All jails stink and the Iron Cliffs county jail is no exception. Despite the annualâand, during his campaigns for re-election, much advertisedâcitations that Sheriff Battisfore had won for the cleanliness of his jail, neither he nor any other man had yet found a way to make the combination of crowded unwashed men, stale sweat and urine smell like a bunch of roses. The full force of this regrettable state of affairs smote my nostrils as the big outer jail door breathed shut behind me. I was fairly caught. During my nearly two-year vacation from crime I had forgotten how bad it was.
“Sweet violets,” I murmured, crinkling my nose and trying to breathe lightly. Jailer Sulo Kangas, the Finn, was on duty. He sat nodding in a chair, his hands folded palms up in his lap, fast asleep. It occurred to me fleetingly that he had been overcome by his environment and swooned. His wispy blond hair was swept up in a Kewpie lock, and he sat under a side and front F.B.I. portrait of one of the country's ten most wanted criminals. “Hello, Sulo,” I said gently, not wanting unduly to startle him. “I came to see Lieutenant Manion.”
Sulo shook his head, like a man emerging from a shower stall, and slowly swam back to consciousnessâ“Ya, ya, ya.” He rubbed his eyes and patted down his hair and heaved himself to his feet. It was really a shame to disturb him. He had only a few more years to go until his retirement and all who knew him were hoping he would make the grade. For many years he had been a good and loyal jailer, but now he was mostly a tired one. “I'd like to see Lieutenant Manion, Sulo,” I tactfully repeated.
“Sure, sure, sure, Polly,” Sulo said, reaching for a big brass key which hung from a metal ring as big as a basketball hoop on the wall over his roll-top desk. “You like see him in his cell?”
“Can we use the Sheriff's office for our huddle, Sulo? I see it's empty.”
“Sure, sure, sure,” Sulo said, opening the barred steel door separating the jail office from the cell blocks, carefully locking himself in, and then shuffling away upstairs to one of the upper tiers of cells, the brass key draped over his arm.
I lit and furiously puffed on an Italian cigar, out of self-defense, and stood idly studying the picture of one of the country's ten most notorious criminals. Hm ⦠. The fugitive reminded me faintly of a former scoutmaster I'd once known, a hell of a good man, a veritable
pyromaniac, with two dry sticks. I leaned closer and read a portion of the fugitive's criminal record. It was a brief Who's Who of crime, in its way as drearily predictable as the announcement of a society wedding. Prepared at Downstate Reformatory; finished at Sing Sing ⦠. I read on. Here was indeed a fine broth of a boy. One wondered how so young a man, one who had spent so much of his life behind bars, could possibly have got himself into so much trouble during his brief intervals outside. If one could only learn to channel and direct such energy, such single-minded devotion to mischief, one could surely power a battleship.
I wondered whether he was proud, wherever he was hiding, of his standing among this elite of criminals, the Big Ten of crime. Ten, I reflected, was getting to be quite a symbol of achievement throughout the country. Let's see, there were the annual ten best-dressed dames, the weekly ten top tunes, and, during football season, the ten top teams. Always the superlative ten; the best, the biggest, the flashiest, the loudest, and now, dear Lord, the crookedest. There were also the ten mostâ
“Yes, sir,” a quiet voice said at my side. “I'm Frederic Manion.”
“Sure, sure, sure,” Sulo said, mindful of his manners. “Dis is Polly Biegler, he used to be our D.A. He's the bucko.”
“Thanks, Sulo,” I said gratefully. “Nice to meet you, Lieutenant.”
As I looked at my man the wry thought flashed over me that despite our dearly hugged illusions of civilization and culture, all our talk about tolerance and fair play and detached social objectivity, most of us have but two reactions to the people who cross our lives: we either like or dislike them on sight. It is as simple as that. And I found myself disliking Frederic Manion on sight. Tolerance, fair play, objectivity, all could be damned; I didn't cotton to this guy. An aura of absorbed self-love clung to him like a cloak; he wore his ego like a halo. He went to work at once to confirm me in my intolerance.
“Hello, there,” he said, swiftly taking and dropping my outstretched hand. “I've been waiting for you.”
The faint air of annoyance and reprimand was not lost on me. “Yes, sir,” I said, gesturing toward the sheriff's office. “Suppose we do our talking in there.”
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We sat facing each other in the Sheriff's office, I in a swivel chair at the Sheriff's desk (where I'd sat through many a tense session as prosecutor) and Lieutenant Manion at the side of the desk. He
was about to smoke a cigarette and it was an absorbing ritual to watch. The honored cigarette was selected as though each in the pack was unique; it was carefully tamped and some fugitive threads of tobacco were removed; it was deftly fitted into a long, ornately carved ivory holder; it was dry-puffed to see that the flues were opened (they evidently were); a common kitchen match was produced and suddenly struck down across the side of the Sheriff's desk (thank goodness the Sheriff knew I used a lighter); the match was permitted to burn so that all the sulphur fumes were dissipated; and thenâthenâthe holder was clenched in two rows of strong white teeth under the little Hitlerian mustache, and lo! the man was smoking. It was something like watching a crucial place kick in the closing seconds of a tie football game. Good God, the man had made it ⦠.
My prospective client sat back and regarded me calmly, with eyes that were neither black nor brown, but bafflingly dark; an expression that was neither interested nor disinterested, but aloof, aloofly detached to the point of scorn. His attitude seemed to say that now, damn it, I was his lawyer; it was up to me to carry the ball. “Mister Cool,” I thought to myself. Neither of us spoke for some time and I am certain that had I not broken the silence we might have been sitting there yet (the Sheriff permitting) like two figures trapped in Madam Tussaud's waxworks.
“Where did you get that fancy holder?” I said.
