“Now the twenty-five minutes you gave us as the allover time between first sighting Kowalczyk and arriving at the Judge’s house comes out longer, does it not, than if you figured it between first sighting Kowalczyk and passing the Adams house on your way to the Judge’s?”
“If you mean how much time it took us to walk the last leg of the trip between the Adams house and the Shinn house, I should think no longer than two minutes.”
“Then with the one minute of delays en route and the two minutes after passing the Adams house, you’d say, Mr. Shinn, that the actual walking time between the place where you met Kowalczyk and the Adams house was twenty-five minus three, or twenty-two minutes?”
“Roughly,” agreed Johnny. “You’d need a stopwatch to be accurate.”
“You and the Judge walked fast?”
“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
“
“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.”
