“And he can then fire me for stupidity. Which I deserve.”

  “Not a chance,” said Gonzalo. “Don’t tell him the literal truth. Tell him that as a result of your own clever detective work you uncovered the facts of the case through a confidential source you cannot reveal.”

  Henry said, “After all, sir, confidentiality is the policy of the Black Widowers.”

  10

  What Time Is It?

  This is another murder mystery, which alone makes it special for me. No, not because I revel in murder—quite the reverse—but just because I have the miserable feeling that whenever I avoid some type of writing some among my readers decide it’s because I just can’t do it. It is with a certain pleasure, then, that I occasionally show them that I can do it. The reason I don’t usually do it is because I usually don’t want to.

  Besides, although all my mystery stories are clever (well, that’s my opinion), I must admit that there are degrees of cleverness and that some are more clever than others. Well, this is one I consider particularly clever. You may not agree with me, of course, but it’s my own estimate that decides the quantity of fun I get out of writing a story, so I have to go by what I think.

  The monthly banquet of the Black Widowers had proceeded its usually noisy course and then, over the coffee, there had fallen an unaccustomed quiet.

  Geoffrey Avalon sipped at his coffee thoughtfully and said, “It’s the little things—the little things. I know a couple who might have been happily married forever. He was a lay reader at an Episcopalian Church and she was an unreformed atheist, and they never gave each other a cross look over that. But he liked dinner at six and she liked it at seven, and that split them apart.”

  Emmanuel Rubin looked up owlishly from his part of the table, eyes unblinking behind thick lenses, and said, “What’s ‘big’ and what’s ‘little,’ Geoff? Every difference is a little difference if you’re not involved. There’s nothing like a difference in the time sense to reduce you to quivering rage.”

  Mario Gonzalo looked complacently at the high polish on his shoes and said, “Ogden Nash once wrote that some people like to sleep with the window closed and some with the window open and each other is whom they marry.”

  Since it was rather unusual that at any Black Widowers banquet three successive comments should be made without an explosive contradiction, it didn’t really surprise anyone when Thomas Trumbull furrowed his brows and said, “That’s a lot of horsehair. When a marriage breaks up, the trivial reason is never the reason.”

  Avalon said mildly, “I know the couple, Tom. It’s my brother and sister-in-law—or ex-sister-in-law.”

  “I’m not arguing that they don’t say they’ve split over a triviality, or even that they don’t believe it,” said Trumbull. “I just say there’s something deeper. If a couple are sexually compatible, if there are no money problems, if there is no grave difference in beliefs or attitudes, then they’ll stick together. If any of these things fail, then the marriage sours and the couple begin to chafe at trivialities. The trivialities then get blamed—but that’s not so.”

  Roger Halsted, who had been chasing the last of the apple pie about his plate, now cleansed his mouth of its slight stickiness with a sip of black coffee and said, “How do you intend to prove your statement, Tom?”

  “It doesn’t require proof,” said Trumbull, scowling. “It stands to reason.”

  “Only in your view,” said Halsted, warmly, his high forehead flushing pinkly, as it always did when he was moved. “I once broke up with a young woman I was crazy about because she kept saying ‘Isn’t it a riot?’ in and out of season. I swear she had no other flaw.”

  “You’d be perjuring yourself unconsciously,” said Trumbull. “Listen, Jim, call a vote.”

  James Drake, host for the evening, stubbed out his cigarette and looked amused. His small eyes, nested in finely wrinkled skin, darted around the table and said, “You’ll lose, Tom.”

  “I don’t care if I win or lose,” said Trumbull, “I just want to see how many jackasses there are at the table.”

  “The usual number, I suppose,” said Drake. “All those who agree with Tom raise their hands.”

  Trumbull’s arm shot up and was the only one to do so.

  “I’m not surprised,” he said, after a brief look, left and right. “How about you, Henry? Are you voting?”

