Helen Read online

  Helen

  Howard Fast writing as E.V. Cunningham

  1

  I could never get used to blinders. Claire wears them, and I suppose you would say that she has the personality for it. She puts the damn things over her eyes and goes to sleep the way a kid goes down a playground slide. I tried them myself once and woke up whimpering that I was blind. Then I got the opaque shades, but that doesn’t beat the desert sun either; there are cracks along the sides, and the sun warps around and cuts into the room like a knife, and the fact is that if you live in the desert, you live in the desert, and that’s all there is to it.

  But last year, when San Verdo became the largest city in the state, we stopped talking about desert. It’s bad public relations to have the largest city in any state sitting smack in the center of a desert, and no reason for it to be there except that there was the stinking little place when they opened the first casino thirty-six years ago. Well, it’s no stinking little place today. It has a population of one hundred and ten thousand people, forty-one schools including a junior college that will be a senior college in another year and a university in five years, two large department stores, and thirty-two casinos, gross take in 1964 over two hundred and eleven million dollars, and numerous other things including forty-three churches and synagogues of various denominations. Nevertheless, it still sits in the desert and the morning sun in the summertime comes up like fire and burns me awake, and there isn’t one damn thing I can do about it.

  This morning it was almost the telephone, but I woke up a moment or two before it rang, and there was Charlie Anderson wanting to know whether he had awakened me or not.

  “Not me but Claire.”

  “Seven o’clock,” Claire mumbled. “What a lousy thing to do!” She sat up with the blinders still on and her blonde hair like straw—which it feels like, incidentally—and said a number of unprintable things—and then the sound of the TV came from Billy’s room, and Claire tore off the blinders and yelled that she would do this and that to him if he didn’t turn off the damned TV.

  Anderson heard it and apologized profusely. “Believe me, I wouldn’t do this, Blake, but I heard you mention that you were driving to Los Angeles today. Didn’t you say that? I mean—I know when you drive you cut out of here at dawn. I was afraid I had missed you already.”

  “I changed my mind,” I said.

  “Then I goofed. Please—”

  “Oh, the hell with it!” I said. “What can I do for you, Charlie?”

  “Drop by and see me this morning. Say about nine-thirty.”

  “About nine-thirty,” I agreed.

  “You know what I would have told him,” Claire said as I put down the phone.

  “I know.”

  “But he holds the hoop and you jump through it.”

  “Sure—I jump through it. Charlie Anderson never did anything for me. I never got business through him, did I? He never even did me a favor, did he?”

  “What he did for you, you paid for,” Claire said, getting out of bed and pulling on a housecoat.

  “So I tell him to go to the devil—because he woke you up?”

  “I don’t really care,” Claire shrugged, going into the bathroom.

  Only it wasn’t quite that way. We were not used up with each other and we didn’t hate each other. Only the edge was gone. You awakened without anticipation and you went to bed without it. I suppose it comes to that in every marriage in due time, and ours was no worse than the next.

  Or better, as I said to myself when I came down to the kitchen for breakfast. Everything is a little sharper, a little clearer when you are shaved and dressed. Claire had put herself together, and she was a pretty, sunburned woman of thirty-two. Billy, four, and Jane, nine, sat at the table eating their breakfast cereal. They were good-looking, well-fed freckled kids, and the kitchen was a modern kitchen, electric oven waist high and set in the wall in a ranch-type house that had cost thirty-one thousand dollars three years before. That’s not bad. That is damn well not bad, and if I wasn’t the best lawyer in San Verdo, I wasn’t the worst either. We lost our tempers on occasion and we shouted at each other. Who doesn’t?

  Claire apologized. She woke up nasty. Other women hit the bottle and others cut gonads, and I could have done a lot worse than Claire. She apologized and I told her to forget it. The kids gurgled happily and ate their breakfast, and after I had my orange juice, I said to Claire,

  “You want to know why Charlie Anderson wants to see me? I’ll tell you why he wants to see me.”

