The Fourth Side of the Triangle (14 page)

It was an unfortunate metaphor. Someone in the courtroom tittered, and at least one newspaper reporter dodged out to phone his paper the “expert psychiatric opinion” that the
lapsus linguae
might well have been a Freudian slip by which the accused confessed his guilt. As for O'Brien, he frowned ever so slightly; he did not care for witnesses who volunteered information on the stand, especially defendants. He was taken off the hook by the district attorney, who had not caught the inference and was fretting about the accused's sitting around the courtroom like an actor at a dress rehearsal. He said so, emphatically.

“The defendant will remain in make-up only a little while longer, Your Honor,” O'Brien said, “and only for the purpose of having one other witness corroborate his identity.”

Judge Suarez waved, and O'Brien went on: “I will ask you to tell us once again, Mr. McKell, of your arrival at Miss Grey's apartment on the night of September 14th, and of what happened subsequently.” He led Ashton through his story. “Then you don't remember the name of the bar? Or where it was located?”

“I do not.”

“Your witness.”

De Angelus's cross-examination was long, detailed, theatrical, and futile. He could not shake the defendant's story, although he spattered it liberally with the mud of doubt. In the end McKell sat labeled adulterer, home-wrecker, betrayer of trust in high places, perverted aristocrat, corrupt citizen of the democracy, and above all murderer. It was an artistic job, and it made Dane and Judy writhe; but no flicker of anger or resentment—or shame—touched the elder McKell's stone-hard face; and Robert O'Brien simply listened with his big head cocked, boyishly attentive, even—one would have thought—a little pleased.

When the district attorney sat down, sated, O'Brien idly said, “Call Matthew Thomas Cleary to the stand.”

A thick-set man with curly gray hair was sworn. He had a squashed nose and round blue eyes that seemed to say: We have seen everything, and nothing matters. His brogue was refreshing, delivered in a hoarse voice.

He was Matthew Thomas Cleary, part owner and sometime bartender of the Kerry Dancers Bar and Grill on 59th Street off First Avenue. He had never been in trouble with the law, saints be praised.

“Now, Mr. Cleary,” O'Brien said easily, walking over to “Dr. Stone” and touching his shoulder, “have you ever seen this man before?”

“Yes, sor. In me bar one night.”

O'Brien strolled back to the witness stand. “You're sure, Mr. Cleary? You couldn't be mistaken?”

“That I could not.”

A police officer escorted a woman to a seat at the rear of the courtroom, unnoticed. Her face under the half-veil was chalky. It was Lutetia McKell, sucked out of her shell at last.

“Mr. Cleary, you must see hundreds of faces across your bar. What makes you remember this man's face?”

“'Twas this way, sor. He was wearing this beard. That was in the first place. The Kerry Dancers bar don't get one customer in a thousand wears a beard. So that makes him stick in me mind. Second place, on the shelf behind the bar I got me a big jar with a sign on it, ‘The Children of Loretto,' that's this orphanage out on Staten Island. I put the small change into it that people leave on the bar. This fellow with the beard, his first drink he gives me a twenty, I give him change, and he shoves over a five-dollar bill. ‘Put it in the jar,' he says, ‘for the orphan children.' And I did, and I thanked him.
That
makes me remember him. Nobody else ever give me a five-dollar bill for the jar.”

“What night was this, Mr. Cleary?” O'Brien asked suddenly.

“September 14th, sor.”

“You mean to say, Mr. Cleary, you can remember the exact night two months ago that this man had a drink at your bar and gave you a five-dollar bill for The Children of Loretto?”

“Yes, sor. On account of that was the night of the championship fight. I'd drew a ring around the date on me bar calendar so I wouldn't forget, I mean so I'd remember not to turn on a movie or a speech or something on the bar TV instead of the fights. And this man come in, like I say—”

District Attorney De Angelus was sitting on the edge of the chair at his table, elbows planted securely, listening with both cocked ears in a kind of philosophic panic.

“Let's not go too fast, Mr. Cleary. All right, it was the night of the championship prize fight, September 14th, and that made you remember the date. But how can you be so sure this man with the beard came in on
that
night? Couldn't it have been on some other night?”

