not running the fashion column for men in the theater programs.” And then, on the other hand, one time when I was trying to recall, more for my own morbid satisfaction than his benefit, what my last words to her had been when I left there the afternoon it happened, I recollected that they hadn’t been to her at all, but to Tenacity, who had stopped me on my way out to ask me if Bernice was “fixing to fire her, or what?” He no sooner heard that than he stopped me then and there and demanded excitedly, “Why didn’t you tell me that before? That the colored girl was still in the place when you left! I’ve had a feeling all along that she’d be our trump card in this!”

I didn’t follow him, and gave him a look that told him so.

“I’d like to bet,” he said, slapping his knee, “that she was drawing pay from other sources besides the wages Pascal paid her!”

I still didn’t get him but no longer bothered signaling the fact. “I read in one of the tabs,” I said, “that they had her down at headquarters the day after, questioning her. I think they’re going to use her as a witness against me—”

“Let me get my hands on her!” he said viciously. “I’ll find out who Pascal’s friends were!”

“Anyway, she left the place herself five minutes after I did that afternoon,” I remarked indifferently. “The doorman and the elevator man both backed her up on that, according to what the paper—”

“Oh, her alibi’s as good as gold,” he interrupted caustically. “A little too good, if you want to know the way I feel about it. She wasn’t satisfied with asking the doorman what time it was — she had to let her Ingersoll slip out of her hand while she was pretending to wind it and break the crystal on the floor, and then make some remark about that meaning bad luck, a death in the house or something to that effect. And the doorman, being colored himself, wasn’t likely to forget that when the time came. Then on top of that, as though that weren’t enough, she conveniently remembered some phone message Pascal had asked her to deliver, and used the downstairs phone — as though she couldn’t have thought of that while she was still upstairs!”

“Oh, that must’ve been to me,” I said reflectively and then again, “No, that’s right, it was a man, and it didn’t come until quarter to—”

“It wasn’t to you at all,” he said sourly. “I got the whole story. It was to some girlfriend of Pascal’s, and the call never went through because she’d been dispossessed for having too many brawls in her place. This clever colored wench has to throw a fit of giggling when she hears that, pretending it struck her so funny, and repeat the whole thing to the doorman word for word. Take it from me, she knew what was coming and wanted to impress every one with the fact that she was going home at quarter to five. I’d like to bet that other days no one even saw her come and go!”

I remembered something then and told him: “Wait a minute, you’ve got the whole thing wrong. That wasn’t the time she made that call — she’d already made it upstairs right in front of me and Bernice. Bernice called her in the room specially for that, and I remember she said she didn’t have to look the number up; she knew it by heart. And that was when they told her they were dispossessed — not down in the lobby at all.”

“Well, it’s damn queer, then,” he said, “that it should strike her so funny fifteen floors below that she has to break out laughing all over the place until the doorman himself told her not to make so much noise; she’d get him in trouble. I never yet heard of any colored Englishwomen, did you?”

“Maybe she’s from the British West Indies,” I suggested unwittingly.

He gave me an indescribable look and shook his head to himself. “You never killed Bernice Pascal,” he said in a low voice. I turned my face aside with sharp impatience. “No, it’s ten to one that what she did downstairs, the coon I mean,” he went on, “was step over to the phone and send out the tip-off that Pascal was packing and getting ready to skip out of New York that night. And then went over to the doorman and pretended that the call she had just made was the first one, the one you heard her make upstairs. Just let her take the stand — I’ll get it out of her. They’ll wish they had paid her fare to California, whoever they are!”

I was so little interested, however, in what his plans were, and in fact in the whole trial itself, that I didn’t even know what date had been set for it. I’d only glanced at a paper on two occasions since they’d brought me here, and as it nearly turned my stomach to see Bernice’s face splashed all over the pages in gummy ink — with words like “Butterfly” and “Slain Beauty” and “Queen of Hearts” written above it — and encounter column after column of a diary that I knew damn well she’d never written, I didn’t repeat the attempt. It was tough enough to have lost her without having to share her with the entire world.

And Berenson, either because he had so much else on his mind that it never occurred to him or because he took it for granted that I already knew, never said a word to me about it either. So the first I knew about when it was due to begin was the morning of the very day itself, when the turnkey suggested to me not unkindly that I “oughta take a shave for myself.”

“Why?” I said, “the cement walls aren’t complaining, are they?”

“They’ll be taking pictures of you today in court,” he said, “and you look like hell. You wanta make a good impression on the jury, don’t ya?”

“Oh, is it today?” I said, and I went ahead and “took a shave for myself.” And I mean just that, for myself, and not for the jury or anybody else.

And so it began — and all I did after that was sit there, day after day, and day after day. I couldn’t even understand what they were talking about most of the time. They’d bring me in each morning and sit me down — and I always sat in the same place — and then at noon they’d take me back again, and then early in the afternoon they’d bring me in again, and then late in the afternoon they’d take me out again. And the next day the whole dreary thing would start over again. All I did was go in and out of that room and sit there — with every one in the back of the room staring their eyes out at me.

At the end of the first week, when I was confident the thing must be nearly over, I found out through Berenson that they’d only just gotten through picking out jurors. When he saw the look on my face, he said, “Wade, this is an interesting case; most men in your shoes would hug every delay!”

He told me Maxine had been present every day. “Tell her to go on home!” I said harshly. “Hasn’t she got enough decency to stay away from here?”

The second week it became a little more comprehensible; at least they stopped asking jurors what business they were in and whether they were opposed to capital punishment, and began to have a succession of people on the stand — who spoke of things more closely related to me. But presently I had heard the banal, monotonous story so often, from so many different angles, that I could have yelled my lungs out for mercy. In sheer self-defense I fell into the habit of staring hypnotically out of the nearest of the wide, tall windows. The sun came pouring in through them almost without exception during the whole of this time, and if I watched attentively enough, I could see little grains of dust floating around in it and making patterns. But at the end of one session Berenson took occasion to warn me against doing that. He said it made me seem callous, hard-boiled, would make a bad impression on the jury. “Oh, jury be damned!” I thought to myself wearily.