Anatomy of a Murder Read Online Free Page B

with the War Cry , who popped his head in my door with his Salvation Army cap awry and said in a voice quavering with fervor, “May the Lard bless yew an’ ’Appy New Year to yew, Sire.”
    â€œAh, Happy New Year to you, General Booth,” I croaked morosely, feeling very noble and very sorry for myself. “Please take the typhoid sign off the door as you leave.”
    â€œTyphide sign, typhide sign?” the General murmured, mystified, as he picked up his weekly quarter and fled. I grinned evilly at my framed law-school diploma on the far wall.
    I was learning the hard way something that people who have never held public office can perhaps never adequately realize: the feeling of utter forlornness and emptiness that sweeps over a man when he is finally beaten at the polls. And the longer he has been on the job the worse, not better, it is. This morbid feeling is beyond all reason; it
is both compulsive and a little daft. One’s last friend has deserted him; the entire community has conspired to ridicule and humiliate him; everyone is secretly pointing the finger of scorn and hate at the defeated one. All day long desolation was mine and I wallowed in it. By mid-afternoon I sighed and pressed the buzzer for Maida.
    â€œI thought maybe you’d taken the gas pipe,” Maida said cheerily as she came in all pert and sassy and shook out her curls and plumped herself across from me with her stenographic pad and a battery of stiletto-sharp pencils. “Are you about to dictate Biegler’s Farewell Address?”
    I laughed, hollowly I hoped, and slid a winkled twenty-dollar bill across the desk. “No dictation, Maida, rather an errand of mercy. Go over to the liquor store and fetch me a fifth of my favorite pilerun. If Socrates could have his hemlock, I shall have the solace of my whisky.” I waved benignly and looked out at the howling blizzard. “Buy yourself a new roadster with the change. Take the rest of the day off to break it in. I’ll hold the fort.”
    â€œThat’s the old fight, Boss,” Maida said, rising. “Such lonely courage is touching. The boss and his faithful bottle. Whisky for Captain Biegler’s chilblains as he stands alone on the bridge and goes down with his ship. His last words were: ‘Saw sub, glub glub.’” Maida had been in the Wacs and she gave me a smart salute as she made ready to go.
    â€œPile it on, Maida, pile it on,” I said. “‘None but the lonely heart shall know my anguish,’” I quoted stoically.
    â€œDon’t forget in your travail, Boss,” Maida said, “that the voters off this county have bought and paid for an elegant ten-year graduate course in criminal law for you—and all for free. Where’s your gratitude? Just think, for defending just one big case now you can get almost as much as you got for prosecuting criminals for an entire year. And no more legal free loaders on your neck reminding you that Yass, I pay my taxes’—anyone who comes in to your office now must be prepared to pay through the nose. And I don’t have to be nice to them. Boy, I can’t wait. I’ll be back in ten minutes with the booze. Thanks for the roadster.”
    Sensible Maida was probably right, of course, as she has an irritating habit of being, and I saw that my main trouble was not so much that I would shortly be an ex-D.A. but rather the blow to my pride in losing the job to an amiable young fellow barely out of law school, one who didn’t know a bail bond from a bale of hay. Why not face it? I was smarting largely because I hadn’t been
smart enough to quit as the retired champ, like Rocky Marciano, but instead had gone to the well once too often, like good old Joe Louis, and had finally, like Joe, been knocked out by an inexperienced newcomer, a newcomer inexperienced in everything, that is, but youth.
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    I had sat listening to the howling wind and