“No,
sor,
” said Cleary stoutly. “On account of him and me was talking about the fight. I says, ‘Time for the big fight any minute now,' and he says, ‘Big fight?” like he never heard of the fights. Who's fighting?' he says—a championship fight! So I tell him the champ is battling this Puerto Rican challenger, Kid Aguirre, and he looks at me like I'm talking Siwash.”

“And that made you remember it was this man, on that particular night?”

“Wouldn't it make anybody? Anyways, I turn on the TV and we watch the fight. After the first round I says to him—”

“To the gentleman with the gray beard?”

“Sure, who else we talking about? I says to him, ‘What d'ye think?” And he says, ‘That boy—the Kid—he'll never make it. He ain't got what it takes. The champ will knock him out,” he says to me.”

“One moment, Mr. Cleary. Mr. McKell, will you please rise—it isn't necessary to come forward—and face this witness? Now will you please say in a conversational tone, ‘That boy will never make it. The champ will knock him out.'”

“That boy will never make it,” said Ashton McKell. “The champ will knock him out.”

“Mr. Cleary, to the best of your recollection, is that the voice, the same voice, of the gray-bearded man you talked to in your bar on the night of September 14th?”

“Sure and it's the same, ain't that what I'm telling you, sor?”

“You're sure it's the same voice.”

“I can hear it ringing in me ears,” said Cleary poetically, “right now.”

O'Brien quickened the pace of his questions. They watched the fight, Cleary said, and in round two they made a ten-dollar bet on the outcome, Cleary maintaining that Kid Aguirre would last the full fifteen rounds, the gray-bearded man insisting that the Kid would be knocked out. And knocked out he was, “as ye'll remember, sor, in the third, to me sorrow.”

“Did you pay the man the ten dollars?”

“He wouldn't let me. ‘Put it in the jar for the orphans,' he says, which I done.”

“One last question, Mr. Cleary: You and this gray-haired man were watching the original telecast of the fight, not a rerun on tape?”

Cleary was sure. The fight had been fought in Denver over closed-circuit television, but it was telecast live for the East, and the tapes were not shown anywhere until the following day.

The district attorney made a savage attempt to break down Cleary's identification of “Dr. Stone.” But luck had thrown a stubborn Irishman his way. The harder De Angelus hammered, the more positive Cleary became. When the cross-examination became abusive, O'Brien politely stepped in: “It seems to me, Your Honor, the witness has answered each of the district attorney's questions not once but half a dozen times. I think we are approaching the point of badgering, and I respectfully call your attention to it.”

The judge glared at O'Brien, but he stopped De Angelus.

Nothing was left for O'Brien but to thrust the point between the horns. He introduced into evidence the official time of the Kid Aguirre knockout, as certified by the timekeeper of the championship fight and the records of the Colorado boxing commission.

Time of knockout: 10:27:46—forty-six seconds after twenty-seven minutes after ten o'clock
P.M
. Eastern Time.

Robert O'Brien summed up for the defense: “I am sure it isn't necessary, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, to remind you that none of us is here in this courtroom to punish moral turpitude. The question you are asked to decide is not one of sin but of guilt. There is only one question on which His Honor will charge you to consider your verdict, and that is: Was the defendant, Ashton McKell, guilty of murdering Sheila Grey by gunshot at twenty-three minutes past ten o'clock on the night of September 14th? You have heard testimony here that must convince anyone that Mr. McKell could not physically have been guilty of that crime. He could not have committed it because, at the time it was committed, he was seated at a bar half a city mile from the scene of the crime, and continued to sit there for some time afterward.

“Not only could Ashton McKell not have shot Sheila Grey, he could not have been at or even near the scene of her death when the fatal shot was fired.

“I repeat: No other aspect of the case should concern you, or—under what I am confident will be Judge Suarez's charge-legally can concern you. Consequently, no reasonable man or woman could bring in a verdict of anything but not guilty.”

