H. H. Morris
H. H. Morris has been published off and on since 1963. He retired from college teaching in 1997 and now writes for the sheer joy of it.
Martin Grackle wanted to see me. The message arrived via voice mail, other deputies, and acquaintances I encountered on the street or in stores. I thanked each man or woman who delivered it and erased the voice mail. If it had been a current problem, Martin would have called 911 or else our switchboard and settled for whatever deputy answered the call. He intended to go back a decade. I didn’t need his confession now.
“Martin Grackle wants to see you, deputy,” said Henry Ellis.
Ellis was pastor of Fulcrum Methodist Church, the only building still in use in the once thriving town of Fulcrum. The young man wore his preacherly face, a solemn expression which said you can hear me out or you can shoot me, but there’s no middle ground. I leaned against my cruiser to listen, since it would set a bad example if deputy sheriffs started shooting Methodist ministers.
“His and my business concluded years ago, reverend.”
“Martin is dying. I can’t talk about what he told me, but only you can bring him peace.”
There was an entire sermon wrapped up in the statement that only I could bring Martin peace. Either I tried to do so or Reverend Ellis went from preacherly face to preacherly voice and started condemning me as a sinner who cared nothing for his fellow man. He wouldn’t stop with condemning me to my face, but would do so to my superiors and to the community at large.
I said, “I’ll give it a shot, reverend. If it’s what I suspect, though, he didn’t want peace when it had meaning.”
It had been a raw January day that threatened freezing rain. Martin met me at the front door of the frame farmhouse and escorted me up the creaking steps to the master bedroom. Evelyn Grackle lay dead on the double bed, her eyes and mouth open, dried spittle on the right side of her chin. I felt her wrist and neck for the pulse that no longer existed. Her flesh was cold. I detected the beginnings of rigor.
“You found her when you came home?” I asked Martin.
“Yes. Mom didn’t seem no worse than normal this morning. She ate breakfast–two pancakes and a banana. I took the plates downstairs, listened while she went to the bath to make sure she didn’t fall, and headed for work. I locked the doors, of course. I didn’t want her roaming in this weather.”
Evelyn had married fairly late in life, an older man who’d lived long enough to see his son mature into another part-time farmer whose real living came from the quarry near Fulcrum. She was around 70, Martin not quite 40. He’d been so busy taking care of momma that he’d never got around to marrying. Over the last few years taking care of momma had become a headache. She had Alzheimer’s and was on the department’s list of potential roamers, men and women who could get lost because they forgot who they were and where they lived. She also suffered from bouts of congestive heart failure. I got her mouth closed and shut her eyes.
I noticed the second pillow as I did so. It was rumpled. Maybe the old woman slept on both sides of the bed, alternating on a whim from left to right. The rest of the covers, a sheet and two quilts Evelyn had made in her younger years, remained neat. Congestive heart failure doesn’t leave the sufferer a lot of strength for squirming around and messing up a bed. An equally likely explanation was that Martin had done precisely as he said–fed her breakfast, put the dishes to soak, and listened for her to go to the bath before departing for work. He’d simply left out a step. He’d smothered Evelyn prior to heading for the quarry.
I called the paramedics. They came, pronounced the obvious, and hauled her body to the nearest hospital so that a doctor could get his fee for signing the death certificate. I asked Martin several questions about Evelyn’s last days. She didn’t want to go to the hospital to die. She feared nothing more than a nursing home. The house and farm were in her name. If she didn’t die at home, she’d leave her son nothing. That was in her more lucid moments. She still had them. She’d enjoyed one as late as when he brought her breakfast this morning. She’d been fading out when she went to the bathroom, so that he had to show her where her bed was and tell her that his father was already in the fields.
I went out into the cold—it had begun sleeting, which was marginally better than freezing rain, since you could see what made you skid on the asphalt roads—and drove back to headquarters. I wrote it up the way Martin had reported it and included nothing about the second pillow. Three days later we got our copy of the death certificate. A doctor with more letters in his last name than most of us have in all three diagnosed congestive heart failure as cause of death.
