Anatomy of a Murder Read Online Free PDF

and water glass in the other. He leaned over my desk and ceremoniously touched my glass with his, spilling never a drop. “Here’s to one of the best prosecuting attorneys Iron Cliffs County ever had,” he said softly. “And here’s to a brilliant future for her newest criminal defense lawyer.”
    I shook my head in wry disagreement. “Happy New Year, Parn,” I said, and we drank. Parnell, as always, took his whisky straight and followed it with a quick gulp of water. For a man suffering from chronic arthritis, and a little drunk, too, I thought the movements were incredibly swift and dexterous. But then, I reflected, the man had had years and years of practice. Practice, in fact, was Parnell’s big trouble. For here was probably the smartest lawyer I ever knew, both the smartest and least successful.
    â€œAh,” Parnell said, smacking his lips. “’Tis a fine concoction—for peasants bent on extinction, that is.”
    Parnell and I had then talked of many things, past, present, and future. As he usually did when we were alone and feeling mellow,
he had spoken briefly and tenderly of his wife Nora, who had died during childbirth many years before. Old Judge Maitland had told me that Parnell had never been the same after he’d lost his sweet Nora. After a long silence I had asked Parnell what he thought of my prospects for taking any criminal defense work away from old Amos Crocker, the county’s leading criminal lawyer. “Do you think there’s a chance?” I repeated.
    My question about old Crocker was not idle. Amos Crocker was a spread-eagle lawyer of the old school who lived and practiced in Iron Bay, the county seat. Ever since I was a kid he’d been stomping around in and out of court, florid and perspiring, a roarer and fighter from hell. He’d been a constant thorn in the side of my predecessors in office and by the time I became D.A. the only noticeable change in him was that he’d lost all his hair and had acquired a red wig (from Weber or Fields, I suspected) and a hearing aid—along with a reputation for professional infallibility that was legendary.
    â€œHumph,” Parnell grunted, shifting in his chair and, I hoped, pondering my question.
    Old Crocker was known more familiarly to the rest of us lawyers simply as The Voice or else Willie the Weeper. Besides his booming bass voice, tears were the secret of his success; he wept his way through every trial; and for many years sniffling, lachrymose jurors had been rewarding him and his amazing tear ducts with verdicts of acquittals. He was said to set his fee by the amount of tears he shed, and by the time I had first tangled with him as a young D.A. his rate was reputed to have been $500 a pint. And he seldom contrived to weep less than half a gallon.
    â€œPolly,” Parnell had finally said, leaning forward against my desk on his forearms, “on any comparative assessment of the relative legal ability and general intelligence between you two there’d be no question but that old flannel-mouth Willie the Weeper’d never get another criminal defense.” He shook his head. “And that’s no great compliment to you, either. Why, that flatulent old wind bag!” he went on. “He’s like an old-time Chautauqua lecturer addressin’ a full tent. All he does is roar and splutter and bawl. In my considered judgment he’s a dummy and a faker. He’s a man of few words, yes, but he uses them over and over. When he gets through arguing to a jury, when at last the relentless torrent of his stout boiler-plate rhetoric is turned off, all—the judge, the jury, his client, opposin’ counsel—all are reduced to a state of cataleptic trance. I said arguing
his cases. I take that back; he never made a real jury argument in his life—all he conducts are filibusters. That’s how he wins the cases he does, with that and his crocodile