The Tragedy of Z (10 page)

“Yes,” said Father Muir. “Yes,” in a neat, pat, absent sort of way. He peered at me. “How do you do, my dear.” Then he trotted to the warden's desk and cried: “Magnus, this is horrible! I don't believe it, as God is my judge!”

“Easy, padre,” said he warden in a kindly tone. “They all slip at some time or other. Sit down. We're about to go over the ground together.”

“But Aaron,” said Father Muir in a trembling voice, “Aaron was such a good man, so sincere.”

“Now, padre. I suppose, Hume, you're anxious to hear what I have to say. Just a minute, though, I'll give you the man's complete
dossier.”
Warden Magnus touched a button on his desk and the clerk opened the door again. “Get me Dow's record. Aaron Dow. Released this afternoon.” The clerk vanished, and a moment later reappeared with a large blue card. “Here we are. Aaron Dow, Convict No. 83532. Age on admittance, forty-seven.”

“How long did he do time?” asked father.

“Twelve years and some-odd months.… Height, five feet six, one hundred and twenty-two pounds, blue eyes, gray hair, semicircular scar on his left breast—” Warden Magnus looked up thoughtfully. “He's changed a lot in his twelve years here. Lost most of his hair, grown rather feeble—he's almost sixty now.”

“What was he committed for?” demanded the district attorney.

“Manslaughter. Got a fifteen-year sentence from Judge Proctor of New York. He killed a man in a New York waterfront saloon. Seems he got howling drunk on rotten gin and went beserk. Never saw his victim before, as far as the prosecutor was able to find.”

“Did he have a previous record?” asked father.

Warden Magnus consulted the chart. “They couldn't discover one. Couldn't, I note, trace Dow at all. It was even thought that his name was an alias, although they couldn't prove it.”

I tried to visualize the man; he was growing before my eyes, but I still could not see him completely. There was something decidedly off-color here. “Warden, what sort of prisoner was this Dow? Refractory?” I ventured timidly.

Magnus smiled. “I see Miss Thumm asks pertinent questions. No, Miss Thumm, he was a model prisoner—Grade A, according to our system of classification. All inmates are eligible for privileges after dressing in, reception period, apprenticeship on the coal pile, and assignment to a regular prison occupation by our Assignment Board. When he's settled down to the routine, the prisoner's standing in our little community—we're virtually a city in ourselves, you know—depends wholly on himself. If he gives no trouble, obeys orders, observes all the regulations, a man can win back some of the self-respect society has taken away from him. Aaron Dow never gave a moment's trouble to the Principal Keeper, who is the official disciplinarian of the prison. Consequently he was Grade A, enjoyed many privileges, and earned his thirty-odd months off for good behavior.”

Father Muir turned his deep soft eyes upon me. “I assure you, Miss Thumm, Aaron was a most inoffensive man. I knew him very well. Although not of my faith, he came to be religious; he was incapable, my dear, totally incapable of——”

“He killed a man once before,” remarked Hume dryly. “I should say he had set a precedent.”

“By the way,” remarked father, “how did he kill his man in New York twelve years ago? Stabbing?”

Warden Magnus shook his head. “Struck him over the head with a full bottle of whiskey, and the man died of concussion of the brain.”

“What difference does that make?” muttered the district attorney in an impatient way. “What else have you got on him, Warden?”

“Very little. It's the hard customers who have the longest prison records, naturally.” Magnus consulted the blue card again. “Yes! Here's something on the record which may interest you, if only for identification. In his second year here he met with an accident which resulted in the loss of his right eye and the paralysis of his right arm—hideous thing, but due to his own negligence entirely in operating a lathe——”

“Oh, so he's got only one eye!” exclaimed Hume. “That's important. Glad you brought it up, Warden.”

Warden Magnus sighed. “We naturally kept it out of the papers; we don't like to let news of that sort get out. It wasn't so long ago, you know, that the prisons of this and other states were in a very bad condition—inmates treated like animals, I'm afraid, rather than like sick men, which of course they are, as modern penology recognizes. The public—part of it, anyway—thinks our penal institutions are still like Siberian prison-camps under the Czars, and we do our best to fight that impression. When Dow had his accident——”

“Very interesting,” murmured the district attorney politely.

