The Accused Part 12

Chapter 13.

Liebman: Cory, you have testified that you had several rendezvous with Mrs. Morlock in the weeks immediately preceding her death. You held these trysts only on Sundays, didn't you?

Cory: Any other day he was liable to be home.

Liebman: And you, in fact, were with her on the Sunday she died, weren't you?

Cory: Sure, yes, but it wasn't like the other times. She was getting sore about him, where he was going every Sunday. She wanted to know what he was doing. She followed him one time and saw him get in Mr. Dodson's car and drive off. So then she wanted me to come early the next Sunday and wait around the corner in my car; she wanted me to take her wherever it was he went. She thought he was seeing some other woman.

Liebman: The irony of this didn't strike you?

Cory: What?

Liebman: Let it go. Cory, did she ever discuss with you the advantages of doing away with the accused?

Gurney: Objection.

Cameron: Sustained. Do you want a ruling on that, Mr. Liebman?

Liebman: No. I take it, then, that on Sunday, May 20th, you generously agreed to help the suspicious Mrs. Morlock as she shadowed her husband?

Cory: The 20th?

Liebman: The 20th. The day she died.

Cory: Well, yes. I did. I didn't want to. All the time I was seeing her I was spending a lot of money on whisky and cigarettes and I was pretty near broke. I had to gas up my car--I didn't know how far he was going or anything like that. She never offered to help pay for it. And I was scared that he might see me with her.

Liebman: My heart goes out to you, Cory.

Cameron: We can do without the sarcasm, Mr. Liebman.

Liebman: I stand reprimanded, Your Honor. Cory--what time did the accused come out of the house?

Cory: I don't know. I was around the corner waiting for Lolly--for Mrs. Morlock. I got there about eight-thirty because he always left a little after that. I waited about ten minutes and then she came out and got in the car and told me which way to go.

Liebman: Was the accused familiar with your car?

Cory: I didn't think so but she said not to take any chances. I stayed a couple of blocks behind him--he was walking then--until he got in Mr. Dodson's car and started out of town. Then I stayed far enough behind so he couldn't see that he was being followed or who was in the car with me. He drove steady as far as South Danville, not in a hurry, and then he parked the car behind a filling station and got out.

Liebman: Did you stop at that time?

Cory: No. I slowed down a little but I drove on past and pulled off the road a little bit and stopped.

Liebman: How far past his car was that?

Cory: Maybe fifty yards. He didn't look back. Mrs. Morlock was the one that said to stop there. We sat in the car and watched him walking up a little dirt road. He was looking straight ahead.

Liebman: What was her att.i.tude at that time?

Cory: She seemed pretty excited. She said, "Come on. Let's see where he goes." I told her that I didn't want any part of it and she got mad. She made me promise to wait for her and I said that I would unless her husband was with her when she came back. She hurried off the way he went--he was out of sight in the trees--and I stayed in the car and waited.

Liebman: You're sure you stayed in the car? You're sure you didn't go into the woods with her?

Cory: I'm sure. I never got out of the car.

Liebman: How long did you wait?

Cory.: I guess it was about twenty minutes. Then I saw Mr. Morlock come running down the road. The road I told you about that the two of them walked up. You could tell just from the way he was running that something had happened and his face was bleeding. I started up my car and got out of there.

Liebman: Thou faithful lover. That's all, Cory.

The Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts vs. Alvin Morlock. Cross-examination of William Cory.

What had been hardly more than an idle curiosity about Morlock's absences each Sunday grew and festered in Louise's mind. He had a h.e.l.l of a nerve, she thought, treating her like a prisoner, not letting her have any money, not speaking to her and all the time carrying on some affair of his own.

How else could he be spending all that time? She reasoned, more cunningly, that if she could catch him at it she would have the satisfaction of bringing him down to her own level--the level on which he placed her--and he could no longer humiliate her with her own shortcomings. But she would have to catch him in the act; right in the middle of the act so that he could have no possible defense. She had tried to follow him one Sunday, thinking that he would head for some cheap hotel room or walk-up flat.

