The telephone rang. She answered it.
“Hello?” she said.
“Gladys?”
“Milton?”
“Yes,” her husband answered. “Gladys, darling, I’m afraid I won’t be able to make it home for dinner tonight.”
“Oh, my dear. You’re working late at the bank again?”
“No.” She thought she heard him swallow. “I’ve been arrested, Gladys.”
“Arrested!” Her brown eyes widened.
“Oh, it’s just a silly mistake, darling,” he soothed, “nothing at all to worry about.”
“But, why did they arrest you, sweetheart?”
“Well, it seems that I resemble some thug who killed a rich old lady for her money last night, darling.”
“But that’s absurd!” she cried, “lover.”
“I know it, dearest,” he said, “but, well you see, I have no proof to the contrary, darling. While this terrible deed was being committed, I was in the neighborhood, walking to the subway.”
“But that’s absurd!” she cried.
“I know it, darling,” he said apologetically, “but well you see, there are witnesses who claim that I’m the man.
“But that’s…” Her hands began to tremble. “Oh, Milton sweet,” she said, “what are we to do?”
“Well,” he said, “if you could get a lawyer for me, dear.”
“Yes,” she said, “I’ll get one right away. Now don’t you fret, lover. Everything will be all right.”
“Of course,” he said. “Yes, of course it will be, Gladys darling.”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t.
The situation degenerated into a flagrant miscarriage of justice, a gross outrage of law, and a dirty shame. On purely circumstantial evidence, Milton Freef was found guilty of pushing that china closet on top of that old lady and making off with her savings.
“…at which time you will be executed in the electric chair,” the judge intoned his final intonation.
At which, Gladys Freef slipped off her chair into a dead heap, taking down with her the lawyer’s papers, bifocals, and homburg.
“Oh, my dear,” she murmured to her glassy-eyed husband in the prison visiting room some days later, “I can’t go on without you. I’ll simply die.”
“Courage,” he squeaked. “Perhaps the lawyer’s appeal will turn the tide.”
“Oh, Milton, lover,” she said passionately, “It must. It simply must.”
It didn’t. And the man who really pushed that china closet on top of that old lady blew all the stolen money on a huge drinking party at a lush hotel, during which he bet he could hop along a terrace railing on one foot and lost. As the terrace was on the fortieth floor, the loss was irreparable.
A distraught Gladys Freef purchased a gun.
Religious scruples restrained her from suicide. Therefore, venturing forth into the street, she shot the first passerby, an Albert Somerset of 1911 Albermarle Road, Brooklyn, New York, in the head.
She was picked up, tried, and found guilty of murder in the first degree despite her lawyer’s plea of insanity.
She was allowed to visit with Milton in a special visiting room, where both visitor and visited were prisoners.
“Oh dearest, you shouldn’t have done it,” Milton said, grasping feebly at her hand.
“I had to, sweetheart,” she replied, the love light shining in her eyes. “Now we’ll be together.”
They both sighed, were permitted a kiss, and then were led away. A sentimental judge set Gladys’s execution for the same day as Milton’s.
Three days later, however, a certain Rockwell Asbury, of the bank where Milton had worked, returned from a two-week vacation and, upon hearing about the situation, went immediately to the nearest police station.
“Yes,” he said, “on the night that old lady was murdered, I walked a half block behind Milton Freef all the way to the subway.”
“Why didn’t you tell us about this before?” they asked him peevishly, and he reiterated that he’d been on a vacation since the night in question fishing for trout in Quebec, although he hadn’t caught anything but a bad cold in the head.
Milton Freef was exonerated and released. He visited Gladys with a heavy heart.
“Gladys,” he said hollowly, “my love.”
“Oh, my darling,” she said, trembling wholly. “Now I shall die alone. “Oh, how cruel it is!”
Milton held her shaking hand in what, for him was a steely grip.
“Don’t despair, Gladys, my dearest,” he muttered through clenched teeth. “I won’t desert you now. We’ll be together, don’t you fret.”
Whereupon, that evening, he purchased a pistol at a downtown pawnshop and, emulating Gladys, went out on the street and fired at the first passerby, a Miss Marilynne Francescatti of Queens, missed, fired again, and made it. When the police car came, Milton Freef was waiting cheerfully.
