The Glass Village полностью

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.

“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!”