She would, she thought, give him just time enough and then she would rush in. She practiced the things she would say to him, and to his woman. Or if she could catch him at something queer like with that f.a.g, Martin... so much the better. She rehea.r.s.ed the things she would say until even the accusations she rejected remained in her mind as referring to facts accomplished, actual things she had seen. There was no longer any possible doubt in her about what he was doing, and her spying took on the air of a crusade. When, on that first Sunday of her espionage, he got into Dodson's car and drove away she raged in her frustration and was more than ever convinced of his guilt. When Cory came, she asked him to drive for her so she could see where Morlock went. He was difficult but she had a sensual power over him that made him easy to control.

She watched Morlock throughout the week, impatient for Sunday to come, clutching her obsession to her like a mother clutching an infant. When Sunday did come and he did leave, she rushed to the appointed place to meet Cory, afraid that he might not be there. He was there and she got into the car, hardly aware of Cory at all.

Morlock, in the few weeks since he had rediscovered the sanctuary of Abram's Rock, had already worked out a routine for his visits. By arrangement with Dodson he had the use of the old LaSalle until evening on each Sunday; in return he filled the car's tank with gasoline at the filling station adjacent to the rock and thus repaid the filling station proprietor as well as Dodson.

He could park the car in back of the filling station and take the road to the rock without speaking to anyone, which was very important. He had reached a point where any conversation at all was an intrusion. Aware of the dangerous psychological ground on which he was treading, he rationalized. The rock was the only place where he could escape Louise, he told himself; the only place where he could be free of half a hundred reminders of the failure of his marriage.

He was aware of his own hypocrisy. In actual fact, he knew, he was visiting the rock less as a refuge than as a retreat from Ludlow, from being a second-cla.s.s teacher and a failure. He spent hours each week on the rock, not in idle, harmless contemplation of what might have been but in an actual return to his youth. Here he and Marianna had played and daydreamed. Here he had been happy.

On Sunday, May 20th, he walked toward the rock in quiet antic.i.p.ation. At the very summit there was a spot where the sun warmed the granite and where there was a fallen tree that he could sit on. Once he had crouched in tears at that very place, he remembered. And Marianna had come to him to ask, "Why are you crying?" That had been the day of his father's funeral.

Today he would remember more pleasant times. He had the faculty of selecting his memories as an orchestra leader might choose a single work from all the creations of a composer. Morlock was also aware of the danger in this power of selection. He was not, he decided, hurting anyone except possibly himself. If he preferred to spend his solitude in a return to what was past--that was his privilege.

This gray slope up which he struggled--how many times he had seen Marianna skip to the top, slim and bare-legged, as graceful as he was clumsy.

When he was at last at the summit he found his fallen tree and sat down, warm from the exercise. Beyond he could see hills and pastures, green with the new gra.s.s of spring and populated only with grazing cattle, brown and black and white and looking like playthings from this height. There were towering spruce and hemlocks below the sheer side of the cliff over which he looked, but their tops never reached the height of the rock. This was the place where Abram, the Indian of the legend, had leaped, it was said. He remembered when he had told Marianna the story. Her eyes had widened and filled with pity.

"Was he killed?" she wanted to know.

"Sure," he had told her with the contempt for death of boyhood. "It's almost a thousand feet down."

"He must have missed her very much," she said thoughtfully. "Had they been married very long? What made her die?"

"I don't know," he had answered. "I guess she just got sick or something. Indians didn't have doctors."

She had been quiet for a little while. Then she said, "She must have been very glad that he loved her enough to jump when she die."

At twelve he had been less interested in the legend than she. Nevertheless, when it was her turn to choose the game they would play, or the direction of their pretending, she often chose the legend of Abram as a focal point to set the stage. He never entered halfheartedly into the game because it was of her choosing or something that he might privately consider sissified; when she pretended that she could hear the dead Indian princess crying in the depths below them for Abram, he pretended that he could hear it too.

Once, when they played this game, she said gravely, "If they made me go away from here, I would wish that I could jump like Abram did, Alvin."