“Hmm. Yes.” Magnus leaned back, a little offended, I thought. “At any rate, he was a problem for a while. With his right arm paralyzed, and him a right-handed man, our Assignment Board had the unusual job of giving him something else of a manual nature to do. He's not educated; reads, but writes only in block-letters, like a child. Mentally, he's rated very low. At the time of his accident he had been working in the carpentry shop at a lathe, as I intimated. Finally, the Board returned him to the same shop, and according to this record he developed quite an aptitude for working wood by hand, despite his handicap.… Well! I see you consider all this irrelevant, and it probably is; but I want to give you a complete picture of the man—for reasons of my own.”

“What do you mean?” inquired Hume sharply, sitting up.

Magnus frowned. “You'll see in a moment.… To complete the story. Dow had no family or friends—or at least seemed not to have had any, because in all his dozen years in Algonquin he never received a letter or sent one, or was visited by outsiders.”

“Funny,” muttered father, rasping his blue jaws.

“Isn't it? Damned remarkable, I'd call it, Inspector.—I beg your pardon, Miss Thumm!”

“It's entirely unnecessary,” I replied wearily. I was tired of being apologized to for every little “damn” and “hell.” “I call it remarkable,” continued Warden Magnus, “because in all my long years in penology I've never known a prisoner more cut off from the outside world than Dow. It seemed there wasn't a human being outside these walls who cared whether the man lived or died. That's unusual enough to need comment; even our worst cases, the most vicious characters, have someone generally who cares for them—mother, sister, sweetheart. Why, Dow not only never had communication with outer world, but, except during his first year, when like all new inmates he was assigned for a period to the road-building gang, he's never been outside the walls until yesterday! He could have been, many times; a lot of our trusties—prisoners with perfect records—are allowed outside on duty of one sort or another. But Dow's good behavior seemed not so much a result of his desire for rehabilitation as of a moral inertia. He was just too tired or indifferent or beaten to be bad.”

“That doesn't sound like a blackmailer,” muttered father. “Nor a killer either.”

“Precisely!” cried Father Muir eagerly. “That's just what I have been thinking, Inspector. I tell you, gentlemen——”

“Excuse me,” snapped the district attorney, “but we're not getting anywhere.” I heard him dreamily; sitting there in that strange sanctum from which the destinies of hundreds of men were directed, I thought I saw a brilliant light. Now, I felt, was the time to tell what I knew, what the strictest logic dictated. I believe I half-opened my mouth to speak. But then I closed it again. These trivial details—could they possibly mean what they seemed to mean? I looked at Hume, at his sharp boyish face, and obeyed the inner warning. It would take more than logic to convince
him.
There was still time.…

“And now,” the warden was saying, as he tossed the blue card on his desk, “I'll tell you the little story that prompted me to ask you to come here tonight.”

“Good!” said Hume crisply. “That's what we want to hear.”

“Please understand,” continued Magnus with gravity, “that my interest in Dow hasn't stopped merely because he's no longer a prisoner here. We often keep tabs on released cases, because many of them eventually come back—about thirty percent these days—and more and more the science of penology is getting to be preventive rather than remedial. At the same time, I can't close my eyes to facts, and I tell you this story because it's my duty to do so.”

Father Muir's face was white with agony; his knuckles on the black breviary were livid.

“Three weeks ago Senator Fawcett came to me and, strangely enough, made guarded inquiries about one of our prisoners.”

“Holy Mother,” groaned the priest.

“The prisoner, of course, was Aaron Dow.”

Hume's eyes were flashing. “Why did Fawcett come? What did he want to know about Dow?”

Magnus sighed. “Well, the Senator asked to see Dow's record and prison photograph. As a rule I would refuse such a request; but because Dow's time was so nearly up, and Fawcett was after all a prominent citizen”—he made a face—“I showed him the photo and card. The photo had been taken, of course, twelve years ago on Dow's commitment. Despite this fact the Senator seemed to recognize Dow's face, because he gulped hard and got very nervous all at once. To cut a long story short, he made an amazing request. He wanted me to muzzle Dow a few months! ‘Muzzled'—that was his exact word. What do you think of that?”

