The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories

The Way Out

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July 1969.

Stanley didn’t bother to stir on his bunk when he heard the guard rattling keys in the cell door.

“Mr. Graves,” the bulky guard said in a polite tone that even a civilian review board would have approved, “you have a visitor. Fellow wants to talk to you.”

“Tell him to see my secretary for an appointment,” Stanley grunted, his eyes remaining closed.

“That’s pretty good, Mr. Graves,” the guard chuckled courteously. “But this fellow is a lawyer. He wants to take up your case. He arranged his appointment through the judge.”

Stanley lifted the long, thin arm draped across his face. He cracked one eye against the bands of sunlight streaming through the cell window.

Pushing past the uniformed guard was a plump, earnest young man in a gray suit cut in the latest Madison Avenue fashion. He brought into the antisepsis of the cell a hint of good cologne. His necktie, shirt, and shoes were carefully coordinated. His face was round and pink, the kind that men ignore when replaying a golf match at the nineteenth hole. Behind heavy, square-rimmed glasses, his china blue eyes beamed at Stanley with a consciously summoned vitality, optimism, and determination.

The gray-suited figure cleared its throat in a good imitation of a masculine rumble. “Tough spot, eh, Graves? Convicted of a capital crime, gas chamber the next stop, cards all stacked against you. One lone man against the massive Establishment.” The rosebud mouth curled in the best Mittyish mimicry of a John Wayne grin. “But the ball game isn’t over, even in the ninth inning. Right Stanley? We’re not licked yet. We’ll find a way out.”

Stanley raised his head a few inches from the lumpy pillow to study the stranger. Even with the prison haircut, Stanley managed a hippie look. His sprawled body suggested ennui. His gaunt hungry-looking face hung in lines of self-sorrow. His large brown eyes, in the shadows of cavernous sockets, were depthless pools of soul. “Go away,” he muttered. “I didn’t smoke any signals. I got no bread to fee a lawyer.”

“That doesn’t matter,” the lawyer said generously. “You’re in trouble. Forty-three days from today the state is going to gas the life out of you for the crime of murder. Nothing else counts.”

“You’re telling me?” Stanley said. He fell back and stared at the ceiling light in its wire-mesh cage. “Why come in here and rake up old leaves, Mr. Whoever-you-are? What is your name, anyway?”

“Cottrell,” the plump young man said. “Leonard Cottrell. Of the SPCD.”

“Never heard of it.”

The guard coughed politely. “Take all the time you need with your client, Mr. Cottrell.” The turnkey eased from the cell, locking the door.

Leonard Cottrell frowned at Stanley’s indolent form. “We’re quite well known, Stanley. Society for the Protection of Civil Dissent Nonprofit organization. Funded with a trust set up by an old lady who lived alone with three cats.”

Stanley shifted on the thin mattress, facing the bleak stone wall a few inches away.

Leonard studied Stanley’s curled spine and bony shoulders. He shook his head slowly. “Monstrous — the way a heartless society can break a man’s spirit. But cast off this despair, my friend. Yours is exactly the type of case that interests us most. Come on, Stanley, where is the old pepper?”

“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,” Stanley muttered. “Get a load of this guy.”

Leonard looked about for a place to sit down. The only seat was a wooden stool of questionable size for his ample bottom. He eased onto it, still looking at Stanley’s back.

“We’ve reviewed your case, Stanley, but a legal record skims the essence of man. Right? It would help if I knew everything there is to know about you as an individual, a man, a suffering human being.” Stanley said nothing. Leonard waited, gradually pursing his lips. “Hmmmm. Just as I suspected. This job has many facets. They’ve really crushed your personality, haven’t they, Stanley?”

“Mr. Cottrell,” Stanley said to the wall, “why don’t you just split? It wouldn’t be like you were copping out. You don’t owe me anything.”

Leonard’s brows escalated. “That’s where you’re wrong, Stanley. ‘Think not for whom the bell tolls...’ If for thee, then also for me.”

“Yeah,” Stanley said. “I know.”

Leonard reached out to pat the knifeblades of Stanley’s shoulders. “Buck up, old man. You’ll feel better as we talk. Believe me, we have a Sunday punch, a way out.”

Stanley inched his head to look at Leonard over his shoulder. “Ah, ha!” Leonard grinned. “I thought that would bring a reaction.”

Stanley’s head dropped back. Again, he was staring at the wall.

“I see,” Leonard murmured. “They’ve so desecrated the inner man that he no longer believes in Sunday punches.”

“Okay,” Stanley sighed. “What’s the Sunday punch?”

“Not so fast.” Leonard waggled a breakfast-sausage finger. “Let’s start at the top. I’m sure your parents are much to blame for your present plight.”

“Yeah,” Stanley said. “They gave me birth.”

“And they were so grossly involved in material things they never had time for you.”

“Nope,” Stanley told the wall. “My mother kept house and darned my socks, and my old man took me fishing and to ball games.”

“Yes... well...” Leonard was wordless for a moment, growing a silent frown. Then he brightened. “Then they spoiled you, smothered you with attention, never gave you a chance to develop in your own way.”

“They treated me like family,” Stanley said. “I was neither spoiled, nor a whipping boy.”

“But surely,” Leonard pleaded, “they scarred your psyche in some way.”

“I don’t think so. I’m the one who left the scars.”

“So that’s it!” Leonard almost tipped his stool over. “In its early contacts with a hostile social environment the organism developed a guilt complex! When did you first start feeling guilty. Stanley?”

“I don’t. Never have.”

“How about the murder of Dominic Asalti?” Leonard prodded.

“He was a sick old man,” Stanley yawned against the wall. “He’s better off.”