It was, everyone said at her funeral, God’s mercy.
“Knock, then walk in,” said the handwritten sign on the door.
It was 80 and sunny outside, 90 and stifling in the living room where Martin lay on the couch. He had two blankets over him and wore jeans and a flannel shirt. His feet, which poked out from under the blankets, were in dirty, white, thick socks. He shivered occasionally.
You name the organ or body part and Martin had cancer of it. He’d ignored the early warning signs or else hadn’t recognized them. It was too late for any treatment except painkillers, and like his momma, Martin intended to die at home. The quarry had a fairly decent insurance plan, but he was still afraid of losing the farm he’d leave to his wife.
“I killed her,” he said the moment I sat in an old wing chair facing the couch.
“Your mother? I suspected it at the time.”
“Why didn’t you arrest me?”
“What I think isn’t what the DA can prove. And what he can prove doesn’t necessarily convince a jury. A pillow over the face. She was drowning in her own fluids anyway, so it was no worse a death than would have occurred naturally. Everyone at the funeral said her passing proved that God is merciful. I reckoned you simply acted for God.”
“I wish you’d arrested me.”
I said, “You wouldn’t have confessed, Martin. You had a pretty secretary to marry, some crops to plant and chickens to raise, and a life to live before it got completely away from you. I could have testified to what I saw. You made sure there were no eyewitnesses to whatever you did. The one thing that could have tripped you up was a full-scale autopsy. A competent pathologist could have probably proven that she’d been smothered. It was mercy. I left it there.”
“It was mercy, deputy. I can’t leave it there.”
“That’s between you and God. You got away with it because I figured letting you do so was easier than pursuing absolute justice.”
“Do you see a lot of it?”
He started coughing. I reminded myself cancer isn’t contagious as he filled three tissues with whatever came up. My daddy had cited a lot of proverbs, most of them picked up from my maternal grandmother, who was a walking collection of country wisdom. Play God, he’d said more than once, and sooner or later God will get you for bad acting. Martin was feeling the full force of the Lord’s critical review. Unlike Evelyn, who’d spent many of her waking hours inhabiting a parallel universe created by Alzheimer’s, he knew exactly what happened to him. He believed he knew why.
“Do you see a lot of it?” he repeated when he could talk.
“It?”
“Mercy killing.”
“I’ve seen one case of it in my career. You were there.”
“If I could have trusted the doctor, I’d have asked him to give her some kind of shot. You know what I mean. Like prisoners get when they’re executed. They go to sleep and never wake up. All doctors care about is money. The sonsofabitches are keeping me alive in order to get this farm.”
“The law’s the law, Martin.”
He said, “It was a merciful death, the best I could do.”
The only peace I could give him was put him in cuffs, shove him in the cruiser, take him to headquarters, and book him. He’d probably die during the process. He definitely wouldn’t last until his trial date.
“Hello,” the woman said, coming in the door. “I’m Arlene Grackle.”
“We’ve met,” I told her. “You’re the secretary who runs the quarry.”
“Ain’t that the truth. The drivers wouldn’t ever figure out the boss’ orders if I weren’t there to explain them. Martin said he wanted to talk with you. Let me get comfortable and I’ll bring you a Coke.”
The slightly chunky blonde was the wife-in-the-wings who’d provided one motive for Martin to murder Evelyn. He coughed some more. I tried to think of a safe way to give him the peace Reverend Ellis babbled about. Maybe it wasn’t mine to give.
Arlene’s idea of getting comfortable was to leave on the halter dress she’d worn for work, but to take off everything under it as well as her sandals. She was in her early thirties, a few lines marking her face, neck, and wrists. After she served me the Coke, she sat in an old barrel chair that let her look at me instead of at Martin. Her carelessness with the dress’ short skirt said she’d already picked out her husband’s casket and was searching for his successor.
“Martin told you he killed his mother?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“He knew all along,” Martin said, agitating himself until he coughed some more.
