The Just And The Unjust (29 page)

His anger gone, his mind cooled, Abner ate his dinner; but with little appetite. Down at the far end of the porch Harry and Margaret were getting their dinner, too; and from Margaret's constant laughter, it could be guessed that Harry was in fine form. Abner certainly felt no remaining interest in Margaret; and that interest he had once felt he remembered now with discomfort. He winced to remember the bedraggled episodes of an affair in which his part seemed to have been that of an importunate, but scared, inexperienced, and rather nasty schoolboy. Margaret could not have a poorer opinion of him than he had of himself; yet he suffered a sort of chagrin to think that Margaret, if she made comparisons, could make them, as she laughed with Harry, at the expense of poor dull old Abner. Abner, even if he repented it, knew well enough what he had seen in Margaret; but Margaret would be utterly unable to imagine what she had ever seen in Abner.

To change his thought, Abner said, 'You know, I like Harry; but he makes me sore sometimes. It's my own fault —'

'I don't like him,' Bonnie said. 'I never have. He's always showing off. He's a lot like Jared. He did that on purpose — I mean, speaking about the case. The only way he can be funny is by trying to show that anybody who is serious about anything is a fool. I was glad you said that to him! He wanted to show Margaret how smart he was; and he did.'

Whether or not Bonnie would really believe that Abner came off best, the loyalty that made her act as if she believed it was grateful to him. He looked at her, feeling the pleasant surprise that comes with the recurring discovery that a woman, as well as always taking, can give; that you may expect to get, as well as a dependant, a confederate, or at least a devoted ally in your contest with the world.

The waiter said, 'Mr. Coates, they want you on the telephone, please.'

'Who is it?' Abner said, startled; for as far as he knew nobody could have known that he was going to be here; he hadn't even known that he was going to be here himself. If a search had been made, trying different places until he was found, the occasion must be urgent; and with a falling sense of alarm, Abner admitted that it was just what Aunt Myrt might do if something had happened at home.

'I'll have to see,' he said, standing up. 'Do you mind?'

'No. Of course not,' Bonnie said.

There was only one thing that could happen at home. Walking quickly after the waiter, Abner thought of the morning when his father had his first stroke. Judge Coates had fallen in the bathroom, and Abner remembered the muffled sound — a peculiar jarring thud. It was not loud, yet it could not be mistaken for any ordinary or harmless sound. Abner, dressing in his own room, had rushed into the hall, saying loudly, 'Father! Father! Was that you?'

It was he, all right.

Judge Coates lay on the tiled floor. His face was a ghastly pallid grey, his cheeks blown out by his slow, loud breathing. His eyelids were not quite closed and through the slits he seemed to peer slyly but blindly to the side. His big, awkward, old man's bulk under a flannel nightshirt with faded stripes was limp in a twisted, somehow shrunken mound. Apparently he had been on the point of shaving, for his pigskin razor case lay beside him with half a dozen old-fashioned straight razors spilling out of it. Some had fallen open, and even in the shock of the moment Abner remembered thinking how dangerous they were. It seemed a miracle that the Judge had fallen without cutting himself.

Though Abner had never seen a stroke before, the actuality was so close to what the word meant to the imagination that he recognized it instantly. It seemed to him that he had read somewhere that the head should be lowered —but immediately doubt assailed him; it would seem more sensible to raise it. Since he did not know which, he at least knew enough to do nothing. Automatically he gathered up the razors, dumping them with frantic haste into the wash-basin. Even in that crowded moment he had time to start when he saw what he had done; for he could imagine his father roaring with indignation to see those razors, a pride and joy of his, the finest that could be obtained, and under no circumstances was anybody to touch them, treated like that. Abner in shirt and shorts with one sock on and one off ran downstairs into the cold morning gloom of the hall and seized the telephone. Doctor Mosher answered at last, incredibly calm and mild; and, in spite of Abner's agitated stutterings, in spite of an intelligence he must have found grim (he and the Judge had grown up together and been friends for fifty years), still calm and mild, his voice graver as he went on, and more decisive, but unhasty, 'All right, Ab. I'll be there. Now, take it easy. Just get a blanket —'

The horror of the moment — it seemed worse for being in the morning, before breakfast, with the whole day ahead — returned to Abner; but he could never again be so unprepared in heart and nerves. The waiter indicated a telephone booth in the hall, a modernistic cubby-hole in scarlet enamel and stainless steel and glass to match the decoration, and Abner, bracing himself, stepped into it and took up the receiver with little outward tremor. 'Yes?' he said.