  “Do you know?”

  “I can make a damn good educated guess. You know how Joe Appolonia over at the Desert Haven has been getting the itch with Coster & Kennedy?”

  “Oh, no! Really—Blake, really?” Her voice went up and took on an edge of excitement that reached the kids and made them pause in their gobbling. Well, thirty-five thousand dollars was something to get excited about, and thirty-five thousand dollars a year was what Joe Appolonia paid Coster & Kennedy each and every year to represent him. And Coster & Kennedy were both of them old and tired and stupid and very respectable, and all of these were virtues that Joe Appolonia needed ten years ago but needed now the way he needs the Red Cross or the March of Dimes.

  “I’m making a guess.”

  “Blake, you guess awful good. Do you know what it would mean?”

  “Do I know?”

  “I mean that kind of money. Would they pay you the same retainer?”

  “Suppose it was twenty-five to begin. That’s not peanuts, huh?”

  “Blake, I got so mad at Charlie Anderson.”

  “So he deserved it. Claire—you want to know something?” She put eggs and coffee in front of me and she nodded. The kids were a part of it. They nodded too.

  “All right—just this. So Charlie Anderson feels free to telephone me at seven in the morning. One more year, Claire—one more year—ah, maybe two years, but two years on the outside—two years and when some political hack like Charlie Anderson has the stupidity to call me at seven in the morning, it costs him his job.”

  “That’s the way I like to hear you talk,” Claire said. “It shows confidence. You know something, Blake, I would not give you two cents for a man who does not have confidence. I don’t care what else he has, if he doesn’t have confidence he’s a loser.”

  Maybe I would have been happier if Claire were the kind of girl who was content; on the other hand she pushed me. I knew that she pushed me. It was something I was always aware of. Somewhere along the way, she had made up her mind that she was going to push me right into a million dollars.

  It is fourteen years since I came to San Verdo, fresh out of law school, and still I am not used to summer in the desert. I walked out of the air-conditioned house into the dry, searing heat, and as always it hit me as something new and unexpected, and in the car which stood in the breezeway, I turned on the air-conditioning again and sighed with relief. This was the first air-conditioned car we had owned, and I considered it a good investment. If you can’t buy happiness, you can buy a lot of comfort.

  Driving downtown, I passed Fremont Square, where the city had made its first experiment in public gambling. For years, the casino crowd had screamed “creeping socialism” every time anyone suggested that the city participate in gambling. It was perfectly all right for the state to run the betting at every race track, but let the city hold out a hand for a few thin coins and the cry went up. We had just cut into the edge of that, and now the city had built a bright little pavilion in the middle of Fremont Square—more of a sun shade than anything else—and had installed forty one-armed bandits under it. As far as I was concerned, it was no worse than metered parking space, but a lot of people didn’t think that way, especially the hotel and casino crowd. Yet all it required was a single
attendant to dispense change, and the take was enormous.

  You would not think that people would be out trying their luck at this time of the morning, but there they were, and at least half of the machines were in action. Most of the players were old ladies in their seventies and eighties, but that was very often the case around the one-armed bandits. These might have been somebody’s grandmothers, but right now they sure as hell didn’t look like candidates for baby-sitting. Intent, rapacious, they clawed at the slot machines with their bony hands, fed in the quarters and half dollars, and bared their dental plates with eagerness. As much as I hate people who approach gambling on moral grounds, this sight made me shiver with disgust. I am not the kind who broods about death but Claire would certainly outlive me; it was all too easy to place her there.

  “Let me remind you,” I said to myself, “to avoid Fremont Square.”

  But then, a little later, I said to myself, “The hell with it. So the old biddies have a fling. What harm does it do?”

  I tell you, if you live in San Verdo, an open mind helps.