He asked, in astonishment, "Why?"

"Because I would be sad at leaving here and going away from you."

He was touched. "I guess I'd feel the same, Marianna."

And it occurred to them both simultaneously. They would make a pact, solemnly and with pomp. They were friends. If anything happened to the one, the other would do as Abram had done.

These things were the subject of Morlock's reminiscence when he heard the sound of someone approaching behind him. He had to recall himself to the present violently and with great conscious effort. He got to his feet and turned in the same motion; when he saw Louise climbing the last few feet to the top he could not believe what he saw. When he did believe it he said, "Louise--for G.o.d's sake, what are you doing here?"

She had followed him up the rutted road from the filling station, stumbling in her high heels and flogged by the outstretched whips of birch and alder that had invaded the road. She caught only a glimpse of him from time to time but she had kept on, realizing that he could hardly have turned off the road. After a few minutes she had begun to perspire from the effort of trying to keep him in sight. The perspiration had stung her where the branches had scratched her skin but she had been unconscious of any pain in her urge to confront Morlock in all his guilt.

Even when he had started to climb the rock, she had not doubted for a moment that her obsession was based in reality; she only wondered at his choice of a trysting place. She had taken off her shoes to get a foothold on the smooth surface and started climbing the barely visible old trail to the top. She had come close enough to the summit to see him several seconds before he heard her and turned and she was profoundly disappointed when she saw that he was alone and that there could be no other person on the bare summit. Unable to believe this she glanced at every pebble, every crevice in the granite.

"I followed you," she said when she had caught her breath. "Al, I thought you were seeing someone, the way you've been gone every Sunday."

He was outraged at her intrusion. "How did you get here?" he demanded.

"I got someone to take me," she said. A quick suspicion returned to her, a saving hope. Probably she was just too early. Probably someone was coming right this minute, the someone he was seeing. She turned to look back down the trail.

Morlock, after his first anger, felt a despairing sense of loss. The rock would never be the same again. It could never again be a sanctuary. With her mere presence she had dirtied it. He saw her backward look and interpreted it correctly.

"Don't bother," he said. "There isn't anyone coming. You shouldn't have come here, Louise." He watched her move toward him, looking curiously about her, like a filthy alley cat in a shrine. "This is all I can stand, your coming here," he said. "You're going to have to get out. I don't care where you go or what you do. I'll help you with what money I can, but you've got to go away from me."

"What did I do?" she demanded. "You can't blame me for thinking you were up to something--seeing some woman probably. You haven't come near me--I know that much."

"This place had a meaning for me," he said. "I used to play here when I was a kid. This is where Marianna--" He caught himself and finished lamely, "And the other kids used to come."

She seized on the name instantly, picking it from all the other words he had used with instinctive awareness of its importance to him.

"Marianna," she said. "Sounds like a Dago like me. Who is she, Al?"

"She was a girl I used to know when we were kids," he said. He tried to divert her. "Come on, Louise. I'll take you down."

She had wandered close to the steep edge. She peered over and drew back quickly with a mock shudder. "h.e.l.l of a drop. What was she like, Al," she said, taunting him.

"She was just a girl."

"And you came up here to play with her?"

"Oh, d.a.m.n it, yes. Now come on down."

She was not through. Glancing at her, he saw that she was smiling maliciously. Lowering her voice, she asked slyly, "What did you play, Al? Doctor?"

When he understood, he took a step toward her, his face contorted. In his fury he slapped her twice across the face. Louise, stepping back from the blow, brought her shoeless foot down on a sharp pebble. To transfer her weight from the injured foot she took still another step backward, this time into empty s.p.a.ce.

Morlock, lunging to catch her, nearly went over the sheer edge himself. Staring down he could see her body twist and turn and hear her thin, terrified wail. She seemed to fall for an impossibly long time before the green boughs of the hemlocks reached up to receive her. In that moment he was aware of a great rushing tide of revelation. That was how it was to fall, the body turning, the lips screaming. That was how Marianna Cruz had died.