The answering voice, he heard with a shock of relief, was Marty's, Strained and irritable, Bunting said, 'I had plenty of trouble finding you.'

'I'm surprised you did find me,' Abner said. 'I didn't know you wanted me.' In his relief he felt irritable himself. His instant anticipation was that Jesse had spoken to Marty, and Marty could not wait a minute to tell Abner what a fool he was. 'What do you want?' he said. 'I'm having dinner.'

'Yes,' said Bunting. 'I know. I'm sorry; but this is important.'

'Well, what is it?'

'I can't tell you on the phone. I want you to come up as soon as you can. I'm at the office.'

'Oh, hell, Marty!' Abner said. 'No, I can't come up! Is it something about Jesse?'

'No, it's not about Jesse,' Bunting said. 'I have some people outside. A constable came to see me at home with a story some people told him. I don't want to mention any names. It involves somebody I don't know much about; but you do, I think. I don't mean any particular friend. I want to try and see if there's any mistake, whether it's true or not, before I let it go to a justice's hearing. There's no warrant out yet, because I told the constable to bring the people to me first. So we've got to work fast —'

'O.K.,' said Abner grudgingly. 'I'll come.'

There could be no arguing with the need to work fast; for, of course, Marty exceeded his powers when he held up a complaint that should go to a J.P. Marty would do such a thing only for the most compelling reasons and it was possible to guess that the business was bad and concerned someone of local importance — Abner tried to think who could come under that heading and yet be better known to him than to Marty. He went out on the porch and said to Bonnie, 'I'm sorry, that was Marty. Something's up. I don't know what, but it must be pretty important. He wants to see me right away.'

'Oh,' said Bonnie. 'Well, that's all right, Ab.'

'I don't know how long it's going to take. It can't take very long. We can probably go swimming all right. Will you mind waiting? He's at the office, and I'll have to just leave you in the car.'

'Well, I'd rather do that than go home,' she said. 'If you'll let me off at the school, Mr. Rawle left some things he wanted me to see about. I think I've got my key. Yes.'

They were twenty minutes in reaching the dark oblong of the high school in the trees at the end of Academy Street. Abner swung up the loop of the drive. 'I'd better see you get in,' he said.

'Silly,' she said, 'I've got in plenty of times. I could find my way around there blindfolded.'

Abner got out and went across to the side door with her. It was the door by which, thirteen or fourteen years ago, he used himself to enter every morning going to the boys' locker-room. Through the glass covered with a strong crisscross iron netting a light could be seen burning down the hall.

'Someone there?' Abner said.

'I don't know. It's Mr. Field's conference room.' She put the key in the lock and Abner pushed the heavy door open. 'I'll see,' she said.

Abner walked down the echoing cool passage with her. 'The lights are right there by the stairs,' she said.

Abner snapped them on. 'Smells just the same,' he said, sniffing. 'What's Sam Field confer about?'

'Oh, mental aptitude, or something.'

On the door beyond was a sign that said: Department of Audio-Visual Education, and Abner laughed. He said, 'We never got any of that in my day.'

The room, a small office with filing cases and a series of complicated charts posted on the walls, was empty. 'That's funny,' Bonnie said. 'It looks as if somebody had been here. Maybe he's upstairs.'

'Or maybe he's in the washroom. What's that?'

'It's a closet. I think he uses it for a dark room, to develop films.'

'Well, maybe the corpse is in it,' Abner said, opening the door. 'Nope.'

'I guess he just forgot to put the light out.'

Abner said, 'We'll go upstairs and look around, anyway.'

'There's no need to, Ab. Mr. Field must have come in for something -'

'Or somebody else. Somebody might know that school was over Saturday, and think he'd just look around. There have been quite a few places broken into during the past month.'

'I'm not timid,' Bonnie said.

'Just the same, I'll have a look.' He went upstairs with her to the principal's office and put the lights on. Bonnie went through to the little room beyond and sat down at her desk.

