Knight's Gambit Read online

  And that was all.

  The sheriff brought him to Jefferson and locked him in a cell in the jail. And that evening after supper the sheriff came through the side door into the study where Uncle Gavin was supervising me in the drawing of a brief. Uncle Gavin was only county, not District, attorney. But he and the sheriff, who had been sheriff off and on even longer than Uncle Gavin had been county attorney, had been friends all that while. I mean friends in the sense that two men who play chess together are friends, even though sometimes their aims are diametrically opposed. I heard them discuss it once.

  ‘I’m interested in truth,’ the sheriff said.

  ‘So am I,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘It’s so rare. But I am more interested in justice and human beings.’

  ‘Aint truth and justice the same thing?’ the sheriff said.

  ‘Since when?’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘In my time I have seen truth that was anything under the sun but just, and I have seen justice using tools and instruments I wouldn’t want to touch with a ten-foot fence rail.’

  The sheriff told us about the killing, standing, looming above the table-lamp—a big man with little hard eyes, talking down at Uncle Gavin’s wild shock of prematurely white hair and his quick thin face, while Uncle Gavin sat on the back of his neck practically, his legs crossed on the desk, chewing the bit of his corncob pipe and spinning and un-spinning around his finger his watch chain weighted with the Phi Beta Kappa key he got at Harvard.

  ‘Why?’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘I asked him that, myself,’ the sheriff said. ‘He said, “Why do men ever kill their wives? Call it for the insurance.” ’

  ‘That’s wrong,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘It’s women who murder their spouses for immediate personal gain—insurance policies, or at what they believe is the instigation or promise of another man. Men murder their wives from hatred or rage or despair, or to keep them from talking since not even bribery not even simple absence can bridle a woman’s tongue.’

  ‘Correct,’ the sheriff said. He blinked his little eyes at Uncle Gavin. ‘It’s like he wanted to be locked up in jail. Not like he was submitting to arrest because he had killed his wife, but like he had killed her so that he would be locked up, arrested. Guarded.’

  ‘Why?’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘Correct too,’ the sheriff said. ‘When a man deliberately locks doors behind himself, it’s because he is afraid. And a man who would voluntarily have himself locked up on suspicion of murder …’ He batted his hard little eyes at Uncle Gavin for a good ten seconds while Uncle Gavin looked just as hard back at him. ‘Because he wasn’t afraid. Not then nor at any time. Now and then you meet a man that aint ever been afraid, not even of himself. He’s one.’

  ‘If that’s what he wanted you to do,’ Uncle Gavin said, ‘why did you do it?’

  ‘You think I should have waited a while?’

  They looked at one another a while. Uncle Gavin wasn’t spinning the watch chain now. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Old Man Pritchel—’

  ‘I was coming to that,’ the sheriff said. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘You didn’t even see him?’ And the sheriff told that too—how as he and the deputy and Flint stood on the gallery, they suddenly saw the old man looking out at them through a window—a face rigid, furious, glaring at them through the glass for a second and then withdrawn, vanished, leaving an impression of furious exultation and raging triumph, and something else.…

  ‘Fear?’ the sheriff said. ‘No. I tell you, he wasn’t afraid—Oh,’ he said. ‘You mean Pritchel.’ This time he looked at Uncle Gavin so long that at last Uncle Gavin said,

  ‘All right. Go on.’ And the sheriff told that too: how they entered the house, the hall, and he stopped and knocked at the locked door of the room where they had seen the face and he even called old Pritchel’s name and still got no answer. And how they went on and found Mrs. Flint on a bed in the back room with the shotgun wound in her neck, and Flint’s battered truck drawn up beside the back steps as if they had just got out of it.

