“He was murdered, stabbed to death, late at night, outside his office, on his way to his car.”
Nodding thoughtfully, he asked, “Have they changed the definition of homicide? The unlawful killing of a human being?”
“No, it’s always been that.”
“Then it wasn’t a homicide, it was not a murder.” He said it as if I would immediately understand and could not possibly disagree with his conclusion.
“You mean,” I suggested tentatively, “that it wasn’t unlawful because there must have been some form of justification? Self-defense, for example?”
“No, I mean it can’t have been a homicide because homicide’s the unlawful killing of a human being and whatever else Calvin Jeffries might have been, he was certainly not a human being.
No, it was not murder.”
I did not know what to say, or even, for that matter, what to think.
“Shall I tell you what they did, the late lamented Calvin Jeffries and my always blameless wife, Jean?”
He turned his head, as if he had just heard someone call out to him. “Jeffries is dead,” he said to no one. The corners of his mouth pulled back until the tendons of his neck were stretched taut. Then it started again, that insane rhythmic repetition, like the harsh clang of a rusty bell rung from the belfry of a distant church. “Jeffries is dead… wed… bed… fed.” He was staring straight ahead, his eyes as vacant as the conscious mind behind them. “Red… bled… med.” He was choking on the words, as if he had lost the instinct for taking a breath, and in the confusion of his panic had thought he was supposed to push it out instead of bring it in.
It stopped and the memory of it stopped as well. “Jeffries is dead,” he said, each syllable pronounced with glittering clarity.
“Murdered. And they say there are no happy endings. Shall I tell you what they did to me, the great judge and the loving wife?”
He glanced away, a wistful expression in his deep-set eyes, the look sometimes seen on the face of men much older than Elliott Winston, the look they get when they begin to think back, not just to their vanished youth, but to the way they saw the world when they were still that young.
“I believed in him. I believed in them both. I worshipped Jeffries. It was an honor to be in the same room with him. He knew everything. He could do anything. There was nothing about the law he did not know.” He looked at me, an eager glint in his eye. “Do you know that he wrote most of the procedural law we use?” Again he turned away. “He told me how he did that and why and he told me a lot of other things that had happened when he was a young lawyer like I was, trying to make a name for himself. We used to spend long evenings, sometimes the four of us-Jeffries, his wife, Adele, Jean, and me-but more often just the three of us. His wife was an invalid.” A strange, almost sinister smile crawled over his mouth. “An invalid! She was an addict.”
I had met Adele Jeffries only on the rare occasion when I happened to run into her husband at some social event. She was supposed to be five or six years older and she looked every bit of it.
Instead of hiding, makeup seemed to heighten the effect of the deep lines that crossed her forehead and creased the sagging skin on her cheeks. Her eyes, however, were lively and alert, the somewhat amused observer of her own sad deterioration. There had been rumors about her for years, the kind of soft-spoken, gently insinuated suggestion that became an indelible part of the way everyone thought about her. No one could actually explain what it was she was supposed to have done, but everyone knew that she was not quite right, and that besides drinking too much she required fairly constant medication.
“Poor Adele,” Elliott was saying. “I’ll bet there wasn’t a doctor in Portland who didn’t at one time or another get one of her famous phone calls. I kind of liked her,” he added as an aside,
“even though I knew she had to be crazy.” Catching the irony of what had just slipped out, his eyes darted away and then darted back, while he shrugged his shoulders and threw up his hands.
“She really was,” he insisted, growing more serious. “She’d go right down the Yellow Pages-under ‘Physicians.’ I saw her do it one day. She sat on a stool in the kitchen, moving that wrinkled finger down the list, crunching up her eyes to make the name come into focus. As soon as someone answered the phone, she’d clear her throat and with as much formality, as much solemnity as if she were introducing the president of the United States, announce that ‘Mrs. Judge Jeffries’-that’s what she called herself-
was calling for Dr. Dolittle or Dr. Whomever. They’d always put her through. And then she would do it again, announce she was Mrs. Judge Jeffries and ask if the doctor would kindly be good enough to order a refill of her prescription for Percodan or Demerol or any one of the other two dozen pain-killing, mind-numbing, nerve-deadening, brain-altering, mood-elevating, awareness-closing pharmaceuticals she was taking by the handful morning, noon, and long into the literal and proverbial night.”
Elliott was panting hard, glaring at me as if the addiction of Mrs. Judge Jeffries had been somehow my fault. Then, suddenly, his head snapped back and he started to laugh. “There was nothing wrong with her. There never was. She had some minor ail-ment, twisted her ankle, something like that, years before. She told me once, during one of her brief interludes of sobriety. After that, every time she had a pain somewhere, just a twinge of dis-comfort, Jeffries would give her something, just for the pain. Eventually, she was hooked-couldn’t live without her pills, that and the booze. Jeffries didn’t mind. He encouraged her. Why deal with pain? It was a way of getting rid of her. She was always there, but she wasn’t there at all. He married her for her money. Now she’s in a nursing home somewhere. She probably doesn’t know where she is. Jeffries worked everything out. He had her declared incompetent while they were still married, put everything of hers in a trust, and named himself trustee. I told you he knew everything about the law.”
Elliott opened his eyes wide and took a deep breath, and then let it out, a look of disgust on his face. “You know who he had draw up the papers? You know who he asked to handle the whole thing?”
I did not want to believe it and I knew it had to be true. “You did that?”
“I didn’t want to. I really didn’t. I told him I thought she was all right, that perhaps if she saw a doctor he could get her to stop drinking, to stop taking all that pain medication. He told me every doctor he talked to told him the same thing, that it was too late, that the damage was permanent, that she needed constant round-the-clock care.
“It still didn’t seem right to me. He insisted he knew a lot more about his wife than I did and that he was surprised and, yes, disappointed-more disappointed than he could say-that I would refuse the favor he had asked. Had I forgotten all the favors he had done for me, the way he had actually broken the law when I had missed a filing deadline or needed extra time to finish something? Then he told me what he had never told me before. He told me that he had sometimes ruled on motions in my favor just because he believed I always wanted to do the right thing, and that if anyone ever found out, if he ever let slip what he had done, he’d be in a lot of trouble and so would I. We had to trust each other, he said. Surely, I didn’t believe that he could possibly want to do anything that wasn’t in the best interest of his own wife? I couldn’t possibly know how painful this was for him, and how the only way he thought he could get through it was knowing it was being taken care of by someone that both of them, he and Adele, had come to think of as a son.”
He gritted his teeth and his eyes fairly started out of their sock-ets. “At the hearing, she sat next to me, docile, unprotesting, until the very end. She leaned over, that vacant smile still on her face, and as clear as a bell said to me, ‘You helped him get rid of me, but I’m not the only one he wants to get rid of!’ And then she started to laugh, this hideous, bloodcurdling laugh that rolled on and on, louder and louder, till I had to put my hands over my ears, for fear that ghastly sound would crack my head.