have we got to talk about? What do you want to know? About the trial? Have you read the transcript?”
I nodded. “Well, not all of it. It was pretty long. But somebody boiled it down for us.”
“Then you know they had only four pieces of evidence, if you want to call them that. First, the fact that Roy had disappeared on the day the warrants were issued for our arrest, apparently because he’d been tipped off by a mysterious telephone call. They tried to use his flight, as they called it, as evidence of his guilt and, by implication, of mine as his accomplice. Second, the fact that we were both acquainted with a woman named Bella Kravecki who disappeared at the same time. Actually, we’d only had her to the house a few times on the strength of a letter of introduction she’d brought from a former colleague of Roy’s in the East. But it was proved that she had definite Communist connections, and they claimed she was a courier waiting to take delivery when the… the shipment was complete. Roy was supposed to have been collecting the stuff for her, and I was supposed to have been holding it in my bank box as it accumulated…” She stopped.
“Yes,” I said. “That was the kicker, wasn’t it? Actually, as far as I’m concerned, the Kravecki woman is a mark in your favor. I find it a bit hard to believe in a Commie courier who associates openly with the spies from whom she’s supposed to pick up the stolen secret formulas. But that’s kind of beside the point, isn’t it? The cold fact is that super-classified materials
were
stolen from your husband’s lab, presumably by him, since very few others had access. They were recovered from a safe-deposit box rented by you. You never denied renting it. You never denied putting the stuff into it. You did deny knowing what it was, but that denial didn’t carry much weight—”
“It was true!” she protested.
“You couldn’t convince the jurors of that. They felt that if you’d really been an innocent uninvolved young wife tricked by a sneaky spy husband into hiding stolen national secrets unknowingly, which was what you were saying, you’d just naturally have been mad as hell at him—why, the creep had even slipped away to safety that last night without warning you that the cops were on their way! How could you help hating a treacherous louse like that, running off with another attractive woman and leaving you, the scapegoat, to stand trial for his crimes?”
“That’s ridiculous!” she protested. “Bella wasn’t particularly attractive, and Roy detested her. He’d never in the world have—”
“There you are,” I said. “I hand you your defense on a platter and you kick it across the room. As you did at your trial. You refused to admit on the stand that there could have been anything between your husband and this Communist mystery woman. You refused to put on a convincing act of hating the deceitful louse; in fact you tried to stand up for him. For a while you even tried to present him as a totally innocent victim who’d been murdered by unspecified villains, which you’d learned through extrasensory perception. Pretty farfetched, wouldn’t you say, the wild defense of a guilty woman struggling against the net of evidence in which she was caught? And let’s consider the fourth item of evidence you mentioned.”
She licked her lips. “That was the
real
frame-up. I did rent one bank box; and I did use it for some rather fat envelopes Roy gave me. But I knew nothing whatsoever about a second box—”
“A second box under your name in a different bank in a different town,” I said. “Las Vegas, New Mexico, to be exact. A second box that contained fifty-five thousand dollars in used bills that you couldn’t explain away and that hadn’t been declared on the joint income tax return of the Ellershaw family.”
She said stiffly, “As I said in court, I didn’t rent that box and I had no idea where that money came from. Anybody can rent a
I nodded. “Well, not all of it. It was pretty long. But somebody boiled it down for us.”
“Then you know they had only four pieces of evidence, if you want to call them that. First, the fact that Roy had disappeared on the day the warrants were issued for our arrest, apparently because he’d been tipped off by a mysterious telephone call. They tried to use his flight, as they called it, as evidence of his guilt and, by implication, of mine as his accomplice. Second, the fact that we were both acquainted with a woman named Bella Kravecki who disappeared at the same time. Actually, we’d only had her to the house a few times on the strength of a letter of introduction she’d brought from a former colleague of Roy’s in the East. But it was proved that she had definite Communist connections, and they claimed she was a courier waiting to take delivery when the… the shipment was complete. Roy was supposed to have been collecting the stuff for her, and I was supposed to have been holding it in my bank box as it accumulated…” She stopped.
“Yes,” I said. “That was the kicker, wasn’t it? Actually, as far as I’m concerned, the Kravecki woman is a mark in your favor. I find it a bit hard to believe in a Commie courier who associates openly with the spies from whom she’s supposed to pick up the stolen secret formulas. But that’s kind of beside the point, isn’t it? The cold fact is that super-classified materials
were
stolen from your husband’s lab, presumably by him, since very few others had access. They were recovered from a safe-deposit box rented by you. You never denied renting it. You never denied putting the stuff into it. You did deny knowing what it was, but that denial didn’t carry much weight—”
“It was true!” she protested.
“You couldn’t convince the jurors of that. They felt that if you’d really been an innocent uninvolved young wife tricked by a sneaky spy husband into hiding stolen national secrets unknowingly, which was what you were saying, you’d just naturally have been mad as hell at him—why, the creep had even slipped away to safety that last night without warning you that the cops were on their way! How could you help hating a treacherous louse like that, running off with another attractive woman and leaving you, the scapegoat, to stand trial for his crimes?”
“That’s ridiculous!” she protested. “Bella wasn’t particularly attractive, and Roy detested her. He’d never in the world have—”
“There you are,” I said. “I hand you your defense on a platter and you kick it across the room. As you did at your trial. You refused to admit on the stand that there could have been anything between your husband and this Communist mystery woman. You refused to put on a convincing act of hating the deceitful louse; in fact you tried to stand up for him. For a while you even tried to present him as a totally innocent victim who’d been murdered by unspecified villains, which you’d learned through extrasensory perception. Pretty farfetched, wouldn’t you say, the wild defense of a guilty woman struggling against the net of evidence in which she was caught? And let’s consider the fourth item of evidence you mentioned.”
She licked her lips. “That was the
real
frame-up. I did rent one bank box; and I did use it for some rather fat envelopes Roy gave me. But I knew nothing whatsoever about a second box—”
“A second box under your name in a different bank in a different town,” I said. “Las Vegas, New Mexico, to be exact. A second box that contained fifty-five thousand dollars in used bills that you couldn’t explain away and that hadn’t been declared on the joint income tax return of the Ellershaw family.”
She said stiffly, “As I said in court, I didn’t rent that box and I had no idea where that money came from. Anybody can rent a
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