The Accused Part 1

The Accused.

by Harold R. Daniels.

Chapter 1.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the accused, Alvin Morlock, is charged with the ultimate crime, the crime of murder. It is the intention of the State to demonstrate, in the course of this trial, that he is guilty and that the degree of his guilt, which it will be your function to fix, demands the ultimate punishment by law. In other words, we charge him with murder in the first degree. Murder calculated. Murder premeditated. Murder ruthlessly and heartlessly committed on the person who had every reason to expect nothing but a cheris.h.i.+ng affection from the accused.

The defense will undoubtedly attempt to arouse your sympathy by attacking the character of the victim of his homicide, Morlock's dead wife. They will tell you that she was extravagant, that she was a slattern and worse. But we will show you that Morlock himself was at least partly responsible for his wife's actions, and I would impress on you that whatever his motives for murder, they in no sense mitigate his guilt. It is not the dead Louise Morlock who is on trial here. It is her husband, and the charge against him is the taking of a human life.

The Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts vs. Alvin Morlock. Opening remarks of Prosecution Attorney Gurney.

Morlock's tenement was the second floor rear of an old sandstone mansion. Once it had been a stately house, handsome in the dignity of spotless windows and immaculate grounds. On an April afternoon he hurried toward its shelter, head bent against the wind that buffeted his slender body. On other days he had felt almost sorry for the house, humiliated now by pigeon droppings and candy wrappers, by discarded cigarette packages and empty bottles that had once held cheap wine and now gleamed dully in the barren hedge. Today he was concerned only with his personal humiliation.

He hurried up the warped stairs to the tenement and let himself in. The door opened from the hall directly into the kitchen, a shabby room with a chromium dinette set looking out of place against oak wainscoting. There was a scattering of dirty dishes on the table. A plate of margarine had half melted into a greasy yellow pool and the bitter smell of reboiled coffee was in the air.

Morlock called, "Lolly?" There was no answer. Lolly--the name which had once denoted affection--now choked in his throat. She was probably downstairs, he decided, and walked into the living room. There was a desk in the room that he used for his own work. She used a drawer in a cheap end table for her correspondence. Morlock opened the drawer and took out an untidy stack of envelopes.

She had made no effort to conceal the mess she had made of their finances. The letters were all there. A slim pile from a department store. Will you please remit? A thicker pile from the appliance store that Morlock had just left. He read through them swiftly. Polite, at first, then insistent. Some of them quite clever in the manner in which they expressed dismay that a trusted customer could so badly disillusion them. From the gas and electric companies there were past-due notices but no letters. They hardly had to dun, Morlock reflected ruefully.

He sat wearily at his own desk after he had gone through the correspondence. In the last hour, the thought that he owed almost eight hundred dollars which he had promised to pay by morning had recurred to him a half dozen times, but with no lessening of its impact. He was stunned, overwhelmed by the personal disaster that had had its beginning only this morning when the hall monitor brought him a note from Dean Gorham requesting that he come to the Dean's office immediately.

Morlock had been discussing the minor British poets for the benefit of a bored and listless cla.s.s in English III when the summons came. After he read it, he had felt no particular alarm although the summons was out of the ordinary. He was not a good instructor; he knew that. He also knew that he was good enough for Ludlow College. He stood up and called to William Cory to monitor the cla.s.s.

In a cla.s.s of louts Cory was the most loutish. In an undergraduate body seemingly more callow and less purposeful than any Morlock had ever instructed, Cory was the most callow. He was not the least purposeful, though, for Cory was apparently dedicated with fanatic zeal and boundless patience to bullying his instructors to the point of mute and hopeless exasperation. Those he could not bully he attacked with seemingly inane questions that had viciously calculated double meanings, with false naivete, and with brutal behind-the-back pantomime.

Cory was older and bigger than most of his cla.s.smates. He was attending Ludlow under the provisions of the GI Bill and this was his protection. The college's financial structure was shaky; the students attending under the Bill were the difference between bankruptcy and a threadbare solvency. There was an awareness of this among the instructors and consequently the Corys were tolerated. Morlock, in turning the cla.s.s over to Cory in his absence, tried to convince himself that he was adopting the policies of the history instructor, Dodson.

"Give the bad ones responsibility," Dodson contended when the instructors were talking shop. "Maybe it will teach them some common sense. If it doesn't it will keep them out of your hair for a while anyway."

Morlock, watching Cory shamble up the aisle, knew that his purpose in picking Cory for monitor had not been the hope of instilling common sense but was based instead on an admission that he feared Cory, and that Cory could embarra.s.s him if he chose, because of that fear.

