If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King

Author:Sherwood King [Sherwood King]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

IV

Grisby not married!

I didn’t know what to say.

‘But that’s the reason he gave me,’ I said. ‘Really.’

‘All right. It may be true. It sounds just fantastic enough – just like some scheme that Grisby might think up. And it checks with certain facts I happen to know. Grisby was preparing to leave the country, I’m sure of that. He’d been putting his house in order for some time. But we can’t use it. No jury in the world would believe it.’

‘No, I guess not. Not if he didn’t even have a wife. But that’s what he said and that’s why he gave me the five thousand, to help him get away from her. He said that was the only way. That’s why he brought me into the bank with him, too – so I’d be sure of getting the money as soon as I went through with my part.’

Bannister was thinking.

‘So then he did take the boat down to Wall Street himself. It fits, all right,’ he said. ‘It could be.’

‘Oh, he took the boat down himself, all right. I saw him leave. I was supposed to wait until he was out a way, and then fire the shot into the sand. The idea was to make people think afterwards, when the police learned he’d disappeared, that I really had shot him and thrown his body into the Sound. That was the story I was to confess to.’

‘Then why did you run away? Before you said it was because you were afraid they might not think it was an accident. That doesn’t hold with the new story you’re telling me.’

‘I got scared when I heard the police coming. I thought maybe there was some trick to it and that Grisby would cross me up, so I tried to hide out in the swamp. Then I got to thinking, and I figured the best thing to do was give myself up and go through with it just as we’d planned. So I came back and made the confession.’

‘Well, at least that’s a story I can believe,’ he said. ‘But the jury would never believe it, and we can’t use it.’

I saw that easily enough – now that I knew Grisby hadn’t even been married.

‘Well, then what can we use?’ I asked.

‘The accident plea is all we have. It isn’t good, but we can say you did have another gun, and that you threw it away, and we can say that Grisby then took the boat down to Wall Street of his own accord and died there from your shot.’

‘I should say I shot him when I didn’t?’

‘It’s your only chance.’

‘Why can’t we take back the confession and try to show that somebody else killed him?’

‘Oh, we’ll plead you ‘Not Guilty,’ don’t worry about that. It’s a law in this state that a man on trial for his life can’t plead guilty, anyway. But I’m in favor of letting the confession stand. I wasn’t before. They might laugh the accident plea right out of court.

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