  Charlie Anderson rates two personal parking spaces, which is not bad when you consider that only ten men in the city administration are in that category. I mean, for a district attorney, he’s sitting up there with the best; and I followed his suggestion and parked in his extra space, well shaded, with the new glass and concrete City Office Building looming over me. The parking attendant waved at me, and the elevator operator said, “Hello, Mr. Eddyman,” and Charlie’s pretty secretary smiled and said, “What about that date you are always talking about or are you all talk and no bite?”

  That’s the difference between being liked and noticed and being disliked and unnoticed.

  “All talk and no bite,” I told her.

  “Go right in.”

  “Now about that date—”

  “You go to hell,” she grinned.

  I went in then, and Charlie Anderson got up from his desk and cut around to shake my hand and welcome me. I would watch Charlie Anderson because I admired his manner of greeting and handling people—not to imitate him but to observe and learn. He made you feel wanted and important. “Don’t ever cut a man down,” he said to me once, “—not unless you are cutting him out of your life for good, and even then think twice about it. You can rob a man of his money, his wife and the coat off his back and still keep him as a friend; but take away his dignity and you got yourself an enemy.” Charlie was a big man, but spare—no fat—and I would guess in his middle fifties. White hair and pink cheeks and handsome enough but not too much.

  He guided me to a chair, gave me a cigarette and fussed over me—which indicated that he was asking for favors and not dispensing them—and there went Joe Appolonia down the drain, but maybe not all the way. No casino owner or owners changed lawyers or did anything else of importance without being in touch with Charlie Anderson—so if it wasn’t now, it would be anther time. Now I would simply increase my score, and Charlie underlined that when he said:

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about the Desert Haven deal—”

  “Because I’d be telling you a lie, Charlie.”

  “Exactly. You know what I like about you, Blake? A quality of no crap. Jesus God, how I hate a man who does it for the glory! I don’t trust him either. There’s nothing wrong with a taste for the big money, and here in San Verdo it’s out in the open. We’re no worse than anywhere else, but short on the crap and hypocrisy. Sure Joe Appolonia talked about you—only yesterday—and give it a little time and he’ll be your client, but he has to let the year with Coster & Kennedy run out. Then when they want to renew, they are too damn proud and ethical to ask. He gives you the retainer, and the word seeps out to the old men. That’s the decent way to do it, the intelligent way.”

  “I can see that,” I nodded.

  “I know you can. Meanwhile, I need a favor from you.”

  “Anything, Charlie,” I said. “I got nine thousand bucks in my checking account. Should I write a check?”

  “Don’t get so goddamn smart about it. I’ll say yes.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “I’ll remember the first time I’m poor. Meanwhile, what about Helen Pilasky? Did you ever run into her when she was around town?”

  “Funny thing—I never did.”

  “That’s not so funny. You don’t move with the crowd she moved with, and that makes sense on your part. What do you know about her?”

  “What I read in the papers. I was in Los Angeles when it happened. I was there with Claire and the kids because some idiot doctor said Claire’s mother was dying. A fat chance, believe me. The old lady will wait us all out.”

  “The Los Angeles papers?”

  “That’s it—and what I heard back here.”

  “I see.” He leaned back in his chair and stared at me thoughtfully. “You know, Blake, she’s trouble for us. We haven’t hanged a woman in this state since 1921—but there are a lot of important people who want her hanged. Hanged! God damn it to hell, we could never get civilized enough for a gas chamber or an electric chair—no, sir—hanging!”

  “If she’s guilty—”

  “Guilty? We’re not discussing guilt or innocence—we’re discussing the public image of this state and this city. We got enough troubles without the humanitarian anti-capital-punishment bunch screaming barbarism. We don’t need that and we don’t want that—”

  “Then don’t hang her.”

  “Don’t be cute with me, Blake.”

  His voice hardened a trifle suddenly, just a trifle, just enough to let me know that I did not go too far. At the same time, I knew that part of the law as well as he did. In our state, a jury verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree left the presiding judge no choice. The death penalty was mandatory. Which explained why almost no woman was ever brought out of a pretrial hearing with a murder-one indictment.