Cory loomed up beside the desk, a hulking, square-faced man of twenty-three with a lingering rash of acne on his cheekbones. His eyes were green and small, his teeth already in poor condition. He affected a varsity sweater and denim jeans. The cuffs of the sweater were s.h.i.+ny with dirt and grease. Morlock turned his head aside to avoid the smell of perspiration and of underwear not often enough changed.

"Alla right, teach'--I got it," Cory said in a ridiculous imitation of an Italian immigrant. As he spoke, he looked toward the cla.s.s expectantly. Looking for his laugh, Morlock supposed. Getting it, too. The watching faces grinned or smirked dutifully.

Once, in the hall, Morlock moved more hurriedly. He was a gray man--gray suit, gray eyes, light brown hair already starting to retreat from his high forehead. A worried man now that he had time to consider the possible implications of Dean Gorham's note.

Dean Gorham had a receptionist, a part-time student worker, young and pretty in a plaid skirt and cardigan sweater. She motioned Morlock into the inner office when he entered the Dean's suite, and he glanced down at her to see if he could read anything in her expression that might give him a clue to the nature of the crisis that had pulled him away from his cla.s.s. If there was anything at all in her expression, it was the sort of contempt that Morlock was accustomed to seeing on the faces of the student body, and it probably had no relations.h.i.+p to the present circ.u.mstance. He hurried past her and into Dean Gorham's office. '

Morlock had some respect for Gorham as a scholar. Gorham, however, was a big, imposing figure of a man with a Roman profile. His statesmanlike stature had led to his being pushed into administrative a.s.signments where he would be available for public display almost from the time he qualified as a teacher; so that his scholars.h.i.+p had drowned in a tide of paper, leaving him harried and unhappy. He looked up uneasily as Morlock came into the room.

"You, Alvin," he said fussily. "Close the door, won't you, and take a chair."

Morlock, not speaking, pulled up a leather covered chair from against the wall and sat down.

Gorham stood up and walked toward the window, where he stood looking out toward the meager campus with his hands clasped behind his back. He coughed once, started to speak and stopped, and finally turned back toward Morlock.

"This is very embarra.s.sing," he began again. "I don't like to meddle in my teachers' affairs. I don't think I ever have with you, have I?"

Morlock--he had a growing and horrible suspicion now about the reason for Gorham's summons--said, "No, sir."

Gorham beat one fist lightly into the open palm of his other hand. "Maybe it would be easier if you read this," he said. He picked up a letter from his desk and handed it to Morlock.

Morlock said, "Excuse me," before he began reading. The letter was addressed to Gorham in his official capacity as Dean.

Sir, it read.

This is to call your attention to a situation which we feel you will wish to deal with personally in order to avoid undesirable publicity. A teacher at Ludlow, Mr. Alvin Morlock, is very much in arrears in his payments on several appliances purchased by him from us on our time contract plan. Repeated letters to Mr. Morlock have gone unanswered. Before taking legal action we are taking this means of attempting to reach an agreement as to prompt payment by Mr. Morlock. We shall appreciate hearing from you on this matter without delay.

The letter bore the heading of a local appliance store. When he had finished it, Morlock's reaction was shameful embarra.s.sment. He wished for a moment that he were dead--anything rather than be in this room with Gorham and his own humiliation. He mumbled, "I didn't know, Dean Gorham. There must be some mistake."

Gorham s.n.a.t.c.hed at the straw eagerly. "Of course. Of course," he agreed. "Those things do happen." While Morlock listened dumbly, he began to relate some anecdote about a bank deposit he had himself made which had been credited to the wrong account. There had been no mistake. He knew it and he was certain that Gorham knew it. The Dean was, in his way, trying to restore his dignity, as if his own self-respect had dwindled because he had been forced to shatter Morlock's.

Gorham, from a sense of duty, continued, "Of course, being teachers we are very vulnerable, Alvin. Caesar's wife, you know," he added with heavy-handed good humor. The Dean sat down behind his desk. "You've been married three months or so, isn't it?"

Morlock nodded.

Gorham said, "I thought so. Of course, there are expenses involved in setting up a household and sometimes it is difficult. At the same time, we must be very careful to avoid things like this, particularly since the college's own situation--" He continued hastily, "Of course, in this case it is a mistake. Clerical error probably. You'll take care of it then?"

Morlock rose. "This afternoon," he said. He turned and would have left the room but Gorham called to him.

