The Alley (14 page)

"Monkey," repeated Anthony stubbornly.

It was too much. "Anthony," said Katy. "I accuse you of contempt of court. Go to the end of the Alley and stand in Hugsy Goode's hidy-hole. We may have to put you on trial instead of the real criminals."

"I'd like that," said Anthony. "That is more important than being a stupid old member of a stupid old jury."

"No," said Katy. "To be on the jury, to say 'Guilty' or 'Not guilty'—that is the most important part."

"Well," said Anthony, "I don't happen to agree, see? If there were no criminals, there would be no jury.
And
no trial,
and
no you, Miss Smarty Judge Katy Starr."

"We'll just put you in jail this minute!" said Katy, exasperated.

"My mother will fight you all," said Anthony.

"You won't be able to call your mother," said Arnold Trickman, his eyes sparkling at the thought. "You'll be in solitary confinement, in a torture chamber besides," he added. Arnold was reading the Dumas books, and they were full of torture chambers and the rack. True, they were rather old for him. But he was in the R. A. class in grade seven in his school, and his reading was that of at least grade nine, his mother said. Few mothers would be able to resist bragging a little about such a smart boy.

"Oh, come on. Get him to jail," said Jonathan Stuart impatiently. (Jonathan was always impatient—he couldn't wait for you to make a move in checkers and would say, "Why not move
that
man?" or "Oh, come on," every second with a groan.) He said, "Isn't it about time to stop kidding around and get on with the trial? Otherwise, I'm going in to do something, fix my stamps, have a snack, something, I don't know, practice, play
The Mikado,
anything..." Jonathan was very fond of Gilbert and Sullivan right now, and often, as you passed by his house, you could hear him giggling over some song he particularly liked and even singing it along with the record.

So they hustled Anthony, bawling, clawing, and protesting, down to jail in Hugsy's little hidy-hole. "Yes," said Ray, looking down at him. "You'll probably have to stay there days, weeks, even years. We'll give you bread and water perhaps, if we think of it."

From the jail, they could hear Anthony howling now and then and calling, "Mother, Mother." His mother did not hear him, however, and bustle down to get him and scold the others; finally Anthony climbed out of jail and, outraged, ran home to report the injustice. "I should have been the bullet-head bandit," he shouted to all in the trial. "I have a bullet head."

"All right," said Katy. "Now we can proceed. Sergeant Rattray, take the stand please. Your witness, Mr.... Oh, my goodness, who's the defendant's lawyer? We have to have a lawyer for him.... Jonathan, you'll have to be the lawyer for the defendant until it is time for you to give the verdict as head juryman when I charge you."

"O. K.," said Jonathan obligingly. "I'll be the lawyer and head juryman, anything you want, the whole works if you want."

"Well, O. K.," said Katy. "We should call the prosecuting lawyer first, anyway," she said. "So, your witness, Mr. Maloon!" she said. And she gave a resounding blow with her mallet that deafened everybody. Mrs. Carroll came out and sounded taps.

"At last!" said Billy with a pained sigh, and he approached Sergeant Rattray.

Ratty (Greg Goode) cringed.

"Now," said the lawyer, Billy Maloon. "Let's see.... I think," he said, "that you'd better give me the two first policemen at the same time, Rattray and Ippolito. If one is guilty, both are. They were together all the time."

So the two first policemen, Greg Goode as Sergeant Rattray and Laura Fabadessa as Ippolito, took the stand, two squares in the cement to the left of the judge.

Judy Fabadessa and June Arp, the two good cellar policemen, innocent of all involvement in the crime, stood smugly by—tinged with envy. Judy wished she had been picked to be one of the first, and, possibly, guilty policemen. But of course big sister Laura got all the good parts. It was so in their home; it was so outside their home, she thought morosely; she made her awful face, though she was trying to break herself of the habit.