  “I mean,” I said, “why should it be murder one?”

  “You know why—because she murdered with deliberation and forethought.”

  “It’s happened before.”

  “Blake,” he said tiredly, “why do you think I dragged you down here? Sure it’s happened before and we haven’t come in with that kind of an indictment. But this time a slut, a pro, a hustler, a lousy hooker deliberately murders a Supreme Court judge—not any judge either—only Alexander Knowton, one of the most important men in this state—”

  I could have said something about Alexander Knowton, but I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and waited.

  “Well, it’s a headache.”

  I nodded.

  “I want you to defend her,” he said suddenly. “I am going to have the court appoint you to defend her.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “But why me?”

  “Because you’re a good lawyer and because you’re smart.”

  “I’m no criminal lawyer.”

  “And I don’t want a criminal lawyer—if the tag means anything. I don’t want any of those creeps who hang around the courthouse. Criminal lawyers—don’t make me laugh! Who becomes a criminal lawyer in a city like this? The incompetents, the nothings! Now I am asking you to take this case and Judge Allan is asking you—which means that Mayor Thurmer is behind us, and he is asking you.”

  “So I don’t say no,” I sighed.

  “You don’t say no.”

  “You want me to try to get her off?”

  “We want you to put up as good a defense as you can, and maybe the jury will be sweet; but there’s no frame in this either way, no fix and no help because it’s too hot and too many want her dead.”

  “Why? I mean, what’s done is done. You knew Knowton. I knew him.”

  “Why?” He nodded at me. “You know something, Blake—I can’t tell you why. You got to find out, and you will. But I am not throwing a bomb into your lap. You can get her off. A smart lawyer can beat this rap with a jury, and that is what we would like to f
eel you can accomplish. We feel you are smart enough—”

  “And what happens if I crap out and she hangs? Is that the end of me in San Verdo?”

  “Come off it. Be reasonable. We ask for a defense. Put up a good, clever defense and we will be satisfied. And no one will hold anything against you. You have my word on that.”

  I thought about it for a while, and then I said, “Suppose I say no?”

  “Are you thinking about saying no?”

  “Just suppose.”

  “I don’t think you would say no, Blake. I just don’t think so.”

  I shrugged and nodded.

  “Good boy,” Anderson said.

  “Who will be prosecuting?”

  “I will, I suppose.”

  “And this Helen Pilasky—what is she like?”

  “Different.”

  “From what?”

  “Just different.”

  “She’s got to have something going for her if you think I can get her off.”

  “She has.”

  “What?”

  “Herself. Her looks. The way she is.”

  “You said she was a hooker.”

  “She is.”

  “You going to give me an all-male jury?”

  “How the hell can I give you an all-male jury?”

  “How the hell do I get her off?”

  “Take it easy, Blake. Step by step. It’s not as bad as you think, not nearly.”

  2

  The new City Office Building is what they call “curtain construction,” which simply means that they build a solid framework and hang the facing upon it—which in this case consisted of that black-tinted glass that has become so popular in Southern California as well as in our own state. It’s supposed to cut the sun glare without eliminating the light, and I suppose it does just that; but from the outside it is black, and our building with its rectangular construction looked like nothing so much as a coffin standing on end. The old City Building, still standing next to it and now mainly police headquarters and jail, is horizontal rectangular out of concrete blocks, and when the new building appeared next to it, some wit dubbed the pair “Coffin upended and coffin reclining.” Our largest daily paper in town, the Frontiersman, launched an angry campaign against these two ugly symbols of death that loomed over the fair city of San Verdo, but the campaign washed out after the election. The new City Building had cost almost five million dollars, and no one was going to tear it down or change it in the interest of beauty, and when you came right down to it, the “fair city of San Verdo” was a little less than a shining example of civic pulchritude, and the Platinum Mile, with its row of garish casinos and its huge neon billboards, has often been referred to as the most tasteless mass of construction in America.