OxCrimes Read online

  I started to breathe hard as I struggled to keep him in sight. Cars rumbled and roared on the 65th Street Transverse, a few yards to my left. I heard the clip-clopping of horses, the rattle of the carriages they pulled. But Davis stuck to the small paths, the branches overhanging, loose stones stirred by his feet. I could not match his pace.

  ‘Dammit,’ I whispered as I lost him around the corner up ahead.

  I dug deep inside myself for some reserve of energy, but found none. Defeated, I slowed as the splendid buildings of Central Park West came into view. The evening had dimmed, the breeze a little cooler on my skin.

  ‘God dammit,’ I said aloud as I slowed to a stop, my shoulders rising and falling, air wheezing in and out of me.

  After a minute or so, I had enough wind in me to go on. I crossed between the traffic on Central Park West, ignoring angry blasts of taxi horns.

  Jarlath had said Davis lived around 68th or 69th. I headed north, but I don’t know why I felt I had to. I had lost him, and that was that. I didn’t believe he would have called me, even if I’d left a number with the receptionist. But still, I kept walking, looking up at the buildings as I passed, imagining him being greeted home by his loving family.

  As I passed beneath the awning of a building, a voice said, ‘Mr McArdle.’

  My heart leapt in my chest. I spun around, my arm up in a defensive gesture, though I had no reason for it.

  Willard Davis stood there, watching me, briefcase in his hand. A thin smile on his lips that didn’t reach his grey-blue eyes.

  I have never been more frightened in my life.

  ‘Why have you been following me?’ he asked.

  ‘I … I … I wanted to …’

  He interrupted my stammering. ‘I would like to have been able to speak with you at the office, Mr McArdle, but as Hattie told you, I was busy all day. And now you’ve followed me home. Why?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, my fear giving way to a strange kind of shame, the shame of being caught in a despicable act even though I knew I had done no wrong. ‘I just wanted to talk,’ I said.

  He studied me for a few seconds, like I was a bug on a pin.

  ‘How did you know where I worked?’

  ‘My eldest boy,’ I said. ‘He’s a policeman.’

  ‘I expect that’s against the law. For a policeman to give out personal information like that.’

  I nodded. ‘I expect it is.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’d better come up.’

  ‘Sarah, boys, this is Mr McArdle, an old friend of mine.’

  The two boys, one around eleven, the other a year or two older, had been standing in the drawing room like soldiers awaiting an inspection.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, sir,’ they said in unison.

  Clean-scrubbed faces, their clothes pressed and spotless. When my boys were that age, there was never a moment when they didn’t look like they’d been pulled feet-first from a muddy ditch.

  Sarah, the wife, didn’t respond. She sat in an armchair, her gaze fixed on some far away place that I believe only existed in her mind.

  ‘Sarah?’ Davis said. ‘Sarah, darling, this is Mr McArdle.’

  She looked at me, startled, as if I had appeared in a flash of sparks and smoke. A smile visited her lips.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said, her words dull and thick.

  I wondered what medication she was on to blunt her so.

  Davis spoke to a coloured lady in a dark pinafore.

  ‘Elizabeth, go ahead and serve Sarah and the boys dinner. Keep mine warm for later. Mr McArdle and I will be in my study. I’d like not to be disturbed.’

  ‘Yessir,’ she said, bending at the knee.

  Davis showed me to a cavernous room lined with book cases, oil paintings on the walls, an antique desk at the far end, not unlike the one I’d moved uptown with my music store, but in far better condition. The room smelled of old paper and wood varnish.

  He sat down in a leather swivel chair on one side of the desk, indicated the seat opposite. ‘So what can I do for you, Mr McArdle?’

  I took the seat, feeling very small in this room, like a fish in the belly of a shark.

  ‘Maybe you heard the news a few nights ago,’ I said. ‘Or maybe you read about it in the papers. A double homicide. A young couple, not so very far uptown from here. They were killed by two Hispanic males.’

  ‘Tragic,’ Davis said.

  He reached for a stack of mail that waited on his desk, lifted the first letter, and slipped the dagger-like blade of an opener beneath the flap.

