Anatomy of a Murder Read online

  “He … .” I said, the legal gears beginning involuntarily to turn.

  Just then a car wheeled around the corner on two wheels, dog tails flying fore and aft, the car awash with shouting juveniles, brakes and tires squealing like neighing stallions. It narrowly missed piling into the rear of my parked car and then roared away down the street. Seconds later two police cars followed in hot pursuit, sirens away, the last one pausing long enough to pick up Jack, who leapt in like a boy. The scene was invested with a curious quality of Keystone comedy and I thought wistfully of the brooding calm that must prevail at this moment over my favorite trout waters up in the Oxbow bush. Creeping mist, a coyote wailing on the ridge, the cackle of a loon, the plash of a rising trout. I stood looking up over the Miners’ State Bank as the big waning yellow moon swam out from behind a jagged dark cliff of cloud. “My heart will always ble-e-e-e-e-d for you,” the juke box wailed, “out of my crying ne-e-e-,e-d for you … .”

  “Crime,” I reflected tritely, as I trudged up the creaking wooden stairs, “crime marches on.”

  I heard the monotonously insistent robot ringing of a telephone before I reached the top of the stairs. The waspish buzzing continued. I did not hurry; after all, it could be for the chiropractor, the beauty operator, the dentist, or even the young newlyweds down the hall. It could have been, but I was certain it wasn’t. For with one of those swift premonitions one cannot define I knew it was for me; it would be, I was sure, my invitation to the waltz—my bid to accept the retainer in Iron Cliffs County’s latest murder. I lowered my duffel and fumbled for the key to my private office. My phone had ceased ringing.

  Paul Biegler

  LAWYER

  read the sign on the frosted-glass door. Underneath was a horizontal black arrow pointing toward Maida’s door, accompanied by the words, “Entrance next door.” It was surprising how few people ever learned to follow the arrow and instead stood there gripped by a sort of dumb enchantment, pounding stupidly on my private door.

  The Chippewa branch store of a national dime store chain embraced the entire main floor of the two-story brownstone building built by my German brewer grandfather in the 1870’s. For many years before they died he and Grandma used to live upstairs, and my combined law offices and bachelor’s quarters now occupied their old parlor, sitting room and dining room.

  Law is one of the last citadels of wavering conservatism in an untidy world and the offices of most lawyers reflect it. My office did not fit the common mold. In fact my mother Belle reprovingly claimed it looked like anything but a law office. Indeed, one of my former opponents for prosecutor had told people that for me it was a perfect place in which to tell, if not make, fortunes … . The combined waiting room and place where Maida did her typing—the old dining room—looked more like the reception room of, not a club, but a comfortably old and rather down-at-the-heel fraternal lodge. There was an old black leather rocking-chair and an even older brown leather davenport to accommodate the overflow. Maida had a new desk, it was true, but it was the kind that was designed to look more like a library table than a desk, and completely swallowed her typewriter except when it was in use. There were no magazines, not even Newsweek, and no pictures on the walls save an enlarged framed snapshot of Maida’s favorite saddle horse, Balsam. Most of the legal files and cabinets and office supplies were kept stashed away out of sight in Grandma Biegler’s roomy old pantry. There boxes of carbon paper, ruled legal pads and brown manila envelopes and all the rest had taken the place of Grandma’s steaming platters of pig hocks and sauerkraut.

  My own office—Grandma’s old sitting room—was even more informal than Maida’s. The Michigan supreme court reports and all my other law books stood on narrow shelves against an entire wall, completely hidden by drawn monk-cloth drapes—largely, I suspect, because it made me nervous to contemplate so many religiously unread books. My library table was Grandma’s old long wooden dining-room table, kept as bare and shining as an ad for spar varnish. Over against one wall was a black leather couch—not a davenport, not a settee, but simply a battered old leather couch. I was determined that the psychiatrists couldn’t hog all the comfort. My waggish Irish lawyer friend Parnell McCarthy occasionally teased me that here was where I tested the virtue of my lady divorce clients.