“Why not bust him?” Arlene asked.
I went through the explanation I’d given Martin.
“There oughta be a law that lets doctors put people out of their misery,” she said. “We do it for animals. Why not for humans?”
“Write your Congressman. Or your state representative. Deputies enforce the laws we’re given whenever we can. Martin was either smart or lucky. Under the circumstances, an investigation would have caused us more trouble than a conviction was worth. Under other circumstances, we’d have given putting him in the slammer our best shot.”
If that wasn’t warning enough, Arlene was a fool.
Two weeks later, on another hot Friday afternoon, Arlene Grackle came home from work, found Martin dead on the couch, and called 911. A nearby deputy responded right after the paramedics reached the farmhouse. He radioed in for instructions.
“Treat it as a crime scene,” I told him. “Mirandize Mrs. Grackle.”
I called the coroner, a political doctor I don’t trust to trim a hangnail, and told him what I suspected.
“Why?” he asked me.
“Martin wanted her to kill him. Cancer isn’t congestive heart failure. If a pillow over the face worked once…”
“You’re sure about that, deputy?”
“He confessed murdering his mother to me. He confessed to his wife. I suspected it from the start. The doctor signed a death certificate that said natural causes without ordering an autopsy. If you find natural causes this time, it’s the easiest answer. I’m betting that you find evidence of suffocation, possibly after he knocked himself out with painkillers—or after she served him an overdose.”
I drove to the farm. Reverend Ellis had beaten me there. He was extremely indignant because the deputy refused to leave the house while he comforted Arlene.
“He must maintain the integrity of possible crime scene,” I said shortly.
“That man won’t even let me wash the blankets and pillow case,” Arlene said angrily.
“He knows his job.”
I knew mine, too—to observe that Arlene had again got comfortable in the same halter dress or a similar one.
We took the medicines. We took the bedding, including the entire pillow as well as its case. If I could have, I’d have taken the sofa. As I removed the tape after the young deputy left with the potential evidence, Ellis angrily approached me.
“This is no way to treat a widow,” he said.
“You heard a confession. Its contents appalled you, but you understood that the deed had occurred under peculiar circumstances. The current circumstances are frighteningly similar. You wanted me involved. What did you expect me to do?”
“I… I don’t know.”
I said, “Martin confessed he murdered his mother. I told him I’d guessed and explained why I hadn’t arrested him. Arlene demanded the same information. What they really wanted to hear me say was that I’d never imagined Martin killed Evelyn. Barring that, they wanted a vague philosophical or political statement that said mercy killing is all right. I said I enforce the laws whenever I can.”
“What if I’d never brought you that message from Martin?”
“She’d have got away with it. You’re gonna preach the same sermon over him the minister back then delivered over Evelyn, the one everyone at the funeral found wise and comforting. Death was God’s mercy to Martin. He no longer suffers.”
“What happens now?”
“I lack grounds to arrest Arlene and let the judge decide whether she waits for trial in jail or while free on bond. Our new widow has a gambler’s chance. Our coroner is slightly less competent than a three-legged sow. He won’t ask for help from the state. If he says natural causes, end of case.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Ellis asked.
“Who knows? Arlene might convince a jury she’s innocent by telling them her preacher said it’s all right to kill the terminally ill.”
“If you say that…”
“She’ll say it. She has a right to defend herself. The law says so.”
Ellis, inexperienced and full of self-righteousness, had let a pretty country blonde lead him into a mess. She’d either get a hung jury or else wind up on probation after serving a token few months in the county jail. Either way, she’d figure she’d paid her debt and go on with her life. The future didn’t look so simple for Reverend Ellis. His congregation would try him in their hearts and find him guilty. His future would be to leave the ministry or to take a series of small churches as he tried to live the mistake down.
If he was lucky, he’d get the chance I’d received—another case, one in which he could stick to the law and the Ten Commandments and let God play God.
© Copyright 2008 H. H. Morris