The Dead Man’s Statement

They buried Arlo Wren on a Saturday, in the rain, in Section D of Cedar Hill, a hundred feet from a stone that had a number on it and no name.

There were four of us. Mrs. Penhallow had come in a wheelchair, pushed by a police matron, with a black felt hat on her head that had belonged to her sister. Leo Maddox had put on his dress uniform for the first time since a captain's funeral in 'ninety-nine, and stood bareheaded in the wet, with the brim of his cap clasped to his chest and his big shoulders hunched. Briona Lang had flown up from Washington and stood a little way off with her hands in the pockets of a long dark coat. I had my notebook in my pocket. I had not opened it in six days.

A chaplain from the hospital read the service. He had not known the dead man, and he did not pretend to; he read the words as they were printed, in a soft, uninflected voice, and when it came to the passage about the resurrection he looked up, briefly, at the four of us under the dripping umbrellas, and stopped, and went on.

There were no flowers. I had asked that there should be none, and was ashamed of it afterward. Mrs. Penhallow had a sprig of rosemary, which she held in her lap until the end, and then asked the matron to lay on the lid. The coffin was plain pine. It was lowered on two straps by a pair of groundsmen in green waterproofs, who did it with great gentleness, and who stood back afterward with their caps in their hands, though they had never heard his name.

The clip went in with him. I saw to that. It lay in his folded hands, in its bag, still wound with tape.

When the earth began to fall, Mrs. Penhallow lifted her head. She sat with her clouded eyes turned toward the sound, and her lips moving, and I bent to catch it. It was a Welsh phrase, soft and singing, that I did not know. I asked her afterward what it meant.

"It means, 'Go in peace, lamb,'" she said. "It's what we used to say to the little ones. When we put them to bed."

…

The case was over by Christmas.

I do not say that to boast of it, or to deny the cost. I say it because it is what happened. A man had given a statement in a lit room, forty minutes long, in the presence of a federal agent and an Assistant District Attorney, and it had been taped, and transcribed, and sworn, and signed in a trembling hand on a hospital bed. He had then died. And the question that fell, with all its weight, upon the shoulders of the Court of Common Pleas, was whether a dead man's words could be heard.

They argued it for nine days.

The defense was brilliant. Corbin Pryce, for Dominic Hargrove, and three other eminent lawyers retained in haste by men who had not, until a week before, known that they would need them, brought every argument that a lifetime of study could supply. The statement was hearsay. The declarant was a confessed murderer. The conditions of the interview were coercive: a man in pain, in a locked room, without counsel, in the middle of the night. It was the testimony of a diseased mind, designed to wound.

Julia Reyes answered them, one by one.

She was a small, dark, sharp-featured woman of forty-three who had never lost a case on appeal. She stood at the lectern in a gray suit with her papers in a neat stack and her glasses pushed up into her hair, and she spoke in a low unhurried voice for three hours. She did not mention justice. She mentioned a rule of evidence that is older than the Constitution: that a man who knows he is about to die has no motive to lie.

He had sworn on the Bible, she said. He had been warned, by the doctor, in plain words, that his chance of surviving the week was less than one in four. He signed it. He signed every page. And he did not say one word that might have saved him.

He named the men who bought the silence of a child's death, and he gave the date and the sum. Where he could not say the amount, he said so. Where he did not know the name, he said that too. And every fact that he stated that could be checked has been checked, and found correct.

She turned, with her papers in her hand, and looked at the bench.

Your Honor, I have heard a great deal in this room about the character of the declarant. I know what he did. I have read the file. But I would ask the Court to consider one thing only. That a man who has spent fifteen years in the dark, and who stood at last at the foot of his own grave, chose to use his last hour to tell the truth.

The judge took it under advisement. He took forty minutes.

The statement was admitted.

…

I was in the room for the first three arrests. I did not ask to be. Leo had come to my flat on the Monday after the funeral, a little before dawn, with his coat over his arm and a cardboard cup of coffee in each hand, and had stood in the doorway and said, "You coming?" And I had found that I had my shoes on.

Edsel Whitmore was first.

He lived in a long low house of gray fieldstone in Bryn Mawr, with a lawn like a billiard cloth and a copper beech and a Labrador that barked once and lay down. He came to the door in a quilted dressing gown. He was eighty-one, thin, upright, with a long pale benevolent face and a fringe of white hair, and a manner of such courteous composure that I thought, for a moment, we must have the wrong address. He looked at the warrant. He looked at Leo. He said, "I have been expecting this for fifteen years."

He said it without any emotion at all, as one remarks upon the weather.

"Would you like to put on a coat, sir?" said Leo.

"Thank you. I should."