Leonard sat plucking the lobe of his ear, looking at Stanley’s back. “I really must understand you. Stanley, if I am to help you. It’s my duty to help, whether you think you need it or not. My duty, my job, my dedication.” His voice notched on an angry twinge. “You’ve no right to spurn me, Stanley.”

“Man. I am so loaded with rights they’re breaking my back.”

Leonard pinched the bridge of his nose. “The higher the obstacle, the greater the sense of fulfillment,” he sighed. He drew in a long breath. “Now let’s get some building blocks in a row, shall we? When did you leave home, Stanley?”

“Four years ago.”

“Couldn’t stand the communication gap any longer, of course.”

“Nope. I just packed up one day and left.”

“But why, Stanley?”

“I didn’t like the taste,” Stanley said.

“Taste?”

“Of life. I thought at first I was looking for something. I mean, I kidded myself by pretending I was looking. Later, I knew the truth. I just couldn’t stand the taste of life. I went a little empty and sick inside every time I thought of the long years ahead. Years of what? Routine. Sticking to a job. Taking the lumps and being satisfied with the rewards. Getting old and full of pain, and then dying, like I had never been. When I was finally honest with myself, I just wanted to spit out the taste.”

Leonard was glowing, fascinated. He stared at the prone figure as if stripping the flesh naked and the flesh to the bones. He was digging into the problem at last. “Where were you when the self-confrontation took place, Stanley?”

“I dunno,” Stanley said. “I guess I placed myself by degrees. No blinding light. No sudden revelation. I drifted out to L.A. first and joined a hippie colony. I listened to the talk, but they didn’t have the answers. They were all ducking, scared of the taste, just like me.”

“Did you have lots of girls, Stanley?”

“Sure. All the same, like programmed dolls on which somebody had turned a switch, all as tired as I was. So I bummed to New York and the east side. Might as well have stayed in L.A. Faces the same. Words the same. The winter was a little colder, that’s all.”

“Drugs, Stanley?”

“Sure. The route. The in thing. Part of the scene, man. Pot, LSD, the hard stuff. But none of it killed the taste.”

“How did you get money to live, Stanley? Steal?” Leonard’s words were eager, dissecting knives. His eyes sparkled. What a case history to mull over and discuss!

“I padded with a runaway chick from Scarsdale,” Stanley said. “She had plenty of bread. She turned on the gas one night while I was out. I came back as the ambulance was hauling her away. Later, I tried the same trip, but I couldn’t cut it. I was running to open the windows before the room was half full of gas. I just couldn’t stick it out.”

Leonard breathed in tremulous excitement. “Was that the only time you tried to kill yourself, Stanley?”

“You kidding? I tried to fall in front of a subway. Couldn’t move, glued to the spot. Went up to a roof top in Atlanta. Couldn’t step over the edge. Peeled a razor blade in New Orleans, but my fingers wouldn’t take it to my wrist.”

Leonard’s head made small movements of incredulity. How warming the knowledge that he was not like this caricature on a jail cell bunk.

“From New Orleans you drifted here, didn’t you, Stanley?”

“It’s all in the record.”

“But I want the little things that aren’t there, Stanley.”

“You’re a sick, meddling old maid, Mr. Cottrell.”

Leonard whitened, then steadied himself. “I understand, Stanley. You’ve been through a horror. You’re facing a worse. Take it out on me, if you like, if it will help.”

“Just go to the record,” Stanley said. “It’s all there. Old man Dominic Asalti wanted to help, too. A real square. He didn’t know anything about the nothingness, the emptiness that even an LSD trip doesn’t fill for long. He had some dough, not much, so I beat him to death and the cops came to my room and found the piece of bloody pipe. The state provided a judge. My folks hired a lawyer. Nobody beat a confession out of me with a rubber hose — but I’m here. And what else did you expect?”

Leonard rose to his full height and shoved the stool back with his heel. In his best stentorian tone, he said, “Truly you are here — but neither forsaken nor forgotten, Stanley. Have faith, the doors will open shortly.”

“Doors of the gas chamber,” Stanley said.

“Never!” Leonard cried. “We shall succor you!”

“But I’m guilty...”

Leonard broke his brisk pacing. “What’s that got to do with it? Guilt or innocence is beside the point.” Leonard’s face flushed even pinker with a sense of impending victory. “The record, you said — and it’s there, in the record — the way out. The fact remains that the officers who came to your room and arrested you entered without your permission and found the murder weapon.”

Stanley began turning slowly on the bunk. Leonard nodded with delight at the first small show of animation.

“That’s right, Stanley, the arresting officers were guilty of illegal entry — not in arresting you, mind you, but in searching your room.” Stanley stood up, eyes glazed, as if trying to comprehend all that was being offered to him.

“You mean,” Stanley said, “the technicality will put the gas chamber on the moon as far as I’m concerned?”

Leonard looked as if he were about to dance a jig and click his heels. His smile was radiant. “I mean exactly that Stanley, fellow human being, victim of a vicious society.”

“How about that?” Stanley said. His hands thrust out, and before Leonard knew what was happening, Stanley’s hands were on his throat.

Leonard emitted a single muffled scream as Stanley cracked his head against the wall.

Stanley was still beating Leonard’s head against the stone when the guard rushed in. Glimpsing the guard’s movement. Stanley quietly turned loose of Leonard’s neck and let the dead plumpness collapse to the floor.

Stanley looked at the guard’s ashen face and noted the trembling in the hand that held the drawn gun. The guard was terribly upset, and Stanley was coldly impersonal about that.

“This time,” Stanley said, “I want you people to be very careful. Don’t make any technical mistakes!”

Then with very tired movements he crossed to the bunk, settled himself, and lay staring at the wall.