Billy laid out his burglar evidence—the screwdriver, all of it, on the curb beneath the high brick wall where he and Connie had been sitting. "Mind them," he said, "while I prove these policemen guilty." He handled his clues fondly. After all, for some weeks he'd kept them in his pocket; in school Miss Hoppeniemi, his teacher, said he should leave his screwdriver home because once it had gashed his leg, but he did not and she did not insist, for she knew boys like Billy have good reasons for what they do.

Connie moved away from the violent clues; but she said, "O.K., I'll mind them."

"Oyez, oyez, oyez!" said Katy. "Be it known," she said, swinging her robe around her with a grand flourish, "be it known and to all these presents, that these two policemen..."

Jonathan stood up. "Excuse me, Your Honor," he said. "I think we should try the real burglars first, the five burglars who we
know
broke into Connie's house. They were there first, and the policemen burglary—if there was one; I'm not at all sure there was—would not have happened if the first real burglary had not paved the way."

Katy was not to be shaken by the great checker player. After all, who was the judge? He or she? "We are trying these policemen first," she said, "because we are." And she went on, "Will the lawyer for the defense kindly take his seat until he is called upon."

Jonathan sat down. He knew she'd fork out one "Katy law" or another if he said any more.

"Oyez, oyez, oyez," said Katy again. "Be it known, and to all these sundries and presents, that these two policemen, defenders of the City of Brooklyn, and of our lives, and of our property, and of our wives, and of our children and dogs and poodles, are accused of stealing Mrs. Ives's diamond ring—an ancient ring, ancestral, and handed down to her from generation to generation, and be it known that they be accused likewise of stealing some ancient watches and cuff links and various other sundries of 'antiquay' and ancient value, handed down through the ages from generation into generation? by the ancestors of Connie Ives."

"It's lucky they did not take the George Washington chair..." said Judy Fabadessa with a gasp.

"Yikes!" said Hugsy Goode, half wishing such a thing might have happened, half devastated at the thought of the George Washington chair gone for good.

"O-o-oh!" Everyone gasped. They all knew the George Washington chair, not to sit in it. The Ives should have a rope across it, like in museums, some, who had been to museums, thought.

"Silence!" Katy shouted. Bang! went her gavel. "Your witness, Mr. Maloon."

Billy plunged in. He spoke the way Katy had been speaking, that is, in the manner, he thought, of Shakespeare. "The awfulness of these policemen's crime," he said, "if crime they did commit, stems—stemmeth not so much from what they tooketh—though that ith—
is
bad enough—god wot," he said, "but stemmeth from the fact that they are
policemen
...a sergeant, Rattray, and an officer, Ippolito; and they are supposed to do no wrong, to set a good example. Also—consider the low nature of their crime, if crime it was—I know, Arp, not proven yet.... Well, they came into a house already broken into by those five real burglars, cowering there, shaking with fear, and swiftly—no, taking their time—pretending to see what, if anything had been stolen, they helped themselves to ring and hairlooms! What a cheap and cowardly thing to do! How low can one fall? The others, the real robbers, had already
done
the dirty and the dangerous work—mashing in the door, giving the bone to the sad dog, Wags. Then and only then, after the path had been cleared for them, then did these two scavengers take the leavings—the best of all as it happens—take what the five first and real robbers, who were really entitled to it, if someone were to have it, had not had time to find. These two fine ... ahem ... specimens of our police force should—if it be burglars that they be wanting to be and not officers of the law—strip themselves of their uniforms, their badges, and their clubs, and become real burglars ... smash in their own doors, not go sneaking around after the smashing has been done and getting the best of it all!"

"Excellent," said the judge. "Do you admit your guilt?" she asked the first two policemen.

"No, Your Honor," they said.

"Your witnesses, Mr. Stuart," said the judge.

"I pass," said Jonathan. "Call the real burglars," he said. He really thought that first burglars should come first, Judge Katy Starr or no Judge Katy Starr, and seconds come second.

