The Glass Village полностью

“Why not? Especially since I’ve got a hell of an alibi,” grinned Johnny, “Judge Lewis Shinn of the Superior Court. At two-thirteen Saturday I was sloshing along with said eminent jurist in a minor flood between Peepers Pond and Holy Hill. We couldn’t have been more than three-fifths of a mile from the pond, which means we were almost two and a half miles from Shinn Corners at the moment the poker came crashing down.”

“Thank God for Emily Berry,” said Adams, “verbal diarrhea notwithstanding!”

“Yes, Emily Berry corroborates your testimony that at two-thirty Saturday you were finding her note under your office door, calling her from your phone, and setting out for Shinn Corners. So you couldn’t have been here, twenty-eight miles away, a mere seventeen minutes earlier.

“Now,” said Johnny, “the residents who testified today.

“Burney Hackett: At two o’clock Saturday, Hackett said, he was leaving Lyman Hinchley’s office in Cudbury. At two-thirteen, he calculated, he must still have been some nineteen miles from Shinn Corners. I phoned Hinchley’s office, and he confirms — Hackett left his office, Hinchley says, just about two o’clock Saturday. So Hackett can’t have murdered Fanny Adams, either.

“Judge Shinn. Judge Shinn is my alibi, which makes me his. Of course, we could have bashed Aunt Fanny’s head in together and rigged the alibi; but even that cockeyed theory can be disproved. Kowalczyk himself passed us on the road as we were headed for Shinn Corners, and we were still a mile and three-quarters away.

“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’—”