Part 11

April 29th ’31—Ran into O. B. at the club just now. Saw him before he saw me. And the very look of him gave me the inspiration I’ve been praying for. What with revising my will yesterday, and buying that little gun this morning, I haven’t been in too good a humor. Not that I mind dying— Oh, I’ve said it too often. Too many denials make an affirmative! No, but death is the least part of it. It’s the wait, and the pain. God, the pain! It took me three shots of morphine to pull me through a spell last night. And, as I’ve also said before, the way around the wait and the pain is suicide. But a tame route. And unsavory. Certainly without thrill. I want thrill. I love it in my fashion as much as B. ever did. I simply haven’t his genius for devising it. How he has devised excitement for the two of us! When he deserted the Bench for the sole purpose of entering into a destroying pact with me, he the detective and I the judge, I couldn’t have foreseen in my wildest moments how positively dangerous and evil he was going to make our lives and our relations to each other. We’ve gone so far with our false witnessing and our false condemning that we are becoming terrified of each other and of our too great knowledge of sin. It’s the only way I can explain the ugly reserves and distrusts that have lately been thrusting between us. I’ve been sorry. It’s spoiled the play. But I hardly wonder. Our two last cases, particularly the Stanton-Mowbray-Blake, skimmed too close to destruction to be altogether pleasant. Perhaps it was the thought of the guillotines we hold over each other’s necks, together with a glimpse of his too handsome wicked face (proximity to him has always had the power to rouse in me such black magic as I possess), that drove the dart of my new scheme between my cerebrum and cerebellum.

I have kept a fairly accurate record of our twenty-odd cases since B. and I went into partnership. Eleven of them led to executions—that is, in each, a man or woman paid with death for a crime they never committed. Yet, of those eleven, eight _confessed_. The most diabolical thing about B.’s power is that he can subtly instil his victims with the exhausted and driven conclusion that to admit is the most painless way out. In some instances I even think his hypnotic force is so great that the person actually _believes_ himself guilty. Anyway a judge can certainly do no less than impose the death penalty on a confessed murderer, can he now?

The publication, or threatened publication, of these Arabian Nights’ entertainments—together with odds and ends of undiscovered murders committed by various friends and relatives—should not only make good sensational reading, but should bring about an upheaval that might quite conceivably be climaxed by my own murder. _That’s_ my fresh idea of an escape expressed in so many words! And however you look at it, it’s such a gay, pleasant, bad game—and so worthy of my associations with B.

And the Devil said to Mr. Legree, “I like your style, so wicked and free Come sit and share my throne with me—”

Yes, I’m all for trying it. And I even dropped B. a hint of something in the wind as I passed him by. I think he took alarm. I’ll give him a ring, in a few days, when my plans have matured. It’ll take a bit of planning. There’s the rounding up of half a dozen spicy criminals. Nadia Mdevani is number one.

My mind’s whirling with ideas! I can begin to see so many little twists I can give the affair—ironic, comic, naughty. An especially nice one for B. himself. It’s going to be jolly interesting. And a good death knell to set the wild echoes flying!

Transcriber’s Notes

--Copyright notice included from the printed edition—this e-text is public domain in the country of publication.

--Silently corrected palpable typos; left non-standard spellings and dialect unchanged.

--Only in the text versions, delimited italicized text in _underscores_ (the HTML version reproduces the font form of the printed book.)