  ‘There were three dead squirrels in the truck,’ the sheriff said. ‘I’d say they had been shot since daylight’—and the blood on the steps, and on the ground between the steps and the truck, as if she had been shot from inside the truck, and the gun itself, still containing the spent shell, standing just inside the hall door as a man would put it down when he entered the house. And how the sheriff went back up the hall and knocked again at the locked door—

  ‘Locked where?’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘On the inside,’ the sheriff said—and shouted against the door’s blank surface that he would break the door in if Mr. Pritchel didn’t answer and open it, and how this time the harsh furious old voice answered, shouting:

  ‘Get out of my house! Take that murderer and get out of my house.’

  ‘You will have to make a statement,’ the sheriff answered.

  ‘I’ll make my statement when the time comes for it!’ the old man shouted. ‘Get out of my house, all of you!’ And how he (the sheriff) sent the deputy in the car to fetch the nearest neighbor, and he and Flint waited until the deputy came back with a man and his wife. Then they brought Flint on to town and locked him up and the sheriff telephoned back to old Pritchel’s house and the neighbor answered and told him how the old man was still locked in the room, refusing to come out or even to answer save to order them all (several other neighbors had arrived by now, word of the tragedy having spread) to leave. But some of them would stay in the house, no matter what the seemingly crazed old man said or did, and the funeral would be tomorrow.

  ‘And that’s all?’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘That’s all,’ the sheriff said. ‘Because it’s too late now.’

  ‘For instance?’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘The wrong one is dead.’

  ‘That happens,’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘That clay-pit business.’

  ‘What clay-pit business?’ Because the whole county knew about old Pritchel’s clay-pit. It was a formation of malleable clay right in the middle of his farm, of which people in the adjacent countryside made quite serviceable though crude pottery—those times they could manage to dig that much of it before Mr. Pritchel saw them and drove them off. For generations, Indian and even aboriginal relics—flint arrow-heads, axes and dishes and skulls and thigh-bones and pipes—had been excavated from it by random boys, and a few years ago a party of archæologists from the State University had dug into it until Old Man Pritchel got there, this time with a shotgun. But everybody knew this; this was not what the sheriff was telling, and now Uncle Gavin was sitting erect in the chair and his feet were on the floor now.

  ‘I hadn’t heard about this,’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘It’s common knowledge out there,’ the sheriff said. ‘In fact, you might call it the local outdoor sport. It began about six weeks ago. They are three northern men. They’re trying to buy the whole farm from old Pritchel to get the pit and manufacture some kind of road material out of the clay, I understand. The folks out there are still watching them trying to buy it. Apparently the northerners are the only folks in the country that don’t know yet old Pritchel aint got any notion of selling even the clay to them, let alone the farm.’

  ‘They’ve made him an offer, of course.’

  ‘Probably a good one. It runs all the way from two hundred and fifty dollars to two hundred and fifty thousand, depending on who’s telling it. Them northerners just don’t know how to handle him. If they would just set in and convince him that everybody in the county is hoping he won’t sell it to them, they could probably buy it before supper tonight.’ He stared at Uncle Gavin, batting his eyes again. ‘So the wrong one is dead, you see. If it was that clay pit, he’s no nearer to it than he was yesterday. He’s worse off than he was yesterday. Then there wasn’t anything between him and his pa-in-law’s money but whatever private wishes and hopes and feelings that dim-witted girl might
have had. Now there’s a penitentiary wall, and likely a rope. It don’t make sense. If he was afraid of a possible witness, he not only destroyed the witness before there was anything to be witnessed but also before there was any witness to be destroyed. He set up a signboard saying “Watch me and mark me,” not just to this county and this state but to all folks everywhere who believe the Book where it says Thou Shalt Not Kill—and then went and got himself locked up in the very place created to punish him for this crime and restrain him from the next one. Something went wrong.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘You hope so?’

  ‘Yes. That something went wrong in what has already happened, rather than what has already happened is not finished yet.’

  ‘How not finished yet?’ the sheriff said. ‘How can he finish whatever it is he aims to finish? Aint he already locked up in jail, with the only man in the county who might make bond to free him being the father of the woman he as good as confessed he murdered?’