  ‘The two killers were shot by the police over in Queens,’ I said. ‘One of them was Hugo Fuente.’

  Davis paused, the blade clear of the envelope, his stony eyes on me.

  ‘The boy we let go,’ I said.

  He blinked. Nodded. ‘Like I said, tragic.’

  ‘That young couple would be alive if we hadn’t saved that boy from the chair.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Davis said. ‘Maybe not. We didn’t try him for the murder of that couple. We tried him for the killing of his father. And we found him not guilty. Whatever he did before or after the trial, it has nothing to do with you, me, or any man on that jury.’

  ‘I wish I could believe that,’ I said. ‘I wish I could turn away from this, convince myself that two young people didn’t die because I changed my vote from guilty to not guilty.’

  ‘There were ten men in that room besides you and me,’ Davis said. ‘Ten men who changed their votes. You have nothing to feel bad about.’

  ‘Yes I do,’ I said, my voice rising. ‘Because I fell first. Because I allowed you to go on and take every other man down, one by one.’

  He set the blade on the desktop, slid the letter from its envelope, and spoke as he skimmed the pages. ‘All we did was talk. No one had a gun to his head. We reasoned it out. You know that.’

  Davis looked up from the letter, fixed his gaze on mine, hard like flint.

  ‘Now, here you are, wanting to talk some more. The time to talk was nine months ago. It’s too late now.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘It’s too late. But I want to ask you one question.’

  He dropped the pages on his desk. ‘Go on.’

  I took a breath and said, ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Why did you do it? Why did you go on a crusade to save the boy?’

  Davis shrugged. ‘You know why. Because I didn’t believe the evidence was strong enough to put him in the chair. Do you want to pick over it all again? The old man in the apartment below, the woman across the El track, the knife with the carved handle. Shall we do it all again, Mr McArdle?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve gone over it enough times myself since that day.’

  ‘Well, then. What more is there to say?’ He got to his feet. ‘If you don’t mind, Mr McArdle, I have work to do tonight, and I’d like to take an hour with my family if I can.’

  I remained seated and asked, ‘You want to know what I think?’

  Davis’s face hardened as he lowered himself back into his chair. ‘All right, what do you think?’

  Leaning forward, I said, ‘I think it was just a game to you. I think you didn’t give a hoot if that boy was guilty or innocent. I think it mattered not one jot to you if he went to the chair or walked free.’

  Davis sat quite still as I talked, his stare never leaving me, his face blank as an unmarked grave.

  ‘I think you wanted to prove yourself better than any other man in the room. To be smarter than them, to outthink them, to outtalk them. I remember the look on your face when each one of them broke down, the pleasure, almost savage. And when one of us stood up to you, you mind him? Juror 3. The man with the messenger business. When he stood his ground, when he didn’t allow himself to be beaten into submission by you, you went for him like a torpedo. You didn’t let up till he was crying his heart out, you didn’t stop until you’d humiliated him in front of the rest of us. It was jus
t a game, wasn’t it, Mr Davis? We were playthings to you. That boy’s life was a ball for you to bat around the room, like a cat toys with a mouse before he gobbles it up.’

  Davis watched from the other side of his antique desk, still, silent and dead-eyed as a statue.

  ‘Am I right, Mr Davis?’ I asked, breathless, my nerves carrying the charge like bell wire.

  He picked up the letter opener, ran its edge along the pad of his thumb, leaving a string of tiny red beads. His tongue licked them away. He asked, ‘Exactly what kind of man do you think I am, Mr McArdle?’

  I’m not sure what rose in me then, I thought it was courage, but I realise now that it was not.

  ‘I know what kind of man you are,’ I said. ‘My son told me. I know about the girl from your office who disappeared, and about the one who drowned in her own bathtub. I guess you’ll never answer for those young women, or for the couple who died because you talked eleven men into giving the wrong verdict. You’ll get away with it, I suppose.’

  I stood, wavered, gripped the edge of the desk, breathed deep.

  ‘I just want you to know, Mr Davis, that your sin did not go unnoticed. I can see myself out.’

  He did not speak as I left the room, as the heavy door closed behind me.

