“Emily Berry: You confirmed her whereabouts as having been in Dr. Kaplan’s office in Cudbury, Adams, when you phoned her there at two-thirty, and I’ve checked with Kaplan’s office, too.
“Samuel Sheare... His testimony today was restricted to the cinnamon jar and the money, so technically he’s still to be eliminated.” Johnny smiled. “But somehow, I’m not much worried about Mr. Sheare.”
“In other words,” said the Judge, “out of Shinn Corners’s total population of thirty-five — and that includes Merritt Pangman, off somewhere in the Pacific — seven are eliminated by today’s testimony and your checkups, Johnny: Burney Hackett, myself, and Emily Berry and her four youngsters.”
“Leaving,” murmured Johnny, “a mere twenty-eight to go.” He stretched, yawning. “Saving our way of life is exhausting,” he said. “Who’s for a little poker?”
The first witness Tuesday morning was Peter Berry.
The fat storekeeper, looking more like William Jennings Bryan than ever, took the oath and sat down in the witness chair trying to keep his smily-jowly face from getting out of control. Berry was surprisingly nervous, Johnny thought. As if the ordeal of facing his customers in a public interrogation presented certain disagreeable possibilities. He kept clearing his throat and mopping his face.
After his wife had left with the children in the sedan Saturday for the dentist’s office, Peter Berry said, he had worked in the store. At about a quarter of two the store emptied and he had stepped out to his garage next door with Calvin Waters to see what was the matter with his new delivery truck.
“Calvin’d come back from makin’ deliveries for me in the mornin’, and when he went to start her up again she wouldn’t,” Peter Berry said. “He was kind of anxious about it, Calvin was, thinkin’ I’d blame him for the trouble. Fact of the matter is, I was put out with him. He’d not only done somethin’ to the truck, he’d parked it in the garage in a place where it boxed in my wrecker, so that if somebody’d called up about an auto accident or somethin’ I might have been held up so long tryin’ to get the wrecker out they’d call Frank Emerson’s garage in Comfort.”
“Mr. Berry—”
“Anyway, Calvin hung around to see what was what. We hadn’t been in the garage tinkerin’ ten minutes—”
“You say,” interrupted Ferriss Adams, “that you entered your garage at one forty-five, Mr. Berry, with Calvin Waters. Did you notice defendant walking along Shinn Road?”
“Nope,” said Berry regretfully. “We were in the garage, and we both had our backs to the road. Otherwise I’d ’a’ seen him sure. Anyway, in about ten minutes I heard my store bell jingle—”
“The bell over your screen door, that rings when the door is opened and closed?”
“Aya.”
“This was at five minutes to two you heard the first jingle?”
“That’s it. So we went back into my store—”
“Calvin Waters, too?”
“Well, yes.” Berry glanced over at Juror Number Eleven — balefully, Johnny thought. The odorous town handyman thought so, too; he squirmed under the Berry glance like a worm that has been prodded. “Calvin don’t mean nothin’ by it, but if ye leave him alone round machin’ry, he starts to fussin’ and tinkerin’ like he knew what was what, which he don’t. Don’t know how much damage he’s done that way. So I never leave him in the garage by himself if I can help it.”
“We understand. Go on, Mr. Berry.”
“Well, once we got back in the store I was kept hoppin’. Bell kept a-jinglin’—”
“Between five minutes to two,” said Ferriss Adams, “and, say, half-past two, how many customers came into the store, Mr. Berry? How many times did the bell jingle?”
Berry thought, his facial curves shifting and overlapping wonderfully. “Six!”
“Six customers?”
“Six jingles. Three comin’ in, three goin’ out. The same three.”
“Oh, I see. Who was the first, the one who came in at five minutes of two?”
“Hosey Lemmon. I was kind of surprised, ’cause I’d thought old man Lemmon was hired out over at the Scotts’, helpin’ Drakeley. But he said he’d just up and quit and he wanted to buy some beans and flour and such, he was headed back up Holy Hill to his shack.” Berry shook his massive head. “Can’t never tell about Hosey.”
Mathilda Scott, in seat number four of the front row, nodded unconsciously, and Johnny heard her sigh.
“And the second customer?”
“Prue Plummer, just about two minutes after Hosey’d come in.”
In the jury box in seat number ten, Prue Plummer smiled violently. She nudged the occupant of seat number nine, Emily Berry, who replied with a withering look and a haughty shoulder.
“Two minutes? You mean Miss Plummer arrived at one fifty-seven? Three minutes of two?”
“Must have been. Hadn’t yet started to rain. I remember she was in the store a couple minutes before the rain started.”
“How long were Hosey Lemmon and Miss Plummer in your store?”
“A spell. They were still there when Hube Hemus came in for some quotations on a new harrow, and for some time after that.”
“Can you remember what time Mr. Hemus came in?”
“Few minutes after Prue. I’d say about two-four, two-five. Rain was comin’ down hard. He had to run from his car, even though he’d parked it right in front of the store.”
“What happened then?”
“I’d told Hosey Lemmon to wait, and Prue was pokin’ through the frozen foods case while Hube and I went through some catalogues—”
“And Calvin Waters was still there?”
“Yep. The five of us.”
“How long, Mr. Berry,” asked Adams casually — and Judge Shinn, Webster, Peague and Johnny all leaned forward, “how long were the five of you together in the store?”
“Till two-nineteen. Hube was the first to leave, and that’s when he left.”
“How can you recall the time so exactly, Mr. Berry?”
“’Cause just before Hube left he took out his watch and set it by my store clock. My clock said two-nineteen. Prue Plummer said her watch made it only two-eighteen, but I told her my clock ain’t missed a minute in ten years — best on the market. She was wrong, and she knew it.” (Prue Plummer’s lips retracted, bringing her nose down in a power dive.) “Then Hube run out to his car and drove off, I waited on Mis’ Plummer and she left, must have been a few minutes later, and then I finished up with old man Lemmon. Fact is,” said Peter Berry, “I wasn’t too sure Hosey had any money. Naturally I don’t ever charge any of his purchases... Well, he’d been paid off in cash at the Scotts’. Must say I was surprised, seem’ that...” Peter Berry stopped, glancing quickly at Judge Shinn. “I mean,” said Berry with a cough, “Hosey left a few minutes after Mis’ Plummer, and then Calvin and me went back to the garage.”
Ferriss Adams turned the witness over to Andrew Webster.
“Mr. Berry,” said the old jurist, “you say that between a few minutes past two o’clock Saturday and two-nineteen you and the other people you mentioned were in the store together. Did you happen to notice, or did one of your customers happen to mention noticing, anyone passing on Shinn Road during that period? Going either toward the Adams house, or away from it?”
“No, sir.”
“You didn’t see the defendant at all?”
“Nope. Couldn’t have, anyways. Can’t see the Adams house from my store ’less you stand in the doorway or climb up on the merchandise in my display window on the Shinn Road side.”
“Thank you, that’s all.”
Ferriss Adams called a conference with Andy Webster before Judge Shinn’s table. They discussed in low tones the advisability of calling Calvin Waters. Finally they decided against it; the time period would be covered by other witnesses, and to try to get anything coherent out of Laughing Waters, as the Judge said, would be just about as feasible as throttling Emily Berry.