He smiled faintly and glanced at the holder. “China via Burma Road, World War Two,” he said. “Hand-carved ivory, Ming Dynasty, mid-sixteenth century.”
“Hm ⦠. Ripley never told me they had cigarettes or holders that long ago, let alone tobacco.”
“They did,” Frederic Manion replied, thoughtfully puffing on his Ming holder. I sensed that the discussion was closed and thought perhaps I had better talk about something more properly down my alley, something say, like the possible defenses to a charge of first degree murder.
The Lieutenant turned away, with his air of cool detachment, and looked slowly around the room. I followed his gaze. The dominant motif of the Sheriff's office, like that of the jail proper, was battleship gray: gray walls, gray ceiling, dirty gray outside bars over gray-trimmed sooty windows. I blinked. There was even a gray cement floor. What unsung genius of a paint salesman, I wondered, had thus seduced the county purchasing agent? The gray walls were
mostly mercifully overlaid with a lush mural of commercial calendars variously depicting and advertising handcuffs, leg irons, straitjackets, riot guns, tear-gas bombs and similar adjuncts to institutional decorum. There were still other calendars devoted to the more gracious aspects of jail living, such as seatless toilets (warranted absolutely unbreakable), roach powders, various insecticides and delousers, andâI found my gaze lingeringâa miraculous spray compound guaranteed to make any jail in the world smell like the middle of a pine forest ⦠.
“Can it be possible?” I thought, wistfully skeptical. Maybe I could wire for a supply if I took this case.
Stuck against the far wall was the inevitable optical chart to test the vision of applicants for drivers' licenses, and about which some of the Sheriff's political detractors claimed darkly, I suddenly recalled, that all but the most myopic applicant would pass if he could but discern the chart itself.
“P-L-U-T-O,” the Lieutenant was repeating glibly, “5, 0, 7, 8, 4 ⦔ and so on down the list. I tilted my horn-rim glasses up on my forehead and was greeted by a blur. I walked over to the chart. “Once more, Lieutenant,” I said. “Please. I can't believe it.”
The Lieutenant again read rapidly and accurately down through the list.
“Well,” I said, returning to my chair, “there goes one possible defense out the window.”
The Lieutenant's dark eyes bored into mine. “What's that?” he said.
“I'm afraid,” I said dryly, “that you can't very well claim that your shooting was a case of mistaken identity.”
The Lieutenant grunted unsmilingly and resumed his cool inventory of the room. Here was one murder defendant, I saw, who did not like to joke about the fix he was in.
One entire gray wall, like a sort of shrine, was devoted to the great man himself, Sheriff Max Battisfore. It was all but covered with photographs, all framed under glass, of the Sheriff as a Public Man, all testifying mutely, in various brotherly attitudes, of his undying love for his fellow citizensâand voters. The Sheriff was shown shaking hands, embracing or being embraced, and occasionally both; he was depicted eating pie, catching and eating smelt, giving or receiving various awards, cups and plaques, and crowning, of course, an endless assortment of queens.
“Love, your spell is everywhere,” I murmured.
“Hm ⦔ the Lieutenant said. “He must own stock in Eastman Kodak.”
There were other pictures of the Sheriff, many others, posed smilingly with politicians ranging from notaries to governors, all winners, and others with people whose affiliations, amidst such a glut of good fellowship, I could not immediately make out. Also prominently displayed, of course, were the framed diplomas which the Sheriff had won for the cleanliness of his jail. One diploma that caught my eye I determined I must one day steal, I simply had to have it. Some ironic wag had squashed a cockroach on the outside glass, where it remained, and from whence, embalmed in its own juice, it beckoned the beholder in a sort of macabre good-jailkeep-ing seal of approval. I sighed and turned to the Lieutenant.
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“Before we talk about your case, Lieutenant, suppose we talk a little about you,” I said. “Sort of helps a lawyer to get the feel of his case, to sense some of the things that mightn't be in the law books. I believe the psychologists sometimes call this the frame of reference.”
“I wouldn't know,” Lieutenant Manion said.
“We'll pass that. How old are you?”
“Thirty-six.”
“How old is your wife?”
“Forty-one.”
“The newspapers said thirty-five.”
After a pause: “She's forty-one.”
“I see. Is it your first marriage?” The conversation was going fairly like a cablegram.
“No.”
“Suppose you tell me the matrimonial score and save time. Like Sergeant Friday, all I want are the facts, man.”
“Is all this necessary?”
“Suppose you let me be the judge.”
“It's my second.”
“How did the first end?”
“Divorce.”
“Did you or she get it?”
“She.”
“What grounds?”
“Cruelty, eating crackers in bed, that sort of thing.” He paused and
softly stroked his mustache. “The real grounds were she'd found an other man while I was in World War Two. I did not fight the case.”
“I see. In the war did you serve in the European or Pacific theaters?”
“Both.”
“Action in both?”
“Plenty.”
“Decorations?”
“Plenty. Anybody who doesn't cut and run gets those. They're like K-rations.”
“Talking about K, how about Korea?”
“I was there.”
“Action?”
“Plenty. Got there just in time for the big bugout from the Yalu.”
“What's bugout? It sounds faintly lecherous to me.”
“It means retreat.”
“Well, whadya know?” I said. “Any Korean decorations?”
“Plenty.”
Ah, I had a genuine military hero on my hands; one who was not only modest but traditionally reticent as hell, too. And wouldn't he look nice in court all decked out in his ribbons and decorations? I could already see Old Glory fluttering over the jury. “What,” I went on, “what brought you 'way up in this forlorn neck of the woods?”
“Well, after the Korean cease-fire I was sent back to the States. Since then I've been shifted around to various outfits as a special instructor. That's why Laura and I got a trailer.”
“Who's Laura?”