Mystery fiction; Trials (Murder) -- Fiction; United States -- Fiction
There was the not quite musty flavor of the little front hall: Cecil
didn't like it but would have disliked its absence. At every homecoming
there was the confidence, as he stumped into the shabby living-room,
that Mrs. Wilks would have left everything just so before retiring to
her world upstairs, except that of course she'd never learn not to put
match-cards in ash trays. Some time the long sorrow that Mrs. Wilks
lived with upstairs--a husband paralyzed for twenty years, unable to
walk or feed himself, not quite able to die--would arrive at an end.
Like all sorrow. Cecil had not gone up last night for his usual visit
and chess game with Tom Wilks. Too late; too tired.
Now in the bleak courtroom remembering the night, relaxing in his chair
beside Callista, still feeling thirty cents' worth of virtue for having
resisted the siren voice of mince pie for lunch, Cecil Warner
remembered--suddenly, like a reward of effort--one of the answers his
mind had given him during the hours before he could sleep. Perhaps it
was the only answer worth remembering out of many. There had been many,
some no better than mumblings of fatigue. That one had come to him by
the mind's magic when the night beyond his window was in a moment of
supreme clarity and peace, and Trinity's delicate chimes had struck the
morning hour of two o'clock, and the wind died: _The defense never
rests._
The air was still today, pure and sharp, the sky a clean splendor above
the smear of the city. Something of it could be felt through the high
eastern window behind them. Callista would have looked upward into that
strong blue of infinity through the detention cell bars. She liked the
brilliant days. They would enrich her artist's vision, he supposed,
revealing depth and detail that duller eyes saw without seeing. A
pleasant day, a good (light) lunch, and T. J. Hunter at the moment
engaged in nothing more harmful than getting a police technician's map
of the Shanesville properties admitted in evidence. A fine map,
laboriously honest. Nothing required right now except an outward
appearance of grumpy indifference suitable to the Old Man.
His gaze passed over the Twelve, the ordinary, respectable, appalling
faces, and turned aside. He studied his blunt, unskillful hands,
examining the blur of an old scar. A small racing unthinking motion of
Terence Mann's fingers up yonder reminded him of the last occasion when
he had spent an evening at Terence's apartment. Quite a while ago--July,
he thought, anyway some time before Callista's trouble. A hot evening,
Terence reviewing some of his Army habits of speech when the old
building's air-conditioning unit goofed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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