  Henry, the unparalleled waiter at all the Black Widower banquets, smiled paternally, “Actually, I was not, Mr. Trumbull, but if I had voted, I would have taken the liberty of disagreeing with you.” He was passing about the table, distributing the brandy. “You, too, Brutus?” said Trumbull.

  Rubin finished his coffee and put the cup down with a clatter. “What the devil, all differences are trivial. Forms of life that are incredibly different superficially are all but identical on the biochemical level. There seems a world of difference between the worm and the earth it burrows in, but, considering the atoms that make it up, both of them…”

  Trumbull said, “Don’t wax poetical, Manny, or, if you must, wax it in your garage and not here. I suspect jackassery is universal but, just to make sure, I’ll ask our guest if he is voting.”

  Drake said, “Let’s make that part of the grilling then. It’s time. And you can do the grilling, Tom.”

  The guest was Barry Levine, a small man, dark-haired, dark-eyed, slim, and nattily dressed. He was not exactly handsome, but he had a cheerful expression that was a good substitute. Gonzalo had already sketched his caricature, exaggerating the good cheer into inanity, and Henry had placed it on the wall to join the rest.

  Trumbull said, “Mr. Levine, it is our custom at these gatherings of ours to ask our guest, to begin with, to justify his existence. I shall dispense with that since I will assume that your reason for existence at the moment is to back me up, if you can, in my statement—self-evident, to my way of thinking—that trivialities are trivial.”

  Levine smiled and said, in a slightly nasal voice, “Trivialities on the human level, or are we talking about earthworms?”

  “We are talking about humans, if we omit Manny.”

  “In that case, I join the jackassery, since, in my occupation, I am concerned almost exclusively with trivia.”

  “And your occupation, please?”

  “I’m the kind of lawyer, Mr. Trumbull, who makes his living by arguing with witnesses and with other lawyers in front of a judge and jury. And that immerses me in triviality.”

  Trumbull growled, “You consider justice a triviality, do you?”

  “I do not,” said Levine, with equanimity, “but that is not with what we are directly concerned in the courtroom. In the courtroom, we play games. We attempt to make favorable testimony admissible and unfavorable testimony inadmissible. We play with the rules of questioning and cross-examination. We try to manipulate the choosing of favorable jurors, and then we manipulate the thoughts and emotions of the jurors we do get. We try to play on the prejudices and tendencies of the judge as we know them to be at the start or as we discover them to be in the course of the trial. We try to block the opposition attorney or, if that is not possible, to maneuver him into overplaying his hand. We do all this with the trivia and minutiae of precedence and rationale.”

  Trumbull’s tone did not soften. “And where in all this litany of judicial recreation does justice come in?”

  Levine said, “Centuries of experience with our Anglo-American system of jurisprudence has convinced us that in the long run and on the whole, justice is served. In the short run, and in a given specific case, however, if may very well not be. This can’t be helped. To change the rules of the game to prevent injustice in a particular case may, and probably will, insure a greater level of injustice on the whole—though once in a while an overall change for the better can be carried through.”

  “In other words,” interposed Rubin, “you despair of universal justice even as a goal of the legal profession?”

  “As an attainable goal, yes,” said Levine. “In heaven, there may be perfect justice; on Earth, never.”

  Trumbull said, “I take it, then, that if you are engaged in a particular case, you are not the least interested in justice?”

  Levine’s eyebrows shot upward. “Where have I said that? Of course I am interested in justice. The immediate service to justice is seeing to it that my client gets the best and most efficient defense that I can give him, not merely because he deserves it, but also because American jurisprudence demands it, and because he is deprived of it at your peril, for you may be next.

  “Nor is it relevant whether he is guilty or innocent, for he is legally innocent in every case until he is proven guilty according to law, rigorously applied. Whether the accused is morally or ethically innocent is a much more difficult question, and one with which I am not primarily concerned. I am secondarily concerned with it, of course, and try as I might, there will be times when I cannot do my full duty as a lawyer out of a feeling of revulsion toward my client. It is then my duty to advise him to obtain another lawyer.

