The Benson Murder Case / Дело Бенсона. Книга для чтения на английском языке - стр. 7

Vance and I had just settled back in our chairs for our second cup of coffee and a cigarette when Currie, answering an impetuous ringing of the front-door bell, ushered the District Attorney into the living-room.

“By all that’s holy!” he exclaimed, raising his hands in mock astonishment. “New York’s leading flâneur[23] and art connoisseur is up and about!”

“And I am suffused with blushes at the disgrace of it,” Vance replied.

It was evident, however, that the District Attorney was not in a jovial mood. His face suddenly sobered.

“Vance, a serious thing has brought me here. I’m in a great hurry, and merely dropped by to keep my promise. … The fact is, Alvin Benson has been murdered.”

Vance lifted his eyebrows languidly.

“Really, now,” he drawled. “How messy! But he no doubt deserved it. In any event, that’s no reason why you should repine. Take a chair and have a cup of Currie’s incomp’rable coffee.” And before the other could protest, he rose and pushed a bell-button.

Markham hesitated a second or two.

“Oh, well. A couple of minutes won’t make any difference. But only a gulp.” And he sank into a chair facing us.

John F.-X. Markham, as you remember, had been elected District Attorney of New York County on the Independent Reform Ticket during one of the city’s periodical reactions against Tammany Hall. He served his four years, and would probably have been elected to a second term had not the ticket been hopelessly split by the political juggling of his opponents. He was an indefatigable worker, and projected the District Attorney’s office into all manner of criminal and civil investigations. Being utterly incorruptible, he not only aroused the fervid admiration of his constituents, but produced an almost unprecedented sense of security in those who had opposed him on partisan lines.

He had been in office only a few months when one of the newspapers referred to him as the Watch Dog; and the sobriquet clung to him until the end of his administration. Indeed, his record as a successful prosecutor during the four years of his incumbency was such a remarkable one that even to-day it is not infrequently referred to in legal and political discussions.

Markham was a tall, strongly-built man in the middle forties, with a clean-shaven, somewhat youthful face which belied his uniformly grey hair. He was not handsome according to conventional standards, but he had an unmistakable air of distinction, and was possessed of an amount of social culture rarely found in our latter-day political office-holders. Withal he was a man of brusque and vindictive temperament; but his brusqueness was an incrustation on a solid foundation of good-breeding, not—as is usually the case—the roughness of substructure showing through an inadequately superimposed crust of gentility.