“I’m not sure I’m keeping up with you.”
The judge flashed his shrewd smile again. “They weren’t fakes, you see. That night we broke into the safe to photograph the books, my safecracker friend noted the combination down for me after he’d opened it. I had the combination. The night before we raided the place, I had two policemen roust the watchman again. They never took him farther than their car, which was parked just around the corner. He wasn’t out of sight of the safe for more than three minutes. But it was time enough for me to slip in and substitute our forgeries for the real books. Then, the next day, I planted the real ones in that front office desk. So you see we weren’t defrauding anybody. We came with a warrant and a subpoena. We found exactly what we were trying to find: Sterrick’s books. The real ones. And we presented them in evidence.”
The judge lit a fresh cigar. “Of course Sterrick didn’t know how we’d done it. When he learned we were on our way with our warrant, he had the safe emptied and its contents removed to some secret hiding place — possibly over in another county, I have no idea. He didn’t realize, of course, that the ledgers and books he was so carefully hiding away were fakes, designed to resemble the real thing. We’d switched books on him, that’s all.”
Harris grinned at him. “You old fox.”
“We played it absolutely straight, as far as the trial was concerned. We faked no evidence. We defrauded no one. But, at the same time, I’d broken half a dozen laws to nail this one. Now how would you judge the case, Jim? Ends justifying means? Or absolute moral justice?”
Harris shook his head slowly. “I’m just not sure.”
“To tell you the truth — even after all these years — neither am I.”
SCRIMSHAW
“Scrimshaw” is, you should permit the immodesty, one of my favorites among these yarns. It was written where it is set — in the town of Lahaina and along the coast of Maui — and was provoked by a conversation with a waterfront scrimshaw shopkeeper who complained at length about the high cost of real ivory in the age of Endangered Species laws…. This story was filmed as a half-hour TV play and shown as an episode of the “Tales of the Unexpected” anthology series in 1981; the stars were Joan Hackett and Charles Kimbrough, and their performances were so good they — and John Houseman’s Hitchcockian introduction — nearly made up for the show’s questionable production values.
She suggested liquid undulation: a lei-draped girl in a grass skirt under a windblown palm tree, her hands and hips expressive of the flow of the hula. Behind her, behind the surf, a whaling ship was poised to approach the shore, its square-rigged sails bold against a polished white sky.
The scene was depicted meticulously upon ivory: a white fragment of tusk the size of a dollar bill. The etched detail was exquisite: the scrimshaw engraving was carved of thousands of thread-like lines and the artist’s knife hadn’t slipped once.
The price tag may have been designed to persuade tourists of the seriousness of the art: it was in four figures. But Brenda was unimpressed. She put the piece back on the display cabinet and left the shop.
The hot Lahaina sun beat against her face and she went across Front Street to the Sea Wall, thrust her hands into the pockets of her dress and brooded upon the anchorage.
Boats were moored around the harbor — catamarans, glass-bottom tourist boats, marlin fishermen, pleasure sailboats, outrigger canoes, yachts. Playthings. It’s the wrong place for me, she thought.
Beyond the wide channel the islands of Lanai and Kahoolawe made lovely horizons under their umbrellas of delicate cloud, but Brenda had lost her eye for that sort of thing; she noticed the stagnant heat, the shabbiness of the town, and the offensiveness of the tourists who trudged from shop to shop in their silly hats, their sun-burnt flab, their hapless T-shirts emblazoned with local graffiti: “Here Today, Gone to Maui.”
A leggy young girl went by, drawing Brenda’s brief attention: one of those taut tan sunbleached creatures of the surfboards — gorgeous and luscious and vacuous. Filled with youth and hedonism, equipped with all the optional accessories of pleasure. Brenda watched gloomily, her eyes following the girl as far as the end of the Sea Wall, where the girl turned to cross the street. Brenda then noticed two men in conversation there.
One of them was the wino who always seemed to be there: a stringy unshaven tattered character who spent the days huddling in the shade sucking from a bottle in a brown bag and begging coins from tourists. At night he seemed to prowl the alleys behind the seafood restaurants, living off scraps like a stray dog: she had seen him once, from the window of her flyspecked room, scrounging in the can behind the hotel’s kitchen; and then two nights ago near a garbage bin she had taken a short cut home after a dissatisfying lonely dinner and she’d nearly tripped over him.
The man talking with the wino seemed familiar and yet she could not place the man. He had the lean bearded look of one who had gone native; but not really, for he was set apart by his fastidiousness. He wore sandals, yet his feet seemed clean, the toenails glimmering; he wore a sandy beard but it was neatly trimmed and his hair was expensively cut, not at all shaggy; he wore a blue denim short-sleeved shirt, fashionably faded but it had sleeve pockets and epaulets and had come from a designer shop and his white sailor’s trousers fit perfectly.
I know him, Brenda thought, but she couldn’t summon the energy to stir from her spot when the bearded man and the wino walked away into the town. Vaguely and without real interest she wondered idly what those two could possibly have to talk about together.
She found shade on the harborfront. Inertia held her there for hours while she recounted the litany of her misfortunes. Finally hunger stirred her and she slouched back to her miserable little third-class hotel.
The next day, half drunk in the afternoon and wilting in the heat, Brenda noticed vaguely that the wino was no longer in his usual place. In fact, she hadn’t seen the wino at all, not last night and not today.
The headache was painful and she boarded the jitney bus to go up-island a few miles. She got off near the Kapalua headland and trudged down to the public beach. It was cooler here because the northwest end of the island was open to the fresh trade winds; she settled under a palm tree, pulled off her ragged sneakers, and dug her toes into the cool sand. The toes weren’t very clean. She was going too long between baths these days. The bathroom in the hotel was at the end of the corridor and she went there as infrequently as possible because she couldn’t be sure who she might encounter and anyhow the tub was filthy and there was no shower.
Across the channel loomed the craggy mountains of Molokai, infamous island, leper colony, its dark volcanic mass shadowed by perpetual sinister rain clouds, and Brenda lost herself in gruesome speculations about exile, isolation, loneliness and wretched despair, none of which seemed at all foreign to her.
The sun moved and took the shade with it and she moved round to the other side of the palm tree, tucking the fabric of the cheap dress under her when she sat down. The dress was about gone — frayed, faded, the material ready to disintegrate. She only had two others left. Then it would be jeans and the boatneck. It didn’t matter, really. There was no one to dress up for.
It wasn’t that she was altogether ugly; she wasn’t ugly; she wasn’t even plain, really; she had studied photographs of herself over the years and she had gazed in the mirror and tried to understand, but it had eluded her. All right, perhaps she was too bony, her shoulders too big, flat in front, not enough flesh on her — but there were men who liked their women bony; that didn’t explain it. She had the proper features in the proper places and, after all, Modigliani hadn’t found that sort of face abominable to behold, had he?