“Did I leave that out? You phoned me at the dentist’s office around two-thirty, said you’d just found my note under your door, and I told you what Aunt Fanny’d said, and anyway when we left after three we walked over to that new parking lot behind the Billings Block where they charge thirty-five cents an hour and if that isn’t an outrage I don’t know what is, you can’t ever find a place to park on the streets in that town any more, and they hold you up somethin’ terrible—”
“You got the children into your car,” urged Adams, “and you began to drive back to Shinn Corners at what time, Mrs. Berry?”
“Mercy, I don’t know. And you wouldn’t, either, if you had to unlock your car and pile that crew in and back out of a parkin’ lot with a ten-year-old slappin’ his six-year-old sister silly and the baby screamin’ and tryin’ to claw his way into your lap—”
“What time did you get home, Mrs. Berry?”
“Now how can I answer that? And why,” demanded Emily Berry suddenly, “should I? Who’s on trial here? What difference does it make where I was? Or when? It must have been some time after four o’clock, if you must know, but I think this is all a waste of time. When I got home the village was in an uproar over that horrible tramp beatin’ Aunt Fanny to death—”
“Objection!”
“Well, he did, didn’t he? Seems to me there’s an awful lot of fuss bein’ made here over what everybody knows. ’Course, I s’pose he’s got to be tried and all that, but if you ask me it’s a lot more than he deserves, he ought to be strung up the way folks used to do around here. My grandmother told me that her grandfather actually saw with his own eyes when he was a boy—”
The last remarks were somehow not stricken from the record. But Andy Webster prudently did not cross-examine, and Judge Shinn rapped with Aunt Fanny’s darning egg and declared court adjourned until ten o’clock the next morning.
It seemed the only sure way, the Judge remarked afterward, to bring Em Berry’s testimony to a close.
Josef Kowalczyk left the Adams house not so much gripped as gripping. He held on to Constable Hackett’s arm tightly, hurrying Hackett along and looking back over his shoulder. Through it all his pale lips murmured, as if he had to keep saying something to himself over and over, something of considerable importance. Burney Hackett said it must have been Polish.
That night, after Millie Pangman had cleared away the dinner dishes and tidied up and run home, the Judge and his four guests sat around the study with brandy and cigars, chuckling over the trial’s first day. Judge Shinn had compiled a list of breaches and errors covering many ruled yellow pages, and the lawyers studied them with a sort of guilty small-boy enjoyment. Usher Peague said that he had covered his quota of murder trials in his days as a reporter and feature writer in Boston and New York, but this was going down in his book as the greatest of them all, bar none.
“You gentlemen will be enshrined in the ivied annals of your noble but humorless profession,” said the Cudbury editor with a wave of his brandy glass, “as the pioneers of a new branch of the law, to wit, the musical comedy murder trial, guaranteed to rate a smash hit in any dusty old lawbook lucky enough to house its collection of surefire yuks.”
“It would be very funny indeed,” said the Judge, “if not for two things, Ush.”
“What?”
“Aunt Fanny and Josef Kowalczyk.”
When they resumed the conversation, the note of amusement was missing.
“I want you to keep right on questioning everybody you get into that witness chair, Ferriss,” said Judge Shinn, “on the subject of their movements Saturday. It’s Johnny’s idea, and it’s a good one. It may give us something.”
“But why, Judge?” asked Ferriss Adams. “Do you seriously suspect one of your own Shinn Corners people of having killed Aunt Fanny? In the face of the circumstantial case against Kowalczyk?”
“I don’t suspect anybody. All we’re doing is seizing the chance to check up on everyone in sight while we’re going through the motions of this mock trial. It’s exactly the kind of checkup that would have been made by the police and the state’s attorney’s office before an indictment.”
“I think it’s important as hell,” said old Andy. “Because I don’t believe Kowalczyk did it. And if he didn’t, the odds are somebody in this God-forsaken neck of the woods did.”
“Why do you say Kowalczyk didn’t do it, Judge Webster?” complained Adams. “How can you say that?”
“Because,” said the old man, “I happen to believe his story.”
“But the evidence—”
“This won’t get us anywhere,” said Judge Shinn. “Johnny, you haven’t opened your mouth. What do you think?”
“Curious pattern’s developing,” said Johnny with a frown. “If it keeps up—”
“What d’ye mean, curious?” demanded Peague.
“Well, seven people testified today, four Shinn Cornerites and three outsiders. Of the seven, six couldn’t possibly have murdered Fanny Adams. Take the three non-residents first. Dr. Cushman of Comfort—”
“You don’t suspect old Doc Cushman,” snorted Peague. “Why, he’s about as big a menace to Shinn Corners as Dr. Dafoe was to Callander, Northern Ontario!”
“Suspicion isn’t the word,” said Johnny. “It’s a math problem. A certain number of factors have to be canceled out. They’re not suspects; they’re simply factors.
“According to Dr. Cushman’s testimony, he was in his office Saturday seeing patients from about one o’clock till after five. After we broke up today, I phoned his nurse. Pretended to be a patient who’d driven up to Cushman’s office in Comfort Saturday at a quarter past two but hadn’t gone in, ‘thinking’ the office was closed. His nurse told me indignantly that it was not closed at a quarter past two Saturday, that she was there and Dr. Cushman was there — in fact, she said, Cushman’s car was parked right out front, hadn’t I seen it? — and a great deal more of the same, but I had what I wanted. At two-thirteen Saturday, when Fanny Adams was killed, Dr. Cushman was in Comfort. So cross him off.
“Second non-resident,” said Johnny, “myself—”
“You?” exclaimed Ferriss Adams.
“Why not? Especially since I’ve got a hell of an alibi,” grinned Johnny, “Judge Lewis Shinn of the Superior Court. At two-thirteen Saturday I was sloshing along with said eminent jurist in a minor flood between Peepers Pond and Holy Hill. We couldn’t have been more than three-fifths of a mile from the pond, which means we were almost two and a half miles from Shinn Corners at the moment the poker came crashing down.”
“Thank God for Emily Berry,” said Adams, “verbal diarrhea notwithstanding!”
“Yes, Emily Berry corroborates your testimony that at two-thirty Saturday you were finding her note under your office door, calling her from your phone, and setting out for Shinn Corners. So you couldn’t have been here, twenty-eight miles away, a mere seventeen minutes earlier.
“Now,” said Johnny, “the residents who testified today.
“Burney Hackett: At two o’clock Saturday, Hackett said, he was leaving Lyman Hinchley’s office in Cudbury. At two-thirteen, he calculated, he must still have been some nineteen miles from Shinn Corners. I phoned Hinchley’s office, and he confirms — Hackett left his office, Hinchley says, just about two o’clock Saturday. So Hackett can’t have murdered Fanny Adams, either.
“Judge Shinn. Judge Shinn is my alibi, which makes me his. Of course, we could have bashed Aunt Fanny’s head in together and rigged the alibi; but even that cockeyed theory can be disproved. Kowalczyk himself passed us on the road as we were headed for Shinn Corners, and we were still a mile and three-quarters away.