“Yes.”
“Was the defendant walking fast when you sighted him?”
“Yes.”
“As fast as you two, or faster, or not as fast?”
“I really couldn’t say,” Johnny shrugged. “Fast.”
“Is it a fair inference that he was walking at about the same pace as you and the Judge?”
“Object!” growled Andy Webster.
“Sustained,” said Judge Shinn.
“Do you agree, Mr. Shinn,” said Ferriss Adams, “that if it took you and the Judge twenty-two minutes’ walking time between the meeting place on the road and the Adams house, then it took Kowalczyk about the same time to get from the Adams house to the meeting place—”
“Object!”
“—and consequently that Kowalczyk must have left the Adams house at two-thirteen, or in other words just about the time of the murder?”
“Ob-jection! Your honor, I move that this entire line of testimony, both questions and answers, be stricken!”
“Oh, I think we’ll let it stand, Judge Webster,” murmured Judge Shinn.
Usher Peague rubbed his ears. Then he went back to his headlong scribbling.
Ferriss Adams brought out Kowalczyk’s “suspicious actions” on sighting the two men in the rain — “Yes, sir, he started to run” — and Andy Webster came back on cross-examination to establish that Johnny and the Judge had been toting guns, implying that any ignorant stranger encountering two armed men on a lonely road might have started to run, too... but in the main it was a cut-and-dried exchange, and Webster did not embroider the point.
Then Johnny resumed his place among the jury and Peague had more wonders to jot down in his notes... the prosecutor taking the stand as a witness while the judge took over the role of prosecutor!
Ferriss Adams told of his arrival at the Adams house at three-thirty Saturday afternoon, how a remark about a tramp had recalled to his mind the man he had seen walking along the road towards Cudbury in the rain a few minutes before, how Burney Hackett had deputized him and the two Shinns to go after the tramp; and of the events that followed, including defendant’s “malicious act” in pushing his, Adams’s, car into the bog in the swamp to delay pursuit — an episode which, to judge from Adams’s bitter tone, still rankled.
On cross-examination Andrew Webster said: “Mr. Adams, you have testified that your visit to Fanny Adams Saturday afternoon was occasioned by an urgent request from her that you come to see her. Will you tell us the circumstances?”
“What’s the relevance of the question?” asked the acting prosecutor, stepping out of his role momentarily to become the judge again.
“Anything the victim did or said just prior to her murder, your honor, especially cast in terms of urgency,” said Andy Webster, “may throw light on the crime. If, for example, Mrs. Adams was in some sort of trouble with a neighbor and wished to discuss it with her grandnephew, who is a lawyer, surely that fact would be relevant and possibly important.”
“Answer the question, Mr. Adams.”
“I can’t,” said Ferriss Adams. “I don’t know what she wanted. She didn’t say, and by the time I got to the house she was dead.” He related that he had locked his Cudbury office in the Professional Building on Washington Street Saturday about five minutes to one, his secretary being on vacation, and had gone out to lunch and to see some people. On his return about two-thirty he had found a note under his door. The note was from Emily Berry — Mrs. Peter Berry, Juror Number Nine — saying that she was at Dr. Everett Kaplan’s dental office with the children and that he was to phone her there, she had a message for him from his Aunt Fanny. He had called Emily Berry immediately from his office phone and found her still at Dr. Kaplan’s office.
“Mrs. Berry told me my aunt had been trying to reach me all morning but my phone was busy — that was true, I was on the phone all Saturday morning on a real estate matter involving a lawsuit. So Aunt Fanny’d asked her to stop by my office and give me a message. She’d got to my office about one o’clock, a few minutes after I left for lunch, and not finding me in she slipped a note under my door. Mrs. Berry said the message was that I was to go see Aunt Fanny in Shinn Corners right away.”
Adams had started out from Cudbury at once, he said. The time couldn’t have been later than twenty-five minutes to three. The rain had been heavy, and he had lost some time when his windshield wiper went blooey and he had to stop to fix it. When he did arrive at his aunt’s house, it was to find Burney Hackett and the others there over the murdered body of his aunt.
“You have no idea, Mr. Adams, what your aunt had in mind?”
“No. She didn’t usually call me unless it had something to do with one of her contracts, and I thought that’s what it was. It didn’t occur to me till you just brought it up that it might have had something to do with her murder. I still think it was about a contract or some other business matter. I don’t see any reason to believe otherwise.”
Emily Berry — with Ferriss Adams and Judge Shinn restored to their proper stations — corroborated Adams’s testimony. The storekeeper’s wife had dressed stylishly for her dual role of juror-witness, in a flowered silk dress, a straw picture hat, and white elbow-length gloves; but the severity of her Gothic features, the tight plainness of her bun, the piano-wire tension of her pregnant figure, gave her the look of a department store dummy on display in a street window.
She spoke sharply, never taking her eyes off Josef Kowalczyk. Johnny thought, Put some knitting in her hands and a guillotine where Kowalczyk sits, and you’ve got Citizeness Defarge.
“Aunt Fanny asked me to deliver the message to Ferriss Adams because she knew his office is in the same buildin’ as Dr. Kaplan’s. Not that I care much for Everett Kaplan’s kind, after all he is the brother of that Morrie Kaplan who runs the moving picture show in Cudbury, you know what they are, but everybody says he’s the best dentist around. Of course, if it wasn’t for my children... Got the children in the sedan a bit after twelve — Dickie, Zippie, Suky, and Willie — and why Peter couldn’t relieve me of that job once in a blue moon I don’t know, but no, he had to stay home and tinker with the new delivery truck, that cost three thousand dollars and is always needin’ fixin’, leaving me to drive four hoodlums twenty-eight miles and back!”
“Mrs. Berry,” said Ferriss Adams, “if you’d please—”
“I’m testifying—, ain’t I? Seems to me a body’s got a story to tell, they ought to let her tell it!”
“The witness,” began Judge Shinn, “will please—”
“I’ll get to it,” said Emily Berry grimly, “if you’ll all stop interruptin’. Well, I got to the Professional Building in Cudbury about one o’clock, and I had to climb the four flights with the elevator right there — I mean to your office, Mr. Adams, they insisted on racin’ up the stairs — if they’d behaved like normal children I could have saved myself all that climbin’—”
“You found my door locked,” said Adams desperately, “you thereupon scribbled a note to me—”
“Yes. And slipped it under your door. Then we walked down to that Dr. Kaplan’s office, had a one o’clock appointment, we were late and his nurse was darn snotty about it and I told her a thing or two! Anyway, they all needed attention to their teeth, not that I wonder, with the junk children keep stuffin’ themselves with these days, though of course havin’ a store makes it kind of hard to give their poor little stomachs a rest, they’re always runnin’ in for somethin’, and we didn’t get away till after three o’clock—”
“My phone call,” said Adams with a sigh.