The Trial Of Callista Blake - free ebook by Edgar Pangborn

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The Trial Of Callista Blake

Edgar Pangborn

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THE TRIAL OF Callista Blake

THE TRIAL OF Callista Blake

EDGAR PANGBORN There is no ethical absolute that does not arise from error and illusion. — GEORGE GAYLORD SIMPSON , The meaning of Evolution . St Martin's Press New York Copyright © Edgar Pangborn 1961 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 61-13391 Manufactured in the United States of America by H. Wolff, New York The author wishes to express his thanks to William Morrow &amp; Company, Inc., for permission to use an excerpt from THE COURT OF LAST RESORT by Erle Stanley Gardner, Copyright

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I

I

Doves wheeled above the city's winter morning, vanishing by a turn of wings, reappearing in a silent explosion of light. Judge Terence Mann saw smoke rising through windless cold from a thousand chimneys, and saw, beyond a bleak acreage of city roofs, the apartment house that contained his bachelor burrow; further on, the Veterans Hospital shone not as a temple of sickness but a shaft of splendor in the sun. His eyes smarted as he turned away from the brightness. That was partly from a lack of s

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II

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Edith Nolan studied eleven faces, and the twelfth now giving the prosecutor stiffly reasonable answers. She wondered if Cecil Warner would dislike, as she did, Mr. Francis Fielding's buttoned-in upper lip. A statistician in the records office of Winchester's biggest department store, forty, consciously literate, rather too good to be true. Edith sensed the fanatic, the acrid mind that must be always right. But such a disposition might harden in favor of acquittal instead of conviction. Since her

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III

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Cecil Warner turned toward the cold gleam of the courtroom window; an eastern window, the winter sunshine long gone. In the morning he had watched a glint of the sun on Callista's black hair, and on the polished bleakness of the table where her arm rested. The daily journey and decline of the sun affected him more deeply now than in past years, left him irrationally disappointed on the gray days, less willing to accept the approach and arrival of night. On such days, or at the tired conclusions

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IV

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Judge Mann followed Joe Bass to the elevator that clanked them gravely to the relative holiness of the sixth floor, where Mann's chambers occupied a corner with a north view. The windows were dark, under a windy spatter of unexpected rain. Mann glimpsed gold blurs of downtown windows, white hurry of headlights, a flow of them two blocks away at the corner of Main and Court, Winchester going home to suburban bedrooms. "Nasty night," said Joe Bass. The red eye closed, the green eye opened; a file

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I

I

The wolves sat on their haunches, or stood, or crouched belly to earth with snouts on forepaws, while others maneuvered in the shadow beyond the tree-border of the clearing. On the other side of that border spread such a blackness as the mind imagines for the sea a mile down, yet here and there it was relieved by the gray of stone; everywhere, also, a coldness. Grayness in the clearing too; no flowers, nothing of the sun, but phallic-bodied toadstools and a ground-vine twisting a serpentine life

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II

II

Edith Nolan watched the cherries wobbling on Maud Welsh's hat as the woman perched in the witness chair, a sparrow ready for flight. T. J. Hunter purred and soothed. "Your occupation, Miss Welsh?" "Guess you could say housekeeper." The voice was dry, brittle as the woman's skin. Merciless morning light played on Maud's wrinkles; bad judgment had tricked her into using dabs of make-up. On her two visits to the Shanesville house, Edith had been aware of Maud as not much more than a background flut

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III

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Judge Mann watched Cecil Warner approach the witness chair like an old bull: heavy step, flaring nostrils, lowered head, eyes communicating nothing but a brooding truculence. He halted ponderously, an old bull arriving at the dubious barrier of a fence, and—just stood there. Judge Mann's pencil drifted across the scratch pad in a rapid script not much like his normal writing: Forgive me this my virtue; For in the fatness of these pursy times Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg, Yea, curb and w

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IV

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Callista sampled and pushed aside the inoffensive meal. The state of New Essex was feeding her well. Treating her well too—a star prisoner. A room of her own and, now that the trial had begun, meals in private, on a tray no less. No utensils of course except a spoon. She rose and performed the infinite journey of three steps from the barred door to the barred window a few times: shorten stride and you could make it come out to four steps. Best room in the hotel, southwest exposure 'n' everything

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I

I

Cecil Warner remembered the night, a corridor of hours, a windy darkness of winter streets, a homecoming to solitude and too much thought and the uncertain consolation of sleep. After leaving Edith's studio a whim had urged him to walk home instead of calling a taxi. By that time the rain had stopped, the winter pavements were damp and harmless. It would have been pleasant to drive alone out of the city on quiet side roads, perhaps winding up in a suburban bar for an hour's casual amusement. Not

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II

II

Weariness had grown like an external pressure, the encroachment of a rising tide, the waters of darkness. Callista had supposed that when Cecil walked over there to cross-examine the tide might recede, even release her entirely. It had not, not entirely, but it might be no longer rising; maybe this was the turn. She had heard Cecil speak, and had listened. Listening, she had felt within the weariness that hint of inarticulate continuing surprise which is an element in any manifestation of love.

