The Glass Village полностью

“Could, if her head was in a certain position. Couldn’t, if it wasn’t.” Dr. Cushman was eying old Andy with great hostility. “Just can’t say. Expect nobody could.”

The Comfort physician was excused.

The next witness called by Ferriss Adams was the bailiff himself. In all gravity the presiding justice rose, came around his “bench,” picked up the Bible, and administered the oath. Then he went back to presiding.

“You found the body of Fanny Adams, Constable Hackett?”

“Yep.”

“Tell us what happened on the afternoon of July fifth — how you happened to find the body and what happened afterwards.”

Burney Hackett told his story. How at ten minutes after three on Saturday afternoon he had left his house to walk over to the Adams house to see Aunt Fanny about an insurance plan for her valuable paintings, how he had arrived a few minutes later to find the kitchen door open and the rain beating in, and how he had discovered Aunt Fanny’s dead body on the floor of her “paintin’ room” next to the kitchen. He identified Exhibit A as the poker he had found beside the body.

He had telephoned to Judge Shinn, Hackett said; as soon as he hung up the phone rang and it was Prue Plummer, who had listened in on his conversation with the Judge (Miss Plummer glared from the jury “box”), to inform him that a tramp had stopped at her back door about a quarter of two, Prue Plummer had refused him food, and she had watched him slouch up Shinn Road and turn into Aunt Fanny Adams’s place and go around to the kitchen door. Hackett had then phoned Dr. Cushman in Comfort, at which point Judge Shinn and Mr. Shinn ran in...

“When you first saw the body, before the arrival of Judge Shinn and Mr. Shinn, Constable,” said Ferriss Adams, “did you notice a locket-watch hanging from a gold chain about the neck of the deceased?”

“I did.”

“In what condition was the watch?”

“The cameo on the front was smashed and the case’d sprung. Way it looked to me, one of the blows had kind of missed and scraped down the front of her, hittin’ the watch on her chest and breakin’ it.”

“Is this the watch?” Adams handed it to Hackett.

“Yep.”

“Exhibit B, your honor... What was the time shown on the face of the watch when you first saw it?”

“What it shows right now. Thirteen minutes past two.”

“It was not only broken, it was also not running?”

“Not runnin’, no. It’d stopped.”

The constable told of Ferriss Adams’s arrival and his story of having passed a tramp on the road a short time before; and of how he, Hackett, had then deputized Adams, Judge Shinn, and John Shinn to go after the tramp; and of how, a few minutes later, he followed them with a posse and they captured the tramp as he ran out of the swamp beyond Peepers Pond.

“Was that the man you captured?” asked Adams, pointing to Josef Kowalczyk. Kowalczyk’s mouth was open.

“Yep.”

“Did he surrender peaceably, Constable Hackett?”

“He put up a fight. We had our hands full.”

Hackett then told of bringing Kowalczyk back to the village, fixing up the coalbin in the church cellar as a jail, searching the prisoner and finding money hidden under his clothing...

“Constable, I show you some U.S. paper money in bills of varying denominations, totaling one hundred twenty-four dollars. Is this the money you and Hubert Hemus took from the person of the defendant when you stripped him?”

Burney Hackett took the bills, shuffled through them, put them to his nose.

“This is the same money.”

“How do you know?”

“For one thing I put it in an envelope and marked it—”

“This envelope, with the notation: Money taken from prisoner Sat’y aftn. July 5 written on it in your handwriting?”

“That’s it. There were thirteen bills — four twenties, three tens, two fives, and four ones.”

“Have you an additional reason for believing these thirteen bills are the same thirteen bills you took from the defendant?”

“Sure do. They smelled strong of cinnamon. You can still smell it on these.”

“Your honor, I enter this envelope and contents as Exhibit C, and I think we all ought to have a whiff of the bills.”

The bills were duly passed to the counsel table and from there to the jury box. Everyone sniffed. The scent of cinnamon was faint, but unmistakable.

“Now Constable Hackett,” said Ferriss Adams, “you have testified that on finding Aunt Fanny’s body, you telephoned to Judge Shinn. Did you do anything between finding the body and making the phone call?”

“I run out through the kitchen door and took a quick look around, thinkin’ I’d maybe spot somebody. At that time I didn’t know how long she’d been dead. I hadn’t yet noticed the stopped watch.”

“When you say you ‘took a quick look around,’ Constable, do you mean you stood at the kitchen door and looked, or did you actually go somewhere?”

“I run across the back yard, looked in the barn, behind the barn, in the lean-to—”

“You went into the lean-to, Constable?”

“Right through it.”

“Did you see or find anything in the lean-to?”

“Not a thing.”

“You saw no firewood of any kind?”

“Lean-to was empty,” said Burney Hackett.