Free A Covenant with Death by Stephen Becker

official. “The state’s case, as you will see, does not rest on any firsthand, eyewitness evidence of the murder. It consists largely of what is called circumstantial evidence. Now: there is a superstition, a wrong belief, a misapprehension, very commonly held about circumstantial evidence. People who do not know the law will tell you that you cannot convict on circumstantial evidence. That is very simply not true. This kind of evidence—that is, evidence that sets the time, place, method; evidence that excludes other possibilities; evidence that is a net, in which it is obvious that the accused is caught, rather than a searchlight pointing directly at him—has been, in more than half the serious criminal cases in which I have been involved, the evidence on which the prosecution based its case. It is not too much to say that without circumstantial evidence courts of law would be paralyzed, and justice would be utterly impossible. The judge will, I am sure, have more to say to you about this later on.”
    Dietrich flattered the jury adroitly. His voice was just barely emotional; he was not leading them on a crusade, but was admitting them as thinking men to the processes, the intimacies, of the law. He was making citizens of them, and the solemnity of their faces proved his success. He went on, discussing the murder itself. He did not point out that the death sentence was mandatory upon conviction; Parmelee would play upon that in his closing statement, in the classic effort to remind men that they were not God and that even a legal execution would leave blood on their hands. Dietrich finished in a low key, reminding the jury that we had not been a state for long but were no longer a territory, and that the existence of law, and of respect for it, was one great difference between barbarism and civilization. The law, and not the visceral preferences of the population: I thought of Gibbon and the wry smile with which he must have written “But patience is not the attribute of zeal; nor can the arts of a court be adapted to the freedom and violence of popular enthusiasm.” He meant another kind of court, but he spoke true.
    Well, Dietrich had a good jury: not crusty old cattle barons or domineering male heroes, but the butcher the baker the candlestick maker, spongy men of the middle class who, taking their wives in adultery, would be more likely to sulk than to shoot. Parmelee would get nowhere with the unwritten law; but I suspected that Parmelee did not intend to bring it up.
    Hochstadter recessed until two o’clock and I went home to lunch, avoiding the Colonel. I had chicken salad and beer, and resumed the morning’s events for my mother. She was somber, for her, but requested details; her Wednesday night mahjongg group, she said, would want to know everything. And she was writing to Ignacio, who missed me.
    By which she meant Rafaela.
    Cousin Ignacio was Ignacio Montemayor, and he was a distant cousin who owned property in the state of Sonora about a hundred and fifty miles southwest of us on an unambitious river. He had a married son, Ramón, and two married daughters, Julia and Marta, and an unmarried daughter, Rafaela. His first wife had died fifteen years before and his second wife, an Indian, about five years before. He had not married a third time. His correspondence with my mother was European: respectful, formal, newsy letters in an elegance of phrase and hand that died with the nineteenth century. We visited perhaps twice a year before the war and then more often; after my father died, my mother took comfort from the bosom of the family, though it was a skinny family and a bony bosom, only Ignacio and Rafaela left to tend the estate. We always hired a car and left early, allowing six hours for travel and minor repairs. We entered Arizona and roared from Douglas to Bisbee to Nogales. At Nogales we rested because we could get a drink just by crossing the street. Nogales must have