• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3025 0

Clarence Darrow, exactly, for the Doctor had always vexed himself with nagging doubts; but Mr. Darrow’s skilled statement of those doubts during Libby Hatch’s trial gave voice to what might otherwise have stayed unspoken ideas. Most of all, the question of why the Doctor had—and has—always worked so hard to find explanations for the terrible events he’s encountered in his professional life seems to have been tough for him to come to grips with. Mr. Darrow’s suggestion that maybe he was at heart using his work as a way of quieting the doubts what he had about himself obviously struck a deep chord; and as the Doctor watched his onetime opponent go on to great fame in courtrooms all across America, I think the idea only haunted him all the more. But it never stopped him from working, from pressing ahead, and it’s that ability—to work through the self-doubts what any worthwhile human being feels—that is, so far as I can tell, the only thing what separates a meaningful life from a useless one.

And then there’s Mr. Moore. I have the luxury of writing these final words because, for the first time since opening this shop, I have an assistant: sportsman that he is, Mr. Moore has conceded the bet after reading the rest of my manuscript, though he was careful to tell me that whatever spirit the narrative may have has been “regrettably marred by an appalling lack of style.” Says him. Anyway, he’s out there now, apron and all, selling smokes to swells and, I think, enjoying the opportunity what it offers him to badger such people in the way what only a shopkeeper can: nothing’s ever pleased my old friend more than being given a chance to spit in the face of the upper crust from which he hails.

His return to the Times after the Hatch case wasn’t easy for him: he would’ve liked to’ve chronicled our recent exploits in the pages of the paper, but he knew that his editors wouldn’t touch the thing with a very long stick. So he decided to console himself by taking over coverage of the legal proceedings what followed “the mystery of the headless body.” It was Mr. Moore’s hope that he’d be able to inject some of the lessons we’d learned from pursuing Libby Hatch into that second story of intimate murder, though he really should’ve known better. The victim of the crime, the dismembered Mr. Guldensuppe, was soon forgotten by just about everybody, while his former lover, Mrs. Nack, and her most recent conquest and partner in crime, Martin Thorn, found themselves the subject of a full-blown public melodrama. Mrs. Nack quickly became, so far as the press, the public, and the district attorney’s office were concerned, a damsel in distress: she passed herself off as having been misled and corrupted by Thorn, when in fact she’d helped plan the killing and assisted in the job of dismembering the corpse. To top it all off, by giving the state everything it needed to send the unfortunate sap Thorn to the electrical chair at Sing Sing, Mrs. Nack managed to get the district attorney to ask the judge in the case to impose the lightest possible sentence on her, which he did: she got fifteen years at Auburn, which, with good behavior, could and did end up being only nine.

When the day came for Thorn to go to the chair, Mr. Moore went up to Sing Sing, determined to get some kind of statement from the doomed prisoner to the effect that society was still willing to let women get away with brutal outrages just because it was too disturbing to believe that they were capable of them. He buttonholed Thorn as the condemned man was being led into the death chamber, and asked him what he thought about Mrs. Nack’s light sentence.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Thorn answered, beaten down and resigned. “I don’t care much about it one way or the other.”

So ended Mr. Moore’s little crusade to bring to light some few of the truths we’d learned from Libby Hatch. The “savage” Thorn and the “deluded but redeemed” Mrs. Nack (as the D.A. labeled them) turned out to be, in fact, very ordinary people, while the “monsters” what everyone in town had originally thought were responsible for