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III

III

Sergeant Peterson had droned his last and had been succeeded on the stand by Trooper Curtis, brisk and dry, with his plaster casts and fingerprints. Both men, Edith Nolan understood, were competent, honest, not deliberately wasting time. Hunter himself was not really unduly slow at this business of hammering home what was already clear and established: Callista had been there. The fingerprint evidence at Shanesville was quite negative: no prints except Ann's on handbag or key case, none but hers

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IV

IV

The pavements throbbed with a golden, sometimes iridescent flame, which could not deceive Cecil Warner, for he was not drunk. The time hadn't come and never would when two bourbons on top of an average dinner could make a fool of him. The dancing fire was nothing in the world but the reflection of headlights on sidewalks wet with the return of winter rain. On his left a separate darkness kept pace with him, blotting out the fire-ballet as he moved. I cast a shadow. It is the nature of a man to c

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I

I

Thought of work had halted Edith's aimless wandering on the Christmas-spattered evening streets downtown. Now the drawing table and empty chair in her studio brought Callista poignantly close in absence. How arrogantly, like a beloved child, Callista had captured her life! Window-shopping with no heart for it, necessary gifts already bought, she had become fed up with Winchester, noise, people, sidewalk grit flung by the wind; with gaudy lights desperately imitating good cheer, drizzle-nosed bel

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II

II

Terence Mann stopped playing, tense with a dissonance of perplexity. A wrong time and mood for Chopin: his hands had been dull in the C-sharp Minor Impromptu. No music now, but an impulsive sorrow of December wind leaning against the building in the dark. " Callista never cried. " To Maud Welsh, that had been "real unnatural." Judge Mann did not find it so. Self-pity was not evident as a quality of Callista Blake. He understood with almost amused distress that he liked the girl. That, plus old d

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III

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She saw it behind her eyelids, a small cloud but deep, suddenly come, suddenly gone. The light strengthened; there was the rock, and a whiteness in the water. How could you know, Callista, that she was dead? She had, as usual, dared to move her cot nearer the wall with the barred door and the graffiti, so that if she crouched at that end of the cot a triangle of shadow protected her from the glare of the naked bulb in the corridor. Matron Kowalski on night duty had a habit of turning that light

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IV

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Edith Nolan pressed her fingertips over eyes grown tired from work. Possibly when she opened them and looked again at the broad sheet of drawing paper on the table, she would know whether her curious urgency of the last hour, the sense of good achievement that had driven her to this exhaustion, had been something more than self-deception. A glance at her wrist watch before she closed away vision had told her it was past one in the morning. Time to quit, if she was not to arrive for the next cour

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I

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Answering T. J. Hunter's inquiry about her occupation, Mrs. Phelps Jason of Shanesville replied in her own time and manner: "I am a widow with a limited private income, not employed in the usual sense, certainly not unemployed in the sense of idle. I manage my Shanesville property as a wild life sanctuary, and am Secretary of the Winchester County Anti-Vivisection League." Judge Mann exhaled. One of those; human, however. In the minute-book, belatedly, he entered the date, December 9, and the wi

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II

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The clock said half past one. Callista watched Judge Mann hurry into the courtroom, all business, dark pucker of a frown, the black robe too priestlike. It seemed to her that all present including herself were distorted by the magnifying power of ritual. As Father Bland, in the back row beside ( my late acquaintance ) James Mulhouse Doherty, would appear deceptively beyond life-size if he were wearing his magic vestments and saying a Mass. "This Court is now in session." Mr.-Delehanty-which-is-t

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III

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He met the flat patient stare of Sergeant Lloyd Rankin, which indicated a readiness like that of a dog who will not attack unless provoked. Say a Boxer: Rankin was built like that, and would fight in a Boxer's style, with single-minded courage closely akin to stupidity. He saw T. J. Hunter seated at the prosecution's table and turned partly away from the witness chair, making a show of rereading that transcript of Callista's ordeal. T.J. would be listening to the cross-examination, and sharply;

