The Self Defender

I, John Conway of Conway, Conway, Heimer and Metz, was the natural choice as a defense attorney. She could afford the best, and our families had moved in the same social circles for three generations. She was, after all, Ellen Rackway, nee Ellen Featherstone.

If her maiden name means nothing to you, that isn’t my fault, dear fellow. It merely proves you are unacquainted with the financial pages and the social register.

Knowing her, I would have defended her if she couldn’t have paid a dime. She was a young woman of spunk and determination. She was not afraid to watch the chips fall where they will. She believed in fair exchange, tooth for tooth. Her code included the rule of seeing anything through to its natural, proper, and inevitable end, and she had always lived up to her code.

Lest you jump to the conclusion that her emotional discipline was inhuman, let me hasten to add that in her lifetime she had committed one very human mistake.

She’d married Kevin Rackway.

A few hours after she became a widow, she was conversing with me at police headquarters. I’d naturally rushed over there the moment her phone call had apprised me of the dreadful turn of events.

Although she was in custody, the police were treating her with consideration. Money and prestige do count, you know. Have you ever heard of a millionaire who went to the electric chair?

I was shown into a small office normally occupied by a police captain. Ellen was brought in moments later. The matron retired discreetly, and although the room was guarded outside the exits by policemen, Ellen was afforded her full constitutional right to talk with her attorney in private.

She was lovely, with a healthy, sportswoman’s figure, a forthrightly beautiful face, and a mane of glistening black hair.

“It was kind of you to come so quickly, John.”

“I’m your godfather, remember,” I said. “Now, tell me what this is all about.”

“It’s about Kevin, of course,” she said.

“Ah, yes,” I said as if an unpleasant odor had risen to my nostrils. “I believe you said on the phone that you’re being held in connection with his death.”

“A customary procedure, John, since I killed him.”

“Ellen, really!”

“I not only killed him, but I reported it immediately to the police.”

“You’ve admitted to them—”

“Certainly, John,” she said calmly. “Why should I try to hide it? Wouldn’t the facts inevitably come to light? Better to wash this bit of linen in public and have done with it.”

I was unable to match her calm. I sank to the edge of a chair and drew a deliberately slow breath to regain my composure.

Ellen patted me gently on the shoulder. “I’m very sorry to put you through this, John.”

“Oh, no! Not at all, my dear. But remember one thing. A client should never speak except through her lawyer.”

“I won’t forget, John. But in this instance, it was best this way. You’ll see.”

“I think there is much for me to see. I know none of the details. When did Kevin die?”

“This morning. Shortly before noon.”

“What was the cause of his death, my dear?”

“I struck him on the head.”

“Dear me! With what sort of instrument?”

“A fireplace poker. A rather heavy one.”

“Dear, dear me! Where did this action take place?”

“At my private lodge on the lake.”

“I see,” I said. “When did you and Kevin go up there?”

“We didn’t. At least not together. I went up yesterday afternoon. Kevin came this morning. He knew I was alone in the lodge. He came for one reason only. He came for the express purpose of killing me.”

As she spoke, she seated herself quietly on a chair near mine. With the slight tilt of her head that was characteristic, she gave me a bit of a smile. “Is it all coming too rapidly for you, John?”

“I must admit there are blank spots.”

“I’ll try to fill in everything for you, John. You know that things were rocky between Kevin and me?”

“I didn’t know, my dear.”

“But you’ve heard rumors.”

“I don’t countenance idle gossip, especially about one who is so—”

“It wasn’t all idle,” she said quietly. “In fact, the gossip fell short of the truth. I’d come to despise Kevin.”

I sighed. “I’d suspected as much,” I admitted.

“I think it began before the honeymoon was over,” she mused. “I knew I’d been played for a fool. It had all been an act with Kevin. He’d married me for one reason alone. My money.”

Her brows pulled together slightly. “For my money... A tired, uninteresting phrase when applied to someone else. Quite another matter when you realize it’s happened to you. It cuts where the pain is sharpest. It violates the sanctity and dignity of being a human being. To be married for one’s money, not for one’s self, is much more than merely being victimized, John. Even a common streetwalker feels she is of some value, some necessity to a man. Not so the woman who is married for her money alone.”

“The rotter!” I said. “To subject you, of all women, to such contemptible cruelty!”

“Kevin had barely begun,” Ellen said. “Once he felt that he had a grip on my money, he ceased all pretense. He resumed his affair with Cricket Luden.”

“Cricket Luden?”

“You wouldn’t know her, of course. A tawdry young woman who shared Kevin’s greed. Kevin and I had been married little more than a month when I suspected he was seeing another woman. I followed him one evening. I saw him meet this vulgar little animal. I made discreet inquiries.

“Easily enough, I learned much about them. She wasn’t a whim of the moment, someone he’d met recently. Their relationship went back for a considerable time. Everything between Kevin and me was but a means to get what they both wanted.”

“Did you face Kevin with this knowledge?”

Ellen nodded. “He denied at first that he knew the girl, which made him all the more sickening, as far as I was concerned.”

“But he did admit the truth?”

“Finally — arrogantly, viciously, vituperatively. As only Kevin could be.”

“You should have come to me at that moment, my dear. You needed a lawyer.”