  ‘It looks that way,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘Was there an insurance policy?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the sheriff said. ‘I’ll find that out tomorrow. But that aint what I want to know. I want to know why he wanted to be locked up in jail. Because I tell you he wasn’t afraid, then nor at any other time. You already guessed who it was out there that was afraid.’

  But we were not to learn that answer yet. And there was an insurance policy. But by the time we learned about that, something else had happened which sent everything else temporarily out of mind. At daylight the next morning, when the jailer went and looked into Flint’s cell, it was empty. He had not broken out. He had walked out, out of the cell, out of the jail, out of the town and apparently out of the country—no trace, no sign, no man who had seen him or seen anyone who might have been him. It was not yet sunup when I let the sheriff in at the side study door; Uncle Gavin was already sitting up in bed when we reached his bedroom.

  ‘Old Man Pritchel!’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘Only we are already too late.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ the sheriff said. ‘I told you last night he was already too late the second he pulled that wrong trigger. Besides, just to be in position to ease your mind, I’ve already telephoned out there. Been a dozen folks in the house all night, sitting up with the—with Mrs. Flint, and old Pritchel’s still locked in his room and all right too. They heard him bumping and blundering around in there just before daylight, and so somebody knocked on the door and kept on knocking and calling him until he finally opened the door wide enough to give them all a good cussing and order them again to get out of his house and stay out. Then he locked the door again. Old fellow’s been hit pretty hard, I reckon. He must have seen it when it happened, and at his age, and having already druv the whole human race away from his house except that half-wit girl, until at last even she up and left him, even at any cost. I reckon it aint any wonder she married even a man like Flint. What is it the Book says? “Who lives by the sword, so shall he die.”?—the sword in old Pritchel’s case being whatever it was he decided he preferred in place of human beings, while he was still young and hale and strong and didn’t need them. But to keep your mind easy, I sent Bryan Ewell out there thirty minutes ago and told him not to let that locked door—or old Pritchel himself, if he comes out of it—out of his sight until I told him to, and I sent Ben Berry and some others out to Flint’s house and told Ben to telephone me. And I’ll call you when I hear anything. Which won’t be anything, because that fellow’s gone. He got caught yesterday because he made a mistake, and the fellow that can walk out of that jail like he did aint going to make two mistakes within five hundred miles of Jefferson or Mississippi either.’

  ‘Mistake?’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘He just told us this morning why he wanted to be put in jail.’

  ‘And why was that?’

  ‘So he could escape from it.’

  ‘And why get out again, when he was already out and could have stayed out by just running instead of telephoning me he had committed a murder?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘Are you sure Old Man Pritchel—’

  ‘Didn’t I just tell you folks saw and talked to him through that half-opened door this morning? And Bryan Ewell probably sitting in a chair tilted against that door right this minute—or he better be. I’ll telephone you if I hear anything. But I’ve already told you that too—that it won’t be nothing.’

  He telephoned an hour later. He had just talked to the deputy who had searched Flint’s house, reporting only that Flint had been there sometime in the night—the back door open, an oil lamp shattered on the floor where Flint had apparently knocked it while fumbling in the dark, since the deputy found, behind a big, open, hurriedly ransacked trunk, a twisted spill of paper which Flint had obviously used to light his search of the trunk—a scrap of paper torn from a billboard—

  ‘A what?’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ the sheriff said. ‘And Ben says, “All right, then send somebody else out here, if my reading aint good enough to suit you. It was a scrap of paper which was evidently tore from the corner of a billboard because it says on the scrap in English that even I can read—” and I says, “Tell me exactly what it is you’re holding in your hand.” And he did. It’s a page, from a magazine or a small paper named Billboard or maybe The Billboard. There’s some more printing on it but Ben can’t read it because he lost his spectacles back in the woods while he was surrounding the house to catch Flint doing whatever it was he expected to catch him doing—cooking breakfast, maybe. Do you know what it is?’

  ‘Yes,’ Uncle Gavin said.

