Waltz Into Darkness

26

“Have a chair, Mr. Durand,” the commissioner said, after having offered his hand.

Durand did so, waited.

The commissioner collected his words, ranged them in mind, and at last delivered them. “I’m sorry. I find that there’s nothing we can do for you. Nothing whatever. And by we, I mean the police department of this city.”

“What?” Durand was stunned. His head went back against the spongy black leather of the chair-back. His hat fell from his grasp and his lap, and it was the commissioner who retrieved it for him. He could hardly speak for a moment. “You — you mean a strange woman, a stray, can come along, perpetrate a mock marriage with a man, abscond with fifty thousand dollars of his money... and.. and you say you can do nothing about it—?”

“Just a moment,” the commissioner said, speaking with patient kindliness. “I understand how you feel, but just a moment.” He offered him the certificate of marriage which he had retained from the previous day.

Durand crushed it in his hand, swept it aside in a disgusted fling. “This... this valueless forgery—!”

“The first point which must be made clear before we go any further is this,” the commissioner told him. “This is not a counterfeit. That marriage is not a mock one.” He underscored his words. “That woman is legally your wife.”

Durand’s stupefaction this time was even worse than before. He was aghast. “She is not Julia Russell! That is not her name! If I am married at all, I am married to Julia Russell, whoever and wherever she may be— This is a marriage by proxy, if you will call it that— But this woman was someone else!”

“There is where you are wrong.” The commissioner told off each word with the heavy thump of a single fingerpad to the desk top. “I have consulted with the officials of the church where it was performed, and I have consulted as well with our own lay experts in jurisprudence. The woman who stood beside you in the church was married to you in person, and not by proxy for another. No matter what name she gave, false or true, no matter if she had said she was the daughter of the President of the United States, heaven forbid! — she is your lawfully wedded wife, in civil law and in religious canon; she and only she and she alone. And nothing can make her otherwise. You can have it annulled, of course, on the ground of misrepresentation, but that is another matter—”

“My God!” Durand groaned.

The commissioner rose, went to the water cooler, and drew him a cup of water. He ignored it.

“And the money?” he said at last, exhaustedly. “A woman can rob a man of his life savings, under your very noses, and you cannot help him, you cannot do anything for him? What kind of law is that, that punishes the honest and protects malefactors? A woman can walk into a man’s house and—”

“No. Now hold on. That brings us back again to where we were. A woman cannot do that, and remain immune to reprisal. But a woman, just any woman at all, did not do that, in your case.”

“But—”

“Your wife did that. And the law cannot touch her for it. You gave her signed permission to do just what she did. Mr. Simms at the bank has shown me the authorization card. Under such circumstances, where a joint account exists, a wife cannot steal from her husband, a husband from his wife.”

He glanced sorrowfully around at the window behind him.

“She could pass by this building this very minute, out there in the street, and we could not detain her, we could not put a hand upon her.”

Durand let his shoulders slump forward, crushed. “You don’t believe me, then,” was all he could think of to say. “That there’s been some sort of foul play concealed in the background of this. That one woman started from St. Louis to be my wife, and another suddenly appeared here in her place—”

“We believe you, Mr. Durand. We believe you thoroughly. Let me put it this way. We agree with you thoroughly in theory; in practice we cannot lift a hand to help you. It is not that we are unwilling. If we were to make an arrest, we could not hold the person, let alone force restitution of the funds. The whole case is circumstantial. No crime has been proven committed as yet. You went to the dock to meet one woman, you met another in her stead. A substitution in itself is no crime. It may be, how shall I say it, a personal treachery, a form of trickery, but it is no crime recognized by law. My advice to you is—”

Durand smiled witheringly. “Forget the whole thing.”

“No, no. Not at all. Go to St. Louis and start working from that end. Get proof that a crime, either of abduction or even something worse, was committed against the true Julia Russell. Now listen to my words carefully. I said get proof. A letter in someone else’s handwriting is proof only that — it is a letter in someone else’s handwriting. Dresses that are too big are only — dresses that are too big. I said get proof that a crime was committed. Then take it—” He wagged his forefinger solemnly back and forth, like a pendulum — “not to us, but to whichever are the authorities within whose jurisdiction you have the proof to show it happened. That means, if on the river, to whichever onshore community lies closest to where it happened.”

Durand brought his whole fist down despairingly on the commissioner’s desk top, like a mallet. “I hadn’t realized until now,” he said furiously, “there were so many opportunities for a malefactor to commit an offense and escape scot-free! It seems to me it pays to flout the law! Why bother to observe it when—”

“The law as we apply it in this country,” the commissioner said forebearingly, “leans backward to protect the innocent. In one or two rare cases, such as your own, it may work an injustice against an honest accuser. In a hundred times a hundred others, it has preserved an innocent person from unjust accusation, false arrest, wrongful trial, and maybe even capital punishment, which cannot be undone once it has taken place. The laws of the Romans, which govern many foreign countries, say a man is guilty until proven innocent. The Anglo-Saxon common law, which governs us here, says a man is innocent until he is proven guilty.”

He sighed deeply. “Think that over, Mr. Durand.”

“I understand,” Durand said at last, raising his head from its wilted, downcast position. “I’m sorry I lost my temper.”

“If I had been tricked into marriage,” the commissioner told him, “and swindled out of fifty thousand dollars, I would have lost my own temper, and far worse than you just did yours. But that doesn’t alter one whit of what I just told you. It still stands as I explained it to you.”

Durand rose with wearied deliberation, ran two fingers down the outer sideward crease of each trouser leg to restore them. “I’ll go up to St. Louis and start from there,” he said with tight-lipped grimness. “Good day,” he added briefly.

“Good day,” the other echoed.

Durand crossed to the door, swung it inward to go out.

“Durand,” the commissioner called out as an afterthought.

Durand turned his head to him.

“Don’t take the law into your own hands.”

Durand paused in the opening, held back his answer for a moment, as though he hadn’t heard him.

“I’ll try not to,” he said finally, and went on out.