Anatomy of a Murder (3 page)

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Authors: Robert Traver

BOOK: Anatomy of a Murder
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The town of Chippewa lies in a broad loamy valley surrounded by bald low-lying granite and diorite bluffs, about a dozen miles west of the town of Iron Bay on Lake Superior. Iron Bay is the county seat of Iron Cliffs County. I used to be prosecuting attorney of Iron Cliffs County. Perhaps the simplest definition of a prosecuting attorney is a D.A. who lacks a comparable press and publicity; otherwise their jobs are the same. There are no radio or TV programs exalting the real or imagined doings of “Mr. Prosecuting Attorney.” I held the prosecutor's job for ten years, until Mitchell Lodwick beat me. You see, Mitch used to be quite a football star both in high school and later at the university. The boy was good. He was also a veteran of World War II while I was a mere 4F from an old scar on my lung caused by an almost losing bout with pneumonia while in law school. The combination for Mitch was irresistible; I was a hero in neither department so I got beat. Alas, I couldn't run with the ball or tell a corporal from a five-star general. And still can't.
Iron mining is the red lifeblood of Iron Cliffs County. The raw iron ore is mined and coasted downhill by rail from Chippewa to Iron Bay, on the Lake, and thence boated down the Great Lakes to the distant coal deposits and blast furnaces. This makes a handy money-saving arrangement, and for once even Nature seems to have conspired on the side of free enterprise. If it weren't for mining I suppose the county'd still belong to the Indians. Instead it now belongs mostly to the Iron Cliffs Ore Company and the other smaller mining companies and, what's left over, to the descendants of the Finns and Scandinavians, the French, Italians and Cornish, and the Irish and handful of Germans (including Grandpa and Grandma Biegler), who luckily landed here many years before an all-American Senator named Patrick McCarran, ironically himself the descendant of immigrants, had discovered that these yearning peoples were henceforth more properly to be known as quotas, and had run up a tall legislative fence around Ellis Island.
So at forty I had found myself without a job, my main assets consisting of my law degree, a battered set of secondhand law books and some creaking old fly rods. Mitch had been a veteran and a hero; I had been a mere 4F and a bum. For quite a while I was pretty bitter about being beaten by a young legal fledgling who hadn't even tried a justice court fender case when he knocked me
off. For a time I indulged in wistful fantasies about the plight of the poor left-at-home 4F in America. Nobody seemed to have a kind word or vote for him; he was the country's forgotten man—he who had remained at home and kept the lamp lit in the window; he who had patriotically bought all those nice interest-bearing war bonds with his time-and-a-half for overtime, who had stayed at home and resolutely devoured all those black-market steaks; he who stayed behind and got a purple nose instead of a Purple Heart; yes, he who had occasionally reached over and turned down the lamp in the window and attempted to console all those lonely wives and sweethearts … .
For a spell I even dabbled with the heady notion of organizing a sort of American legion of 4F's. We'd have an annual convention and boyishly tip over buses and streetcars and get ourselves a national commander who could bray in high C and sound off on everything under the sun; we'd even get a lobby in Washington and wave the Flag and praise the Lord and damn the United Nations and periodically swarm out like locusts selling crepe-paper flowers or raffle tickets or so ne damned thing, just like all the other outfits. “Arise and fight, ye 4F's!” their leader Paul Biegler would cry. Were we men or were we mice?
By and by the pain went away, however, and as I sat there in my open office window looking down upon the deserted street I reflected that I wouldn't take my old D.A. job back again if they doubled the salary. No, not even if they threw Mitch in as an assistant. Being a public prosecutor was perhaps the best trial training a young lawyer could get (besides being a slippery stepping-stone to politics), but as a career it was strictly for the birds. I fumbled for and ignited an Italian cigar (one never merely