  ‘Do you know what it means, what it was doing there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘But why?’

  ‘Well, I can’t tell you. And he never will. Because he’s gone, Gavin. Oh, we’ll catch him—somebody will, I mean, someday, somewhere. But it won’t be here, and it won’t be for this. It’s like that poor, harmless, half-witted girl wasn’t important enough for even that justice you claim you prefer above truth, to avenge her.’

  And that did seem to be all of it. Mrs. Flint was buried that afternoon. The old man was still locked in his room during the funeral, and even after they departed with the coffin for the churchyard, leaving in the house only the deputy in his tilted chair outside the locked door, and two neighbor women who remained to cook a hot meal for old Pritchel, finally prevailing on him to open the door long enough to take the tray from them. And he thanked them for it, clumsily and gruffly, thanking them for their kindness during all the last twenty-four hours. One of the women was moved enough to offer to return tomorrow and cook another meal for him, whereupon his old-time acerbity and choler returned and the kind-hearted woman was even regretting that she had made the offer at all when the harsh, cracked old voice from inside the half-closed door added: ‘I don’t need no help. I aint had no darter nohow in two years,’ and the door slammed in their faces and the bolt shot home.

  Then the two women left, and there was only the deputy sitting in his tilted chair beside the door. He was back in town the next morning, telling how the old man had snatched the door suddenly open and kicked the chair out from beneath the dozing deputy before he could move and ordered him off the place with violent curses, and how as he (the deputy) peered at the house from around the corner of the barn a short time later, the shotgun blared from the kitchen window and the charge of squirrel shot slammed into the stable wall not a yard above his head. The sheriff telephoned that to Uncle Gavin too:

  ‘So he’s out there alone again. And since that’s what he seems to want, it’s all right with me. Sure I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry for anybody that has to live with a disposition like his. Old and alone, to have all this happen to him. It’s like being snatched up by a tornado and whirled and slung and then slammed right back down where you started from, without even the benefit and pleasure of having taken a trip. What was it I said yesterday about living by the s
word?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘You said a lot yesterday.’

  ‘And a lot of it was right. I said it was finished yesterday. And it is. That fellow will trip himself again someday, but it won’t be here.’

  Only it was more than that. It was as if Flint had never been here at all—no mark, no scar to show that he had ever been in the jail cell. The meagre group of people who pitied but did not mourn, departing, separating, from the raw grave of the woman who had had little enough hold on our lives at best, whom a few of us had known without ever having seen her and some of us had seen without ever knowing her.… The childless old man whom most of us had never seen at all, once more alone in the house where, as he said himself, there had been no child anyway in two years.…

  ‘As though none of it had ever happened,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘As if Flint had not only never been in that cell but had never existed at all. That triumvirate of murderer, victim, and bereaved—not three flesh-and-blood people but just an illusion, a shadow-play on a sheet—not only neither men nor women nor young nor old but just three labels which cast two shadows for the simple and only reason that it requires a minimum of two in order to postulate the verities of injustice and grief. That’s it. They have never cast but two shadows, even though they did bear three labels, names. It was as though only by dying did that poor woman ever gain enough substance and reality even to cast a shadow.’

  ‘But somebody killed her,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Uncle Gavin said. ‘Somebody killed her.’

  That was at noon. About five that afternoon I answered the telephone. It was the sheriff. ‘Is your uncle there?’ he said. ‘Tell him to wait. I’m coming right over.’ He had a stranger with him—a city man, in neat city clothes.

  ‘This is Mr. Workman,’ the sheriff said. ‘The adjustor. There was an insurance policy. For five hundred, taken out seventeen months ago. Hardly enough to murder anybody for.’

  ‘If it ever was a murder,’ the adjustor said. His voice was cold too, cold yet at the same time at a sort of seething boil. ‘That policy will be paid at once, without question or any further investigation. And I’ll tell you something else you people here don’t seem to know yet. That old man is crazy. It was not the man Flint who should have been brought to town and locked up.’