  In one corner was an overstuffed black leather rocker with a matching footstool, flanked by a floor lamp and a revolving book-stand for my nonlegal magazines and books. Beyond it was a Franklin stove with an unabashed black stovepipe rising up to Grandma’s old chimney outlet near the high ceiling. On the walls were some small color prints and photographs of trout and still others of men—mostly of a tall, thin, balding, prow-nosed character called Paul Biegler, exhibiting or fishing for trout. In the opposite corner stood a combination radio and phonograph and alongside it a television set.

  Ostensibly I lived at my mother’s house on Hematite Street, but by tacit agreement I usually slept at my office—in Grandma’s old parlor—and used my old quarters in the family homestead mostly for storing my fishing gear in the winter and my guns and snowshoes and skis in summer. So my mother Belle dwelt alone in her big empty house like a dowager queen, re-reading her Hardy and Dickens and fussing with her water colors and listening to endless soap operas. It did not seem to bother her that I practically lived at my office. She had always felt strongly that growing boys should have a certain amount of freedom before finally settling down. After all, there was no rush; boys would surely be boys; and to her mind I was, in my early forties, still little more than a fumbling adolescent.

  Belle had equally firm views on the seriousness of matrimony. The contract was a long one and sensible people did not marry in haste and repent at leisure. One day, and all in good time, I would doubtless marry and move my lucky bride in among all the clanking curios and relics in the old house on Hematite Street. She had it all planned, even to giving me her rusty old wooden icebox, the kind that used pond ice and drained into a pan on the floor. As for myself I had never married for the simple reason that I had never yet in my travels encountered a woman in whose company I cared to remain more than a few hours at a time, whether day or night. Well, maybe there had been one but she, sensible girl, had instead married a wholesale drug salesman and had presented him with two sets of twins before I lost count.

  The telephone began to drone again and I answered it largely because it was the only way I knew to make the damned thing stop. My fishing trip, I saw, was officially over.

  “Hello,” I said into the telephone. “This is Paul Biegler.”

  “This is Laura Manion,” a woman said. “Mrs. Laura Manion. I’m sorry to be calling you so late, but I’ve been trying to get you all weekend. I finally reached your secretary and she said she thought you might be back tonight.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Manion?” I said.

  “My husband, Lieutenant Frederic Manion, is in the county jail here at Iron Bay,” she went on. “He’s being held for murder. He wants you to be his lawyer.” Her voice broke a little and then she went on. “You’ve been highly recommended to us. Can you take his case?”

  “I don’t know, Mrs. Manion,” I answered truthfully. “I’ll naturally have to talk with him and look into the situation before I can decide. Then there is always the matter of making mutually agreeable financial arrangements.”

  It was funny, the fine suave marshmallow phrases a lawyer learned to spin to let a prospective client gently know he must be prepared to fork over some heavy dough. Mrs. Manion was an alert student of marshmallow phrases.

  “Yes, of course, Mr. Biegler. When can you see him? He’s awfully anxious to see you.”

  I surveyed the clutter of mail, mostly junk and routine stuff, that had accumulated during my absence. “I’ll go see him around eleven in the morning. Will you plan to be there?”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to go to the doctor’s. I don’t know if you’ve heard the details, but I—I had quite an experience. I’m sure I can see you Tuesday, though—that is, if
you can take the case.”

  “I’ll plan to see you Tuesday, then,” I said, “if I enter the case.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Biegler.”

  “Good night, Mrs. Manion,” I said. Then I switched out the lights and sat in the darkness watching the reflection of the changing traffic lights below dancing on the opposite wall. The room was stuffy so I opened the window and sat looking down upon the silent and empty city square, watching my smoke drift lazily out the window, brooding sleepily about the tangled past and future.

  chapter 2

  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.