lights
them) and fell to musing about my old Irish friend Parnell McCarthy.
I have called Parnell McCarthy an Irishman and perhaps I had better explain. In the polyglot Upper Peninsula of Michigan calling a man, say, an Irishman is rarely an effort to demean or stigmatize him—black eyes lie richly strewn that way—but rather an effort at description, a painless device for swiftly discovering and assessing the national origins of a person's ancestors to the simple end of getting along together. Offense is neither intended nor taken. Thus a man named Millimaki is generally known and indeed more often describes himself as a Finn, though his mother may have been a Cabot and his ancestors on both sides have fought at Valley Forge;
and thus a Biegler is hopelessly stamped a German, as often called “Dutchman,” though some of his ancestors may alternately have toiled and prayed in the leaky galley of the
Mayflower.
So Parnell McCarthy was an Irishman, though he was born in the shadow of a mine shaft in Chippewa, and had once possessed, so my mother Belle had told me, one of the loveliest soprano voices of any altar boy in the history of St. Michael's parish. Parnell's “Irish-ness” lay more in certain word patterns and in the subtle lilt and cadence of his speech than in any vaudevillian
Erin go bragh
Mr. Dooley talk. So Parnell McCarthy was an “Irisher,” as many Finns and Swedes might call him, and an Irishman he would proudly remain, to the despair of all visiting sociologists and bemoaners of hyphenated Americans. And all of the U.P. folk were fiercely American, as any rash doubter ruefully and swiftly found out—as all-American, say, as Rocco Purgatorio the Italian, who had once broken up a memorable Liberty Bond rally in the Chippewa High School by abruptly getting up and waving a tiny flag and singing fervently: “Eef you doan lak your Unka Semmy, den go backa to da lan' w'ere you fromm—you—you
son-a-beech … .”
Of late years and largely because of his drinking Parnell had lost most of his clients and had become a sort of lawyers' lawyer, grubbing a fitful sort of living in the exquisite drudgery of looking up land titles and interpreting abstracts for the other lawyers and some of the smaller mining companies. Our intimacy had dated from my first year as prosecutor and had begun with a typical Parnellian flourish. A perplexed young state trooper had phoned me the first thing one Monday morning.
“Mr. Prosecutor, we got a seedy old character over here booked on suspicion of drunk driving. Found him early this morning standing beside on old Maxwell wrapped around a tree, drunker'an a skunk. He insists upon seeing you—alone.”
“Who's the villain?” I inquired.
“‘Parnell Emmett Joseph McCarthy,' he says. Claims some dame called Dolly Madison was driving the car.”
“I'll come over,” I said, wincing.
“But who's this here Dolly Madison character?” the young trooper persisted. “I thought we knew all the old hookers around here.”
“I'll be right over,” I said. “It's a little complicated to explain over the phone.”
Parnell and I were finally alone over at the jail. “Let's have it, Mr. McCarthy,” I said respectfully. “And please omit Dolly Madison.”
Parnell finally focused his inflamed eyes on me. “All right, all right, young man,” he said with great dignity. “I'm drivin' down this road, see, all nice as pie, see, mindin' me own business, when all of a sudden it happen … .”
“What happened?” I asked a little shrilly.
“As true as I'm settin' here, young fella, I'm blinded by the lights of an approachin' dragon,” he said, and forthwith fell asleep.
After I had rallied sufficiently the officers and I conferred, following which certain arrangements were made whereby we promised to give Parnell the benefit of Dolly Madison if he in turn would promise to voluntarily give up driving. Parnell and I had shaken hands on it, and both promises had been solemnly kept. And that was how I first got to really know my old friend.
 
