“Thank you, Mr. Graves.”
De Angelus did not cross-examine; he objected. The consultation with Judge Everett Hershkowitz before the bench evidently satisfied His Honor, for he overruled the objection and the district attorney sat down to torment a fingernail. Barton’s new look had not escaped him.
“Call Miss Hattie Johnson.”
“Miss Johnson, what is your line of work?”
“I am a special telephone operator.”
“You do not work for the telephone company itself?”
“No, sir, for Tel-Operator, Incorporated.” Tel-Operator, Incorporated, turned out to be a firm that supplied operators for private corporations which required a type of answering service that the regular answering services were not prepared to furnish. Usually, the witness explained, this special service was for a limited period of time, such as after a “premium offer” was advertised for sale by a department store, and so on. “We have to be very quick and accurate,” Miss Johnson said.
“And you were one of the operators assigned to The Princess Soap Company’s television show Lucky Number gimmick?”
“Yes, sir, on Wednesday nights, for the four weeks it lasted.”
“Do you recall your work in connection with the telecast of Wednesday, September 14th last, Miss Johnson?”
“I do. That was the first show we worked.”
“I show you this transcript. Do you recognize it?”
“Yes, sir. It is a copy of one of my telephone conversations with a person I called that night.”
“Who was the person? Read the name from the transcript, Miss Johnson.”
“‘Mrs. Ashton McKell, 610½ Park Avenue, New York City.’”
Judge Hershkowitz had to resort to his gavel. District Attorney De Angelus was observed to inhale deeply, as after a long run, then fold his arms defensively across his chest.
Barton placed the transcript in evidence. Its contents, read aloud by the witness, almost broke up the court, and the Court almost broke up his gavel. As for the district attorney, he was blitzed.
When order was restored, Barton called Lutetia McKell to the stand.
“—but how could you have forgotten the call, Mrs. McKell? When so much depended on it?”
“I don’t know,” Lutetia replied helplessly. “I did remember speaking to some man over the phone—”
“Was that Bo Bunson, Master of Ceremonies of the Princess Soap show?”
“Yes, I remember him now. But I’m afraid none of the conversation struck me with any sense of importance. It all seemed so silly, in fact, my mind simply dropped it out of sight.”
“In any event, you remember the call now?”
“Yes.”
“You remember winning $500 as a result of that call?”
“Now I do.”
“You’re a very wealthy woman, Mrs. McKell?”
“I beg your pardon? Surely—”
“And all your financial affairs are handled by others? Your husband? Your family attorney? Banks, and so forth?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then you’re not accustomed to handling money?”
“I’m afraid not.”
The D.A. was watching her with admiration, almost affection. The same expression in varying degrees touched the faces of the judge, Barton himself, and Inspector Queen, who was sitting in on the trial and had testified for the prosecution.
“Tell us about your telephone conversation that night with Mr. Bunson.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t understand the game very well. I do not watch television as a rule, and it’s been so very long since I played games. When — Mr. Bunson, is it? — asked me to guess the Lucky Number, I simply could not think of a number. Any at all. It was so peculiar. My mind just froze. Has that ever happened to you?” She was half turned in the witness chair between Henry Barton and Judge Hershkowitz, and it was a tribute to her palpable helplessness that both men responded to it with sympathetic nods. “At any rate, not wishing to disappoint the young man on the TV, and happening at that moment to notice the studio clock above his head, I think I said something like, ‘Does it matter where I get the number?’ and he said something that must have been comical, because the studio audience laughed — I don’t recall just what it was — and then I said, ‘Oh, dear, the only number I can think of is the time the clock over your head shows — twenty-two minutes past ten. So I’ll say 1022.”
“1022,” Henry C. Barton said to the jury in his summation. “Hold on to that number, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to direct you to clear my client of the charge for which she’s being tried.
“Ten. Twenty. Two.
“At twenty-two minutes past the hour of ten o’clock on the night Sheila Grey was shot to death, Lutetia McKell in her own voice and person was answering the telephone in the McKell apartment. You have examined the photostatic evidence of the telephone operator’s handwritten report — Mrs. McKell’s name, her address, her telephone number, the exact time the operator called her and she answered in the McKell apartment. You have listened to an excerpt from the taped recording of the actual show as it was telecast, and you have heard the unmistakable voice of Mrs. McKell talking to Mr. Bunson while the show was on the air, and you have heard her point out the time on the studio clock and use it as her number entry in the guessing game.
“1022.
“There was no collusion. This was by no stretch of anyone’s imagination a put-up job. The advertising agency did not invent this game, The Princess Soap Company did not pay for its production and telecast, all to provide an alibi for Lutetia McKell. Nor is there any way in the world that Lutetia McKell could have anticipated that she would be called at the exact time to provide her with an alibi. These are hard facts, and hard facts do not lie.
“At 10:22 P.M. Lutetia McKell was in her own apartment, speaking over the phone in the hearing of millions of TV viewers.
“At 10:23 P.M. Miss Grey was shot and killed in her apartment two stories above the McKells’.
“One minute later. Sixty seconds!”
Barton took a little stroll before the jury to allow his words time to sink into their heads.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I do not envy the prosecution its job. The district attorney — for all the evidence he has presented about cartridges, revolvers, and fingerprints; for all his charges of jealousy — has the impossible task of asking this jury of intelligent men and women to believe that Mrs. McKell — who, while certainly not showing her years, still is no longer at the Olympic Games sprinter age — hung up her telephone after talking to Bo Bunson, left her apartment, rang and waited for the elevator or sprinted up two flights of stairs (can you see Mrs. McKell sprinting, ladies and gentlemen?) to the penthouse, surreptitiously and cautiously gained entry to the Grey apartment — and I would have you remember that at no time have the People introduced evidence to indicate that Mrs. McKell had any means of gaining that entry to the Grey apartment — surreptitiously and cautiously stole into Miss Grey’s bedroom, searched for the revolver, found the revolver, sneaked into Miss Grey’s workroom, confronted Miss Grey long enough for the poor woman to cry out, and then shot her to death... all in sixty seconds!
“I defy Jesse Owens in his prime to do it! I invite the district attorney to try it himself. It simply couldn’t be done. It was a physical and temporal impossibility.
“Ladies and gentlemen, there is only one point for you to consider in judging the guilt or innocence of this defendant: Did Lutetia McKell, at precisely 10:23 P.M. on the night of September 14th, shoot Sheila Grey to death in the Grey apartment, or did she not? She did not. She did not, and you now know she did not. And the reason you know she did not is simply that she could not. She had not time.”