Wham.
“Just a minute!”
“Yes — Mrs. Valenty — please.”
Lucas was white, Brice hardly able to talk, she icy, a tight little smile on her face, as she watched the effects of what made my poor little bombshell look like a firecracker. The judge told the jury to retire, and when they had clumped out, said: “Mr. Brice, what does this mean?”
“I’m completely caught by surprise.”
“Mrs. Valenty?”
“It means that Mr. Lucas, knowing my husband was set on a child, though the doctor had said it would kill me, didn’t even make one phone call to warn me what was in store for me. It means my husband rang him, before he was state’s attorney, to find out who made the decision in case one had to be made, as to the life that would be spared — a conversation that I overheard — and that he did not, not ever, ring me. He was my husband’s friend, but perhaps it won’t be such fun to accuse the widow of murder.”
The judge argued with her, saying it was not up to Lucas to discuss his client’s affairs, and Brice argued with her, saying it was “utter folly” to claim justifiable homicide. She said: “If you don’t want my case, Mr. Brice, I can get somebody else. But I can tell you right now, we’re going to try my case, and not some case you think ought to be my case. My husband wanted me dead, and Mr. Lucas knew it. That’s the first event that led to my husband’s decease. I was married to Death, and he pursued me to the end — but didn’t get me, thanks to a brave boy, Duke Webster. That’s my case, and I won’t have any other.”
Brice wiped the sweat from his face, but Lucas took it quite calm.
He said: “The call was made, Your Honor, exactly as she says, and I’ll stipulate it, if that helps, or take the stand, if Brice wants — though it may surprise her what I said at the other end, which she apparently didn’t hear. But I see nothing I can object to. If that’s her case, I may feel, as Brice does, she’s courting complete disaster — but there’s nothing I can object to.”
“Bring the jury in.”
She ripped along with it, on the same question all afternoon, and told of her childhood, St. Mary’s, the oxen, the church, the holly, all the stuff that had meant so little to me but that the jury seemed to get the point of. She told of her “weakness,” and the relation it had to Val’s hopes for a child. It turned out that Hollis Valenty was ten times as dark an idea as Bill had mentioned to me, and that the volcanoes I’d heard in the summer were plenty real. Toward the end of the day she opened the envelope she held in her lap, and broke out the pictures that got such a play, “taken of me, by my husband’s photographer, on my wedding day, and by myself, with a camera I have, by working it with a string — as I became, little by little, with Duke Webster’s help.”
Brice squawked as usual, and the court warned her that if introduced, the pictures would be public property, subject to use by the press, but she said: “I want the jury to see what I’m talking about. Why I could have no child, as natural birth was impossible, and an operation, a Caesarean as it’s called, was impossible too, as no stitches could hold in such fat.”
So the pictures went to the jury, and the men looked away quick, but the women, the three middle-aged women at the far end of the box, studied each separate one. The papers got them too, and ate them up, hog-wild, just why I don’t quite know. But some, the fat ones, were too ugly to be quite decent, and the others, the slim ones in bra and panties, were just a little too pretty. There was a pause during the looksee, and she sat staring at me, her face turning pink.
“Webster, is there anything on earth, anything you know I can tell her, any message you can send, that’ll stop this insane recital?”
Brice had stopped by the hospital that night on his way to see her, and after saying that, in spite of the Arizona fumble, my testimony had helped a lot, he got bitter about her and “this damned surprise she’s sprung on me.”
He went on: “It’s worse than you think, Webster, because Lucas is really decent. He warned Valenty, and he’s got the memo to prove it, notes typed up by his girl, that he was heading for trouble if he went through with any such scheme of having a child that could kill his wife. He’ll take the stand, sure — if I’m silly enough to ask him. And on top of that he’s too nice. He’s got something on her, and I don’t know what it is. So he’s the guy, Webster, she’s picking a personal feud with.”
“He’s the guy to lick just the same.”
“But why make herself trouble?”
I thought that over, pointed out she already had trouble, and Lucas wouldn’t pull any punches just from her pulling hers. Then I asked him: “You heard of Doc Kearns?”
“Not that I know of, no.”
“Fight manager. Had Dempsey.”
“Oh. Jack. Yes.”
“Beautiful boxer, Dempsey, one of the best in the business. But also a socker, see, the best in the business. Well, making him box was safe. But letting him sock was dough. So the doc gave him his head, and, brother, how it worked. Of course they were taking a chance, because Jack could stop one, same as anyone else. And, as a matter of fact, he did. Firpo lowered the boom, and Jack all but went out before he climbed back in the ring. But he won. That was before I was born, but they’re still talking about it. Listen, Mr. Brice, you got a socker. Goddam it, let her sock.”
“I wish I thought she could?”
“Could? She has. My heart’s still jumping at the swings she landed today — and a heart can’t be fooled. And besides, you heard what she said. This is her case — not some case you dream up tonight.”
“It’s your neck too, Webster.”
“And my heart, especially that.”
So he let her sock, and by the time she was done, the middle of the next afternoon, it was clear for the whole world to know that in her mind at least the scene on the tank was just one more chapter of “something ordained from the beginning, except that Duke intervened.” All that time Lucas was quiet, not objecting, hardly seeming even to listen. When it came his turn to question her, he got up, stood studying his fingernails, and then spoke very easy: “Just one or two points, Mrs. Valenty. First, was there or was there not a pregnancy?”
“That was a fine invitation to be a mother, wasn’t it, now, Mr. Lucas? What would you have said? No, there wasn’t a pregnancy.”
“Did your husband tell you, after the call you overheard, of the warning I gave him then? About the consequences he’d face if you did incur pregnancy and he took no surgical steps to protect you?”
“...No, he did not.”
Suddenly the points she had piled up looked sick. But he was polite as he asked her: “Later, judging from the pictures, a child was possible?”
“I guess so, I—”