He went upstairs to dress, and a patrolman went with him. And I stood in the hall, on a Persian rug, among the framed photographs of rowing eights and the portrait of a founder in a stiff collar, and I looked at the long table by the stair. On it, in a silver frame, was a photograph of a boy of eighteen in a blazer, with a lovely face, holding a trophy. Beside it there was a candle, lit, in a glass.

I have wondered since what the candle was for.

…

Elmer Crandall took longer. He had a lawyer's instinct for the telephone, and had made three calls before we reached the lift of the building on Walnut Street where he kept his offices. But he had made them to the wrong people. The first was to a man who had died in August. The second was to a man who put the receiver down. The third was to Frank Holt.

I had it from Briona, afterward. She had been on the other end of the line.

"It was a tap," she said. "A court order, three days old. I had two agents in a van on Locust Street listening to every call that came in or out of that building. And at ten past six that morning the phone rings, and it's Crandall, and he says, 'Frank, they're coming.' And there's a silence, a long one. And then Frank says, in that voice of his, that soft kind voice—" She stopped. "He says, 'I know, Elmer. I'm sorry.'"

"Is that all?"

"He said, 'I'd have liked it to be different.' And he hung up."

I thought of a bench at the end of a pier, with a hat on a man's knee. But I did not say it.

Holt did not run. That was the great surprise. He had a passport and a car and a number of friends in a number of countries, and a sum of money in a bank in Grand Cayman that would have kept him in comfort for forty years. He did none of them. He remained in his office on the ninth floor with the door open, and when the agents came for him, at a quarter to nine, he rose from his desk with the dignity of a man about to deliver a speech, and put on his gray overcoat, and held out his wrists.

"I should like to say," he said, "that I am sorry for the trouble."

Nobody answered.

"I did not intend that any of it should reach so far." He looked, gravely, from face to face. "I was asked to do a small thing, once, by people I trusted. It seemed a small thing. One does not see the whole of a road, you know, when one is standing at the first step."

His right forefinger was going against the seam of his trousers. I counted. I could not help it.

Seven, in ten seconds.

…

Hollis was taken at Cape May, at breakfast, on the porch of a white clapboard guest house that overlooked a gray sea. He was seventy-one. He had a plate of eggs and a copy of the Press of Atlantic City and a pair of reading glasses on a cord. He looked at the badge, and the paper, and the face of the young agent who held it, and set down his fork with a small precise click.

"Is it about the girl?" he said.

It was, they told him.

He nodded. He took off his glasses, and folded them, and laid them on the folded newspaper. He did not say another word until the car.

I was not there. I have the account from an agent, who was. He said that, as they went down the steps of the porch, the old man stopped at the bottom and looked out toward the water. It was low tide. The beach was empty. A single gull stood in the surf. And Dr. Harold Hollis, who had signed the death of a hundred children and a thousand men, stood there in the thin morning wind with his hands cuffed in front of him, and said to nobody, in a wondering voice:

"I always thought it would be louder."

…

The papers ran her name on the front page.

It was the Inquirer, on the Sunday after the arrests, and it took up the whole of the top half of the page. It was a photograph that had been found in the files of the Friends Meeting, taken at a Christmas party in the year before she died. A small girl in a gray coat sat at a table with a paper hat on her head. She was not looking at the camera. Her face was tilted a little upward, toward a sound, and her eyes were wide and gray and soft with attention, and she was smiling at something just beyond the frame.

The headline said: STELLA.

Underneath, in smaller type: She was nine. She was blind. She was called for four hours and nobody came.

I read it on a bench by the river, at seven in the morning, with a paper cup of tea beside me. I read every word. I read the long account of the cellar, and the dogs, and the cover-up, and the name of the boy who had pieced it all together and paid for it with his life. I read that the Sunflower House property would be turned into a garden. I read that the Mayor had announced an inquiry, and the Governor had called for resignations, and that a petition with three hundred thousand names was before the Legislature to change the law on sealed files.

I put the paper down.

The river was gray and wide. A rowing eight went by, very fast and silent, eight small figures bent to the oars. A gull cried.

I took the pen from my pocket and held it in my fingers, and for a long moment I did not click it. I thought of a man with a yellow clip in his hand, saying, I'd like it to have her name on. I thought of a stone that now had one.

It was, by every measure that a court would use, a victory.

And I sat there until the tea went cold, and I could not feel it.

…

THE END — Ending 7 of 8: Dead Man's Statement

A true account is worth little if it costs the life that could have been saved.

You let a dying man finish his story, and the story was enough: the powerful were named, tried and convicted, and a child finally has her name in the paper. But the poison was treatable, and the clock you spent listening was the clock he did not have. You gave the truth its day in court. You did not give Arlo his life.

There are seven other endings. Go back to Chapter 54 to choose differently.