  I walked to the apartment door, the one that opened onto its own private entrance hall, leading to the elevator. As I passed the drawing room, I saw his wife, Sarah, watching me from the doorway. She said nothing as our eyes met, but even now I wonder if, somewhere deep in her consciousness, somewhere behind the veil of whatever drugs Davis kept her on, I wonder if part of her mind begged me for help?

  We buried Jarlath one week later.

  Eugene took it worse than anybody. He had no time for his brother when he was alive. Now he’s grieving so hard I fear it might unman him.

  Jarlath left a bar on Charles Street at two in the morning, steaming drunk. One witness, a vagrant, saw a tall thin man with dark hair slip out of a doorway as Jarlath passed, slide a blade between his ribs three times, and walk on as if nothing had happened. Jarlath died on the sidewalk, his lungs filling with blood. No one to hold his hand as he faded. I hope there wasn’t a great deal of pain or fear for him in those last minutes. I will carry the knowledge that I caused his death to my grave, that if I had heeded his advice and stayed away, my son would not be in the ground today.

  I expect he’ll come for me. When enough time has passed, when the receptionist has forgotten about the strange old man who wouldn’t go away, I imagine I’ll feel a hand on my shoulder, something cold and sharp in my side.

  But I will keep my mouth shut.

  I solemnly swear, so help me God, that I will never breathe a word about Juror 8, a man called Willard Davis, to another living soul.

  STELLA DUFFY, born in London in 1963 but brought up in New Zealand, has written thirteen novels, fifty short stories, and ten plays. The Room of Lost Things and State of Happiness were both longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and she has twice won Stonewall Writer of the Year, and the Crime Writers’ Association Short Story Dagger. In addition to her writing work, Stella is also a theatre director, Artistic Director of Shaky Isles Theatre, Associate Artist with Improbable, and is currently heading the Fun Palaces project, a nationwide celebration of the arts.

  Face Value

  Stella Duffy

  It’s not about me.

  I used to say that all the time, at first when the fuss happened, when it took me from promising to promised, from potential to arrived, when everyone wanted to know who I was and where I’d come from, I said it as my stock answer.

  It’s not about me.

  Because it was true, it wasn’t.

  Later, in interviews, quite possibly hundreds of interviews at the time of the retrospective, the same old questions, all over again, I said the same, all over again. Or at those stupid parties where I was only in attendance to promote my career, to assist my agent, to do the right thing by the person they’d decided I was, at the events there was always some oily man who’d think it was flattering to contradict my stock answer, to correct me, with an ‘Oh but come on, surely you can admit it now …’

  I’m admitting it now.

  It was not about me.

  They’d ask too, sitting around the dinner table with friends, this workmate of that gym-buddy, this father of that child at school. I noticed, when I was younger, as a non-mother, that the school-gate friends of my friends were the worst. They had nothing to talk about but their children, and even the most besotted parent runs out of child-praise eventually. Halfway through the second bottle, house prices, the government, and the cost of the child-minder covered, the increasingly desperate conversation would finally turn to me.

  You don’t have children?

  What do you do?

  And then –

  Oh. You’re her. You did that piece.

  For God’s sake. I did about four dozen others, each one of them massively successful, along with a hundred or more less well known, and another couple of hundred that never saw the light of day beyond my studio. But yes, I made that piece. And no, it’s not about me.

  Maybe I wouldn’t mind if they were also interested in the rest of it, the paintings and the tapestries I worked on next, the miniatures I’ve been making for over a decade now, even the films, self-revelatory as they are. The films are about me, intentionally, deliberately, they are self-sacrificing, self-offering, in a way that nothing else I have made has been. Which might explain why they’ve not been as successful. Something about the giving up of self, too readily, that doesn’t sit right with the viewer. The viewer wants to feel they have prised us from our shell, found the pearl hidden in the gritty oyster. When I offered my pearls, strand by strand, reel by reel (it was film, not video, for some things I am a purist), there was – oddly – less engagement for the viewer. Well, there it is. I have had to accept that not all of my work is received in the same spirit it is offered. I took a while to learn, but I know it now.