Hume rubbed his hands together in what seemed to me a very unpleasant manner. “Significant, Warden! Go on.”

“Now, despite the crass nerve of the man in making such an impossible request,” continued Magnus, his jaw hardening, “I felt that the situation required delicate handling. It interested me. Any relationship between a prisoner and a citizen, particularly a citizen with as odoriferous a reputation as Fawcett's, I was duty-bound to investigate. So I didn't commit myself but led him on. Why, I asked, did he want Aaron Dow muzzled?”

“Did he say why?” asked father, his brows bunching.

“Not at first. He was in a sweat, shaky as a new case drunk on potato water. Then it came out—Dow, he said, was blackmailing him!”

“We know that,” muttered Hume.

“I was skeptical, but didn't show it. You say he was? Well, I didn't see how it was possible and asked the Senator in what way Dow had been able to get in touch with him. We exercise a rather rigid censorship over all mail, you know, and contacts as well.”

“Sent Fawcett a letter and a sawed-off section of toy chest,” explained the district attorney, “in a carton of prison-made toys.”

“So.” Magnus pursed his lips thoughtfully. “That's a hole we'll have to stop up. Possible, of course, and it wouldn't be hard—But I was very interested at the time, because the smuggling of messages in and out of prison is one of the most annoying problems we have, and for a long time now I've suspected a bad leak somewhere. At any rate, Fawcett refused to say how Dow'd been able to get in touch with him, and so I dropped that tack.”

I moistened my lips; they were very dry. “Did Senator Fawcett admit that this man Dow really had something on him?”

“Hardly. He said Dow's story was ridiculous, a barefaced lie—the usual denials. Naturally, I didn't believe him; he was too upset to be entirely innocent of whatever hold Dow had over him. He attempted to explain his concern by saying that, even though the story was a lie, publication of it would seriously endanger, if not defeat, his chances for re-election to the State Senate.”

“Seriously endanger his chance, eh?” said Hume grimly. “He never had a chance. However, that's beside the point. I'd bet that whatever Dow had on him was legitimate enough.”

Warden Magnus shrugged. “I thought so, too. And the same time I was in a peculiar position. On Fawcett's word alone I couldn't punish Dow, and I told the man so. Of course, if he wished to press the charge, tell what the ‘lie' was.… But the Senator was almost as excited about the suggestion as he'd been about asking me to muzzle a Grade-A prisoner. He wanted no publicity, he said. And then he insinuated that he might be able to “help” me politically if Dow were placed in solitary for a few months.” Magnus bared his teeth in an ugly grin. “The interview developed into a scene from an old-time melodrama. Corrupting the official, and all that sort of thing. You know, of course, that no politics gets behind these walls. I've something of a reputation for incorruptibility and I reminded Fawcett of it. He saw it was no use, and went away.”

“Scared?” growled father.

“Petrified. Naturally, I didn't let grass grow under my feet. As soon as Fawcett left, I summoned Aaron Dow to my office. He played innocent, denying that he'd attempted to blackmail the Senator. So, since Fawcett's refusal to press a charge tied my hands, I merely warned Dow that if I found any truth in the story I'd see his parole was revoked and all his privileges taken away.”

“And that's all?” asked Hume.

“Nearly all. This morning—I should say yesterday morning—Fawcett telephoned me here to say that he had decided to ‘buy' Dow's silence rather than to permit a ‘false story' to be circulated, and asked me to forget the entire incident.”

“That's downright screwy,” said father thoughtfully. “Smells bad, in fact! Doesn't sound like this Fawcett bird at all. You're sure it was Fawcett who called?”

“Positive. I thought, too, that his call was queer, and wondered why he took the trouble to tell me that he meant to pay blackmail.”

“It
is
funny,” frowned the district attorney. “Did you tell him Dow was being released yesterday?”

“No. He didn't ask, and I didn't say.”

“You know,” drawled father, crossing his legs with the grace of the Colossus, “I got an idea about that call. Yes, sir. Struck me all of a sudden. I got an idea Senator Fawcett was framin' poor old Aaron Dow both ways to the ace.”