“To the gentleman with the gray beard?”
“Sure, who else we talking about? I says to him, ‘What d’ye think?” And he says, ‘That boy — the Kid — he’ll never make it. He ain’t got what it takes. The champ will knock him out,” he says to me.”
“One moment, Mr. Cleary. Mr. McKell, will you please rise — it isn’t necessary to come forward — and face this witness? Now will you please say in a conversational tone, ‘That boy will never make it. The champ will knock him out.’”
“That boy will never make it,” said Ashton McKell. “The champ will knock him out.”
“Mr. Cleary, to the best of your recollection, is that the voice, the same voice, of the gray-bearded man you talked to in your bar on the night of September 14th?”
“Sure and it’s the same, ain’t that what I’m telling you, sor?”
“You’re sure it’s the same voice.”
“I can hear it ringing in me ears,” said Cleary poetically, “right now.”
O’Brien quickened the pace of his questions. They watched the fight, Cleary said, and in round two they made a ten-dollar bet on the outcome, Cleary maintaining that Kid Aguirre would last the full fifteen rounds, the gray-bearded man insisting that the Kid would be knocked out. And knocked out he was, “as ye’ll remember, sor, in the third, to me sorrow.”
“Did you pay the man the ten dollars?”
“He wouldn’t let me. ‘Put it in the jar for the orphans,’ he says, which I done.”
“One last question, Mr. Cleary: You and this gray-haired man were watching the original telecast of the fight, not a rerun on tape?”
Cleary was sure. The fight had been fought in Denver over closed-circuit television, but it was telecast live for the East, and the tapes were not shown anywhere until the following day.
The district attorney made a savage attempt to break down Cleary’s identification of “Dr. Stone.” But luck had thrown a stubborn Irishman his way. The harder De Angelus hammered, the more positive Cleary became. When the cross-examination became abusive, O’Brien politely stepped in: “It seems to me, Your Honor, the witness has answered each of the district attorney’s questions not once but half a dozen times. I think we are approaching the point of badgering, and I respectfully call your attention to it.”
The judge glared at O’Brien, but he stopped De Angelus.
Nothing was left for O’Brien but to thrust the point between the horns. He introduced into evidence the official time of the Kid Aguirre knockout, as certified by the timekeeper of the championship fight and the records of the Colorado boxing commission.
Time of knockout: 10:27:46 — forty-six seconds after twenty-seven minutes after ten o’clock P.M. Eastern Time.
Robert O’Brien summed up for the defense: “I am sure it isn’t necessary, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to remind you that none of us is here in this courtroom to punish moral turpitude. The question you are asked to decide is not one of sin but of guilt. There is only one question on which His Honor will charge you to consider your verdict, and that is: Was the defendant, Ashton McKell, guilty of murdering Sheila Grey by gunshot at twenty-three minutes past ten o’clock on the night of September 14th? You have heard testimony here that must convince anyone that Mr. McKell could not physically have been guilty of that crime. He could not have committed it because, at the time it was committed, he was seated at a bar half a city mile from the scene of the crime, and continued to sit there for some time afterward.
“Not only could Ashton McKell not have shot Sheila Grey, he could not have been at or even near the scene of her death when the fatal shot was fired.
“I repeat: No other aspect of the case should concern you, or — under what I am confident will be Judge Suarez’s charge-legally can concern you. Consequently, no reasonable man or woman could bring in a verdict of anything but not guilty.”
The waiting was a stasis, the blood piling up in the vessel to the bursting point, the question being would there be resolution and relief before the complete blockage and eruption. Reporters spotted Lutetia McKell and crowded round her, to her distress, until Richard M. Heaton rescued her; none of them dared leave the courtroom while the jury deliberated; they sat and talked, or were mute, thinking their own thoughts. Heaton tended to be optimistic, O’Brien noncommittal (“I never speculate on what a jury will or will not do”), except to point out that District Attorney De Angelus had not left the room, indicating the prosecution’s belief that the jury would not be out long — for whatever that was worth; De Angelus himself was the recipient of a message, delivered to him by messenger, to which he dashed off an immediate reply, and sank back only to be aroused by another messenger with another envelope.
“He’s kept so very busy, isn’t he?” said Lutetia. Then she began nibbling at her handkerchief.
So Dane and Judy captured her attention by telling the story of their original unsuccessful search for the bar and bartender, and of their visit to Ellery Queen.
“That’s his father, Inspector Queen, who just came in and spoke to the D.A.,” Robert O’Brien pointed out.
And of the lightning development of the hunt thereafter.
Lutetia was touched. “Margaret is so faithful,” she said. “You know, Dane, how she worships your father. I suppose all along she’s known a great deal more than any of us, from this and that picked up at random. She must have realized something was wrong when she found that outlandish tan suit in Ashton’s bedroom. She always empties the pockets of his suits, you know.”
For want of something better to do, they discussed old Margaret’s incredible enterprise in the matter of the baggage claim check and the black bag. They agreed that she must have found the claim check in the tan suit shortly after the first visit of the police; to old Maggie, Irish-born, to whom “police” and “rebel-hunters” would forever be synonymous, at the same time loyal unto death to Ashton McKell, the sight of the claim check must have triggered her instinct for trouble, and she had simply secreted it to keep it out of the hands of the law. After Ashton’s arrest she had sneaked down to Grand Central, found all her fears confirmed when, in return for the check, she was handed the little black bag, and promptly enlisted her sister as a confederate, hiding the bag in her sister’s flat for no other reason than to keep it from being found by the authorities, who were searching everything pertaining to McKell.
“Hers not to reason why,” said Dane. “Good old Maggie.”
“Something’s about to break,” said O’Brien alertly. “Look at what’s going on at the D.A.’s table... I was right. There goes the bailiff into the judge’s chambers. The jury’s probably reached a verdict.”
They had.
Not guilty.
There was a frantic moment when everyone was in motion — hands clasping, lips babbling, backs being slapped, Ashton embracing Lutetia (in public!), Dane embracing Judy (both electrically surprised at the naturalness with which they turned and fell into each other’s arms) — then everything suddenly stopped, hands, eyes, mouths, everything. For an instant it was hard to say why, because really nothing had happened except the approach of a very large man grasping a folded piece of paper. But then it came through: there was something in his very approach, a balls-of-the-feet guardedness, the way his great fingers grasped the paper, the hard look on his hard face, that was like a gush of ice water.
It was Sergeant Velie.
Who said politely, “Mr. McKell.”
Ashton still had his arm about Lutetia. “Yes?”
“If you don’t mind, sir,” Sergeant Velie said, “I have to speak to Mrs. McKell.”
“To my wife?”
It seemed to Dane that his mother started and then took a perceptible grip on herself.