  I hasten to add, it’s not at all that I dislike talking about my work. I’m happy to do so, just not that piece. And because I’ve been so open about it, because I’ve said time and again in interviews, that I will talk about anything but that, because I have not lied, not once, when I have discussed my feelings, my lack of feelings, my choice never to speak of it – that is, inevitably, what it always comes back to. The one journalist, interviewer, fan, who is sure that they will force me to reveal all. How it made my career and then broke me. How I went a little crazy for half a year or so after that exhibition. How it changed my life.

  I did not change my life. It wasn’t about me.

  I have been an artist for just over fifty years. I have a well-respected, widely sold, widely collected back catalogue. I am known, wanted. Yet of all the work I’ve ever made, it’s always that bloody piece that they come back to – and they will insist on asking about it, all of them. All of you. And so, because it is the truth, and because I know I can never get you to shut up and leave me alone if I just refuse to answer at all, I generally say something like: But what no-one ever understood, is that it wasn’t about me.

  Then there they are, the almost-winks, the smug insinuations, the little knowing grin that what I’m really revealing is how false we artists are, how blind to our own truths. I am offered the smile that suggests, no matter how honest an artist endeavours to be, that we are never fully revealed in mere words, that we show so much more in our self-deluded hiding than we do in the truths we try to speak.

  In short, they – you – do not believe that I do not want to talk about it. They – you – do not believe that they don’t understand the piece and never have done.

  I’m telling you now, once and for all, it was never about me.

  This is why.

  She was nineteen when we met, I was twenty-five. Now, at sixty-four, that six-year gap between nineteen and twenty-four seems nothing, but come on, don’t you remember how adult you felt at nineteen? A
nd then how, by our mid-twenties, nineteen – all the teens – seemed an age away, the love earned and lost, the passion experienced, the agonising, ecstatic growing up that had gone before, that had changed our DNA.

  So, she was nineteen and I was her senior by every bit of six years. She was being paid very little by my agent to come over and help me out a bit – my agent’s phrase, not mine. My agent’s idea, not mine. I’ve always guarded my privacy, even back then I didn’t want anyone in the studio, couldn’t bear the idea of someone watching as I worked. I have always wanted a clean line between process and product. The market didn’t like the separation then, and they like it even less now, when artist and artwork have become so inextricably linked that buyers believe they are getting a piece of you when they hang you on the wall, when they make space in the foyer, when they build a room just for the work.

  Oh yes they did. They created a room just for the work, my work. Astonishing. I was twenty-five – dear God I was young, and I was good. Young and good, there is no more potent combination. True, money is handy, money is useful, but when you’re young and talented, money is a sideline. It’s only with age that we come to understand its true worth. Someone – someone malleable, amenable, needy (someone my agent could pay, my agent being old enough to understand the true value of money) – came up with the astonishing idea of creating a room for my work. It took a little persuasion, or maybe a lot, I wasn’t involved in the negotiations then, I don’t involve myself in them now. Process/product. Keep them apart. In the end, the gallery owners, in collaboration with a middle-aged architect keen to show he wasn’t yet past it, decided to use the occasion of my first major exhibition to extend the gallery. Yes, it may have been an idea that was pending, my work may have been just the excuse they needed to demand their Board agree to a bigger spend, or perhaps the architect paid, and certainly my agent fucked. Whatever happened behind the scenes, the effect was that they made a new space specifically for, informed by, my first ever exhibition. They changed a building for me.

  They took out two walls, lifted the ceiling, opened a room that had been all about artificial light, proud of the artifice of its light, and made it about the day and the night, and the difference between the two. My work in daylight, sunlight, rainlight, from five until nine – this was a summer exhibition, we considered autumn but dead leaves turn to mulch, and no-one wants chill winds at an opening. The people we wanted to come, to buy, were all about showing themselves, we couldn’t be handing out scarves as they entered the building, so summer it was. And there was also my work in sodium yellow – we kept the space open twenty-four hours a day. I know it happens all the time now, but not back then, forty years ago you understand, we were new, brand new. We were a happening for the rich and comfortable. They so wanted to be happening, they just didn’t want to have to wear batik. Neither did I.