“Kevin dared me to do so,” she said. “He reminded me of community property laws and the legal entanglements the rich can get into when a marriage is dissolved.”

“I see!” The coldness in my voice was meant for Kevin’s memory. “He had you trapped.”

“Yes.”

“Unless you went to court with an iron-clad case of adultery—”

“They were smart. They played it very carefully, John.”

“And any other grounds for divorce would have meant a large community property settlement.” “Yes,” she said.

“You could have afforded it,” I reminded her.

“No, I couldn’t have. Not at all.”

“You gave more than fifty thousand dollars to charity and college scholarship funds last year alone, Ellen.”

“I shall give an equal or larger amount this year.” She stopped speaking and studied me for several long seconds. Her eyes were dark and lonely. “Don’t you understand the difference, John?”

“I think I do.”

“I think you’re trying to understand. But you can’t really, because you aren’t a woman. Only a woman could understand what Kevin had done to me, what he was doing to me that night as he stood and told me sneeringly that I could buy my way out.”

“Unjust,” I agreed. “Horribly unjust.”

Ellen said, “I went through hell, believe me. Then I decided that justice lay only in depriving him of the very thing that had motivated him, the thing he wanted more than anything else. If I’d been humiliated, I would humiliate in return. First, I stopped his charge accounts. That brought on a scene.

“But I stuck to my guns. Then I transferred funds and left him without a joint checking account. The scenes got rougher, but I didn’t relent, even after he struck me with his fist one night.”

“The abominable louse!” I said.

“He was a pauper surrounded by plenty. Everything he’d schemed to get was in sight, but not within his reach. He was reduced to the necessity of coming to me when he wanted money for a pair of trousers.”

“Bully for you, Ellen!”

“In addition, Miss Cricket Luden was becoming impatient, questioning the eventual success of Kevin’s plot.”

“Her ardor was cooling?” I asked.

Ellen nodded. “She had to go to work to maintain herself. It didn’t set well at all. Kevin really wanted her, and he was driven to distraction. At last, the distraction became desperation. He even threatened to filch objects of art from the estate and sell them. I told him to go right ahead. I’d have him jailed, since such items remain in my father’s name.

“Kevin knew I would do exactly what I’d said. For the second time, he struck me. Quite a punch. In the stomach. A hard slapping about the face. I managed to undergo the torture with a laugh.”

“Bravo!” I said.

“I told him that he’d made his bed and now he would lie in it. Quite alone. Quite penniless. No threat, no amount of torture would make me change my mind. He would never get his hands on my money until the day I died.”

“Bravo and ole!” I said.

“The final change came to him then, John. I can’t describe it definitely, not as you describe a color or a view of the seashore. Something in his face, behind his eyes, in his manner when he thought I was unaware that he was observing me.”

“More scheming. A thicker plot,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, the first hint of tiredness in her voice. “I know that now. I knew it at the lake cottage. I told him yesterday that I believed I’d discovered a way to defeat him, to sever myself from him without a community property settlement.

“I drove up to the lake. I’d told the servants, and he learned my destination from them. Today he came. He was prepared to kill me. He had it all figured out. He reviled me. He took delight in telling me how it would happen.

“He was going to make it look as if I’d suffered a fall in the cottage and died alone, without being able to summon medical attention. Miss Luden and a male friend were going to say that he’d been with them at the time of my death.”

“The horror of it all!” I said.

“When he was all finished with his sadistic speech, Kevin advanced on me. I begged him to go away, to forget that such a dreadful thing had ever hatched in his mind. He said no, that he was going to kill me and take pleasure in doing it. I screamed as he reached for me, and I grabbed the poker beside the big fireplace there in the lodge. I... I struck him. He fell. He was dead.”

I took Ellen’s hand in both of mine. “You poor, poor girl.”

“And so—” she expelled a shaky breath — “we are here.”

“Yes,” I said. “But perhaps not for long.”

“Perhaps?”

“You were simply defending yourself,” I said. “Any jury in the land would agree that in this case you were justified. It was a case of a lone woman at the mercy of a murderer. A woman faced with no choice but to try to keep herself from being killed. If we only—”

“If?” she said.

“A single witness.”

A faint smile slipped across Ellen’s lips. “How about a jury box full of witnesses? A courtroom full of witnesses?”

“I don’t catch your meaning, my dear.”

“I’m referring to the tape,” she said. “When Kevin stopped his car outside the lodge, I was in the study off the main room, using the tape recorder to dictate some correspondence. I remember leaving the recorder on when I went into the other room to meet Kevin.

“It’s a very expensive outfit, John, very sensitive, and the scene between Kevin and me took place noisily, as you can imagine. Everything he said to me, the whole of the scene, is in sound on that recorder. If the tape were played before a jury—”

“My dear,” I literally shouted, “we’ll have you out on bail in a matter of minutes. When we play that tape for the district attorney, I doubt that he’ll even insist on the formality of a trial.”

“Are you sure, John?”

“Certain. What a stroke of—” I glimpsed the depths of her eyes. She was also sure. As sure as I.

As if she divined my thoughts, she laughed softly and patted my cheek. “Of course I had to defend myself, John.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “No one can doubt that.”

Not even, I added to myself mentally, if it did take you awhile to goad Kevin into it, my dear.