'Ab, open the window for me, will you? It's stifling.' When he had pushed up the broad window, Abner went down the hall, snapping the lights on in the classrooms and in the big auditorium. When he came back he said, 'All right. I don't see anyone. Not even Sammy.'

'Ab, you've been hours! If they wanted to see you right away —'

'They can keep their shirts on. I'll be back pretty soon.'

Outside, Walking through the moonlight and tree shadows to his car, Abner remembered that this matter of her job was one thing they had not really settled. A great weariness came over him; for how could he settle that? If Bonnie knew his new circumstances she would certainly not give her job up, she really couldn't — that depressing, distinctive school smell seemed to be still in his nostrils. He drove down to the Childerstown National Bank building. The bank was locked and silent, a light burning behind the plate-glass windows over the gleaming multiple knobs and dials of the vault doors. Street light fell on the bronze plaque: Martin M. Bunting, District Attorney, affixed to the jamb of the doorway on the left. Abner went through the narrow hall faced with polished stone and ran upstairs.

The door to the district attorney's office was open, and, to Abner's surprise, there was no one in the outer room but Marty. He sat with his coat off at his secretary's desk, by a shaded light, slowly typewriting with two fingers. He looked at Abner, for a moment abstracted or deep in thought. Then he drew a breath and leaned back.

Abner said, 'Sorry, Marty. I couldn't get here any sooner.' It occurred to him that if the affair had been settled so quickly it could not have been a very important one. 'I got held up a minute,' he said. "Bonnie wanted to stop at the high school. We thought somebody had been in there; and I thought I'd better look around.'

'It's all right,' Bunting said. 'Got a cigarette?' Abner gave him one, and Bunting added,'I was at the school, among others.'

'You were?' said Abner. 'There was a light on down in some office Sam Field uses —'

'John must have forgotten it. That's where we went.'

'Say, what goes on?' said Abner. He struck a match and held it out, cupped in his hand. Bunting bent forward, bringing the cigarette end to it. 'Yeah, Field,' he said, exhaling smoke. Abner lit a cigarette himself and sat on the edge of the desk. Bunting said, 'They left about fifteen minutes ago. I sent him over to Delp's with Bill and John Costigan. He's waiving hearing; but we have to have a J.P.'s transcript.'

'What is it?'

Bunting gestured with the cigarette. 'Two indictments there,' he said. 'I'm doing another. Reason I called you was — you knew him at school, or something, didn't you?'

'He was in my class,' Abner said.

'I thought maybe you knew him well enough to have a talk with him. But he didn't stand up very long. About ten minutes after I called you he must have seen it wasn't any use.'

Abner picked up the not yet folded sheet of the first bill of indictment, his eye skipping down the printed form and fiiled-in blanks. '... at the County aforesaid, and within the jurisdiction of this Court, with force and arms ... then and there did to the great damage of the said Mary Beach ...'

'For God's sake!' Abner said.

'There were at least eleven,' Bunting said. 'The Beach girl told her mother, and so her father went to Bill Ortt. He came around to see me about six o'clock. We've been rounding them up all evening.'

'What did Sam say?'

'He said at first that they were making it up. It's true that the Beach girl, and some of the others, don't have a very good reputation. But I guess he picked the ones he thought wouldn't be likely to raise a row—' Bunting shrugged and began to typewrite again.

Taking up the second sheet, Abner read: '... did induce Nina Friedman —'

'What Friedman? Leon Friedman?'

'Yes. Runs the auto supply store.'

Abner read on: '... to enter his private office situate in the Childerstown High School, did engage in conversation with her as to sexual matters and did put his hands upon her person during such conversation. ...'

'There's something else,' Bunting said. The ash flew off his cigarette as he waved it and fell on a pile of photographs.

Brushing off the ash, Abner turned them over. 'For God's sake!' he repeated. 'These some of the school kids?'

'Uh-huh. The blonde one's Mary Beach. I don't think we need to identify them. It seems he told them he was entering photographs in a contest — you know, art; and if he won, they'd be given a screen test, or something. That's how he got them to pose.'

'Well, if it got that far, are you sure it stopped?' Abner turned the photographs face down and put them back.