  “Still, if I were to secure the acquittal of a man I considered a scoundrel, the pain would not be as intense as that of failing to secure the acquittal of a man who, in my opinion, was wrongfully accused. Since I can rarely feel certain whether a man is wrongfully accused or is a scoundrel past redemption, it benefits both justice and my conscience to work for everyone as hard as I can, within the bounds of ethical legal behavior.”

  Gonzalo said, “Have you ever secured the acquittal of someone you considered a scoundrel?”

  “On a few occasions. The fault there lay almost always in mistakes made by the prosecution—their illegal collection of evidence, or their slovenly preparation of the case. Nor would I waste pity on them. They have the full machinery of the law on their side and the boundless public purse. If we allow them to convict a scoundrel with less than the most legal of evidence and the tightest of cases simply because we are anxious to see a scoundrel punished, then where will you and I find safety? We, too, may seem scoundrels through force of circumstance or of prejudice.”

  Gonzalo said, “And have you ever failed to secure the acquittal of someone you considered wrongfully accused?”

  Here Levine’s face seemed to crumple. The fierce joy with which he defended his profession was gone and his lower lip seemed to quiver for a moment. “As a matter of fact,” he said, softly, “I am engaged in a case right now in which my client may well be convicted despite the fact that I consider him wrongfully accused.”

  Drake chuckled and said, “I told you they’d get that out of you eventually, Barry!” He raised his voice to address the others generally. “I told him not to worry about confidentiality; that everything here was sub rosa. And I also told him it was just possible we might be able to help him.”

  Avalon stiffened and said in his most stately baritone, “Do you know any of the details of the case, Jim?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then how do you know we can help?”

  “I called it a possibility.”

  Avalon shook his head. “I expect that from Mario’s enthusiasm, but not from you, Jim.”

  Drake raised his hand. “Don’t lecture, Geoff. It doesn’t become you.”

  Levine interposed. “Don’t quarrel, gentlemen. I’ll be pleased to accept any help you can offer, and if you can’t, I will be no worse off. Naturally, I want to impress on you the fact that even though confidentiality may be the rule here, it is particularly important in this case. I rely on that.”

  “You may,” said Avalon stiffly.

  Trumbull said, “All right, now. Let’s stop this dance and get down to it. Would you give us the details of the case you’re speaking of, Mr. Levine?”

  “I will give you the relevant data. My client is named Johnson, which is a name that I would very likely have chosen if I were inventing fictitious names, but it is a real name. There is a chance that you might have heard of this case, but I rather think you haven’t, for it is not a local case and, if you don’t mind, I will not mention the city in which it occurred, for that is not relevant.

  “Johnson, my client, was in debt to a loan shark, whom he knew—that is, with whom he had enough of a personal relationship to be able to undertake a personal plea for an extension of time.

  “He went to the hotel room that the loan shark used as his office—a sleazy room in a sleazy hotel that fit his sleazy business. The shark knew Johnson well enough to be willing to see him, and even to affect a kind of spurious bonhomie, but would not grant the extension. This meant that when Johnson went into default he would, at the very least, be beaten up; that his business would be vandalized; that his family, perhaps, would be victimized.

  “He was desperate—and I am, of course, telling you Johnson’s story as he told it to me—but the shark explained quite coolly that if Johnson were let off then others would expect the same leniency. On the other hand, if Johnson were made an example of, it would nerve others to pay promptly and perhaps deter some from incurring debts they could not repay. It was particularly galling to Johnson, apparently, that the loan shark waxed virtuous over the necessity of protecting would-be debtors from themselves.”

  Rubin said dryly, “I dare say, Mr. Levine, that if a loan shark were as articulate as you are, he could make out as good a case for his profession as you could for yours.”

