Redemption by Howard Fast Page A

Attorney?”
    â€œNo. The very fact that he’s an old friend mitigates against it. They have too much evidence and too much motive. If Jerry Brown finds motive in a few other women, it might help; but I want you to understand one thing, Ike: as matters stand now, at this moment, they have enough evidence for a conviction.”
    â€œAll circumstantial.”
    â€œIke, for God’s sake, stop being a law professor and start to think like a criminal lawyer. If I had a dollar for every perp convicted on circumstantial evidence, I’d be rich. The woman you love, the woman you agreed to marry, faces the possibility of spending the rest of her life in prison. This is a carefully premeditated murder. The woman—”
    â€œYou keep saying ‘woman,’” I interrupted. “You can’t be sure of that. No one can be sure of that. Why can’t we argue that a man is an equal possibility and my motive is as good as Liz’s. Better, because I don’t share her belief in God’s justice or that vengeance is His. Why shouldn’t I have killed him?”
    â€œAnd used the lipstick? And implicated the woman you love? And sent her to prison? It won’t wash. Anyway, Liz was their decision, and the lipstick makes me agree that a woman killed him. As I said, it was carefully premeditated. The woman made an appointment to see Hopper. She put the gun to the back of his head and ordered him to write a check for cash in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars. Cash, because a name on the check would have given the whole game away, and when he lifted his pen to sign it, she shot him. There’s a beautiful gesture of hate—one hundred thousand dollars worth of hate.”
    â€œLiz didn’t kill him:”
    â€œNo, and that’s what we’re going to prove. We’ve talked enough tonight. I’m going home. I’ll see you tomorrow, and we’ll look at that space in the Woolworth Building.”
    Sarah left, and I turned off the lights and went into my bedroom. Liz had closed the door and was huddled under the covers and I thought she was asleep. I undressed quietly, but when I crawled into bed, she opened her eyes and kissed me.
    â€œHow is the headache?”
    â€œAll right now. The truth is, Ike, I couldn’t talk about it anymore, and I didn’t want to hear you and Sarah talk about it, so I closed the door. Hold me in your arms, Ike, please—I’m so frightened.”
    I took her in my arms, her head on my shoulder.
    â€œIke, so many times I thought of him dead, of being released from my fear of him—in my heart, I wanted him dead. I have to face that.”
    â€œNo, you don’t have to face it and you don’t have to think anymore about it.”
    â€œI love you, Ike.”
    â€œI know you do.”
    â€œYou don’t have to marry me, Ike. If you didn’t want to marry me after all this, I’d understand.”
    â€œI want to marry you—more than I ever wanted anything.”
    â€œAnd you don’t think I’m a murderer?”
    â€œI don’t think nonsense, and you’re talking nonsense.”
    She fell asleep in my arms, but sleep did not come so easily for me. Suspicion is an ugly little monster that crawls through your brain and leaves dirty bits of doubt behind. Was it conceivable that Elizabeth had murdered this man who had abused her so? To me, it was not, and I can say truthfully that it had never entered my mind except as a seed planted there by others. Did Sarah believe that Liz was guilty? I know that the question of guilt or innocence is not the determining factor in the acceptance of a case by a criminal lawyer—then, what did Sarah believe? Why was she so insistent on putting Liz on the stand and thereby giving the unspeakable Rudge an opportunity to cross-examine? I knew Sarah, or at least a part of her, recalling her statement that no man really knows a woman. But she had