He had never let himself think about it before. Now it was thrust on him. He sobbed once, and began to run down the trail. There was heavy undergrowth around the base of the rock. It tore his flesh and his clothing as he forced his way through. When he came to her, Louise was lying face down on a ma.s.s of detritus from the rock.

Her clothing was hardly disheveled and there was nothing gruesome about her appearance. She might have been sleeping there except that her body was curiously flattened, out of proportion. Morlock turned her over and then, without feeling for her pulse, he began to force his way through the underbrush to the road that led to the filling station. And Cory, sitting in his car, saw Morlock running, head down, unaware of the blood streaming down from his face.

As he ran Morlock frantically made plans. Louise had already cost him too much, in dignity, in self-respect. He would not let her cost him his freedom--his life, perhaps. She was dead. He was certain that she was dead so that there was no person except himself who could say what had happened on top of the rock. She had fallen accidentally. It happened all the time. That was what he would tell them. He would have to a.s.sume a grief that he did not feel, but he could do it. He must do it. He had a driving obsession to get her body away from the rock and this he could do by pretending to refuse to believe that she was dead. He would get someone to help him to get her away from there and at the same time add color to his picture of bereavement. Alive or dead she desecrated Abram's Rock.

Chapter 14.

Gurney: I will recall William Davis to the stand.

Cameron: Witness will remember that he is still under oath.

Gurney: Mr. Davis, getting back to Sunday, May 20th, I'd like to ask you if you saw the car driven by the last witness, Cory.

Davis: I didn't see any car. I didn't see her then, either.

Gurney: Her?

Davis: Mrs. Morlock. This Cory already said he pulled ahead of the filling station before he parked. I was pretty busy. I did see Morlock's car when he pulled in but I didn't pay much attention to him. I knew where he was going.

Gurney: Tell us what happened then.

Davis: Maybe half an hour after Morlock got out of his car and went toward the rock, I was sitting in the station making out bills. All of a sudden I heard footsteps coming like someone was running--I've got gravel around the gas pumps. You can't walk on it without making a racket. I got up to see what was going on and just then he came in the door. He was breathing hard and his hair was all mussed up. He had a couple of bad scratches on his face. He yelled, "She fell from the rock. Help me." I tried to steady him down so I could find out what happened. "Who did?" I asked him. He said, "My wife. Help me, please." I've got a stretcher that the Civil Defense issued me in the station. I knew that if she was hurt she'd have to be carried out to the road. I called the town constable--we don't have a police force--and I told him to come out to the station and to send an ambulance. Then I went with Morlock. I was carrying the stretcher and I had a hard time keeping up with him. I asked him how it had happened and he said-- Liebman: Your Honor, I don't think that would be admissible.

Gurney: It would be in the Res Gestae. I can give you any number of precedents.

Cameron: I'll have to agree with Mr. Gurney, Mr. Liebman.

Liebman: I'll withdraw the objection.

Cameron: Witness will continue.

Davis: He was pretty broken up. He said, "I don't know, I don't know." He kept after me to hurry. Well, pretty soon we came to where she was. I took one look at her and I told him that I was sorry for him but it wasn't any use and we might as well go back and let the ambulance men handle it but he insisted that she wasn't dead and we should get her to the hospital. So the two of us got her on the stretcher and started out of the woods. Halfway there we met Tom Harrison--he's the constable--and Doctor Sedge.

The Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts vs. Alvin Morlock. Redirect testimony of William Davis.

Gurney: Doctor Sedge, the witness who preceded you has stated that you were present when the body of Louise Morlock was being carried from the woods surrounding Abram's Rock. Would you give the jury an account of what happened from that point?- Sedge: I am an intern at the County Hospital. I was on call on Sunday--the Sunday in question--and when Constable Harrison telephoned for an ambulance to meet, him at Mr. Davis's filling station, my immediate thought was that there had been an auto accident. I got in the ambulance and told the driver where to go. When we got to the station, Constable Harrison was already there. The station was unlocked but there was no one in sight and we were puzzled for a moment until the driver looked up the road and saw two men with a stretcher. We hurried to meet them.