A murmur of disapproval ran through the courtroom. After all, why not at least
question
the two who were already on the stand? In trials like this, in the Alley, anyone might disappear suddenly for the rest of the day, have to go to the dentist, or to the doctor's for a check-up, or to visit a relative—a grandmother. Yet all that Lawyer Stuart could say was, "Call the real burglars!" He should have questioned the two policemen about lots of things—why they had stayed upstairs so long while Mrs. Ives and Connie were talking to Charlotte Stuart, why Connie's mother had had this powerful feeling, as though she heard a voice saying, "They have it, they have it." He should make excuses for them ... he was their lawyer ... see that they got off ... explain everything convincingly ... temporary insanity—something!

"Call the real robbers," Lawyer Stuart repeated, unshaken.

"He probably has a good reason," they all decided, though not being able to imagine what.

So Katy Starr called the five real first main robbers. "Five real robbers to the witness stand," she said.

The five hopped up eagerly. ("Shows they're guilty, or they would not have answered to the word 'robbers,'" said Billy bitingly.) Ray Arp, the bullet-head man, Hugsy Goode, Arnold Trickman, Brother Stuart, and Stephen Carroll, all five filed to the stand. Some hung their heads in shame; others stared about belligerently with their lips stuck out.

"Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, the real truth, and nothing but the truth?" asked the judge sternly.

Holding their hands over the grade-six speller, the accused five said, "We do. Aye, aye."

"You don't say, Aye, aye,'" admonished Lawyer Stuart. "You just say, 'Yes, Your Honor,' please. You are ignorant burglars. If you were not ignorant, you would not be in this sort of work. 'Aye, aye' sounds nautical, not like Brooklyn burglar talk."

"Could be burglars of the Brooklyn Navy Yard," suggested Hugsy hoarsely. "Picked up the language there."

Connie put in, "If the burglars prove to be related to the bullet-head man who stopped Mama and me the day of de Gaulle, they were not ignorant men, they were educated men; they had probably been through high school if not college—perhaps, Grandby. Who knows?"

"Might be professors here?" asked Hugsy.

"Come, come," said Mr. Stuart impatiently. "College degrees or not—that will come out in the trial—just try not to be nautical, try to be educated Brooklyn burglars," he said to the five.

"Nay," said they.

Jonathan sighed. He liked for things to be right—right language to fit a character—Brooklyn language for Brooklyn burglars, nautical language for pirates and sailors. As for him, he tried to speak like Chief Justice Warren, to set the right tone. You could see that he was disgusted with the ayes and nays and with other stupidities—no Attorney General, for example. "Where were you between the hours of twelve and one on Saturday, May the fifteenth," he asked, "Alumni Day on the campus of Grandby College?"

"In the Alley," the five said. "Oh no, beg pardon, sir. We was on Story Street."

The listeners gasped. What could be more incriminating? Story Street was the street of the Iveses, the Stuarts—the Fabadessas, too, for that matter.

"Hm-m-m," said Jonathan. "This looks bad for you, Five Men, because Story Street is the seat of the crime."

"Scene," corrected the judge.

"Seat," repeated Jonathan firmly.

"Never heard of 'seat of crime,'" said Katy.

"Oh, all right, scene of crime if you must," said Jonathan, somewhat rattled. (He was rattled because, so far, his questions were proving these men guilty instead of not guilty as he was supposed to do.) To do better, Jonathan swung suddenly around. He knew to do this from watching the Perry Mason show. Then he grabbed the screwdriver from where it lay beside Billy, and he said, "You don't recognize this screwdriver named 'Stanley,' do you?"

"Nay," said the five.

"Your Honor," said Jonathan, addressing the judge. "You see? These five innocent men, dragged here to court in the prosecutor's hope of solving the crime speedily—politics! politics!—do not impress me as being guilty. Let them go, Your Honor. Let them go back to their peaceful pursuits and ways of life, their children, their wives, their trades, their work. They do not recognize the screwdriver named 'Stanley.'"

"Objection, Your Honor," said Billy Maloon, springing to his feet.

"Sustained," said the judge. "We shall now hear from the prosecutionating lawyer, Mr. (roars of laughter here) Maloon." (Well, Billy was awfully little for his age and once, on a broiling day, had come out in a snowsuit. No one had ever forgotten that.)