  Levine said, after a momentary pause, “I would not be surprised. In fact, before you bother to point it out, I may as well say that, given the reputation of lawyers with the public, people hearing the defenses of both professions might vote in favor of loan sharks as the more admirable of the two. I can’t help that, but I still think that if you’re in trouble you had better try a lawyer before you try a loan shark.

  “To continue, Johnson was not at all impressed by the shark’s rationale for trying to extract blood from a stone, then pulverizing the stone for failure to bleed. He broke down into a rage, screaming out threats he could not fulfill. In brief, he threatened to kill the shark.”

  Trumbull said, “Since you’re telling us Johnson’s story, I assume he admitted making the threat.”

  “Yes, he did,” said Levine. “I told him at the start, as I tell all my clients, that I could not efficiently help him unless he told me the full truth, even to confessing to a crime. Even after such a confession, I would still be compelled to defend him, and to fight, at worst, for the least punishment to which he might be entitled and, at best, for acquittal on any of several conceivable grounds.

  “He believed me, I think, and did not hesitate to tell me of the threat; nor did he attempt to palliate or qualify it. That impressed me, and I am under the strong impression that he has been telling me the truth. I am old enough in my profession and have suffered the protestations of enough liars to feel confident of the truth when I hear it. And, as it happens, there is evidence supporting this part of the story, though Johnson did not know that at the time and so did not tell the truth merely because he knew it would be useless to he.”

  Trumbull said, “What was the evidence?”

  Levine said, “The hotel rooms are not soundproofed and Johnson was shrieking at the top of his voice. A maid heard just about every word and so did a fellow in an adjoining room who was trying to take a nap and who called down to the front desk to complain.”

  Trumbull said, “That just means an argument was going on. What evidence is there that it was Johnson who was shrieking?”

  “Oh ample,” said Levine. “The desk clerk also knows Johnson, and Johnson had stopped at the desk and asked if the shark were in. The desk clerk called him and sent Johnson up—and he saw Johnson come down later—and the news of the death threat arrived at the desk between those two periods of time.

  “Nevertheless, the threat was meaningless. It served, in fact, merely to bleed off Johnson’s rage and to deflate him. He left almost immediately afterward. I am quite certain that Johnson was incapable of killing.”

  Rubin stirred restlessly. He said, “That’s nonsense. Anyone is capable of killing, given a moment of sufficient rage or terror and a weapon at hand. I presume that after Johnson left, the loan shark was found dead with his skull battered in; with a baseball bat, with blood and hair on it, lying on the bed; and you’re going to tell us that you’re sure Johnson didn’t do it.”

  Johnson held up his glass for what he indicated with his fingers was to be a touch more brandy, smiled bis thanks to Henry, and said, “I have read some of your murder mysteries, Mr. Rubin, and I’ve enjoyed them. I’m sure that in your mysteries such a situation could occur and you’d find ways of demonstrating the suspect to be innocent. This, however, is not a Rubin mystery. The loan shark was quite alive when Johnson left.”

  Rubin said, “According to Johnson, of course.”

  “And unimpeachable witnesses. The man who called down said there was someone being murdered in the next room, and the desk clerk sent up the security man at once, for he feared it was his friend being murdered. The security man was well armed, and though he is not an intellectual type, he is perfectly competent to serve as a witness. He knocked and called out his identity, whereupon the door opened and revealed the loan shark, whom the security man knew, quite alive—and alone. Johnson had already left, deflated and de-energized.

  “The man at the desk, Brancusi is his name, saw Johnson leave a few seconds after the security man had taken the elevator up. They apparently passed each other in adjoining elevators. Brancusi called out, but Johnson merely lifted his hand and hurried out. He looked white and ill, Brancusi says. That was about a quarter after three, according to Brancusi—and according to Johnson, as well.

  “As for the loan shark, he came down shortly after four and sat in the bar for an hour or more. The bartender, who knew him, testified to that and can satisfactorily enumerate the drinks he had. At about a quarter after five he left the bar and, presumably, went upstairs.”