Anatomy of a Murder Read Online Free

belong to the Indians. Instead it now belongs mostly to the Iron Cliffs Ore Company and the other smaller mining companies and, what’s left over, to the descendants of the Finns and Scandinavians, the French, Italians and Cornish, and the Irish and handful of Germans (including Grandpa and Grandma Biegler), who luckily landed here many years before an all-American Senator named Patrick McCarran, ironically himself the descendant of immigrants, had discovered that these yearning peoples were henceforth more properly to be known as quotas, and had run up a tall legislative fence around Ellis Island.
    So at forty I had found myself without a job, my main assets consisting of my law degree, a battered set of secondhand law books and some creaking old fly rods. Mitch had been a veteran and a hero; I had been a mere 4F and a bum. For quite a while I was pretty bitter about being beaten by a young legal fledgling who hadn’t even tried a justice court fender case when he knocked me
off. For a time I indulged in wistful fantasies about the plight of the poor left-at-home 4F in America. Nobody seemed to have a kind word or vote for him; he was the country’s forgotten man—he who had remained at home and kept the lamp lit in the window; he who had patriotically bought all those nice interest-bearing war bonds with his time-and-a-half for overtime, who had stayed at home and resolutely devoured all those black-market steaks; he who stayed behind and got a purple nose instead of a Purple Heart; yes, he who had occasionally reached over and turned down the lamp in the window and attempted to console all those lonely wives and sweethearts … .
    For a spell I even dabbled with the heady notion of organizing a sort of American legion of 4F’s. We’d have an annual convention and boyishly tip over buses and streetcars and get ourselves a national commander who could bray in high C and sound off on everything under the sun; we’d even get a lobby in Washington and wave the Flag and praise the Lord and damn the United Nations and periodically swarm out like locusts selling crepe-paper flowers or raffle tickets or so ne damned thing, just like all the other outfits. “Arise and fight, ye 4F’s!” their leader Paul Biegler would cry. Were we men or were we mice?
    By and by the pain went away, however, and as I sat there in my open office window looking down upon the deserted street I reflected that I wouldn’t take my old D.A. job back again if they doubled the salary. No, not even if they threw Mitch in as an assistant. Being a public prosecutor was perhaps the best trial training a young lawyer could get (besides being a slippery stepping-stone to politics), but as a career it was strictly for the birds. I fumbled for and ignited an Italian cigar (one never merely lights them) and fell to musing about my old Irish friend Parnell McCarthy.
    I have called Parnell McCarthy an Irishman and perhaps I had better explain. In the polyglot Upper Peninsula of Michigan calling a man, say, an Irishman is rarely an effort to demean or stigmatize him—black eyes lie richly strewn that way—but rather an effort at description, a painless device for swiftly discovering and assessing the national origins of a person’s ancestors to the simple end of getting along together. Offense is neither intended nor taken. Thus a man named Millimaki is generally known and indeed more often describes himself as a Finn, though his mother may have been a Cabot and his ancestors on both sides have fought at Valley Forge;
and thus a Biegler is hopelessly stamped a German, as often called “Dutchman,” though some of his ancestors may alternately have toiled and prayed in the leaky galley of the Mayflower.
    So Parnell McCarthy was an Irishman, though he was born in the shadow of a mine shaft in Chippewa, and had once possessed, so my mother Belle had told me, one of the loveliest soprano voices of any altar boy