There was another trial, during which Milton’s lawyer pleaded insanity but with no more success than had Gladys’s attorney. He was found guilty of murder in the first degree and, since a date had already been set for his execution, it was restored intact.
They met in that special room again and held fond hands.
“Oh, honey lover,” she said, “you did it for me.”
“Yes,” he replied huskily. “Now we’ll be together, darling.”
They were led away to their separate cells, both content, both resigned.
Until two days later when the appeal formerly filed by Gladys’s lawyer was granted and her sentence of death was altered to a sentence of confinement in the state insane asylum.
Her outraged objections were interpreted as signs of mental breakdown, and she was removed from prison in a straight jacket, screaming and kicking.
Milton, upon being informed of this twist of fate, fell into a state of acute melancholia, during which he sought feverishly for an answer to this cruel dilemma.
The following morning, when the guards brought breakfast to prisoner Freef, they found him unclothed on all fours, attempting to climb the wall of his cell and baying.
The prison psychiatrist was notified and, for several days, observed Milton with a suspicious eye, being an old hand at this sort of thing.
It wasn’t until Milton began butting his head against walls that the psychiatrist decided that something was genuinely wrong. Where upon, after lengthy investigation, during which the lie detector revealed that prisoner Freef was telling the truth when he said he was Cosmo de Medici, the psychiatrist, reluctantly, pronounced him insane and, regretfully, recommended his removal to the state insane asylum.
At last! Milton Freef rejoiced within at the thought that he would be together with his beloved Gladys again. He put up only token resistance as they swathed him in straight jacket and led him away.
When he reached the asylum, however, he learned that, two days previous, Gladys had finally proved, to the satisfaction of the staff, that she was not insane after all. She had left the asylum early that morning, singing happily because she believed she was going to join her dear husband.
Milton, upon discovering this, fell into such a violent state that his protestations of sanity went unregarded. He was put into a special cell, padded, to brood.
There, cannily, he evolved a plan for escape. He knew he could not bear to live without Gladys. Therefore, he would break out of the asylum, go to the prison on the day of her execution, demand entrance, be shot down, and thus join Gladys in the bourne beyond.
Two weeks and a day later, a docile Milton Freef was allowed to walk the grounds with his keeper. While strolling behind a hydrangia bush, Milton, who had read of such things in his youth, pressed a vital nerve on the burly keeper’s neck and rendered him unconscious. Then, scaling the high brick wall, Milton ran quickly down the highway.
In a farmhouse a few miles down the road, Milton stole a raincoat and returned to the highway. There, in answer to his beckoning thumb, a car stopped.
“You would like a ride?” said the kind old lady in the car.
“I would like your car,” said Milton and, as gently as he could, dragged her off the front seat and threw her in a ditch.
He then began the long drive to the state penitentiary. He did eighty all afternoon long, his heart singing a happy song about returning to his love.
About ten that night, however, Milton Freed began to get sleepy. Several times, his head nodded, each time jerking up with enforced alertness, dark eyes shining angrily. He would get back to Gladys!
But, at eleven, his head slumped over fatally, and the car rode across the center line.
Just before the black limousine came roaring out of the night, Milton looked up in confounded horror, blinded by the glaring headlights.
“Oh no!” he cried.
Then the crash. An awful crash.
Milton Freef crawled, dying, from the rubble of the old lady’s car which was, luckily for the old lady, insured.
“Gladys,” he moaned horribly, “Gladys.”
“Milton.”
He thought he dreamed or was losing his mind.
“What?” he murmured, “What?”
But then, crawling from the twisted wreckage of the limousine came Gladys.
They inched toward each other, glazed eyes shining with love.
“Gladys. Is it really you, my precious?”
“Yes, lover! I…convinced them…I was insane—again. They were taking me back.”
They met. Their hands touched.
“Together,” sighed Gladys in happy agony. “Oh, dearest.”
“At last,” sobbed Milton. “My sweet.”
Whereupon they kissed, both of them expiring in glorious expiration.
The tall man looked at them with sympathy. He sighed. I’m afraid my hands are tied,” he said. “After all—murder.” He clucked and shook his head. “We’ll have to keep you separated. Perhaps, after a century or two, we might reconsider.” Shrugging, he scratched his right horn. “Mal chance,” he said.
He smiled. “Good try, though,” he added.