The Glass Village полностью

“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.