I couldn’t help noticing that the atmosphere in the courtroom, particularly on the part of the spectators, wasn’t nearly as sympathetic as it might have been, considering the amount of effort and dramatic suspense he had put into his recital. But it was reverence itself compared to what was brought on later, when Berenson had taken him over.
He began by asking him: “Did you report this incident to the police at the time it happened, Mr. Saint-Clair?”
“Sinclair. It’s pronounced as if it were spelt s-i-n. I told Mr. Westman that.”
Berenson roared, “I didn’t ask you how you say your name! I asked you if you reported this alleged robbery to the police at the time!”
“No,” replied the witness heatedly, “and you don’t have to yell at me like that, either!”
When the gale of merriment had subsided and he could make himself audible once more, Berenson demanded, “Why not? Why didn’t you?”
“For reasons of my own.”
“Will you kindly tell the court what they are?” Berenson insisted.
“Because I was afraid it might hurt me professionally,” Mr. Sinclair answered unwillingly. I could tell, even from where I was, that he was a little less at ease than he had been up to now.
“But you claim you were the one who was robbed,” Berenson said dulcetly. “How could that hurt you professionally or otherwise?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” the witness answered peevishly. “I just had an idea that it might, that was all!”
I was almost expecting Berenson to wind up by getting him to admit he was the one who had done the robbing, before he was through.
“And yet you’re willing enough to come here today and tell your story to the court, irrelevant as it may be. How is that, Mr. Sinclair?”
“I’m not working now,” he said lamely. “I was then.”
“Well, I don’t pretend to understand the ethics of the theatrical profession,” Berenson remarked stingingly. “We’ll let that part of it go. Where did you have this money, this hundred and fifteen dollars you say the defendant stole from you?”
“In my apartment.”
“We already know that, Mr. Sinclair,” Berenson said patiently. “Just whereabouts was it? Under the rug?”
There was a preliminary titter or two from the back, but I, who already knew the answer that Berenson was bound to get if he kept on insisting, held on to the chair I was on.
The Sinclair gentleman suddenly lost the little temper that remained to him and blurted out vindictively, “In the bathroom, behind the toilet paper! Now are you satisfied?”
The judge had to threaten to have the room cleared no less than three times before the ribald outbursts this had brought on were effectively stemmed. It took nearly three minutes, I should judge. And by that time, the hunted yet venomous look on Mr. Sinclair’s face would have drawn pity from any one but a courtroom audience.
When he was released from the stand (Berenson told me later that he cut such a ridiculous figure, he had benefited rather than harmed us), he made his way to the back of the room with a rapidity that almost resembled flight, and disappeared through the big frosted-glass doors to the accompaniment of a playful hiss from some young woman or other seated back there.
I thought he had come back again, possibly to avenge himself on her or on all of us, a moment later when I saw everyone’s head turning that way, from the jury to the very court attendants, and heard a commotion at the door. People began to stand up in their seats here and there to look over the heads of others, and the judge’s gavel had no effect for a moment or two. Westman hurriedly quit his place before the witness-box and disappeared toward the back of the room, and when a line of vision had been cleared, I saw him standing before a woman whose entire face was wound with bandages so that not even the eyes showed through, supported on either side by a colored man and woman as though she could hardly stand up.
She was taken out of the room again as soon as he had finished speaking to her two attendants, for it was evident that she herself couldn’t talk, and after he had conferred with the judge, the latter rapped and announced that court was adjourned until the following day owing to the incapacitation of one of the principal witnesses for the state, Tenacity Lowell.
The way Berenson came to me when I had been escorted back, you would have thought his own life was at stake and not mine. “They threw acid at her,” he gasped despondently, “right in the doorway of her own flat! She’s lost an eye, and the whole lower part of her face’s been eaten away — can’t talk even if she wanted to.” He gave me a searching look. “It’s not going to be easy now, Wade.”
“Do you think it has anything to do with this?” I asked him. “With the case?”
“Do I think!” he said bitterly.
“But she was Westman’s witness — what would they want to bawl up the prosecution for like that, if I’m supposed to be taking the rap for some one?”
“Listen, you knew her when she was Pascal’s maid — did she ever strike you as being anything intelligent? Well, whatever she knew, I could’ve gotten out of her. And she knew, all right! And they knew she knew. They weren’t taking unnecessary chances—”
“Gee, that was a lousy thing to do,” I commented.
“Feel sorry for yourself, Wade,” he advised me knowingly. “If it wasn’t for that very wench there, Pascal would be alive right now in California with you. She was the one sent them the tip-off that night — I know what I’m talking about!” He lit a cigarette and shook it at me when it was lit. “She got Pascal hers that night. And now, indirectly, she’s getting you yours. Don’t look at me like that,” he said fiercely. “Do you think I’m talking through my hat or something! I had a damn good chance of getting you out of it if Westman had put her on the stand. And now — you may as well hear it from me as from any one else — I think it’s too late for me to pull you through. You’re in the soup.”
“And what about it?” I said. “I could’ve been in Montreal or Winnipeg the day after it happened, if I’d wanted to. And still be there today, if I’d wanted to badly enough. Only I didn’t want to. I wanted to be where I am. And I wanted to get just what I’m going to get, nothing less and nothing more.”
“The case is closing,” he warned me, “and there’s not much time left! There’s only one thing that might still do some good — how much I don’t know. I can let you take the stand yourself — in your own defense.”
“Do that,” I said, “and hear all about how I choked Bernice Pascal to death.”
“You’re insane,” he spat at me. “I should have pleaded that for you in the first place.”