"Alvin. I don't have much but if I can help--"

The unexpected kindness shook Morlock more deeply than his shame had. He tried to speak and could not. Instead he shook his head and rushed from the room, past the receptionist and down the hall to his own cla.s.sroom. He paused to regain his poise before he entered the room; when he did enter, Cory was talking to the cla.s.s, telling some dirty story. Morlock said, "That will do, Cory. You can return to your seat."

Cory stood up indolently. "Alla right, teach'," he said in the same moronic affectation of an accent. Morlock, infuriated, shouted, "Oh, for G.o.d's sake, Cory, stop being a jacka.s.s."

His glance was turned toward the cla.s.s when he called out to Cory. He was surprised to see among the sly, antic.i.p.atory smirks a few smiles of congratulation, admiration, perhaps. He a.s.signed a chapter for study and forgot the incident in planning what he would say, to Louise--or Lolly, as she called herself. It was not in him to rail at her or to demand any explanations; he accepted this at the same time that he admitted there was no other way to reach her short of physical violence. He had tried sarcasm and it had withered in the face of her stupendous lack of sensitivity. And Morlock was disarmed by his own sense of guilt. He had known--or at least he should have known, he reflected in the drowsy cla.s.sroom--that she was incapable of handling money or any responsibility. But in the first days of marriage he had tried to see her irresponsibility as a rather charming naivete. When he could no longer maintain the absurdity that she was naive, he had still hesitated to destroy the illusion, and with it his marriage that he had counted on so heavily. He had once thought, a little desperately, that she would gain a sort of a.s.surance through his trust in her. And now with that hope gone, he could not bring himself to ask her why she had not paid the bills, why she had not told him of the dunning letters. She would react in one of two ways. She would become sly and sullen, probing to find out how much he knew. Or--and this was much worse--she would become kittenish. Daddy is mad at mother for spending his money?

Morlock remembered quite clearly the circ.u.mstances surrounding her a.s.sumption of the family funds. Three days after they were married he had handed her a check--it amounted to seventy dollars--and asked her to cash it for him on the following morning. When he came home from the college on the next day she handed him some bills.

"I paid another week on the rent," she said brightly. "And I have to do some grocery shopping tomorrow. Do you want to give me the money now?"

The marriage was new enough so that this seemed a kind of sharing and a bond. He had meant to give her a few dollars for housekeeping expenses but he kept only a few dollars for himself and handed the rest back to her. "You might as well pay all the bills," he said. It was this demonstration of faith that he hated to take back in spite of a growing distrust.

Dismissing his thoughts of Lolly, Morlock decided that he would have to stop at the appliance store and find out exactly how much he owed--which brought up another problem. Somehow he would have to get money. From a bank, perhaps, although he did not have the slightest idea of how money was borrowed from banks. Or from one of those companies that advertised in the papers interminably: Pay your bills. The money you need in one hour. Morlock resolved to stop at the appliance store and then at the bank. But he would not tell Lolly. He felt a moment's panic at the thought that there were probably other creditors besides the utility companies. The grocer. The butcher. He rea.s.sured himself that she would have kept those paid, otherwise they would have no service, but he did not make a convincing case of it.

Prosecution Attorney Gurney: You have given your name as George Gorham and your occupation as being Dean of Ludlow College. What relations.h.i.+p did you have with the accused?

Gorham: As an instructor in English Literature he was under my administration.

Gurney: He wasn't a professor?

Gorham: Mr. Morlock did not have enough academic credits to qualify for the t.i.tle.

Gurney: I see. Did you consider him competent?

Gorham: I considered him competent, yes.

Gurney: Competent for Ludlow College, you mean?

Gorham: I fail to see-- Gurney: Isn't it a fact that Ludlow College barely meets the minimum standards for recognition by the National Board of Regents?

Defense Counsel Liebman: Objection, Your Honor. The status of Ludlow College is irrelevant.

Presiding Justice Cameron: Sustained.

Gurney: Let it go. This backwater college, then-- Cameron: That will be enough, Mr.: Gurney.

Gurney: Mr. Gorham, as Dean of the college did you ever receive requests from Morlock's creditors asking you to make him pay his bills?

Gorham: I did receive such letters.

Gurney: Did he pay his bills?

Gorham: I a.s.sume that he did.

Gurney: The letters stopped coming?

Gorham: Yes.

Gurney: Then you had the right to a.s.sume that he had paid them. Do you know where he got the money?

Liebman: Objection.

Cameron: On what grounds, Mr. Liebman? I would think the subject pertinent.

Gurney: I will be glad to rephrase the question, Your Honor. Mr. Gorham--should I refer to you as Dean Gorham, by the way?

Gorham: The t.i.tle is an academic courtesy only.