The waiting was a stasis, the blood piling up in the vessel to the bursting point, the question being would there be resolution and relief before the complete blockage and eruption. Reporters spotted Lutetia McKell and crowded round her, to her distress, until Richard M. Heaton rescued her; none of them dared leave the courtroom while the jury deliberated; they sat and talked, or were mute, thinking their own thoughts. Heaton tended to be optimistic, O'Brien noncommittal (“I never speculate on what a jury will or will not do”), except to point out that District Attorney De Angelus had not left the room, indicating the prosecution's belief that the jury would not be out long—for whatever that was worth; De Angelus himself was the recipient of a message, delivered to him by messenger, to which he dashed off an immediate reply, and sank back only to be aroused by another messenger with another envelope.

“He's kept so very busy, isn't he?” said Lutetia. Then she began nibbling at her handkerchief.

So Dane and Judy captured her attention by telling the story of their original unsuccessful search for the bar and bartender, and of their visit to Ellery Queen.

“That's his father, Inspector Queen, who just came in and spoke to the D.A.,” Robert O'Brien pointed out.

And of the lightning development of the hunt thereafter.

Lutetia was touched. “Margaret is so faithful,” she said. “You know, Dane, how she worships your father. I suppose all along she's known a great deal more than any of us, from this and that picked up at random. She must have realized something was wrong when she found that outlandish tan suit in Ashton's bedroom. She always empties the pockets of his suits, you know.”

For want of something better to do, they discussed old Margaret's incredible enterprise in the matter of the baggage claim check and the black bag. They agreed that she must have found the claim check in the tan suit shortly after the first visit of the police; to old Maggie, Irish-born, to whom “police” and “rebel-hunters” would forever be synonymous, at the same time loyal unto death to Ashton McKell, the sight of the claim check must have triggered her instinct for trouble, and she had simply secreted it to keep it out of the hands of the law. After Ashton's arrest she had sneaked down to Grand Central, found all her fears confirmed when, in return for the check, she was handed the little black bag, and promptly enlisted her sister as a confederate, hiding the bag in her sister's flat for no other reason than to keep it from being found by the authorities, who were searching everything pertaining to McKell.

“Hers not to reason why,” said Dane. “Good old Maggie.”

“Something's about to break,” said O'Brien alertly. “Look at what's going on at the D.A.'s table … I was right. There goes the bailiff into the judge's chambers. The jury's probably reached a verdict.”

They had.

Not guilty.

There was a frantic moment when everyone was in motion—hands clasping, lips babbling, backs being slapped, Ashton embracing Lutetia (in public!), Dane embracing Judy (both electrically surprised at the naturalness with which they turned and fell into each other's arms)—then everything suddenly stopped, hands, eyes, mouths, everything. For an instant it was hard to say why, because really nothing had happened except the approach of a very large man grasping a folded piece of paper. But then it came through: there was something in his very approach, a balls-of-the-feet guardedness, the way his great fingers grasped the paper, the hard look on his hard face, that was like a gush of ice water.

It was Sergeant Velie.

Who said politely, “Mr. McKell.”

Ashton still had his arm about Lutetia. “Yes?”

“If you don't mind, sir,” Sergeant Velie said, “I have to speak to Mrs. McKell.”

“To my
wife?
”

It seemed to Dane that his mother started and then took a perceptible grip on herself.

But her glance at the big sergeant was coldly courteous. “Yes? What is it, please?”

“I'm going to have to ask you,” said the detective, “to come down to police headquarters with me.”

Lutetia stirred, ever so slightly. Her husband blinked. Dane moved forward angrily: “What's this all about, Sergeant? Why do you want to take my mother—of all people!—down to headquarters?”

“Because I have to book her,” the sergeant said impassively, “on a charge of suspicion of the murder of Sheila Grey.”

III The Third Side

·

LUTETIA

There was confusion. Dane kept running around looking for the lawyers, who had left the courtroom. Ashton interposed his formidable body between his wife and the sergeant as if he expected an assault. Judy looked about wildly for Dane. Reporters, catching the drama, were beginning to converge on the group with everything flapping. The sergeant said, “I have to ask you to step out of the way, Mr. McKell. This'll turn into a mob scene if you don't let me get her out of here quick.”