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IV

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As Joe Bass emptied the ash tray and made gentle needless motions with a dustrag at the bookshelves, Judge Terence Mann glanced at the handful of doodle scraps he had taken out of their temporary shelter in the minute book at the close of the day. None of them pleased him now, except possibly his sketch of the fingerprint technician Sergeant Zane scratching the lens he wore in place of a head. Drawing the toxicologist Dr. Ginsberg with his smooth face modified into a chemical retort had not turn

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I

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"In the prison house are many mansions. This one looks very nice—thank the good Sheriff for me, for us, Cecil. Is it wired for sound?" "No, dear, it's just an office. Sheriff's working late down the hall—records room—and said we could have this. Nobody'll bother us." "May I sit at the desk and judge humanity?" "Why not?" "Or I'll be a lady of the Abbey of Theleme, where the law was 'Do what thou wilt.' No—can't have anything like that going on in the Sheriff's own office. And still—flowers on th

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II

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COURT OF GENERAL SESSIONS OF WINCHESTER COUNTY, NEW ESSEX December 10, 1959 Action: People vs. Callista Blake ; Justice Terence Mann presiding. Court in session at 0956. JUDGE MANN : Do I understand, Mr. Hunter, that you wish to have read to the jury the letters that were admitted in evidence before adjournment yesterday? MR. HUNTER : Yes, your Honor. I am prepared to read—to go ahead with that right away. JUDGE MANN : Let them be read by the clerk of the court. MR. DELEHANTY : Your Honor, I hav

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I

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In the robing room after the noon recess, Judge Mann was assailed by a feeling of being out of place, ludicrously so, dismayingly. The village atheist blundering into a crowd of churchgoers to retrieve his hat; or an explorer required to take part in a tribal ritual without a briefing on the rules. Innocent oversight, by the way, on the part of local chieftains and witchdoctors, for why wouldn't they assume that everybody knew the rules from infancy as they did? What am I doing here? He could as

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II

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"Your witness, Mr. Hunter." Edith Nolan thought with an edge of panic: Is that all, Cecil? The Old Man's face was saying a kind of good-bye to her, turning away, not apparently displeased or disappointed—satisfied rather, so far as one could hope to read a face that must also be presenting a front to the gaze of the jury. But there was so much more that ought to have been said! The intimate truths of personality, relation, individual quality, that become no longer small once your vision is clear

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III

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Callista thought: I am stronger than she is, and never knew it before. Why is she crying, after she was so wonderful? It was no trick of vision; no mistaking the intrusive brilliant glitter on her cheeks as Edith stepped down and walked rather clumsily—but head high—toward her seat. She would not retire in any sniffling droop: rather, Callista knew, she would be furious at the weakness, and maybe not reach for a handkerchief even when she was clear of the arena but keep her head high and angrily

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I

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"The chips are down now, aren't they, Callista?" She'll understand that the best answer for that one is no answer. But I might —Cecil Warner remained on his feet by the defense table until he could reassure himself that Callista did understand. She was watching the prosecutor with outward calm, her hands folded—white hands, actually strong, now seeming small and frail. "Mr. District Attorney, I have one or two old-fashioned quirks. It was natural for Mr. Warner to use my first name because he is

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II

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The courtroom had gone into a silence where voices were remembered with uncertainty, like the dead. The judge's chair was empty. Three reporters talked in small murmurs at the press table, waiting it out, and a few spectators remained. Edith watched Mr. Delehanty appear from the small side door at her left, take up with quiet importance a manila folder from his idle desk, mutter inaudibly to one of the bailiffs, glance first at an old-fashioned gold watch from his pocket and then toward the door

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III

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From a letter written by Terence Mann, formerly Justice of the Court of General Sessions of Winchester County, New Essex, July 17, 1960, to Dr. John Sever Mann, of Boston : ... For that matter, I can hardly understand that more than a week has passed since Callista died. My sense of time seems to be still slightly distorted. For many days and months, too much to endure and understand, hope for and relinquish; then quiet, aftermath. Finished. The new things that begin, some of them surely good, a

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THE TRIAL OF CALLISTA BLAKE

THE TRIAL OF CALLISTA BLAKE

EDGAR PANGBORN In 1959, in the state of New Essex, a witch was on trial. Or so she seemed to many of the jurors who would ultimately decide her fate, and to the people who thronged the crowded courtroom, many of them friends of the murdered woman. On trial for poisoning her former lover's wife, she would—if found guilty—be executed. Callista Blake is nineteen years old at the time of her trial. She has a very slight physical deformity, and the much greater mental ones of apparent aloofness, fier

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