I remembered that it had been Parnell who had kept the lonely vigil with me on my last day as prosecutor on that blizzardy day before New Year's nearly two years before. I had bravely determined to stick out that last day in my office if it killed me. Nobody would be able to say that Polly Biegler had cut and run when the going got tough. But no one had been much interested in saying anything; there were more alluring prospects afoot; one had resolutely to get ready, for one thing, to greet the festive new year in an appropriate state of alcoholic coma.
The morning had passed without a single phone call or a caller except the postman, with a heart-warming New Year's card from my insurance agent, which I dropped thoughtfully in the wastebasket, and who was followed shortly by an earnest bow-legged little Cornishman with the
War Cry
, who popped his head in my door with his Salvation Army cap awry and said in a voice quavering with fervor, “May the Lard bless yew an' 'Appy New Year to yew, Sire.”
“Ah, Happy New Year to you, General Booth,” I croaked morosely, feeling very noble and very sorry for myself. “Please take the typhoid sign off the door as you leave.”
“Typhide sign, typhide sign?” the General murmured, mystified, as he picked up his weekly quarter and fled. I grinned evilly at my framed law-school diploma on the far wall.
I was learning the hard way something that people who have never held public office can perhaps never adequately realize: the feeling of utter forlornness and emptiness that sweeps over a man when he is finally beaten at the polls. And the longer he has been on the job the worse, not better, it is. This morbid feeling is beyond all reason; it
is both compulsive and a little daft. One's last friend has deserted him; the entire community has conspired to ridicule and humiliate him; everyone is secretly pointing the finger of scorn and hate at the defeated one. All day long desolation was mine and I wallowed in it. By mid-afternoon I sighed and pressed the buzzer for Maida.
“I thought maybe you'd taken the gas pipe,” Maida said cheerily as she came in all pert and sassy and shook out her curls and plumped herself across from me with her stenographic pad and a battery of stiletto-sharp pencils. “Are you about to dictate Biegler's Farewell Address?”
I laughed, hollowly I hoped, and slid a winkled twenty-dollar bill across the desk. “No dictation, Maida, rather an errand of mercy. Go over to the liquor store and fetch me a fifth of my favorite pilerun. If Socrates could have his hemlock, I shall have the solace of my whisky.” I waved benignly and looked out at the howling blizzard. “Buy yourself a new roadster with the change. Take the rest of the day off to break it in. I'll hold the fort.”
“That's the old fight, Boss,” Maida said, rising. “Such lonely courage is touching. The boss and his faithful bottle. Whisky for Captain Biegler's chilblains as he stands alone on the bridge and goes down with his ship. His last words were: ‘Saw sub, glub glub.'” Maida had been in the Wacs and she gave me a smart salute as she made ready to go.
“Pile it on, Maida, pile it on,” I said. “‘None but the lonely heart shall know my anguish,'” I quoted stoically.
“Don't forget in your travail, Boss,” Maida said, “that the voters off this county have bought and paid for an elegant ten-year graduate course in criminal law for you—and all for free. Where's your gratitude? Just think, for defending just one big case now you can get almost as much as you got for prosecuting criminals for an entire year. And no more legal free loaders on your neck reminding you that Yass, I pay my taxes'—anyone who comes in to your office now must be prepared to pay through the nose. And I don't have to be nice to them. Boy, I can't wait. I'll be back in ten minutes with the booze. Thanks for the roadster.”
Sensible Maida was probably right, of course, as she has an irritating habit of being, and I saw that my main trouble was not so much that I would shortly be an ex-D.A. but rather the blow to my pride in losing the job to an amiable young fellow barely out of law school, one who didn't know a bail bond from a bale of hay. Why not face it? I was smarting largely because I hadn't been
smart enough to quit as the retired champ, like Rocky Marciano, but instead had gone to the well once too often, like good old Joe Louis, and had finally, like Joe, been knocked out by an inexperienced newcomer, a newcomer inexperienced in everything, that is, but youth.
 
I had sat listening to the howling wind and wondering what had happened to Maida and my twenty bucks when I heard a knock on the door. It couldn't have been Maida because she would have characteristically railed and shouted and pounded or else used her key. It would doubtless be some thoughtless character who'd lurked all day in some tavern, polishing his nose, and then come to gloat over the fading D.A. Lord, it would be good to at last get away from
that
servitude, the thoughtless headlong rush of the great aggrieved multitude … . Well, I'd show him what an alert on-the-ball public servant he was losing. I moved over and opened the door.
There stood my old Irish friend, Parnell McCarthy, another Chip pewa lawyer, covered with snow and gently drunk. He was holding a damp brown paper bag, top and bottom, balancing it delicately, as though it contained a piece of priceless statuary. With his bulbous red nose and twinkling gray eyes he looked faintly like an erring Santa Claus. He also smelled very good.

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