Gurney: Dean Gorham, then. Is it a fact that Ludlow College carries a family life insurance policy on each of its instructors?

Gorham: It is not. The firm that carries the college's large policies makes available a small policy at low rates to faculty members. The college shares the cost with the individual faculty members.

Gurney: Did Alvin Morlock have such a policy on his life and that of his wife?

Gorham: He did.

Gurney: What was the face value of the policy?

Gorham: One thousand dollars.

Gurney: Do you know how much money Morlock owed at the time of his wife's death?

Gorham: Certainly not.

Gurney: But you do know that he was heavily in debt and that he was being hounded by his creditors.

The Commonwealth of Ma.s.sachusetts vs. Alvin Morlock. Direct testimony of George Gorham.

It was only half-past two when Morlock stopped in front of the immaculately gleaming facade of the appliance store. Embarra.s.sment and shame waited for him in the building, and he hesitated before he entered. He had been here once before when Lolly had picked out a television set and a refrigerator and a stove. In that order, he remembered wryly. And the largest television set, the smallest refrigerator and stove.

He shook his head silently at the clerk who came to meet him and walked toward the back of the store where a green neon script sign marked the credit department. A fat woman with a sour expression came to her side of the waist-high counter. When he gave his name she said, "Just a moment, please," and went into a tiny cubicle of an office. She did not come out again. Instead, a tall, very thin man came out and walked to the counter.

The thin man said disapprovingly, "I'm the credit manager, Mr. Morlock. I've been waiting for you to come in about your account."

Morlock knew instinctively that this man would not make or permit any face-saving pretenses. He was holding a manila folder with the word Delinquent stamped on it in red ink, holding it in such a manner that the letters leaped flamboyantly to the eye. Morlock had half planned some evasive explanation, but he said instead, "I'm here. How much do I owe you, please?"

The credit man had expected the evasion, the lie. There was a routine to affairs such as this, Morlock supposed. The deliberate display of the red brand on the folder. The calculated air of disapproval. Next would come hinted threats. The credit man frowned at the folder.

"You realize, of course, that since you are delinquent the entire balance is due. We are prepared to forgo immediate payment of the whole amount if you bring your payments up to date, Mr. Morlock."

What dignity Morlock could now salvage depended on liquidating the entire bill. He plunged ahead obstinately. "The total, please."

The credit man opened the folder. "Two months delinquent," he said. "The balance due as of today, with interest, amounts to seven hundred and sixty dollars."

Lolly had made no payments whatsoever, then. Morlock, with no head for figures, remembered vaguely that the original total had been something over eight hundred dollars of which he had paid ten per cent at the time of the purchase. He had been appalled at the amount then; he was overwhelmed now by the prospect of the immediate payment of such a large amount of money. There had been, in his youth, no money for luxuries. The salary he received from Ludlow College had seemed like a great deal of money after the long years of privation when macaroni and cheese had been a dinner and hamburger a banquet. He had even been able to save a little before his marriage. What, in G.o.d's name, had she done with it?

"I'll be back in the morning," he said to the thin man, and left the store.

He had walked home after convincing himself that it was too late to stop at the bank, and found that Lolly was not home.

At four o'clock she had still not returned and Morlock went into the bathroom to shower and shave, finding a kind of peace in the rituals of habit. She had still not returned when he finished dressing and he wandered into the living room, picking up a book. It did not hold his interest, and he heard her footsteps in the hall before she slammed the kitchen door behind her.

Lolly came to the door of the living room and stood silently looking at him. He had had enough practice in the last few weeks to enable him to gauge her condition with a nice precision. Her face was slightly flushed but placid enough at first glance. On closer inspection, there was a strained tightness to the muscles of her jaw and chin and the pupils of her brown eyes were contracted. He didn't overlook the slight swaying of her body.

"h.e.l.lo, Daddy," she said archly. There was a bright fleck of saliva at the corner of her mouth.

"h.e.l.lo, Louise," Morlock said. He decided against bringing up the matter of the unpaid bills now. Her present mood was as unstable as it was unpredictable. She might interpret the most innocent phrase, the most meaningless gesture, as a slight. When that happened she was capable of flying into a murderous fury, beating him down with obscenities. Lately he had begun to wonder if the violences were genuine, but whatever they were, he had no stomach for them.

She walked carefully into the room. "I was downstairs with Anna," she said lightly. "Does Daddy want his supper now?"

He shook his head. "I'm not very hungry," he said. "I'll get something for myself by and by."

She said, "Oh." And, after a moment, "I think I'll go back down and see Anna then. Maybe we'll go to a show."