Free A Covenant with Death by Stephen Becker Page B

I said.
    â€œMmm. I hope it’s not. But what else? What a bad thing. Will they hang him?”
    â€œIf he’s found guilty he has to hang. It’s the law.”
    â€œA bad law,” he said. “Maybe not. She has no brother to do it, and her father is an old and weak man. I saw him.”
    â€œYou think private revenge is better than the law?”
    He considered. “I don’t know. When the law does it, everybody shares. The law does it for you and me. But you and me, we don’t really care about that woman. We weren’t really hurt that she died.”
    â€œYes we were. Because it could have been us. Anybody. For different reasons. She died for all of us.”
    â€œWell now,” he said, “for all of us? You make her sound like the Christ.” He plunged into the thicket of children and extinguished the fire. “All right,” he called. “First, one for everybody. Then you can fight for the rest.” The dogs had drifted off. “You know who is most nervous?” he asked me.
    â€œWho?”
    â€œWillie Waite.”
    â€œMy God. I never even thought of him.”
    â€œHe was drunk again last night. Which is not unusual, but he looked bad.”
    I sighed. “He gets paid for it, but I don’t suppose that makes much difference.”
    â€œA pension. Until now it was a pension. More than a dollar a day for doing nothing. But you’re right. The money doesn’t help.”
    Willie Waite was about forty-five, with a slattern for a wife and two unhealthy little children. He had been a ranch hand, salt digger, prospector, guide, dishwasher, handy man, hostler, and even, in days long gone, towel boy at Consuelo’s, an establishment of blessed memory of which I will have more to say. He was a man of no accomplishment, no character, no eccentricity; he was just Willie Waite; and he was also the official, state-appointed, one-and-only hangman of Soledad County. The hangman has never been in demand socially, and the old custom of hiding him behind a black mask was a good one. With the mask he was anonymous and therefore surrogate for us all; without it he had his own identity and absolved the rest of us. With it he could do his day’s work and go home and tell his friends he’d been fishing; without it he had no friends. It was, come to think of it, not much different with soldiers, or anyway enlisted men; we paid them to do our killing and then locked up our daughters when they came to town. They were crude and not civilized like the rest of us and did not have a home with a garden. I had not seen Willie Waite for months. He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and, some said, the junior kleagle or whatever in our county.
    â€œLet’s go in,” Juano said.
    â€œIt’s full,” I said. “Have you got a seat?”
    â€œA cousin,” he said. “He was there this morning. This afternoon I take the seat and he goes back to work. Luis Nava. You know him. The bean merchant. He runs the cockfights.”
    â€œI know him,” I said. “I think he is my cousin too in a complicated way.”
    Juano clapped me on the back. “Let’s go, cousin.”
    Dietrich spent an hour or so establishing Louise Talbot’s presence—and the probable absence of anyone else—at the house on the evening of the murder. (It was here that Mrs. Orville Moody contributed her observations, and the Colonel, and Henry Dugan.) He was working chronologically with his witnesses, establishing the time and place and mood before he even established the crime. Helen Donnelley took the stand late that afternoon and I saw for the first time that she was attractive, almost beautiful; overlooked and ignored by us rakish masculine chaffers because she was, after all, in her forties, because she had, after all, two children, because her husband was, after all, an elder; and beauty, to us local studs, was under thirty and virginal, like