“Oh, that must’ve been to me,” I said reflectively and then again, “No, that’s right, it was a man, and it didn’t come until quarter to—”
“It wasn’t to you at all,” he said sourly. “I got the whole story. It was to some girlfriend of Pascal’s, and the call never went through because she’d been dispossessed for having too many brawls in her place. This clever colored wench has to throw a fit of giggling when she hears that, pretending it struck her so funny, and repeat the whole thing to the doorman word for word. Take it from me, she knew what was coming and wanted to impress every one with the fact that she was going home at quarter to five. I’d like to bet that other days no one even saw her come and go!”
I remembered something then and told him: “Wait a minute, you’ve got the whole thing wrong. That wasn’t the time she made that call — she’d already made it upstairs right in front of me and Bernice. Bernice called her in the room specially for that, and I remember she said she didn’t have to look the number up; she knew it by heart. And that was when they told her they were dispossessed — not down in the lobby at all.”
“Well, it’s damn queer, then,” he said, “that it should strike her so funny fifteen floors below that she has to break out laughing all over the place until the doorman himself told her not to make so much noise; she’d get him in trouble. I never yet heard of any colored Englishwomen, did you?”
“Maybe she’s from the British West Indies,” I suggested unwittingly.
He gave me an indescribable look and shook his head to himself. “You never killed Bernice Pascal,” he said in a low voice. I turned my face aside with sharp impatience. “No, it’s ten to one that what she did downstairs, the coon I mean,” he went on, “was step over to the phone and send out the tip-off that Pascal was packing and getting ready to skip out of New York that night. And then went over to the doorman and pretended that the call she had just made was the first one, the one you heard her make upstairs. Just let her take the stand — I’ll get it out of her. They’ll wish they had paid her fare to California, whoever they are!”
I was so little interested, however, in what his plans were, and in fact in the whole trial itself, that I didn’t even know what date had been set for it. I’d only glanced at a paper on two occasions since they’d brought me here, and as it nearly turned my stomach to see Bernice’s face splashed all over the pages in gummy ink — with words like “Butterfly” and “Slain Beauty” and “Queen of Hearts” written above it — and encounter column after column of a diary that I knew damn well she’d never written, I didn’t repeat the attempt. It was tough enough to have lost her without having to share her with the entire world.
And Berenson, either because he had so much else on his mind that it never occurred to him or because he took it for granted that I already knew, never said a word to me about it either. So the first I knew about when it was due to begin was the morning of the very day itself, when the turnkey suggested to me not unkindly that I “oughta take a shave for myself.”
“Why?” I said, “the cement walls aren’t complaining, are they?”
“They’ll be taking pictures of you today in court,” he said, “and you look like hell. You wanta make a good impression on the jury, don’t ya?”
“Oh, is it today?” I said, and I went ahead and “took a shave for myself.” And I mean just that, for myself, and not for the jury or anybody else.
And so it began — and all I did after that was sit there, day after day, and day after day. I couldn’t even understand what they were talking about most of the time. They’d bring me in each morning and sit me down — and I always sat in the same place — and then at noon they’d take me back again, and then early in the afternoon they’d bring me in again, and then late in the afternoon they’d take me out again. And the next day the whole dreary thing would start over again. All I did was go in and out of that room and sit there — with every one in the back of the room staring their eyes out at me.
At the end of the first week, when I was confident the thing must be nearly over, I found out through Berenson that they’d only just gotten through picking out jurors. When he saw the look on my face, he said, “Wade, this is an interesting case; most men in your shoes would hug every delay!”
He told me Maxine had been present every day. “Tell her to go on home!” I said harshly. “Hasn’t she got enough decency to stay away from here?”
The second week it became a little more comprehensible; at least they stopped asking jurors what business they were in and whether they were opposed to capital punishment, and began to have a succession of people on the stand — who spoke of things more closely related to me. But presently I had heard the banal, monotonous story so often, from so many different angles, that I could have yelled my lungs out for mercy. In sheer self-defense I fell into the habit of staring hypnotically out of the nearest of the wide, tall windows. The sun came pouring in through them almost without exception during the whole of this time, and if I watched attentively enough, I could see little grains of dust floating around in it and making patterns. But at the end of one session Berenson took occasion to warn me against doing that. He said it made me seem callous, hard-boiled, would make a bad impression on the jury. “Oh, jury be damned!” I thought to myself wearily.
Among those called on as witnesses was Leroy, Bernice’s Harvard-accent doorman. His last name was Devereaux, I found out. He came to court without his uniform and wearing a fuzzy caramel-colored suit with patch pockets and a half belt in back that would have driven any college freshman insane with longing. With this went beige spats, four inches of brown-silk handkerchief hanging out of his breast pocket, and, I am almost positive, a walking stick hanging up somewhere in the courthouse checkroom.
He sat up there at elegant ease, and no man in the room could match his English. It was really as delightful as it was instructive to listen to him speak, but I noticed the judge had to turn his head away several times during the course of the cross-questioning.
Leroy told how I had appeared about nine in Bernice’s lobby, passed a grip I was carrying to him, and then insisted I had just had a message from him on her behalf to come up there, which he again flatly denied having sent me, just as he had that night. This point held them up for fully half an hour, and only the liquidity of Leroy’s vowels kept me from returning to look out of the window again in spite of Berenson’s admonition. When they had finally decided that it was the relief man who had sent the message (and I saw Berenson give me a triumphant look, but what about I couldn’t imagine), Leroy was allowed to go ahead. He told them he had asked me if I wanted to be announced, whereupon (the “whereupon” was his own, too) I had given him an odd look and remarked: “Miss Pascal expects me more than she ever expected any one in her life.” At which point I heard a buzz of excitement rise from the onlookers at the back of the room. The judge struck the desk with his mallet, and when they had grown quiet again. Westman, the prosecuting attorney, asked Leroy to describe the look he said I had given him.
“It was a, I should say a sinister look,” Leroy said.
I had never known just how to pronounce that word until I heard him use it.
“Explain what you mean,” Westman said.
“It was the look of a man who is dangerous, who is capable of almost anything. Well, there’s no other word for it, it was a sinister look, that was all,” Leroy informed him dogmatically.