The Twilight Zone: Complete Stories by Rod Serling

held out her hands to him.
    “Please, Walter,” she said. “Please, my darling—”
    Bedeker said, “Ethel, go drown in the tub and leave me alone. I’m going head first down that light well, and I want you to get out of the way!”
    He advanced toward her and she backed away from him.
    “Please, darling,” she said. “Please come back to the apartment. I’ll make you potato pancakes. Remember, you used to love potato pancakes.”
    Bedeker yanked her arm away from him, pushed her aside. “You, my dear,” he said, “are a potato pancake. You look like a potato pancake. You have all the excitement of a potato pancake. You are as tasteless as a potato pancake. Now I’ve told you for the last time to get out of my way.”
    She threw herself against him, struggling to push him back and only at the last instant did she realize that her foot was no longer on the level of the roof floor. It dangled over the concrete stoop surrounding the stairwell. In a moment her balance shifted and she had fallen backwards, smashing through the glass, and hurtled fourteen stories down to the concrete courtyard below. Even her scream was a quiet, pathetic noise coming from a quiet, pathetic woman. It was more misery than horror; more a gentle protest than the last utterance of a woman going head first to her death.
    Bedeker tiptoed over to the light well and looked down. Lights were going on sporadically on every other floor like the panel board of an elevator announcing the stops. He scratched his jaw, took out a cigarette and lit it.
    “I wonder what it felt like,” he said softly.
    Some place off in the distance he heard a siren. There was a growing mumble and jumble of voices inside the building. Then suddenly he had a thought. It was a wonderful thought. An exciting thought. He hurried to the door leading to the rear stairs, went down them two at a time, trotted into his apartment and picked up the telephone.
    “Operator,” he said, “get me the police, please. Immediately. It’s an emergency.” After a moment he heard the voice of a desk sergeant at the local precinct. “Hello? Is this the police station? Well, this is Walter Bedeker, 11 North 7th Street. That’s correct. Apartment 12B. Will you please come over here right away. No, no trouble. I just killed my wife. That’s right. Yes, I’ll stay right here. Good-by.”
    He put the receiver down, took a deep luxurious drag on his cigarette, flicked the ashes away and said, “Well, let’s give the old electric chair a whirl!”
    The trial of the State vs. Walter Bedeker was, in the words of the District Attorney, “the most predictable thing to hit town since professional wrestling.” The court reporters, spectators, and certainly the jury seemed to share the prosecution’s view. In three days of proceedings, the State made one telling point after the other. They established motive. (Six witnesses had testified to the fights between Walter Bedeker and his wife.) They showed premeditation. (The janitor testified that he had heard Bedeker threaten his wife on at least a dozen occasions.) And they did everything but bring in photographs of the actual commission of the crime. (At least ten neighbors had seen Bedeker come down off the roof and hurry back into his apartment.)
    So in short, Mr. Walter Bedeker sat alongside of his lawyer on the eve of the last day of trial in a most vulnerable position. You could not have told this, however, by looking at Walter Bedeker. He sat half smiling at the judge, the witnesses, the prosecution. On the stand he openly and freely admitted he had pushed his wife down the light well and had no misgivings about it at all. As a matter of fact, he would do it again.
    His lawyer, hired by the State, was a desperately energetic young man who objected on the slightest provocation, who argued, pleaded and thundered throughout the trial, who parried every telling thrust on the part of the prosecution and parried well. But his was a losing